What is "iambulus"

__notoc__ Iambulus (, Iamboulos) was an ancient Greek merchant and the likely author of a Utopian novel about the strange forms and figures of the inhabitants of the "Islands of the Sun".

His work did not survive in the original, but only as a fragment in Diodorus Siculus' Bibliotheca historica. Diodorus, who seems only to have transcribed lambulus in his description of the Indians, relates that lambulus was made a slave by the Ethiopians, and sent by them to a happy island in the eastern seas, where he acquired his knowledge. The whole account, however, has the appearance of a fiction; and the description which lambulus gave of the east, which he had probably never seen, consisted of nothing but fabulous absurdities.

Iambulus is mentioned in the humorous novel, " True Story" by Lucian as writing "a lot of surprising things about the Atlantic Ocean". He is listed in the preface as an inspiration.