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Excerpt from Luciani Vera Historia: Edited With Introduction and Notes for the Use of Middle Forms in Schools But to speculate on all the possible originals of Lucian's romance is useless. A start being once made, imagination would do the rest; we shall therefore only indicate a few Of the Obvious or most probable sources of allusion. These are chiefly Homer's Odyssey, certain stories in Herodotus (men tioned in the notes), and the Indian History of Ctesias1 named in Lucian's preface. To these may be added the work Of Iambulus 2, of which the account given by Diodorus Siculus is said to be an epitome. But besides these Greek sources there are plain traces of Eastern fable. Not only had Lucian been a great traveller in his youth, but the place of his birth, situated as it was upon the confines of the Eastern and Western world, may well have made him familiar with Orien tal tales. The stories in the collection known as the Arabian Nights are some of them very ancient, or at least founded on very ancient traditions, and there are at any rate two inci dents in the Vera Hirtaria that may have been borrowed from this source. The similarity between the gigantic Kingfisher (ii. 560) and the Roc, or Rukh, that in the Second Voyage Of Sindbad the Sailor alighted on the dome [its egg] and brooded over it with its wings 3 (cp. 7a as. Hahrrovaa, etc.) is Obvious. Again in the Fifth Voyage the sailors break the Roc's egg and eat the young one which they find inside 4. The only doubt indeed arises from the sequel of this tale in the Arabian Nights. There the ship is smashed by the enraged birds in revenge for their broken egg, and the temptation to note this incident would scarcely, we think, have been re sisted by Lucian, if he had heard of it. The counterpart to the huge sea monster (i. 448) appears in a story told (not in the text of the Thousand and One Nights), but in the Cairo edition Of Sindbad's Seventh Voyage 5. In this expedition they encounter an enormous fish that could gulp down ships with their crews entire, and Sindbad's vessel would have been thus swallowed, had not a storm come on and broken it in pieces just at the critical moment. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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