ABSTRACT
Lucian has won many admirers over the centuries, but perhaps the most prestigious was Erasmus, whose Praise of Follyand Colloquies interact extensively with the works of this talented writer. Lucian wrote in Greek, but his mother tongue was probably an Aramaic dialect known as Syriac. Ancient historical writers tended to name their sources either when they were faced with contradictory accounts, or when their careful research had unearthed some particularly unusual material. The Byzantine scholar Photius regarded Dio as a much clearer writer than Thucydides and appreciated the subject matter of the Roman History, like other educated readers in the Byzantine world who saw their state as a continuation of the Roman empire. Both the magnitude and the chronological sweep of the Roman History recall Livy rather than Tacitus as a precedent within the genre, although the fact that Dio combined writing with an active public career distinguishes him from Livy.
