Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

Lucian’s Allusive Journey 115
man whose portrait of the place had been wrongly disbelieved” (Lucian, 2004:
I.29). Lucian does not object to the description of Cloudcuckooville from
Aristophanes’ travel narrative, The Birds, because, like Lucian’s text, it is part of
a fictive narrative. In How to Write History, Lucian explicitly emphasizes this
separation between history and poetry:
Such writers seem unaware that history has aims and rules different from
poetry and poems. In the case of the latter, liberty is absolute and there is one
law—the will of the poet. Inspired and possessed by the Muses as he is, even
if he wants to harness winged horses to a chariot, even if he sets others to run
over water or the top of the corn. (Lucian, 1959: 13)
Those who “wrongly disbelieved” are discredited because Aristophanes’ perception
of Cloudcuckooville cannot be false, as it is an imaginative landscape of his
own creative design (Lucian, 2004: I.9). Aristophanes has complete creative
license and thus Cloudcuckooville can be represented in Lucian’s text as a truly
fictive place. In contrast to Lucian’s quick acceptance of Aristophanes as a wise
and truthful man, Lucian goes so far as to correct Homer’s description of the
Island of Dreams when he says, “no one else has ever written an account of it,
apart from Homer, that is, who was not entirely accurate” (II.32). Even though
the common element that Homer, Herodotus and Aristophanes share is travel
narrative, Lucian connects them with history in How to Write History:
That, then, is the sort of man the historian should be: fearless, incorruptible,
free, a friend of free expression and the truth, intent, as the comic poet says,
on calling a fig a fig, a trough a trough, giving nothing to hatred or to
friendship, sparing no one, showing neither pity nor shame. . . . (Lucian,
1959: 57)
Aristophanes is Lucian’s “comic poet,” who through deliberate fiction, seems to
create a kind of aesthetic and imaginative truth. Because the utopian society created
in The Birds does not purport to be true, Aristophanes, while a fiction
writer, “is the sort of man the historian should be.”
Lucian’s focus on the classical texts of Homer, Herodotus, and Aristophanes
in order to comment on knowledge, fiction and truth can also be seen in
other parts of A True History. Part of Lucian’s allusive journey involves lampoons
of various contemporary philosophical schools. Just as Lucian uses parody
of Homer and Herodotus to compel his readers to question the fantastic
elements of their respective texts, so too does Lucian parody some of the
impractical elements of contemporary philosophy. One of the lands that Lucian
passes on his journey is Lamptown (Lynchopolis) about which he says, “we
found not a single human being, but lots of lamps running around . . . they all
had names as well, just like human beings” (Lucian, 2004: I.29). Lucian satirizes
the Neo-Pythagorean belief that “souls wandered in the air in the form of
sparks” (Hall, 1981: 203). As has been suggested by Hall, “The attitude towards