The aim of this book is to make Lucian's A True Story accessible to intermediate students of Ancient Greek. The running vocabulary and commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page. Lucian's A True Story is a great text for intermediate readers. Its breathless narrative does not involve many complex sentences or constructions; there is some unusual vocabulary and a few departures from Attic Greek, but for the most part it is a straightforward narrative that is fun and interesting by one of antiquity's cleverest authors. In A True Story, Lucian parodies accounts of fanciful adventures and travel to incredible places by authors such as Ctesias and Iambulus. The story's combination of mockery and learning makes it an excellent example of the Greek literature of the imperial period. Revised August, 2014.

A True History is a novel written in the second century AD by Lucian of Samosata, a Greek-speaking author of Assyrian descent. The novel is a satire of outlandish tales that had been reported in ancient sources, particularly those that presented fantastic or mythical events as if they were true. It is Lucian's best-known work.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

This is the first substantial commentary on Lucian's Verae Historiae ("True Histories"), a fantastic journey narrative considered the earliest surviving example of Science Fiction in the Western tradition. The Introduction situates the work in the context of Lucian's oeuvre, especially his preoccupation with distinguishing truth from fiction and exposing the lies of philosophers. In their commentary, the editors trace the sources and the meaning of the numerous intertextual allusions and parodies of philosophers, poets, historians and paradoxographers. The Verae Historiae emerges from this scrutiny as a remarkably complex text with some very "modern" concerns: it problematizes the act of reading, allegorical interpretation, authorial reliability, and the validity of cultural norms and literary genres.

One of the translators of Lucian, Thomas Francklin, bemoaned in his introduction to True History, "We cannot but lament that the humour of many of the references has been lost to us; therefore, Lucian's True History cannot be half as pleasurable as when it was first written, but there are enough remaining allusions which we understand to secure it from being unrelatable." This work, True History Decrypted, attempts to take those "remaining allusions" and make them relatable to the modern reader. Modern audiences rarely have the background to fully understand all of the allusions made in True History and classical texts in general. It would be unfortunate if there were not a book that could help guide the reader through each section and provide the necessary background to fully enjoy the work. This book takes a two tiered approach to understanding True History: (1) provide extensive commentary section-by-section, addressing the main themes and ideas of the work as the reader goes along; (2) provide an Appendix of works that Lucian may have been acclimated to and used as a basis for the parody found in True History. With these two eyes, the True History becomes a great deal more enjoyable and easier to comprehend. There is no doubt that True History is Lucian's most famous and influential work. It has influenced works like More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. True History masquerades as a clinical account of the travels of the narrator and his companions. The style, tone, and approach of True History is exceptionally true to the travel genre; however, it is with the content where Lucian makes his satirical intent manifest. The narrator travels to the moon and back, to different islands like the Island of Cheese and Island of the Damned; he meets a cast of strange, twisted characters throughout, some more fanciful than others. Underneath it all, Lucian is really questioning the idea of truth found in factual, non-fiction writing. On a meta level, Lucian is trying to show the impossibility of absolute truth in writing. If the purpose of satire is improve the condition of a certain aspect of society, then Lucian is trying to call out some of the more grossly inaccurate worldly depictions in order to improve, all around, truth in literature, history, and entertainment. True History Decrypted is suitable for the casual reader and scholar. The text has previously been used in the university classroom.

In a companion volume to his award-winning adaptation of The Odyssey, the incomparable graphic novelist Gareth Hinds masterfully adapts Homer’s classic wartime epic. More than three thousand years ago, two armies faced each other in an epic battle that rewrote history and came to be known as the Trojan War. The Iliad, Homer's legendary account of this nine-year ordeal, is considered the greatest war story of all time and one of the most important works of Western literature. In this stunning graphic novel adaptation — a thoroughly researched and artfully rendered masterwork — renowned illustrator Gareth Hinds captures all the grim glory of Homer's epic. Dynamic illustrations take readers directly to the plains of Troy, into the battle itself, and lay bare the complex emotions of the men, women, and gods whose struggles fueled the war and determined its outcome. This companion volume to Hinds’s award-winning adaptation of The Odyssey features notes, maps, a cast of characters, and other tools to help readers understand all the action and drama of Homer's epic.

The study of the Second Sophistic is a relative newcomer to the Anglophone field of classics, and much of what characterizes it temporally and culturally remains a matter of legitimate contestation. This Handbook offers a diversity of scholarly voices that attempt to define the state of this developing field. Included are chapters that offer practical guidance on the wide range of valuable textual materials that survive, many of which are useful or even core to inquiries of particularly current interest (e.g., gender studies, cultural history of the body, sociology of literary culture, history of education and intellectualism, history of religion, political theory, history of medicine, cultural linguistics, intersection of the classical traditions and early Christianity).

Building the Canon through the Classics. Imitation and Variation in Renaissance Italy (1350-1580) provides a comprehensive reappraisal of the construction of a literary canon in Renaissance Italy by exploring the multiple reuses of classical authorities. The volume reshapes current debate on the notion of canon by intertwining two perspectives: analyzing when and in what form a canon emerged, and determining the ways in which an ancient literary canon interacts with the urge to bestow a similar authority on some later and contemporaneous authors. Each chapter makes an original contribution to its selected topic, but the collective strength of the volume relies on its simultaneous appeal to readers in Italian Studies, intellectual history, comparative studies and classical reception studies.

Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, flourished in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure. Enormously popular in the Renaissance, these stories have been less familiar in later centuries. Translations of the Greek stories were not readily available in English before B.P. Reardon’s first appeared in 1989.Nine complete stories are included here as well as ten others, encompassing the whole range of classical themes: romance, travel, adventure, historical fiction, and comic parody. A foreword by J.R. Morgan examines the enormous impact this groundbreaking collection has had on our understanding of classical thought and our concept of the novel.