Lucian's True History

A voyage past the Pillars of Hercules to the moon, the war between the sun and the moon over the colonisation of the morning star, and an island made of cheese — announced by the author as a pack of lies from beginning to end. Lucian wrote it in the second century as a parody of Homer and of the travellers who claimed to be truthful. It is the oldest surviving fiction about a journey to another world. Forty-three plates range from Boucher to Cézanne, their mythological seas and voyages echoing Lucian's own tall tale of a ship blown past the Pillars of Hercules.