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Lucian of Samosata (C. 115–C. 200) | Encyclopedia of Philosophy (914 words) |
 | Lucian of Samosata(C. Lucian of Samosata, the philosophical satirist and satirist of philosophy, was born at Samosata (Samsat) on the Euphrates and was educated there. |
| Lucian's philosophical position is not easy to define because he expresses contradictory attitudes, and his persistent irony and his obvious wish to entertain make it hard to know how seriously to take his statements. |
| In The Fisher, Lucian claimed to be a champion of philosophy, which he described elsewhere as a civilizing and morally improving study; however, he constantly criticized pseudo philosophers for their greed, bad temper, sexual immorality, and the general inconsistency between their preaching and their practice. |
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Lucian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (576 words) |
| He was born in Samosata (now inundated in a reservoir of eastern Turkey), in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria, thus he referred to himself as a "Syrian" |
| Lucian almost certainly did not write all the more than eighty works attributed to him— declamations, essays both laudatory and sarcastic, and comic dialogues and symposia with a satirical cast, studded with quotations in alarming contexts and allusions set in an unusual light, designed to be surprising and provocative. |
| Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation where one pleads in court, composing pleas for others, and teaching the art of pleading, but Lucian's practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot, somewhat as a rhapsode had done in declaiming poetry at an earlier period. |
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