Lucian was born in Syria but educated in the Greek manner. He lived and wrote during the 2nd century AD, a period in which the Romans controlled the Mediterranean, but he was part of an intellectual movement that looked back at the earlier achievements of Greek culture and respected those traditions...or respected some of them at least. For Lucian clearly thought many of the portrayals of the gods in works such as Homer's Iliad were silly. He spoofed them by turning many famous episodes from Greek myth into dialogues in which the characters spoke to each other as regular people instead of great figures from myth.

Lucian's Dialogue of the Gods #5 (Prometheus & Zeus)