Author Description

First published in 1931, this fascinating book provides a study of famous Greek satirist and rhetorician, Lucian of Samosata, as well as an analysis of the Classical Greek philosopher Plato's Symposium in the light of Lucian's criticism. An essay in popular form, whose aim is really to call attention to the Flower and Harmon translations and thereby, ultimately, to Lucian himself. "LUCIAN is a mine of entertainment, a treasury of information. He is a humorist, a man of wit, fancy, irony, earnestness, solemnity, subtle humor, broad burlesque, a man of immense reading and incredible fluidity of thought and word, who writes sometimes with the care of a gem-cutter, and often with the freedom and splash of Shakespeare. He is the latest of the wits of antiquity and the earliest of the modern humorists. He has left eighty pieces, long and short, of very unequal excellence, the paperasse of a great littérateur. Among these things are a few masterpieces which show a finish and subtlety that rank them with the best Hellenic handiwork. The serpent of immortality lies coiled within them."—John Jay Chapman