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formally sustained within the tight syntactical and cultural frame of the epigram itself. One of them makes a pointed allusion to
‘bifrons Janus’
, 7 the two-faced god who thereby saw everything. There are, similarly, two faces to More’s first work. These epigrams were said by Sir John Harington to ‘flie over all Europe for their wit and conceit’, 8 while to another poetaster they were ‘too obscene to be lookt upon, and who so rubbeth stincking weeds, shall have filthy fingers’. 9 But even if they didfly over Europe, despite their bawdiness, they were overtaken on the way by another of More’s classical imitations.
    His translations of Lucian became by far the most popular of his productions; estimates of the number of editions within his lifetime vary from nine to fourteen but on any count they outdistance the sales and general reputation of the now more famous
Utopia.
The truth is that, in Lucian, the young More found his perfect match. It was said of this second-century satirist that
‘ridentem dicere verum’
, he spoke the truth through laughter, and Erasmus noted that he treated everything
‘naso’
, 10 with a nose—with ridicule and with a certain dislike for the odour of old verities. Erasmus also said of himself that he had a nose; this is generally taken to represent his dislike for the smell of fish and domestic stoves, but it perhaps implies a shared distaste for the more farcical elements of orthodoxy, custom and traditional observance. Lucian was one of the ancients, therefore, who could join the ranks of the moderns. His extant works, and in particular his satirical dialogues, were some of the most widely circulated and translated of the fifteenth century; he also hit the mark for those prose writers of the early sixteenth century, such as More, who were looking for a model upon which they could establish their own satire of vain ritual and conceit.
    More had started his systematic study of Greek under the aegis of Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, putting aside his Latin for a time in order to master the new language. It is not known when he first came upon the works of Lucian—an edition emerged from the Aldine press in 1503, however, and it seems the likely spur to his interest. It is remarkable, in any event, how quickly he acquired a working knowledge of this difficult tongue. Within four or five years of beginning to learn how to read and write an entirely different set of characters, he was able to translate one of the finest exponents of the language in a proficient and reliable fashion. He worked with Erasmus upon some of Lucian’s dialogues, and their Latin versions were published in the winter of 1506. More was the junior partner in the enterprise, providing four translations beside twenty-eight by Erasmus, but the influence of Lucian upon his subsequent writing was permanent and profound. When Erasmus suggested that a correspondent read
Utopia ‘si quando voles ridere’
11 (’if you want to laugh’), we are in the same Lucianic world of
‘ridentem dicere verum’.
Medieval schoolmen were generally supposed to lackhumour; certainly any sense of irony might have proved fatal for their aspiration towards total and systematic knowledge. Lucian provided an antidote for the somewhat mirthless pursuit of certainty upon the uncertain earth. It was reported of More that he could make even the most solemn colleague burst into laughter; in that respect he resembles Tiresias, who, in one of the Lucianic dialogues, declares that it is not necessary to become anxious over the affairs and events of the world but, rather, to remain as cheerful as possible and pass your life in laughter.
    There are formal, as well as informal, connections with Lucian. In the work of the satirist More discovered the possibilities of dialogue as a way of exploiting the dramatic possibilities of the world; most of his own prose works would eventually assume the same form. He thereby became the begetter in the