Lucian of Samosata

Lucian of Samosata (born about 125, died after 180) was a satirist who wrote in Greek under the Roman Empire. Born in Samosata on the Euphrates, in what is now Turkey, he trained as a rhetorician and traveled as a lecturer through Greece, Italy and Gaul before settling in Athens, and late in life held an official post in Egypt. His witty dialogues mock gods, philosophers, charlatans and the dead, among them the Dialogues of the Dead, Alexander the False Prophet and The Lover of Lies, and his True History is an ancestor of science fiction. Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais and Swift all learned from him.