Lucian of Samosata; Ancient Greek: Λουκιανὸς ὁ Σαμοσατεύς, about 125 CE – after 180 CE) was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language during the Second Sophistic. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature.

Lucian wrote exclusively in ancient Greek. He wrote mainly in the Attic dialect, but On the Syrian Goddess, which is attributed to him, is written in a faux-Ionic dialect.

Few details of Lucian's life can be verified with any degree of accuracy, though clues can be found in writings attributed to him. In several works he claims to have been born in Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria.

There are eighty-two surviving works attributed to him (though several are doubtful):declamations, essays both laudatory and sarcastic, satiric epigrams, and comic dialogues and symposia with a satirical cast, studded with quotations in alarming contexts and allusions set in an unusual light, designed to be
surprising and provocative. His name added lustre to any entertaining and sarcastic essay: more than 150 surviving manuscripts attest to his continued popularity. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499. His best known works are A True Story (a romance, patently not "true" at all, which he admits in his introduction to the story), and Dialogues of the Gods (Θεῶν διάλογοι) and Dialogues of the Dead (Νεκρικοὶ Διάλογοι).

Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation whose practitioners pleaded in court, composed pleas for others, and taught the art of pleading. Lucian's practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot, somewhat as a rhapsode had done in declaiming poetry at an earlier period. In this way Lucian travelled through Ionia and mainland Greece, to Italy and even to Gaul, and won much wealth and fame.