Having thus said, I conjured him by Iuppiter the hospitable, and by our familiarity, and the shipwracke we suffered together.

THE DREAM OF LUCIAN

Lucian: His Life or His Dream

Lucian

Translated by Francis Hickes, 1634

‘There’s nothing more boring than other people’s dreams’, so the saying goes. This story is certainly an exception. Lucian of Samosata (Samsat, Turkey), a Greek satirist of the second century AD, describes his boyhood dream with immense charm. The ancients tended to believe in the significance of dreams. Lucian’s apparently led him to change his career path from artist’s apprentice to rhetorician and writer. His seventeenth-century translator, the Oxford-educated Francis Hickes, renders his story compellingly.

After I had given over going to schoole, and was grown to be a stripling of some good stature, my father advised with his friends, what it were best for him to breed mee to: and the opinion of most was, that to make mee a scholler, the labour would be long, the charge great, and would require a plentifull purse: whereas our meanes were poore, and would soone stand in need of speedy supply: but if he would set mee to learn some manuall art or other, I should quickly get by my trade enough to serve my owne turne, and never be troublesome for any diet at home, if I were placed abroad, neither would it be long before I should make my father a glad man, to see mee daily bring home with mee what I had got by my labours.