SOURCE: "Lucian," in Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 9-25.

In the following excerpt, Duncan discusses the playfully detached viewpoint Lucian adopts throughout his works.

From the late fifteenth century until well into the nineteenth, Lucian held his place among the most widely translated and imitated of Greek authors. He later came to be banished from the pantheon of nineteenth-century Hellenism, partly because he was a 'silver' Greek—or rather not a Greek at all but a Syrian of the second century A.D. who had copied the styles of an earlier age—but mainly because of his ambiguous attitude toward the nobler ideals of Attic culture. His status today typically reflects the split between the scholar and the general reader of ancient literature which the decline of classical education has brought about. The object of recondite and forbidding monographs on the shelves of...