Lucian of Samosata
Alexander the False Prophet — a new god with a puppet snake, and the Epicureans who called it
Ἀλέξανδρος ἢ Ψευδόμαντις · Written after 180 CE, in Lucian's later years. The events are recent and in some cases witnessed: Alexander founded his oracle at Abonoteichus on the Black Sea coast in the 150s and it outlived him.
Lucian's account of how to manufacture a god. Alexander of Abonoteichus planted a goose egg containing a baby snake in the foundations of a temple under construction, dug it up before a crowd, and announced the rebirth of Asclepius; within weeks he had a full-grown tame snake with a painted linen head worked by horsehair, an oracle answering sealed questions, and a stream of money from across the empire. The narrative follows the mechanics — how seals were opened and re-closed, how ambiguous answers were filed, how mysteries with torchlight were instituted, how a Roman governor was cultivated. Two groups saw through it and Alexander named them from the pulpit: Christians and Epicureans. At section 47 he takes a copy of the Principal Doctrines — also on this site — into the marketplace and burns it.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
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Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Austin Morris Harmon translated Lucian for the Loeb Classical Library; this volume is of 1925, and Perseus serves it under a CC BY-SA licence. It is chosen here over the 1905 translation used for the other three Lucian works on this site, and the reason is coverage: that version omits sections 41 and 42 entirely — about 140 words of Greek its translator declined to render — and this one prints all sixty-one. So the house voice for Lucian changes for this work alone: brisker and more colloquial than the 1905 version, and occasionally slangy in a 1920s way ('buncombe', 'consummate rascal') where the Greek is merely contemptuous. Κύριαι Δόξαι becomes 'Established Beliefs' here; the same book appears elsewhere on this site as the 'Sovran Maxims' and as the Principal Doctrines.