A True Story and Dialogues of the Dead

Introduction

Lucian begins A True Story by announcing: 'The one true thing I shall say is that I am lying.' He then tells of a wildly absurd voyage: his ship is carried by a whirlwind to the moon and caught up in an interplanetary war between the kings of the Moon and the Sun, later swallowed by a giant whale, inside which the crew live for nearly two years, and finally reaches the Isles of the Blessed, where he talks with Homer and Socrates. It parodies the tall tales of ancient historians and travel writers. The volume also includes the Dialogues of the Dead, in which Alexander, philosophers and millionaires, in the underworld, have lost everything but their bare bones.