Lucian of Samosata imagined a ship carrying fifty adventurers to the Moon. In his second-century CE Greek satire A True Story, a storm carries the sailors away from the sea and into a conflict between the rulers of the Moon and the Sun. Their armies include riders mounted on monstrous birds and insects, while giant spiders make a web large enough to serve as a battlefield. The quarrel begins with a proposed colony on the Morning Star.
Lucian warns his audience from the outset that none of this is true. He then devotes two books to recounting his invented voyage in the assured manner of a traveller who has measured distances, witnessed battles and recorded the customs of foreign peoples. Lucian uses the confident traveller to mock writers whose command of detail persuaded audiences to trust reports they could not check.
The voyage carries its narrator well beyond the lunar battlefield. He and his companions spend time inside an enormous sea creature, discover a sea of milk, speak to Homer in the Greek afterlife and visit an island governed by dreams. These episodes explain why A True Story frequently appears in discussions of the origins of science fiction. His journey also draws on older traditions of comic travel, literary parody and fantastic adventure.
Lucian, a Greek writer in the Roman Empire
Lucian was born in Samosata, a city on the Euphrates in the Roman province of Syria, close to modern Samsat in Turkey. Most surviving biographical details come from Lucian himself, and a seemingly personal recollection in his works can also be part of a literary performance. He probably lived from the 120s CE into the later second century. Although he grew up in a multilingual region, his surviving works were written in Greek. In those works, he presents himself as someone who acquired the education necessary for a professional career in public speaking.
Public speaking could bring prestige and a living in the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire. Greek had retained enormous cultural prestige, and audiences admired public speakers who could reproduce the language and style of classical Athens, despite the disappearance of its fifth-century BCE political world. Historians call this revival of elaborate rhetoric and engagement with the classical literary past the Second Sophistic. A sophist might be a travelling lecturer who performed speeches for paying or admiring audiences; the term did not necessarily denote a particular philosophical doctrine. Lucian mastered the admired style and used it to ridicule speakers who passed eloquence off as knowledge.
As the Dickinson College commentary on the work explains, A True Story assumes a reader educated in that Greek literary inheritance. References to the Odyssey, philosophical debates, marvellous voyages and the techniques of historians can work as jokes without a lengthy explanation. Lucian was writing under Roman rule, yet the Roman Empire itself has little place in the story. Homeric journeys and the reputations of classical thinkers supply much of the material for his jokes.
Lucian had already developed this approach in comic dialogues that challenged the pretensions of respected intellectuals. In Icaromenippus, someone travels into the sky to view the gods and the human world from above. Elsewhere, dead heroes, philosophers, gods and ordinary people meet and talk under improbable circumstances. His dialogues expose how ridiculous an authoritative claim can sound when someone asks its speaker to explain it. With A True Story, he gives that method an unusually long narrative, complete with rulers, wars, invented communities and a traveller who claims to have seen it all.
There is no secure year of publication for A True Story. The date AD 160 sometimes attached to it should not be mistaken for evidence from a dated manuscript or ancient publishing record. Its placement in the second century rests on Lucian’s career and on the Greek literary culture in which he worked. Its earliest readers would not have called it a novel or science fiction. They would have recognized familiar writing conventions being turned into an elaborate comic imitation.
Why does A True Story begin by admitting it is false?
At the beginning, Lucian compares reading with athletic training: an athlete needs occasional rest, and a reader occupied with serious texts needs amusement too. He offers diversion that will also reward thought. Then he names writers of fantastic travels, particularly Ctesias of Cnidus, who described India, and Iambulus, whose tale of a marvellous island is known through later summaries. Their reports of extraordinary animals and peoples provided ready targets for a writer interested in how easily invention could pass for eyewitness testimony.
In Book 1, section 3, Lucian plainly announces that his own account will be filled with impossibilities. His promise of honesty lies in telling the reader beforehand that the events are invented. After that admission, the narrator is free to make the most confident assertions about things he never saw. He offers no newly found archive, secret document or previously unknown continent to authenticate it. The familiar conventions of a reliable travel report are enough to make the invention convincing.
The Odyssey provided one important model. Odysseus himself tells the Phaeacians of encounters with Circe, the Cyclops and other astonishing beings. These episodes are part of an epic, not a modern claim to documentary truth; Lucian nevertheless takes the traveller’s first-person voice and stretches its possibilities. A speaker can describe marvels as though he personally witnessed them without producing historical evidence. The Greek title, translated as True Stories or A True Story, draws attention to that problem before the first adventure begins.
The apparently useful details are part of the joke. Lucian’s captain numbers his crew, reports distances in stades, supplies lists of troops, identifies rulers and records peace terms. The stade was a Greek measure of distance whose length varied between regions and periods. Converting Lucian’s figures into exact modern distances would therefore mistake his purpose. Even an impossible itinerary starts to resemble a travel report when its author supplies such figures.
A storm carries fifty sailors to the Moon
The ship sails beyond the Pillars of Heracles, the strait at the western entrance to the Mediterranean, with fifty men eager to discover what lies farther out. Their early discoveries include an island where vines behave impossibly. Then a storm lifts the ship clear of the sea. After seven days and nights in the air, the crew approaches a bright spherical land with fields, people and recognizable signs of settlement. Other heavenly bodies surround them. When they look below and recognize the world from which they departed, they realize that the land beneath their feet is the Moon.
In Book 1, section 10, the narrator turns from the impossible journey to surveying an unfamiliar country. The visitors moor their ship, disembark and look around. Lucian supplies this new country with a harbour, cultivated land and a government, much as another travel writer might describe a distant island. Once the astonishing arrival has been reported, the narrator busies himself with its inhabitants and their political concerns.
The ruler is Endymion, whose name Greek audiences knew from myths connecting him with the Moon goddess Selene. His opponent, Phaethon, rules the Sun and also carries a name associated with the solar myths. In Lucian’s hands they are rival monarchs. Endymion plans to settle people on the Morning Star, which ancient observers associated with Venus, but Phaethon objects to the colony. The stranded sailors are promptly enlisted in the lunar army and dragged into this struggle for territory.
There was nothing unfamiliar to Greek readers about rival powers contesting a colony. Greek city-states had founded settlements around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, sometimes coming into conflict over land, wealth and influence. Lucian moves those rivalries into the heavens while retaining the behaviour of earthly kings. He also borrows the habits of epic battle descriptions, in which the naming of warriors and their armour could occupy a great deal of space.
The war between the Sun and Moon
The armies have troops mounted on immense vultures and fleas, along with creatures combining the features of birds, insects and plants. Lucian gives these outlandish formations military names and describes their weapons, shields and equipment as carefully as another author might describe cavalry and infantry. His newly arrived narrator joins the fighting with remarkably little concern about why strangers should participate in the Moon’s quarrel.
Giant spiders supply the army with its battlefield. Their enormous web stretches between the Moon and the Morning Star, providing a surface on which soldiers can move and deploy. Lucian explains it as a clever piece of military preparation. The narrator treats this impossible bridge between heavenly bodies as a practical solution to moving an army. Illustrators later seized on this scene: a seventeenth-century depiction and a nineteenth-century image by William Strang both helped establish the web as one of the voyage’s best-known episodes.
The Sun wins the advantage. Its troops build a double wall of clouds that shuts out sunlight from the Moon, giving Endymion’s people what amounts to a permanent eclipse. Deprived of light, he has to negotiate. The surrender also follows familiar political procedures: in Book 1, section 19, the Sun’s assembly meets twice before it accepts a settlement. The details resemble the assemblies and deliberations recorded in Greek histories of actual wars.
The treaty in section 20 lays out obligations for each side. Phaethon’s people must remove the cloud barrier and release captives. Endymion’s people agree to respect the independence of the other stars, hand over hostages and pay ten thousand jars of dew every year. The rivals will found the Morning Star settlement together and admit other participants. Their agreement is carved on a monument suspended between the two territories. The colonization scheme is not merely postponed or quietly dropped, as it is in some retellings. Lucian supplies the sort of fully articulated peace settlement a historian might quote, right down to the improbable tribute.
For present-day readers, the episode might resemble space opera. An educated Greek audience could also recognize the methods of Thucydides, the fifth-century BCE historian who recorded debates, sieges, treaties and wars between Greek states. The 1998 commentary by Aristoula Georgiadou and David H. J. Larmour discusses the work’s many parodies and its interest in narratorial authority. It would go too far to identify every detail of the battle with a passage from Thucydides. The resemblance lies in the careful imitation of serious political and military history.
How the people of the Moon live
With the treaty settled, the narrator describes the Moon’s inhabitants as though preparing a report about an unfamiliar society. All are male, and their reproduction reverses earthly expectations. Men carry pregnancies in their calves; babies are removed and exposed to the wind before coming to life. Other lunar people grow from human tissue planted in the ground and become tree-people. Some bodily parts can be detached or manufactured. Lucian presents these customs with a traveller’s confidence, though he has already told the audience that no such biological observations were made.
The Greek text of section 22 adds a mock explanation of language: the invented practice of carrying children in the calf supposedly accounts for the Greek word for that part of the leg. There are also prescribed ages for marriage and detailed conditions of birth. Lucian is parodying the authority claimed by explanations drawn from etymology, medicine and accounts of foreign customs. A technical explanation sounds persuasive for a moment, even when it is explaining an impossibility.
The lunar diet is equally strange. Residents cook frogs but consume their smoke rather than the meat, and they obtain drinks by squeezing moisture from the air. At the end of life they dissolve into air without leaving a body. Bald heads are admired, whereas inhabitants of comets supposedly prefer the reverse. In Section 23, Lucian inventories these customs with the composure of a visitor describing an ordinary community.
Another remarkable invention is a mirror suspended over a well. Looking into the mirror reveals Earth’s people and cities; descending the well lets visitors hear conversations below. The narrator says that he recognized members of his family, although he does not know whether they recognized him. In the episode in section 26, Lucian pushes the eyewitness claim into especially implausible territory. His observer has a device that overcomes the distances that would usually prevent verification, yet still cannot confirm what the people on Earth perceived.
Karen ní Mheallaigh examines Lucian’s interest in copies, illusions and invented realities in her 2014 study of Lucian’s fiction. Lucian invents the Moon’s society using categories familiar from ancient accounts of foreign peoples. Its laws, marriage customs, physical characteristics and food habits mimic the information a Greek writer might collect when explaining a foreign people to readers at home.
From the stars to the inside of a whale
The sailors eventually return toward Earth. Along the way they discover a settlement inhabited by living lamps, including the lamp the narrator knows from his own house. They also pass Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, the imaginary city in Aristophanes’ comedy Birds. Lucian playfully treats Aristophanes as someone whose extraordinary account deserves belief. Having already been to the Moon, the sailors are hardly entitled to expect normal conditions when their ship reaches the sea again.
There a vast sea creature swallows ship and sailors together. According to Book 1, section 30, it is 1,500 stades long, a number meant to convey impossible dimensions rather than identify a real animal. Within it the crew finds forests, fish, wrecked vessels and land under cultivation. The narrator estimates that the creature has room for a city of ten thousand people and even gives the enclosed land a circumference of 240 stades. The measurements make the creature’s interior sound like a territory that could be mapped.
A father and son have established a life inside the animal by cultivating the ground, while other occupants, named and shaped after marine creatures, make their existence dangerous. Negotiations and fighting follow, with the newcomers securing control of territory. Inside the monster, Lucian gives the travellers another inhabited territory to explore, complete with competing interests and disputes over control.
Months pass before the crew escapes. During their imprisonment, they watch a battle at sea through the creature’s open mouth. Gigantic men steer floating islands as if they were ships, rowing with trees and manoeuvring enormous rudders. Later the narrator devises an escape: the sailors set fire to the forest inside the creature, wait for it to die, hold its jaws open with timbers and lower their ship into the water. The account of the escape describes each step with the practical confidence of an ordinary sailor.
In Book Two, a freezing wind turns the sea solid, and the crew walks over the ice, shelters in a cave excavated from it and pulls the ship along like a sled until the thaw. Next come an ocean of milk and an island made of cheese, with vines that give milk and a shrine to Galatea, the sea nymph whose name lends itself to a milk-related joke. In section 3, the travellers establish that the island is cheese by tasting it. Tasting the island is his evidence for a claim no reader is expected to accept.
Homer, Socrates, and the Island of the Blessed
Their route then leads into the Greek world of the dead. The Island of the Blessed is imagined as a home for heroes and virtuous souls, furnished with fertile ground, streams of milk and wine and trees bearing food without cultivation. Lucian heightens that traditional abundance until dishes seem to grow ready for the table. The best jokes concern the famous people Lucian places in this abundant afterlife.
Among them is Homer, whom the narrator can question about his birthplace and the composition of the epics, matters that had occupied Greek scholars for generations. Historical and legendary figures now behave like people at the same gathering. Socrates persistently questions the company until Rhadamanthys, a judge of the dead, threatens to expel him. Plato is missing altogether, supposedly because he lives in the ideal city imagined in his Republic. Lucian gives familiar intellectual reputations an afterlife in which their owners have to live with them.
In Book 2, section 17, the joke about Plato depends on readers knowing that the ideal society described in his work is a philosophical proposal, rather than an actual city on a map. Lucian lets the philosopher live inside his own imaginary political model. Meeting Homer permits a similar fantasy: the narrator can obtain immediate answers from a poet whose life and authorship real scholars were unable to investigate firsthand.
The Island of the Blessed is not open to everyone. Elsewhere, notorious tellers of unbelievable stories, among them Ctesias and Herodotus, are punished in the company of liars. Herodotus was a historian; Lucian’s decision to put him there is a satirical judgement within the fiction, not an impartial finding about the Histories. The scene recalls the introduction, where Lucian criticized the authors of extravagant travel reports. His narrator has described even greater marvels while making a point of admitting that they are fabricated.
The two kinds of afterlife amount to a comic judgement on Greek literary celebrity. Respected figures feast or quarrel, while others are made to answer for the stories they circulated. By turning the dead into people whom a traveller can visit and interview, Lucian stages conversations that are impossible in the real world. Authors and philosophers are no longer untouchable names in books; their claims and habits can be made ridiculous.
The Island of Dreams and the unfinished ending
The Island of Dreams appears only after these meetings with the blessed and the punished. It seems to retreat as the sailors approach, like the memory of a dream fading after waking. Their harbour lies near an ivory gate. Readers of the Odyssey would recognize the image: Penelope describes gates of horn and ivory, distinguishing dreams that come true from those that mislead the dreamer.
Lucian extends the image by giving the island gates of iron and clay as well. There are temples dedicated to Night and the Rooster, a palace belonging to Sleep, shrines to Truth and Deceit, and an oracle served by a dream-interpreter. The description in Book 2, section 33 identifies these places with the precision of a guide to a real city. Each new feature raises the problem of trusting what one sees and hears in a place governed by dreams.
In the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, Penelope describes the gates through which truthful and deceptive dreams pass. Her uncertainty about a dream becomes, in Lucian’s hands, an entire country with harbours, temples and an oracle that travellers can inspect. The narrator’s access to such a place does nothing to establish which dreams should be believed. Indeed, the elaborate geography is another reminder that a detailed account may owe its exactness to invention.
The ship passes still more wonders, including a forest growing out of the sea and an island of seemingly hospitable women who turn out to have donkey legs and deadly intentions. At last they sight what seems to be another continent. Before they can explore it, a storm wrecks the ship. The narrator survives and promises further books, but the text stops at Book 2, section 47. No continuation by Lucian is known. We do not know whether he intended to write one, and the unfulfilled promise may be one final joke at the expense of confident narrators.
Was A True Story the first science fiction?
The voyage to the Moon gives readers several elements they would recognize from later science fiction: inhabited worlds beyond Earth, conflict between those worlds, unusual means of reproduction and devices that extend human perception. Lucian’s extended account of a populated Moon is unusual among surviving Greek and Roman works. These features explain the frequent description of A True Story as an early example, sometimes even the first example, of science fiction.
Science fiction is a much later literary label. It developed in intellectual circumstances shaped by ideas of science and technology that Lucian did not share. His ship is carried into space by a storm, not a rocket; he does not present a scientific explanation for life on the Moon. Edible islands and talking lamps receive just as much attention as the lunar inhabitants. He uses fantastic invention to examine why readers believe some stories and distrust others.
The question has attracted different scholarly approaches. In a 2016 study of the work’s relationship to science fiction, Katelis Viglas uses the terms cognitive estrangement and novum, the unfamiliar invention that forces a reader to reconsider the known world. The 1998 commentary by Georgiadou and Larmour discusses the narrative as a science-fiction novel while tracing its satire and allusions. Other scholars place greater emphasis on fantastic travel in antiquity and on Lucian’s ridicule of writers who claimed knowledge of inaccessible countries.
The Dickinson editors likewise place the book within fantasy, early science fiction and the learned humour of Greek literature. The label recognizes the originality of Lucian’s populated Moon without making him the inventor of a modern literary genre. He imagines travel beyond Earth, but repeatedly returns to a familiar problem for historians and readers alike: whether convincing detail makes a witness credible.
Lucian’s inventions also invite questions about ancient ideas of living bodies and artificial life. Karen ní Mheallaigh’s 2023 chapter on Lucian’s lunar tree-people examines imagined bodies and artificial reproduction against ancient ideas about nature and technology. That helps locate the episode in the intellectual possibilities of the second century CE. Her interpretation turns on ancient ideas about bodies and nature, not on treating the story as an astronomical prediction.
How later readers imagined Lucian’s voyage
The book travelled far beyond its original Greek-speaking readership. Manuscripts preserved Lucian’s writing, and translations and printed editions made it available in early modern Europe. Cyrano de Bergerac wrote lunar journeys in the seventeenth century; Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century Gulliver’s Travels also belongs to the tradition of satirical voyages among improbable societies. Both later authors share elements of the satirical-voyage tradition represented by Lucian’s A True Story. A shared device is not by itself evidence of direct borrowing, however; particular claims of influence need more specific support.
Printed editions also changed how readers pictured the journey. A Dutch edition of 1647 pictured the Sun-Moon battle with the giant spider web between them; the British Library-derived image record identifies that particular image and its edition. An illustrated English edition followed in 1894, with work by William Strang, J. B. Clark and Aubrey Beardsley. The British Museum’s catalogue of a surviving copy identifies Strang’s Spiders of Mighty Bigness, along with pictures of the whale and the Island of Dreams. These illustrations gave later readers a visual Moon war, whale and Island of Dreams that Lucian’s first audience could only imagine.
Lucian’s narrator can interview Homer, inspect the inside of a whale and provide the written terms of a treaty between celestial kingdoms. None of those details asks to be believed as history, because the author has already made his admission. The comedy lies in seeing how thoroughly a writer can borrow the manner of truthful testimony to make an invented story persuasive. The title returns the reader to Lucian’s original joke: someone can admit to inventing everything and still sound like a reliable witness.
