Lucian of Samosata's True History: the first journey to the Moon

The first literary journey to the Moon of which we have a complete account opens with a declaration of falsehood. It was written in Greek, in the second century AD, by Lucian of Samosata, a rhetorician and satirist born in a city of Roman Syria on the banks of the Euphrates. In the preface to the True History the author warns that the only true thing in the book is precisely this: that he will tell only of things never seen, never happened and utterly impossible.

A parody of travellers' tales

The warning is no mere joke. Lucian targets the historians and travellers who filled their works with marvels passed off as truth: he names Ctesias of Cnidus, author of a work on India, and Iambulus, who had described wondrous islands in the ocean, and goes back as far as Homer's Odysseus, master of incredible tales at the court of the Phaeacians. The True History is therefore a literary satire, in two books, which pretends to imitate those models while pushing them to absurdity.

The narrator sets sail with fifty companions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, towards the western ocean, driven only by curiosity to learn its limits. After a first island, where a river of wine flows, the ship is lifted by a whirlwind and carried through the air for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day the travellers glimpse a great land hanging in the sky, shining and round: it is the Moon.

The war between the Moon and the Sun

The Moon is ruled by Endymion, the handsome shepherd of myth loved by Selene, who was carried there while he slept. The travellers are captured by the Vulture Dragoons, warriors who ride huge three-headed vultures, and brought before the king. Endymion is at war with Phaethon, king of the Sun, over the Morning Star, which both wish to colonise. The narrator and his companions enlist in the lunar army.

The battle is a catalogue of grotesque inventions: horsemen on cranes, soldiers with wings of lettuce leaves, archers riding fleas bigger than elephants, giant spiders weaving a web between the Moon and the Morning Star. The Sun wins and builds a wall of clouds to cut off the Moon's light. The war ends with a peace treaty, whose text Lucian reports as a parody of diplomatic documents.

Lunar customs and a return full of surprises

The Selenites have customs that are the reverse of earthly ones. There are no women, and children are born from the calves of men; when they die, the inhabitants dissolve into smoke. They feed on the aroma of roasted frogs and have eyes that can be taken out and put back. In the royal palace there is a well topped by a mirror: whoever looks into it sees and hears what is happening on Earth.

Setting off again, the travellers pass through the city of lamps and Cloudcuckooland, the city in the clouds imagined by Aristophanes in the Birds, before falling back into the ocean and being swallowed by a whale. Lucian returned to the Moon in the Icaromenippus as well, where the philosopher Menippus reaches it with one eagle's wing and one vulture's wing and meets Empedocles there, hurled up by Etna.

Rediscovered by the humanists and translated into Latin in the fifteenth century, the True History had a lasting influence: it can be recognised in Rabelais, in Cyrano de Bergerac and in Swift's Gulliver's Travels. For this reason many regard it as an ancestor of science fiction, although its aim was different: to laugh at the credulity of readers and at the ease with which writers invent.