Lucian of Samosata
The Ship, or The Wishes
Πλοῖον ἢ Εὐχαί · Second century CE, probably after 160.
Four men walk home from the docks after gawping at an enormous Egyptian grain freighter and fall to wishing aloud — for money, for an empire, for a ring that grants anything. Each fantasy is allowed to run until it collapses under its own weight.
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 (Oxford, 1905) — the Fowler of Modern English Usage. Their Lucian is brisk, idiomatic late-Victorian English that reads far more naturally than the Greek does, and that is the distortion to watch: Lucian's studied Atticism is a costume, and Fowler renders it as ordinary good prose. They also soften obscenity and abuse, and occasionally supply a joke's punchline where Lucian leaves it implicit.