Lucian: Three Menippean Fantasies

A handful of fragments is all that remains of the writings of Menippus, the third-century BCE provocateur of the Greek Cynic movement. The Western literary tradition knows him through Lucian, the Greek satirist who lived and worked four hundred years later. Included in this book are Joel Relihan’s lively English translations of Lucian’s three reanimations of Menippus—fantastic narratives and comic dialogues set in heaven and hell: Menippus; or, The Consultation of the Corpses Icaromenippus; or,