Lucian of Samosata

LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA (Hellenized Syrian, c. 125-after 180)

Lucian of Samosata was a wildly-popular satirist born in Samosata along the banks of the Euphrates in a part of the Roman province of Syria that is now in Turkey. He is best known for ridiculing superstition, religious practices, and belief in the paranormal. All we know of him comes from his own works (written in ancient Greek), but the "facts" are obscured by any literary license he may have taken--and his sarcasm. He may have been a successful travelling lecturer who settled down in Athens for a decade to write. More than 80 of his writings have survived, a huge number compared to other classical writers. His most famous work, A True Story, takes down authors who tell incredible tales. Lover of Lies contains the oldest known version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." His works affected later writers including Thomas More, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Swift.

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Juvenal's Satires

JUVENAL'S SATIRES (1st-2nd centuries CE)

The Satires were written by Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), a Roman poet of the late 1st and early 2nd century CE. Few details of his life are known with certainty; his dates are suggested by references in his text to people known to have lived at that time. His fifth and final book seems to have been written after 127. He wrote at least 16 poems (though the 16th is incomplete), published in five books, for a highly educated audience, satirizing life in the Rome of his day. Later translators have added titles to his works (he did not), such as "The Decay of Feminine Virtue" and "Wrong Desire is the Source of Suffering" (these are the titles of numbers VI and X, some of the most renowned in the collection).

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