Lucian of Samosata
Dialogues of the Dead — what you cannot take across the river
Νεκρικοὶ Διάλογοι · Second century CE, probably around 160-170.
Thirty short scenes in the underworld. Croesus complains that Menippus laughs at him for missing his gold; Alexander argues with Hannibal over who was the greater general, and Diogenes asks him whether he still thinks he was a god; a man who spent years flattering a rich old man for his will finds the old man has outlived him; Charon makes the new arrivals strip off their crowns, their purple and their beards before they board. Only the Cynics, who arrived with nothing, have nothing to lose.
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:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
H. W. and F. G. Fowler's Clarendon Lucian (1905), by the brothers who would later write the Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It is the standard public-domain Lucian and it is very good English: brisk, idiomatic, timed for the joke, which is the right instinct for this author and occasionally too free with him. They anglicise readily and will find an English equivalent rather than a literal rendering, so the wit is relocated as often as it is translated. The same translation is used for the site's other Lucian except Alexander. Their numbering of the thirty dialogues is the traditional one and matches the Greek.