In a lengthy career as a writer and performer giving public readings of his work throughout the empire, Lucian produced a large, diverse, and singular corpus that is comparable in size to that of Plato. It consists of seventy-six authentic libelli in the Oxford edition, written in a basically Attic vocabulary that is actually larger than Plato's. Of the literary forms that Lucian employs, it is the dialogue (in both Platonic and Cynic, or Menippean, forms) that dominates his work (thirty-six of seventy-three prose works); but his highly variegated oeuvre also contains memorable satiric narratives; tall tales à la Baron Münchausen (A True Story); satiric diatribes (On Mourning); and many lectures or critical essays such as The Ignorant Book Collector and How to Write History. More than a thousand years after his death, Lucian was taken as a model of the witty, erudite cultural critic by the humanists of the Renaissance. He is historically significant for transmitting the Cynic and Skeptic traditions to Europe -- the English philosopher David Hume is said to have read Lucian's comic Dialogues of the Gods on his deathbed -- and also as one of the principal sources of satiric literature in Europe.
This is a free page. This page contains 175 words. This
biography contains 1,595 words (approx. 5 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Lucian Access Pass.
