Lucian

c. 120–after 180 CE

Lucian of Samosata on the Euphrates, a Syrian who made himself a master of Attic Greek, travelled the empire as a lecturer and ended as an official in Egypt. His eighty-odd pieces — dialogues of the gods and of the dead, the True History, Hermotimus, the Sale of Creeds, Alexander the false prophet — turn the forms of Plato and of comedy on philosophers, charlatans, the credulous and the gods themselves.