Lucian

Lucian of Samosata was a Syrian who wrote in Greek, a travelling lecturer who turned his rhetorical training to satire in the second century, mocking philosophers, gods, historians and the credulous in some eighty dialogues and essays. A True History is a parody of travellers’ tales that reaches the moon and the belly of a whale, and is the ancestor of science fiction; the Dialogues of the Dead have the great meet as skeletons; How to Write History is the first treatise on the subject. Erasmus and More translated him, and Swift and Fielding learned from him how to be serious by not being.