A Syrian satirist may have invented science fiction
Lucian of Samosata, a Hellenized Syrian writing after about 125 and into the years after 180, skewered philosophers, priests, and superstition in Attic Greek. His tongue-in-cheek A True Story—a voyage that includes a trip to the Moon—is often called the earliest known science fiction, and more than eighty works attributed to him survive.
Almost everything about Lucian's life comes from his own sarcastic pages; he appears in no contemporary inscriptions and is missing from Philostratus's Lives of the Sophists. Classicists warn that "Lucian-like" narrators may be masks, not memoir—Donald Russell likens trusting his self-portrait to believing the lunar voyage in True Stories. Still, the outline he offers places him in Samosata on the Euphrates, once capital of Commagene until Vespasian annexed it in 72 AD into Roman Syria. His native tongue was probably Syriac; all extant works are ancient Greek, mostly Attic of the Second Sophistic.
In The Dream he claims a failed sculpture apprenticeship under an uncle, then a flight toward Culture and education. Scholars such as Simon Swain and Karin Schlapbach treat that oration as ironic or apocryphal, even a playful prolalia rather than autobiography. Somehow he mastered rhetoric, toured Greece, Italy, and Gaul as a lecturer, and around 160 returned east a wealthy celebrity, recorded in Antioch in 162 or 163. About 165 he bought an Athenian house, invited his parents, and spent roughly a decade writing nearly all his famous works before stopping around 175. Under Commodus (180–192) he may have held a lucrative Egyptian post, after which he drops out of history entirely, and nobody knows how he died.
He invented comic dialogue as a parody of Socratic talk. Lover of Lies holds the oldest known "Sorcerer's Apprentice" tale; Dialogues of the Gods and related pieces mock divine myths; Philosophies for Sale ridicules every school. Alexander the False Prophet targets oracle fraud Alexander of Abonoteichus; On the Syrian Goddess is a chief source on Atargatis's cult. Western literature drank deep: Thomas More's Utopia, Rabelais, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, and Swift's Gulliver's Travels all show his imprint.
His own philosophy is slippery. He belonged to no school, attacked Stoics and Platonists for feeding superstition, yet leaned toward Skepticism; Edwyn Bevan counts him a Skeptic outright. In Hermotimus he decides that life is too brief to sort out which rival system is truest, so plain common sense must serve, and the saying that eyes make better witnesses than ears recurs across his dialogues.
Source: Lucian
