Lucian

Born around 125 to a lower middle class family in Samosata along the Euphrates, Lucian was apprenticed to his uncle as a sculptor but fled after a botched attempt at the craft, heading to Ionia for an education. He became a travelling lecturer across the Roman Empire, building fame and wealth before settling in Athens for a decade - the period that produced most of his extant works. Writing entirely in ancient Greek despite his likely Syriac mother tongue, he created the comic dialogue as a parody of Socratic tradition and penned A True Story, a tongue-in-cheek satire of tall tales that launched him to the moon centuries before anyone else tried. His targets ranged from Cynic philosophers like Peregrinus Proteus to the fraudulent oracle Alexander of Abonoteichus, from supernatural believers in Lover of Lies to the gods themselves in The Dialogues of the Gods and Zeus Rants. In his fifties he may have taken a government post in Egypt, after which the historical record goes silent. More than eighty of his works survived - a towering quantity for antiquity - and his sarcasm echoed forward into More, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Swift.