The Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 02

Lucian of Samosata wrote with the venom of a wasp and the precision of a scalpel. Born in what is now Turkey in the 2nd century AD, he composed in Greek so elegant that centuries of scholars called it Attic purity, but his ideas were anything but conservative. He was an outsider, a satirist who turned his sharp tongue on the greedy, the pompous, the false philosophers, and the gullible patrons who supported them. This volume gathers his dialogues and treatises on one of his favorite subjects: the intellectual who sells his mind for a comfortable life, only to discover he's traded freedom for a gilded cage. Through vivid character sketches and biting irony, Lucian exposes the hollowness of wealthy patronage, the pretensions of competing Greek philosophies, and the true cost of choosing security over integrity. These are not dusty artifacts. They are ferociously funny portraits of a world not so different from our own, where creators still navigate the dangers of depending on the powerful.