The Project Gutenberg eBook, Trips to the Moon, by Lucian, Edited by Henry
Morley, Translated by Thomas Francklin

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Title: Trips to the Moon

Author: Lucian

Release Date: December 10, 2003 [eBook #10430]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRIPS TO THE MOON***

This eBook was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.

TRIPS TO THE MOON

by Lucian.

Translated from the Greek by Thomas Francklin, D.D.

CONTENTS.

Introduction by Professor Henry Morley.
Instructions for Writing History.
The True History.
Preface.
Book 1.
Book 2.
Icaro-Menippus--A Dialogue.

INTRODUCTION.

Lucian, in Greek Loukianos, was a Syrian, born about the year 120 at
Samosata, where a bend of the Euphrates brings that river nearest to
the borders of Cilicia in Asia Minor. He had in him by nature a
quick flow of wit, with a bent towards Greek literature. It was
thought at home that he showed as a boy the artist nature by his
skill in making little waxen images. An uncle on his mother's side
happened to be a sculptor. The home was poor, Lucian would have his
bread to earn, and when he was fourteen he was apprenticed to his
uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor. Before long, while
polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it.
His uncle thrashed him. Lucian's spirit rebelled, and he went home
giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of
the extraordinary power he showed in his art.

After some debate Lucian abandoned training as a sculptor, studied
literature and rhetoric, and qualified himself for the career of an
advocate and teacher at a time when rhetoric had still a chief place
in the schools. He practised for a short time unsuccessfully at
Antioch, and then travelled for the cultivation of his mind in
Greece, Italy, and Gaul, making his way by use of his wits, as
Goldsmith did long afterwards when he started, at the outset also of
his career as a writer, on a grand tour of the continent with
nothing in his pocket. Lucian earned as he went by public use of
his skill as a rhetorician. His travel was not unl