Lucian of Samosata
A True Story
Ἀληθῶν Διηγημάτων Α΄–Β΄ · Later second century CE; no secure date.
Lucian opens by announcing that every travel writer lies and that he fully intends to as well, then sails past the Pillars of Heracles, is carried to the Moon by a waterspout, fights in a war between the Moon and the Sun, and is swallowed by a whale. Written around 170 CE and still funny.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
H. W. and F. G. Fowler, The Works of Lucian of Samosata (Clarendon Press, 1905) — the same translators as this site's Lucian, The Ship, deliberately, so the two can be read against each other. This is the Fowler of Modern English Usage, and it shows: brisk, idiomatic, allergic to pomp, and willing to be free with the letter to keep the pace. Their stated aim was to make Lucian read like a living writer rather than a set text, and they largely manage it. The cost falls in one predictable place. Lucian's invented names are Greek compounds that are funny because they are formed correctly — and the Fowlers render them as English compounds that are funny in English: Salad-wings, Flea-archers, Cork Island, Cheese Island, Firebrace and Flashman for the Sun's envoys. That is a real translation decision and mostly a good one, but the reader is seeing English wordplay standing in for Greek wordplay, not the Greek. Where a name has been Englished rather than transliterated, say so and give the Greek. The Fowlers were also open about omitting whole works they judged indecent, and within a work they soften rather than cut; where the Greek is coarser than the English, that is worth a note.