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Hello, hello, and today I am standing up for Lucian.

So Lucian is born around 120.

That is obviously the year, not the time.

It's a very specific sundial.

Maybe to give you an anchor in time, that's about two years before the start of Hadrian's wall being built.

So it's around about this time, Hadrian's going around telling him what is going to be a really great wall.

And the barbarians are going to pay for it.

I know. I know. He was from South. Unusually for this program, Lucian is neither a Greek nor a Roman.

I know. He was from Samasata in what is now Turkey.

So his first language would have been a dialect of Aramaic.

But he wrote in Greek, and he would have certainly also been fluent in Latin, by the way.

He wrote in Greek, Attic Greek.

It's the equivalent as us writing in the style of Chaucer nearly. So that's how ancient Greece is a lot longer in time than you think it is. It's about 2,000 years it covers. So he is a polyglot, as we have

established. He is also a polymath, right? About 80 of his work survived. They're quite

short, but even so, that's a lot. And they cover an extraordinary range of subjects. There are comic

dialogues, there's prose fiction, there's a guide to how to write history, there's dialogues of

some courtisans, there's a history of dance. And there is also, it's a really important thing.

Hardly anyone ever writes about dance.

If we didn't have Lucy, anyway, it doesn't matter.

Most importantly, at least for me, he is responsible for the single earliest text

which one could legitimately describe as science fiction.

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