Short Story· 166· Science Fiction
by Λουκιανὸς Σαμοσατεύς Lucian of Samosata
Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα (A True Story): 2 recorded works trace back to it.
Works that record this one as a source, with the evidence a contributor gave.
Lucian's voyage is the model for the satirical impossible voyage that Swift made his own: a narrator who swears to the truth of plainly absurd travels, used to mock travellers' tales and the society at home. Swift knew Lucian well, and A True Story is routinely named first among Gulliver's classical ancestors.
The first voyage to the Moon in European literature is Lucian's, and Cyrano's is its seventeenth-century descendant: a comic lunar journey that becomes a vehicle for satire, now carrying the new astronomy and libertine philosophy instead of Greek historians.