The only existing full-scale study of Lucian's thinking on the subject of the divine is that undertaken in the 1930s by the French scholar Marcel Caster. He came to what seems to me a startling conclusion, that Lucian was an atheist in the modern acceptance of the word; he was someone who went well beyond the Epicurean position, that there were gods, but that they did not intervene in the world, to the much more radical proposition that there were no gods at all. Caster had reached that judgement by telling himself that only someone who was seriously irreligious and who indeed thought the notion of the divine was a bad joke could have mocked the gods as Lucian did; Lucian's abiding concern was with preserving Greek culture from bad taste, ignorance and barbarity. It is possible to draw quite different conclusions, as I shall attempt to do, from much the same body of evidence.

To get at what Lucian himself thought is difficult. There are a number of reasons for this. For a start, Lucian virtually never, while speaking in his own voice, commits himself to a position on the nature of the gods and their place in the cosmic order. It is besides not at all easy to say when Lucian is speaking in his own voice and not that of a persona assumed for the moment.