This important diachronic study of the life and works of Lucian of Samosata investigates the varied images of the
Sophist from Syria from late Antiquity to the seventeenth-century. Using sources in Patristic literature, Byzantine glosses, the Neo-Latin satire of the Quattrocento, the Vitae Luciani, and Golden Age texts, Zappala demonstrates how the writings of Lucian are fragmented into a series of "authors": the historiographer, the writer of fantasy, the moralist, the atheist, the stylist. The study illustrates the dynamic relationship between a fixed text and the cultural translation which "unfixes" that text and spins it out onto surprising, paradoxical recreations. Both in its sources and its treatment, this work is a groundbreaking study which illuminates previously unstudied areas of the continuing mutation of Classical literature in the European heritage.