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From Lucian’s Wonderland, being a Translation of the ‘Vera Historia,’ by St J. Basil Wynne Willson, M. A., illustrated by A. Payne Garnett; Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons; 1899, pp. vii-xvi.
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION.
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Lucian was born probably about 120 A.D. at Samosata, the capital of Commagene in Syria. He died about the end of the century. Thus he was a contemporary of the Roma emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus.
Though by birth a Syrian, he was a pure Greek in language and genius. His parents were poor, and at an early age he was apprenticed to an uncle who was a sculptor. Whatever talent he had for the plastic art remained latent; for at his first attempt he viii broke a slab of marble, and the heavy chastisement that he received in consequence from his master’s hand sent him back to his mother in tears. His determination not to return to art was confirmed by a dream that he had that night, in which he found himself being dragged in opposite directions by two women — the one, who name was Culture, fair and pleasing; the other, Sculpture, hard-handed and repulsive. With the smart of his uncle’s blows still upon him, he fled eagerly to the former.
Apparently he did not immediately settle down to earning a livelihood, but, presumably without means, and, as is gathered from his writings, in the garb of a slave, wandered about Ionia.
We next find him as an advocate at Antioch, but an unsuccessful one, and in order to gain ix means to live, he took to composing speeches for others to deliver. Being of a restless active spirit, he did not remain long at Antioch, but again set out on his travels, visiting Greece, Italy, and Gaul, practising the profession of an itinerant rhetorician. In this he was successful, and at the age of forty had saved enough to make him independent, though not rich. Disgusted with the tawdry tricks of the rhetorician’s art, he returned home and devoted himself to literature.
In company with Peregrinus1 he migrated x to Greece. He settled at Athens and studied philosophy, not attaching himself to any particular school, but applying himself to the exposure of the fallacies of the various systems. It was at this period that he composed most of his many varied works.
Towards the close of his life he again fell into poverty, and was compelled to return to his old profession of speech-writing. From this drudgery he was saved by the Emperor Commodus, who installed him in a lucrative appointment at Alexandria. He seems to have discharged the office by deputy, living the while comfortably at Athens on the emoluments, troubled only by the common enemy of old age, the gout.
Suidas, a late writer, with a strong bias against Lucian, whom he regarded as a blasphemer against Christianity, ascribes his death xi to mad dogs, and condemns him to the companionship of Satan in everlasting fire.
The majority of Lucian’s writings are pungent satires, generally written in the form of a dialogue, on the manners, customs, and thought of his time. The decadence of philosophy and the corruption of a worn-out religion were the chief subjects of his keen Aristophanic wit and sceptical humour.
The ‘Veracious History’ is of a somewhat different kind. It is a romance in which free rein is given to the play of a riotous fancy. Its object was to poke fun at writers of travel like Ctesias and Iambulus (whom he mentions), Hellanicus, Herodotus, and Xenophon, as well as at poets like Homer.
xiiIn the second book, in a mood of gentle and delightful pleasantry, he jokes at the Heroes of Greek mythology, the great men of history, and the prominent philosophers of various schools. Nor does he pass over his contemporaries; but we who find it hard to discover all the allusions in Swift’s ‘Gulliver,’ can scarcely expect to understand all the sly innuendoes and subtle hits at men and customs of his time.
Much of the ‘Veracious History’ is parody of the writers mentioned above; some may be drawn from fables2 and legends collected by xiii him on his travels, which, with his natural keenness of observation, he stored up and put to good use; but more is due to the richness of his Oriental fancy combined with the keen intellectualism of Greece.
The influence of the ‘Vera Historia’ can be seen to a greater or less extent in modern writers like de Berjerac in his ‘Voyage to the Moon’ and ‘Empire of the Sun,’ Voltaire in ‘Micromegas’ and ‘Princess of Babylon,’ xiv Rabelais in ‘Gargantua,’ Swift in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ and the writer of ‘Baron Münchhausen,’ who reproduces whole incidents almost verbatim.
A great controversy has raged round Lucian as to his attitude towards Christianity. But this question does not concern the work here translated. Having lived at Antioch and travelled in the East, he must have been acquainted with Christianity and its literature; but it is not needful to see in the description of the Island of the Blest a parody of the New Jerusalem of the Revelation, or in the mast that sprouted, the chasm in the ocean, and the great monster that swallowed the ship, to insist upon allusions to Aaron’s rod that budded, the crossing by the Israelites of the Red Sea, and Jonah’s whale.
Whether he was antagonistic or not to Christianity it is hard to decide, as the xv authenticity of the works which throw most light on the subject is open to great doubt. The probability is that he looked upon Christianity with the same critical eye as he regarded all religions of the time, and we cannot expect him to have formed a very high estimate of the creed from so pinchbeck an exponent of it as Peregrinus.
St J. B. W. W.
Footnotes
1 Peregrinus was a Cynic philosopher who, after a youth of debauchery, visited Palestine, and became converted to Christianity. By means of well-practised hypocrisy he rose to some position in the Church, and returned to his native town of Parium on the Hellespont, where, to atone for the sins of his youth, he divided his property amongst his fellow-townsmen. Apparently from an innate craving for notoriety, he burnt himself alive at the Olympic games in 165 A.D. Lucian wrote a treatise on his death, which he witnessed.
2 Mr Jerram, in the Introduction to his edition, has an interesting paragraph, which I quote in full: “The stories in the collection known as the ‘Arabian Nights’ are some of them very ancient, or at least founded on very ancient traditions, and there are at anyrate two incidents in the ‘Vera Historia’ that may have been borrowed from this source. The similarity between the gigantic Kingfisher and the Roc, or Ruckh, that in the Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor ‘alighted on the dome [its egg] and brooded over it with its wings,’ is obvious. Again, in the Fifth Voyage the sailors break the Roc’s egg and eat the young one which they find inside. The only doubt indeed arises from the sequel of this tale in the ‘Arabian Nights.’ There the ship is smashed by the enraged birds in revenge for their broken egg, and the temptation to note this incident would scarcely, we think, have been resisted by Lucian, if he had heard of it. The counterpart of the huge sea monster appears in a story told, not in the text of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ but in the Cairo edition of Sinbad’s Seventh Voyage. In this expedition they encounter an enormous fish that could gulp down ships with their crews entire, and Sinbad’s vessel would have been thus swallowed had not a storm come on and broken it in pieces just at the critical moment.”
[xvi]
Next:
CONTENTS.
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