Library › Greek: Satire & Fable › Dialogi deorum
In Dialogi deorum (Dialogues of the Gods), Lucian of Samosata eavesdrops on Olympus. These short comic dialogues in Ancient Greek, composed in the second century AD, catch the gods off duty: Zeus explaining away his love affairs, Hera scolding, Hermes exhausted by errands, Apollo and Hephaestus trading gossip — divine dignity dissolving into family squabble.
The collection perfected a genre: myth retold as comedy of manners, with the anthropomorphic gods judged by human standards and found ridiculous. Enormously popular from Byzantium onward, it shaped satirical treatments of mythology in European literature and remains one of the most enjoyable introductions to Lucian’s art.
About this edition. The Greek text is that of the Perseus Digital Library. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).