Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 88, Ancient Greek Sci-Fi.

In this episode, we will read one of the world's oldest surviving novels, Lucien of Somoset

is True Story, written in Greek, sometime in or a little after the 160's CE.

The title of this novel is sometimes translated as The True Tales or True Histories, but

most commonly in English today it's known as The True Story, which is what we'll call

it in this program.

In the previous episode, we met Lucien of Somoset, an erudite and irreverent writer from

the distant Eastern Roman province of Syria, and we learned about his shorter works.

We heard Lucien's polite, but patronizing take on Christianity, and his somewhat less

courteous criticisms of the disciplines of philosophy and theology more generally.

Put briefly, Lucien felt that the very multiplicity of philosophies and religions out there

was substantial evidence that they were all just made up, and that to boot the internal

absurdities of various philosophical works, and tales of gods and goddesses were good

for a laugh, but beyond that, the works did not deserve to be taken seriously.

Finally, we learned that Lucien was interested in the subject of history.

While he wrote a lot of satire, Lucien also had sober and serious opinions on what

history ought to do, and we closed our previous episode on Lucien of Somoset with his famous

essay How to Write History.

The novel that we're about to read in this episode is a wild and entertaining chunk

of prose, and an exuberant mockery of what Lucien holds to be poor history writing.

And so before we open Lucien's novel, we should get a couple of things related to works

of ancient history fresh in our minds.

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