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Lucian seems to have been the Kurt Von­negut of the Roman World, pok­ing fun at philoso­phers and the clas­sics of Greek lit­er­a­ture with a cheer­ful cyn­i­cism. Though he was an Assyr­i­an from Mesopotamia, liv­ing in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry A.D., he wrote in Clas­si­cal Greek (the equiv­a­lent of some­one today writ­ing in Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish). His most famous work is the True His­to­ry, some­times list­ed as the first sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry, since it incor­po­rates a trip to the moon and the sun, and an inter­plan­e­tary war. But it’s real­ly a shag­gy-dog sto­ry intend­ed to spoof the creduli­ty of Homer and Herodotus. The nar­ra­tor repeat­ed­ly tells you some­thing absurd, then says he won’t tell you anoth­er, more absurd detail because you won’t believe him. It employs tech­niques of farce and bur­lesque lat­er per­fect­ed by Baron Mün­chausen and Mark Twain. Lucius the Ass, the attri­bu­tion of which is occa­sion­al­ly ques­tioned, is notice­ably dif­fer­ent in style, and con­tains pas­sages that are obvi­ous­ly intend­ed to be read as porn. The same sto­ry (the hero is trans­formed into a don­key: trou­ble fol­lows) was also told by Apuleius. It’s inter­est­ing in that it draws atten­tion to the suf­fer­ing of an ani­mal, some­thing to which most Roman writ­ers were obliv­i­ous. Most of the oth­er pieces are com­ic dia­logues in which the Gods are spoofed in all-too-human terms. Lucian seems to have con­sid­ered all reli­gion char­la­tanism, and did not have much good to say about philoso­phers, either. Chris­tians are sat­i­rized in The Death of Pere­gri­nus. The auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal My Dreamreveals that a stone-mason’s son from a back­wa­ter part of the Empire could edu­cate him­self into a suc­cess. Lucian was able to set­tle down and write spoofs after a career as a lec­tur­er that took him across the Empire. A mod­ern read­er with a rou­tine expo­sure to Greek mythol­o­gy will get at least half of Lucian’s allu­sions, though not, of course, his puns. This anthol­o­gy con­tains less than half of his known works. Read more »

Steve Muhlberg­er’s site exposed me to the blog­ging of Juan Cole, who is a Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan his­to­ri­an spe­cial­iz­ing in con­tem­po­rary Mid­dle East­ern and South Asian stud­ies. He counts as one of the major his­to­ri­ans of, and pol­i­cy experts on the Mid­dles East. His blog, Informed Com­ment, is the best source of insight­ful com­ment and hard-to-find cru­cial infor­ma­tion in this field that I’ve seen, any­where. I rec­om­mend check­ing out this entry, since it exem­pli­fies his abil­i­ty to sort out the “big pic­ture” from a bliz­zard of data. I was not sur­prised to learn that Cole is an avid Sci­ence Fic­tion fan .…it seems that all today’s best his­to­ri­ans are.

This is an excel­lent, enter­tain­ing nov­el set in Eng­land in 1720, at the time of the “South Sea Bub­ble.” This was a finan­cial cri­sis caused by a com­plex stock mar­ket swin­dle, which was cooked up by an alliance of pri­vate and gov­ern­ment inter­ests. Read­ing the book today, now that we have wit­nessed the biggest armed rob­bery in human his­to­ry, in the form of the Wall Street bailouts, is a more piquant expe­ri­ence than it would have been if I had picked it up when it was pub­lished, eight years ago. [Last Novem­ber, I reviewed an inter­est­ing biog­ra­phy of John Law, the man at the heart of the finan­cial melt­down of France that occurred in the same year.] Read more »