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Rating: Who would ever expect a work like the "True History" from a man who lived in the 2nd century AD? And when you consider that this man was a Syrian of Greek language with a Latin name, coming from an area that was, if not marginal, at least troubled within the Roman Empire (Samosata was indeed a town very close to the Euphrates, located on one of the empire's 'hottest' frontiers, constantly attacked by the Parthian armies), it is certainly possible to get a more accurate idea of the caliber of this character, one of the last original and prominent intellectuals of a culture in slow decline, who lived through a period of nostalgic recapitulation of what had been best produced in past centuries, a man who combined enormous philosophical and literary erudition gained in the years of his youth spent in Ionia, where he learned to speak and write Greek in a refined and polished way, with a lively and imaginative mind typical of the civilization and Syrian-Eastern blood coursing through his veins.
As the author of many works of philosophical, satirical, and even historiographical character, Lucian, in the last years of his life, during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161 - 180 AD), wrote this bizarre "True History," which for convenience, but without fear of exaggeration or of stating absurdities, we could even define as the first example of a fantasy novel in history: the author himself declares to write a disengaged work, aiming to relax the intellectual mind lost between the rhythm of poetry in trimeters and hexameters and the complicated (and sometimes abstruse) reasoning of the philosophers of the time. But learned references are not lacking, in any case: it is a work of amusement, but still intended for an erudite audience, or at least one that has more than a superficial knowledge of Greek literature.
The "True History" is the story of a journey undertaken by the author himself, of a periplus beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the farthest ends of the world out of sheer curiosity, which is nothing but a fierce parody of the "Odyssey": during this journey, entirely in an anti-heroic and anti-epic tone, the reader will encounter peoples and monstrosities with exaggerated features to the point of the most brutal and satirical comedy in the fullest sense of the word (what can be said about the Ship-Men who use their disproportionate phallus as a mast to attach the sail?): strongly corrosive is the description of the sun and lunar armies, which parodies that of the Persian army made by Herodotus of Halicarnassus in his "Histories," or the catalog of the same alignments modeled after the Iliad, or the meeting with the main characters of history and mythology that he encounters in the Islands of the Blessed, ridiculed and stripped of all dignity that tradition attributed to them (Homer himself, the Greek national poet, is portrayed as a prisoner native to Babylon named Tigranes, thus mocking even certain philological theories that were very popular at that time about the singer's origins), or yet the episode in which his ship is swallowed by a gigantic whale, now seen as a vitriolic attack on the biblical story of Jonah in the belly of the whale (recent studies have established that the biblical text was much more well-known in antiquity than had ever been suspected, to the extent that clear echoes of it have been traced even in "The Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides of Athens, who lived more than five centuries before Lucian).
The periplus unfolds in an exaggerated comic crescendo worthy of the most desecrating Aristophanes, in the name of the most unbridled imagination, proposing things blatantly impossible (navigation on ice or on a sea of milk, or being transported to the Moon by a violent wind) and blatantly passing them off as true (hence the title of the work), as sacrosanct truths, thus taking up the paradox of Epimenides of Crete, who stated that all Cretans were liars and originating an insoluble vicious circle of chain deductions. Lucian's satire hits everything and everyone, leaving no stone unturned and without fear of descending into the offensive and the trivial, despite the narration of improbable couplings with plants and other similar amusements: and it is thus that unexpectedly, just by mocking and parodying the almost millennial Greek culture, he manages to revive it in one of its last original creations, as if playing with this last card without a care to reanimate a dying organism, increasingly pervaded by an antiquarian sensibility that caused literature and the figurative art of the time to stagnate.
Books and essays could be written abundantly about the meanings of some of the author's ingenious inventions or on the learned references inserted by Lucian at every turn, or again on the connections between his humor and the comedy of the "golden" 5th century BC and the philosophical implications of some of his statements (it seems in any case that he had a certain familiarity, if only of an artistic and literary type, with the ideas of the philosophers of the Cynic school, as can also be inferred from his "Dialogues of the Dead"), but this is obviously not the suitable venue: this is intended only as a suggestion for anyone interested in reading the most entertaining and irreverent, desecrating and bizarre work produced by Greek literature.
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