Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 87, Lucian of Somasida.

Lucian of Somasida, who lived roughly from the 120s to the 180s CE, was a satirist from

the province of Syria, at that point the far eastern end of the Roman Empire. The previous season

of our podcast on the New Testament and its theological milieu might lead one to believe that in the first

few centuries CE, people all around the Mediterranean were converting to Christianity and not much

else was going on. But now it's time for something completely different. Reading the 80 or so surviving

works that have come down to us from Lucian of Somasida, we find that while cult religions and

various philosophies involving salvation and personal ethics were indeed becoming increasingly

popular all over the Roman Empire and beyond, satire, secularism and irreverence were nonetheless

proceeding with business as usual in certain circles. For Lucian of Somasida, both religion and

philosophy are a continuum of the same scam, a scam to provide gullible people with

species answers and to elevate unscrupulous charlatans to positions of authority. Over the course

of Lucian's vast collection of extant works, nothing is safe from Lucian's wide-ranging mockeries

of philosophers and his burl asks of religions. Lucian of Somasida today is probably most famous

for four things. Let's go over them quickly at the outset of this episode. First, many of the

satirical writings that Lucian left behind are written in a form that he pioneered if not invented.

This form is the comic dialogue. The comic dialogue is a farcical version of the platonic

dialogue rather than using philosophical dialogues to explore great truths like Plato and Cicero do.

Lucian's comic dialogues are deployed to make fun of the contradictions and the hubris of various

ideologies. The second thing that Lucian is well known for is that around 165 CE,

Lucian recorded his impressions of Christianity and he lampooned what seemed to him ridiculous and

unoriginal about the new religion. The third thing that Lucian is famous for today is that he wrote

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