Gildersleeve was probably right in calling the _True History_ “a comic sequel to a brilliant essay entitled ‘How to write History.’”[319] The traditional manuscript order which places the _True History_ after _How History Should Be Written_ seems so aptly prompted by Lucianic irony. For this romance in two books is not history at all and has nothing of Lucian’s primary requirement for history, that it should be true! It is a work of pure imagination, one of the earliest accounts of fictitious voyages and as such is part of the great tradition from the Odyssey to _Gulliver’s Travels_.[320] Lucian’s preface explains both the nature of the piece and his reasons for writing it.[321] The _True History_ like many good stories is told in the first person by Lucian himself. The author, moreover, preludes and interrupts the narrative to get in direct touch with his reader. In his introduction, he states that his purpose in writing is to furnish to students some reading that will give relaxation, but at the same time “a little food for thought.” The story is bound to charm, Lucian thinks, because of the novelty of the subject, the humor of the plan, the plausible lying involved and the comical parodies of such authors as Ctesias, Iambulus, and Homer in his Odyssey. Lucian confesses to being a liar with the best of them, but affirms that his lying is unique in being honest because he admits it. “Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others—which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.”[322] In spite of this confession, Lucian here and there in his story tries to create an atmosphere of veracity by protestations of it. As he never saw the Corn Sparrow forces or the Crane Knights, he does not venture to relate the marvellous and incredible stories told about them.[323] When he describes the magic mirror over a well in the Moon which furnished him television of his family and country he says that disbelievers by going there will find he tells the truth.[324] In the Island of the Wicked, Lucian finds all liars, both those who had told lies on earth or written them, among the latter Ctesias and Herodotus. “On seeing them,” he says, “I had good hopes for the future, for I have never told a lie that I know of.”[325] The last sentence of the romance is: “What happened in the other world I shall tell you in the succeeding books.”[326] This, a Greek scholiast comments, is the greatest lie of all!