Rhetoric, he says, "made a Greek of him," went with him from city to city in Greece and Ionia, "sailed the Ionian sea with him and attended him even as far as Gaul, scattering plenty in his path."[13] For, as he explains elsewhere, he was among the teachers who could command high fees, and he made a good income in Gaul.[14] But, about the age of forty, he resolved "to let the gentlemen of the jury rest in peace—tyrants enough having been arraigned and princes enough eulogized."[15] From now onward he wrote dialogues—he had at last found his proper work.

Lucian's Dialogues

Dialogue in former days had been the vehicle of speculation—"had trodden those aerial plains on high above the clouds, where the great Zeus in heaven is borne along on winged car." But it was to do so no more, and in an amusing piece Lucian represents Dialogue personified as bringing a suit against him for outrage. Had Lucian debased Dialogue, by reducing him to the common level of humanity and making him associate with such persons as Aristophanes and Menippus, one a light-hearted mocker at things sacred, the other a barking, snarling dog of a Cynic,—thus turning Dialogue into a literary Centaur, neither fit to walk nor able to soar? Or was Dialogue really a musty, fusty, superannuated creature, and greatly improved now for having a bath and being taught to smile and to go genially in the company of Comedy? Between the attack and the defence, the case is fairly stated.[16] Lucian created a new mode in writing—or perhaps he revived it, for it is not very clear how much he owes to his favourite Menippus, the Gadarene Cynic and satirist of four centuries before.

Menippus however has perished and Lucian remains and is read; for, whatever else is to be said of him, he is readable. He has not lost all the traces of the years during which he consorted with Rhetoric; at times he amplifies and exaggerates, and will strain for more point and piquancy than a taste more sure would approve. Yet he has the instinct to avoid travesty, and his style is in general natural and simple, despite occasional literary reminiscences. His characters talk,—as men may talk of their affairs, when they are not conscious of being overheard,—with a naïve frankness not always very wise, with a freedom and common sense, and sometimes with a folly, that together reveal the speaker. They rarely declaim, and they certainly never reach any high level of thought or feeling. The talk is slight and easy—it flickers about from one idea to another, and gives a strong impression of being real. If it is gods who are talking, they become surprisingly human—and even bourgeois, they are so very much at home among themselves. Lucian's skill is amazing. He will take some episode from Homer and change no single detail, and yet, as we listen to the off-hand talk of the gods as they recount the occurrence, we are startled at the effect—the irony is everywhere and nowhere; the surprises are irresistible. Zeus, for instance, turns out to have more literary interests than we suppose; he will quote Homer and make a Demosthenic oration to the gods, though alas! his memory fails him in the middle of a sentence;[17] he laments that his altars are as cold as Plato's Laws or the syllogisms of Chrysippus. He is the frankest gentleman of heaven, and so infinitely obliging!

In short, for sheer cleverness Lucian has no rival but Aristophanes in extant Greek literature. His originality, his wit, his humour (not at all equal, it may be said, to his wit), his gifts of invention and fancy, his light touch, and his genius for lively narrative, mark him out distinctively in an age when literature was all rhetoric, length and reminiscence. But as we read him, we become sensible of defects as extraordinary as his gifts. For all his Attic style, he belongs to his age. He may renounce Rhetoric, but no man can easily escape from his past. The education had intensified the cardinal faults of his character, impatience, superficiality, a great lack of sympathy for the more tender attachments and the more profound interests of men—essential unbelief in human grandeur. An expatriated adventurer, living for twenty years on his eloquence, with the merest smattering of philosophy and no interest whatever in nature and natural science or mathematics, with little feeling and no poetry,—it was hardly to be expected that he should understand the depths of the human soul, lynx-eyed as he is for the surface of things. He had a very frank admiration for his own character, and he drew himself over and over again under various names. Lykinos, for example, is hardly a disguise at all. "Free-Speech, son of True-man, son of Examiner," he calls himself in one of his mock trials, "hater of shams, hater of impostors, hater of liars, hater of the pompous, hater of every such variety of hateful men—and there are plenty of them"; conversely, he loves the opposites, when he meets them, which, he owns, is not very often.[18]

Lucian and philosophy

With such a profession, it is not surprising that a man of more wit than sympathy, found abundance of material in the follies of his age. Men were taking themselves desperately seriously,—preaching interminable Philosophy, saving their souls, and communing with gods and dæmons in the most exasperating ways. Shams, impostures, and liars—so Lucian summed them up, and he did not conceal his opinion. Granted that the age had aspects quite beyond his comprehension, he gives a very vivid picture of it from the outside. This is what men were doing and saying around him—but why? Why, but from vanity and folly? Gods, philosophers, and all who take human life seriously, are deluged with one stream of badinage, always clever but not always in good taste. He has no purpose, religious or philosophic. If he attacks the gods, it is not as a Sceptic—the Sceptics are ridiculed as much as any one else in the Sale of Lives—men who know nothing, doubt of their own experience, and avow the end of their knowledge to be ignorance.[19] If he is what we nowadays loosely call sceptical, it is not on philosophic grounds. We should hardly expect him in his satirical pamphlets really to grapple with the question of Philosophy, but he seems not to understand in the least why there should be Philosophy at all. He is master of no single system, though he has the catch-words of them all at his finger-ends.

His most serious dialogue on Philosophy is the Hermotimus. "Lykinos" meets Hermotimus on his way to a lecture—a man of sixty who for many years has attended the Stoics. Into their argument we need not go, but one or two points may be noted. Hermotimus is a disciple, simple and persevering, who owns that he has not reached the goal of Happiness and hardly expects to reach it, but he presses bravely on, full of faith in his teachers. Under the adroit questions of Lykinos, he is forced to admit that he had chosen the Stoics rather than any other school by sheer intuition—or because of general notions acquired more or less unconsciously—like a man buying wine, he knew a good thing when he tasted it, and looked no further. Yes, says Lykinos, take the first step and the rest is easy—Philosophy depends on a first assumption—take the Briareus of the poets with three heads and six hands, and then work him out,—six eyes, six ears, three voices talking at once, thirty fingers—you cannot quarrel with the details as they come; once grant the beginning, and the rest comes flooding in, irresistible, hardly now susceptible of doubt. So in Philosophy, your passion, like the longing of a lover, blinded you to the first assumptions, and the structure followed.[20] "Do not think that I speak against the Stoics, through any special dislike of the school; my arguments hold against all the schools."[21] The end is that Hermotimus abandons all Philosophy for ever—not a very dramatic or probable end, as Plato and Justin Martyr could have told Lucian.

The other point to notice is the picture of Virtue under the image of a Celestial City, and here one cannot help wondering whether the irony has any element of personal reminiscence. Virtue Lykinos pictures as a City, whose citizens are happy, wise and good, little short of gods, as the Stoics say. All there is peace, unity, liberty, equality. The citizens are all aliens and foreigners, not a native among them—barbarians, slaves, misformed, dwarfs, poor; for wealth and birth and beauty are not reckoned there. "In good truth, we should devote all our efforts to this, and let all else go. We should take no heed of our native-land, nor of the clinging and weeping of children or parents, if one has any, but call on them to take the same journey, and then, if they will not or cannot go with us, shake them off, and march straight for the city of all bliss, leaving one's coat in their hands, if they won't let go,—for there is no fear of your being shut out there, even if you come without a coat." Fifteen years ago an old man had urged Lykinos to go there with him. "If the city had been near at hand and plain for all to see, long ago, you may be sure, with never a doubt I would have gone there, and had my franchise long since. But as you tell us, it lieth far away"——and there are so many professed guides and so many roads, that there is no telling whether one is travelling to Babylon or to Corinth.[22] "So for the future you had better reconcile yourself to living like an ordinary man, without fantastic and vain hopes."[23]

Lucian never ceases to banter the philosophers. When he visits the Islands of the Blest, he remarks that, while Diogenes and the Epicureans are there, Plato prefers his own Republic and Laws, the Stoics are away climbing their steep hill of Virtue, and the Academics, though wishful to come, are still suspending their judgment, uncertain whether there really is such an island at all and not sure that Rhadamanthus himself is qualified to give judgment.[24] Diogenes in the shades, Pan in his grotto, Zeus in heaven, and the common man in the streets, are unanimous that they have had too much Philosophy altogether. The philosophers have indeed embarked on an impossible quest, for they will never find Truth. Once Lucian represents Truth in person, and his portrait is characteristic. She is pointed out to him—a female figure, dim and indistinct of complexion; "I do not see which one you mean," he says, and the answer is, "Don't you see the unadorned one there, the naked one, ever eluding the sight and slipping away?"[25]

Lucian's Lover of Lies

But still more absurd than Philosophy was the growth of belief in the supernatural. Lucian's Lover of Lies is a most illuminating book. Here are gathered specimens of the various types of contemporary superstition—one would suspect the author of the wildest parody, if it were not that point by point we may find parallels in the other writers of the day. Tychiades (who is very like Lucian himself) tells how he has been visiting Eucrates and has dropped into a nest of absurdities. Eucrates is sixty and wears the solemn beard of a student of philosophy. He has a ring made of iron from gibbets and is prepared to believe everything incredible. His house is full of professed philosophers, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Platonic, advising him how to cure the pain in his legs, by wrapping round them a lion's skin with the tooth of a field mouse folded within it.[26] Tychiades asks if they really believe that a charm hung on outside can cure the mischief within, and they laugh at his ignorance. The Platonist tells a number of stories to prove the reasonableness of the treatment,—how a vine-dresser of his father's had died of snake-bite and been recovered by a Chaldæan, and how the same Chaldæan charmed (like the Pied Piper) all the snakes off their farm. The Stoic narrates how he once saw a Hyperborean flying and walking on water—"with those brogues on his feet that his countrymen habitually wear"—a man whose more ordinary feats were raising spirits, calling the dead from their graves, and fetching down the moon. Ion, the Platonist, confirms all this with an account of another miracle-worker—"everybody knows the Syrian of Palestine" who drives dæmons out of men; "he would stand by the patient lying on the ground and ask whence they have come into the body; and, though the sick person does not speak, the dæmon answers in Greek, or in some barbarian tongue, or whatever his own dialect may be, and explains how he entered into the man and whence he came. Then the Syrian would solemnly adjure him, or threaten him if he were obstinate, and so drive him out. I can only say I saw one, of a black smoky hue, in the act of coming out."[27] The Syrian's treatment was expensive, it appears. Celsus, as we shall see later on, has some evidence on this matter. The nationality of the magicians quoted in the book may be remarked—they are Libyan, Syrian, Arab, Chaldæan, Egyptian, and "Hyperborean."

Other tales of magical statues, a wife's apparition, an uneasy ghost,[28] a charm for bringing an absent lover, and the familiar one of the man who learns the spell of three syllables to make a pestle fetch water, but unhappily not that which will make it stop, and who finds on cutting it in two that there are now two inanimate water-carriers and a double deluge—these we may pass over. We may note that this water-fetching spell came originally from a sacred scribe of Memphis, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, who lived underground in the temple for three and twenty years and was taught his magic there by Isis herself.[29] Interviews with dæmons are so common that instances are not given.[30]

More significant are the stories of the other world, for here we come again, from a different point of approach, into a region familiar to the reader of Plutarch. Eucrates himself, out in the woods, heard a noise of barking dogs; an earthquake followed and a voice of thunder, and then came a woman more than six hundred feet high, bearing sword and torch, and followed by dogs "taller than Indian elephants, black in colour." Her feet were snakes—here we may observe that Pausanias the traveller pauses to dismiss "the silly story that giants have serpents instead of feet," for a coffin more than eleven ells long was found near Antioch and "the whole body was that of a man."[31] So the snake-feet are not a mere fancy of Lucian's. The woman then tapped the earth with one of these feet of hers, and disappeared into the chasm she made. Eucrates, peeping over the edge, "saw everything in Hades, the river of fire and the lake, Cerberus and the dead"—what is more, he recognized some of the dead. "Did you see Socrates and Plato?" asks Ion. Socrates he thought he saw, "but Plato I did not recognize; I suppose one is bound to stick to the exact truth in talking to one's friends." Pyrrhias the slave confirms the story as an eye-witness.[32] Another follows with a story of his trance in illness, and how he saw the world below, Fates, Furies, and all, and was brought before Pluto, who dismissed him with some irritation, as not amenable yet to his Court, and called for the smith Demylos; he came back to life and announced that Demylos would shortly die, and Demylos did die. "Where is the wonder?" says another—the physician, "I know a man raised from the dead twenty days after his burial, for I attended him both before his death and after his resurrection."[33]

In all this, it is clear that there is a strong element of mockery. Mockery was Lucian's object, but he probably kept in all these stories a great deal nearer to what his neighbours would believe than we may imagine. Ælian, for example, has a story of a pious cock, which made a point of walking gratefully in the processions that took place in honour of Æsculapius; and he does not tell it in the spirit of the author of the Jackdaw of Rheims.

Lucian and the gods

As one of the main preoccupations of his age was with the gods, Lucian of course could not leave them alone. His usual method is to accept them as being exactly what tradition made them, and then to set them in new and impossible situations. The philosopher Menippus takes "the right wing of an eagle and the left of a vulture," and, after some careful practice, flies up to heaven to interview Zeus. He has been so terribly distracted by the arguments of the schools, that he wants to see for himself—"I dared not disbelieve men of such thundering voices and such imposing beards." Zeus most amiably allows him to stand by and watch him at work, hearing prayers as they come up through tubes, and granting or rejecting them, then settling some auguries, and finally arranging the weather—"rain in Scythia, snow in Greece, a storm in the Adriatic, and about a thousand bushels of hail in Cappadocia."[34] Zeus asks; rather nervously what men are saying about him nowadays—mankind is so fond of novelty. "There was a time," he says, "when I was everything to them—

Each street, each market-place was full of Zeus—

and I could hardly see for the smoke of sacrifice"; but other gods, Asklepios, Bendis, Anubis and others, have set up shrines and the altars of Zeus are cold—cold as Chrysippus.[35] Altogether the dialogue is a masterpiece of humour and irony.

In another piece, we find Zeus and the other gods in assembly listening to an argument going on at Athens. An Epicurean, Damis, and a singularly feeble Stoic are debating whether gods exist, and whether they exercise any providence for men. Poseidon recommends the prompt use of a thunderbolt "to let them see," but Zeus reminds him that it is Destiny that really controls the thunderbolts—and, besides, "it would look as if we were frightened." So the argument goes on, and all the familiar proofs from divine judgments, regularity of sun and season, from Homer and the poets, from the consensus of mankind and oracles, are produced and refuted there and then, while the gods listen, till it becomes doubtful whether they do exist. The Stoic breaks down and runs away. "What are we to do?" asks Zeus. Hermes quotes a comic poet in Hamlet's vein—"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"—and what does it matter, if a few men are persuaded by Damis? we still have the majority—"most of the Greeks and all the barbarians."[36]

In Zeus Cross-examined the process is carried further. Cyniscus questions Zeus, who is only too good-natured and falls into all the questioner's traps. He admits Destiny to be supreme, and gets entangled in a terrible net of problems about fore-knowledge, the value of sacrifice and of divination, divine wrath, sin and so forth, till he cries "You leave us nothing!—you seem to me to despise me, for sitting here and listening to you with a thunderbolt on my arm." "Hit me with it," says Cyniscus, "if it is so destined,—I shall have no quarrel with you for it, but with Clotho." At last Zeus rises and goes away and will answer no more. But perhaps, reflects Cyniscus, he has said enough, and it was "not destined for me to hear any more."[37] The reader feels that Zeus has said more than enough.

From the old gods of Greece, we naturally turn to the newcomers. When Zeus summoned the gods to discuss the question of atheism at Athens, a good many more came than understood Greek, and it was they who had the best seats as they were made of solid gold—Bendis, Anubis, Attis and Mithras for example. Elsewhere Momus (who is a divine Lucian) complains to Zeus about them—"that Mithras with his Persian robe and tiara, who can't talk Greek, nor even understand when one drinks to him"—what is he doing in heaven? And then the dog-faced Egyptian in linen—who is he to bark at the gods? "Of course,", says Zeus, "Egyptian religion—yes! but all the same there are hidden meanings, and the uninitiated must not laugh at them." Still Zeus is provoked into issuing a decree—on second thoughts, he would not put it to the vote of the divine assembly, for he felt sure he would be outvoted. The decree enacts that, whereas heaven is crowded with polyglot aliens, till there is a great rise in the price of nectar, and the old and true gods are being crowded out of their supremacy, a committee of seven gods shall be appointed to sit on claims; further, that each god shall attend to his own function, Athene shall not heal nor Asklepios give oracles, etc.; that philosophers shall talk no more nonsense; and that the statues of deified men shall be replaced by those of Zeus, Hera, etc., the said men to be buried in the usual way.[38]

Lucian's Alexander

More than one reference has been made to new gods and new oracles. Lucian in his Alexander gives a merciless account of how such shrines were started. He came into personal contact—indeed into conflict—with Alexander, the founder of the oracle of Abonoteichos, and his story is full of detail. The man was a quack of the vulgarest type, and, yet by means of a tame snake and some other simple contrivances, he imposed himself upon the faith of a community. His renown spread far and wide. By recognizing other oracles he secured their support. Men came to him even from Rome. Through one of these devotees, he actually sent an oracle to Marcus Aurelius among the Marcomanni and Quadi, bidding him throw two lions with spices into the Danube, and there should be a great victory. This was done, Lucian says; the lions swam ashore on the farther side, and the victory fell to the Germans.[39] Lucian himself trapped the prophet with some cunningly devised inquiries, which quite baffled god, prophet, snake and all. He also tried to detach an eminent adherent. Alexander realized what was going on, and Lucian got a guard of two soldiers from the governor of Cappadocia. Under their protection he went to see the prophet who had sent for him. The prophet, as he usually did with his followers, offered him his hand to kiss, and Lucian records with satisfaction that he bit the proffered hand and nearly lamed it. Thanks to his guard, he came away uninjured. Alexander, however, after this tried still more to compass his death, which is not surprising.[40] There is other evidence than Lucian's, though it is not unnaturally slight, for the existence of this remarkable impostor.

Lucian and Peregrinus

Lucian has one or two incidental references to Christians.[41] Alexander warned them, in company with the Epicureans, to keep away from his shrine. But we hear more of them in connexion with Proteus Peregrinus. Lucian is not greatly interested in them; he ridicules them as fools for being taken in by the impostor; for Peregrinus, he tells us, duped them with the greatest success. He became a prophet among them, a thiasarch, a ruler of the synagogue, everything in fact; he interpreted their books for them, and indeed wrote them a lot more; and they counted him a god and a lawgiver. "You know," Lucian explains, "they still worship that great man of theirs, who was put on a gibbet in Palestine, because he added this new mystery (teletèn) to human life." In his mocking way he gives some interesting evidence on the attention and care bestowed by Christians on those of their members who were thrown into prison. He details what was done by the foolish community for "their new Socrates" when Peregrinus was a prisoner. When he was released, Peregrinus started wandering again, living on Christian charity, till "he got into trouble with them, too,—he was caught eating forbidden meats."[42]

Lucian differs from Voltaire in having less purpose and no definite principles. He had no design to overthrow religion in favour of something else; it is merely that the absurdity of it provoked him, and he enjoyed saying aloud, and with all the vigour of reckless wit, that religious belief was silly. If the effect was scepticism, it was a scepticism founded, not on philosophy, but on the off-hand judgment of what is called common-sense. Hidden meanings and mysteries were to him nonsense. How little he was qualified to understand mysticism and religious enthusiasm, can be seen in his account of the self-immolation of Peregrinus on his pyre at the Olympian games[43]—perhaps the most insufficient thing he ever wrote, full of value as it is. Peregrinus was a wanderer among the religions of the age. Gellius—who often heard him at Athens, calls him a man gravis atque constans, and says he spoke much that was useful and honest. He quotes in his way a paragraph of a discourse on sin, which does not lack moral elevation.[44] To Lucian the man was a quack, an advertiser, a mountebank, who burnt himself to death merely to attract notice. Lucian says he witnessed the affair, and tells gaily how, among other jests, he imposed a pretty miracle of his own invention upon the credulous. He had taken no pains to understand the man—nor did he to understand either the religious temper in general, or the philosophic, or anything else. His habit of handling things easily and lightly did not help him to see what could not be taken in at a glance.

What then does Lucian make of human life? On this he says a great deal. His most characteristic invention perhaps is the visit that Charon pays to the upper world to see what it really is that the dead regret so much. It is indeed, as M. Croiset points out, a fine stroke of irony to take the opinion of a minister of Death upon Life. Charon has left his ferry boat and comes up to light. Hermes meets him and they pile up some mountains—Pelion on Ossa, and Parnassus on top, from the two summits of which they survey mankind—a charm from Homer removing Charon's difficulty of vision. He sees many famous people, such as Milo, Polycrates and Cyrus; and he overhears Croesus and Solon discussing happiness, while Hermes foretells their fates. He sees a varied scene, life full of confusion, cities like swarms of bees, where each has a sting and stings his neighbour, and some, like wasps, harass and plunder the rest; over them, like a cloud, hang hopes and fears and follies, pleasures and passions and hatreds. He sees the Fates spinning slender threads, soon cut, from which men hang with never a thought of how quickly death ends their dreams; and he compares them to bubbles, big and little inevitably broken. He would like to shout to them "to live with Death ever before their eyes"—why be so earnest about what they can never take away?—but Hermes tells him it would be useless. He is amazed at the absurdity of their burial rites, and he astonishes Hermes by quoting Homer on the subject. Last of all he witnesses a battle and cries out at the folly of it. "Such," he concludes, "is the life of miserable men—and not a word about Charon."[45]

In the same way and in the same spirit Menippus visits the Lower World, where he sees Minos judging the dead. Minos too seems to have been interested in literature, for he reduced the sentence upon Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, on the very proper ground of his generosity to authors. But the general picture has less humour. "We entered the Acherusian plain, and there we found the demi-gods, and the heroines, and the general throng of the dead in nations and tribes, some ancient and mouldering, 'strengthless heads' as Homer says, others fresh and holding together—Egyptians these in the main, so thoroughly good is their embalming. But to know one from another was no easy task; all become so much alike when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long scrutiny we began to recognize them. They lay pell-mell in undistinguishable heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left. With so many skeletons piled together, all as like as could be, eyes glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not to tell Thersites from Nireus the fair.... For none of their ancient marks remained, and their bones were alike, uncertain, unlabelled, undistinguishable. When I saw all this, the life of man came before me under the likeness of a great pageant, arranged and marshalled by Chance," who assigns the parts and reassigns them as she pleases; and then the pageant ends, every one disrobes and all are alike. "Such is human life, as it seemed to me while I gazed."[46] Over and over again with every accent of irony the one moral is enforced—sometimes with sheer brutality as in the tract on Mourning.

Menippus asked Teiresias in the shades what was the best life. "He was a blind little old man, and pale, and had a weak voice." He said: "The life of ordinary people is best, and, wiser; cease from the folly of metaphysics, of inquiry into origins and purposes; spit upon those clever syllogisms and count all these things idle talk; and pursue one end alone, how you may well arrange the present and go on your way with a laugh for most things and no enthusiasms."[47] In fact, "the unexamined life" is the only one, as many a weary thinker has felt—if it were but possible.

Criticism of Lucian

Goethe's criticism on Heine may perhaps be applied to Lucian—"We cannot deny that he has many brilliant qualities, but he is wanting in love ... and thus he will never produce the effect which he ought."[48] Various views have been held of Lucian's contribution to the religious movement of the age; it has even been suggested that his Dialogues advanced the cause of Christianity. But when one reflects upon the tender hearts to be found in the literature of the century, it is difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the mass of serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for something less terrible than a godless world of mockery and death, and the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers. He did not love men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. His admirers to-day speak of him as one whose question was always "Is it true?" We have seen that it was a question lightly asked and quickly answered. It is evident enough that his mockery of religion has some warrant in the follies and superstitions of his day. But such criticism as his, based upon knowledge incomplete and sympathy imperfect, is of little value. If a man's judgment upon religion is not to be external, he must have felt the need of a religion,—he must have had at some time the consciousness of imperative cravings and instincts which only a religion can satisfy. Such cravings are open to criticism, but men can neither be laughed out of them, nor indeed reasoned out of them; and however absurd a religion may seem, and however defective it may be, if it is still the only available satisfaction of the deepest needs of which men are conscious, it will hold its own, despite mockery and despite philosophy—as we shall see in the course of the chapter, though two more critics of religion remain to be noticed.

Sextus Empiricus

Lucian was not the only man who sought to bring the age back to sound and untroubled thinking. There was a physician, Sextus—known from the school of medicine to which he belonged as Sextus Empiricus—who wrote a number of books about the end of the second century or the beginning of the third in defence of Scepticism. A medical work of his, and a treatise on the Soul are lost, but his Pyrrhonean Sketches and his books Against the Dogmatists remain—written in a Greek which suggests that he was himself a Greek and not a foreigner using the language. Physicists, mathematicians, grammarians, moralists, astrologers, come under his survey, and the particular attention which he gives to the Stoics is a material fact in fixing his date, for after about 200 A.D. they cease to be of importance. His own point of view a short extract from his sketches will exhibit fully enough for our present purpose.

"The aim of the Sceptic is ataraxia [freedom from mental perturbation or excitement] in matters which depend on opinion, and in things which are inevitable restraint of the feelings (metriopátheian). For he began to philosophise in order to judge his impressions (phantasías) and to discover which of them are true and which false, so as to be free from perturbation. But he came to a point where the arguments were at once diametrically opposite and of equal weight; and then, as he could not decide, he suspended judgment (epéschen), and as soon as he had done so, there followed as if by accident this very freedom from perturbation in the region of opinion. For if a man opines anything to be good or bad in its essential nature, he is always in perturbation. When he has not the things that appear to him to be good, he considers himself tortured by the things evil by nature, and he pursues the good (as he supposes them to be); but, as soon as he has them, he falls into even more perturbations, through being uplifted out of all reason and measure, and from fear of change he does everything not to lose the things that seem to him to be good. But the man, who makes no definitions as to what is good or bad by nature, neither avoids nor pursues anything with eagerness, and is therefore unperturbed. What is related of Apelles the painter has in fact befallen the Sceptic. The story goes that he was painting a horse and wished to represent the foam of its mouth in his picture; but he was so unsuccessful that he gave it up, and took the sponge, on which he used to wipe the colours from his brush, and threw it at the picture. The sponge hit the picture and produced a likeness of the horse's foam. The Sceptics then hoped to gain ataraxia by forming some decision on the lack of correspondence between things as they appear to the eye and to the mind; they were unable to do it, and so suspended judgment (epéschen); and then as if by accident the ataraxia followed—-just as a shadow follows a body. We do not say that the Sceptic is untroubled in every way, but we own he is troubled by things that are quite inevitable. For we admit that the Sceptic is cold sometimes, and thirsty, and so forth. But even in these matters the uneducated are caught in two ways at once, viz.: by the actual feelings and (not less) by supposing these conditions to be bad by nature. The Sceptic does away with the opinion that any one of these things is evil in its nature, and so he gets off more lightly even in these circumstances."[49]

A view of this kind was hardly likely to appeal to the temper of the age, and the influence of Scepticism was practically none. Still it is interesting to find so vigorous and clear an exponent of the system flourishing in a period given over to the beliefs that Lucian parodied and Apuleius accepted. Sextus, it may be added, is the sole representative of ancient Scepticism whose works have come down to us in any complete form.

One very obscure person of this period remains to be noticed, who in his small sphere gave his views to mankind in a way of his own.

In 1884 two French scholars, MM. Holleaux and Paris were exploring the ruins of Oinoanda, a Greek city in Lycia, and they came upon a number of inscribed stones, most of them built in a wall. What was unusual was that these were neither fragments of municipal decrees nor of private monuments, but all formed part of one great inscription which dealt apparently with some philosophic subject. In June 1895 two Austrian scholars, MM. Heberdey and Kalinka, re-collated the inscription and found some further fragments, and now the story is tolerably clear, and a curious one it is.[50]

It appears that the fragments originally belonged to an inscription carved on the side of a colonnade, and they fall into three series according to their place on the wall—one above another. The middle series consists of columns of fourteen lines, the letters 1-½ to 2 centimetres high, fifteen or sixteen in a line,—each column forming a page, as it were; and it extends over some twenty-one or two yards. The lowest series is in the same style. On top is a series of columns added later (as the inscription shows) and cut in letters of 2-½-3 centimetres, generally ten lines to the column—the larger size to compensate for the greater height above the ground, for it was all meant to be read. The inscription begins:—

"Diogenes to kinsmen, household and friends, this is my charge. Being so ill that it is critical whether I yet live or live no longer—for an affection of the heart is carrying me off—if I survive, I will gladly accept the life yet given to me; if I do not survive, DO..."

Diogenes of Oinoanda

There ends a column, and a line or two has been lost at the top of what seems to be the next, after which come the words "a kindly feeling for strangers also who may be staying here," and the incomplete statement which begins "knowing assuredly, that by knowledge of the matters relating to Nature and feelings, which I have set forth in the spaces below...." It is evident that Diogenes had something to say which he considered it a duty to make known. This proves to have been the Epicurean theory of life; and here he had carved up for all to read a simple exposition of the philosophy of his choice.

The uppermost row contains his account of his purpose and something upon old age—very fragmentary. There follow a letter of Epicurus to his mother, and another letter from some one unidentified to one Menneas, and then a series of apophthegms and sentences. Thus fragment 27 is a column of ten lines to this effect: "Nothing is so contributive to good spirits, as not to do many things, nor take in hand tiresome matters, nor force oneself in any way beyond one's own strength, for all these things perturb nature." Another column proclaims: "Acute pains cannot be long; for either they quickly destroy life and are themselves destroyed with it, or they receive some abatement of their acuteness." These platitudes are, as we may guess, an afterthought.

The middle row, the first to be inscribed, deals with the Epicurean theory of atoms—not by apophthegm or aphorism, but with something of the fulness and technicality of a treatise. "Herakleitos of Ephesus, then, said fire was the element; Thales of Miletus water; Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximenes air; Empedocles of Agrigentum both fire and air and water and earth; Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ the homoeomeries of each thing in particular; those of the Stoa matter and God. But Democritus of Abdera said atomic natures—and he did well; but since he made some mistakes about them, these will be set right in our opinions. So now we will accuse the persons mentioned, not from any feeling of illwill against them, but wishing the truth to be saved (sôthênai)." So he takes them in turn and argues at leisure. The large fragment 45 discusses astronomy in its four columns—in particular, the sun and its apparent distance and its nature. Fr. 48 (four columns) goes on to treat of civilization,—of the development of dress from leaves to skins and woven garments, without the intervention "of any other god or of Athena either." Need and time did all. Hermes did not invent language. In fr. 50, we read that Protagoras "said he did not know if there are gods. That is the same thing as saying he knew there are not." Fr. 51 deals with death—"thou hast even persuaded me to laugh at it. For I am not a whit afraid because of the Tityos-es and Tantalus-es, whom some people paint in Hades, nor do I dread decay, reflecting that the [something] of the body ... [three broken lines] ... nor anything else." At the end of the row another letter begins (fr. 56) "[Diogen]es to Anti[pater] greeting." He writes from Rhodes, he says, just before winter begins, to friends in Athens and elsewhere, whom he would like to see. Though away from his country, he knows he can do more for it in this way than by taking part in political life. He wishes to show that "that which is convenient to Nature, viz. Ataraxia is the same for all." He is now "at the sunset of life," and all but departing; so, since most men, as in a pestilence, are diseased with false opinion, which is very infectious, he wishes "to help those that shall be after us; for they too are ours, even if they are not yet born"; and strangers too. "I wished to make use of this colonnade and to set forth in public the medicine of salvation" (tà tês sôtêrías protheînai pharmaka, fr. 58). The idle fears that oppressed him, he has shaken off; as to pains—empty ones he has abolished utterly, and the rest are reduced to the smallest compass. He bewails the life of men, wasted as it is, and weeps for it; and he has "counted it a good man's part" to help men as far as he can. That is why he has thought of this inscription which may enable men to obtain "joy with good spirits" (tê[s met' euthu]mías charâ[s]), rather than of a theatre or a bath or anything else of the kind, such as rich men would often build for their fellow-citizens (fr. 59).

The discussion which follows in the third series of columns need not here detain us. Diogenes appeals for its consideration—that it may not merely be glanced at in passing (fr. 61, col. 3); but it will suffice us at present to note his statement that his object is "that life may become pleasant to us" (fr. 63, col. 1), and his protest—"I will swear, both now and always, crying aloud to all, Greeks and barbarians, that pleasure is the objective of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which these people now unseasonably meddle with (for they shift them from the region of the contributive to that of the objective) are by no means an objective, but contributive to the objective" (fr. 67, col. 2, 3). Lastly we may notice his reference to the improvement made in the theory of Democritus by the discovery of Epicurus of the swerve inherent in the atoms (fr. 81).

Altogether the inscription is as singular a monument of antiquity as we are likely to find. What the fellow-citizens of Diogenes thought of it, we do not know. Perhaps they might have preferred the bath or other commonplace gift of the ordinary rich man. It is a pity that Lucian did not see the colonnade.

Side by side with Lucian, Sextus and Diogenes it is interesting to consider their contemporaries who were not of their opinion.

Perhaps, while the stone-masons were day by day carving up the long inscription at Oinoanda, others of their trade were busy across the Ægæan with one of another character. At any rate, the inscription which M. Julius Apellas set up in the temple of Asklepios in Epidauros, belongs to this period. Like Diogenes, he is not afraid of detail.

Marcus Julius Apellas

"In the priesthood of Poplius Ælius Antiochus.

"I, Marcus Julius Apellas of Idrias and Mylasa, was sent for by the God, for I was a chronic invalid and suffered from dyspepsia. In the course of my journey the God told me in Ægina not to be so irritable. When I reached the Temple, he directed me to keep my head covered for two days; and for these two days it rained. I was to eat bread and cheese, parsley with lettuce, to wash myself without help, to practise running, to drink citron-lemonade, to rub my body on the sides of the bath in the bath-room, to take walks in the upper portico, to use the trapeze, to rub myself over with sand, to go with bare feet in the bath-room, to pour wine into the hot water before I got in, to wash myself without help, and to give an Attic drachma to the bath-attendant, to offer in public sacrifices to Asklepios, Epione and the Eleusinian goddesses, and to take milk with honey. When for one day I had drunk milk alone, the god said to put honey in the milk to make it digestible.

"When I called upon the god to cure me more quickly, I thought it was as if I had anointed my whole body with mustard and salt, and had come out of the sacred hall and gone in the direction of the bath-house, while a small child was going before holding a smoking censer. The priest said to me: 'Now you are cured, but you must pay up the fees for your treatment.' I acted according to the vision, and when I rubbed myself with salt and moistened mustard, I felt the pain still, but when I had bathed, I suffered no longer. These events took place in the first nine days after I had come to the Temple. The god also touched my right hand and my breast.

"The following day as I was offering sacrifice, a flame leapt up and caught my hand, so as to cause blisters. Yet after a little my hand was healed.

"As I prolonged my stay in the Temple, the god told me to use dill along with olive-oil for my head-aches. Formerly I had not suffered from head-aches, but my studies had brought on congestion. After I used the olive-oil, I was cured of head-aches. For swollen glands the god told me to use a cold gargle, when I consulted him about it, and he ordered the same treatment for inflamed tonsils.

"He bade me inscribe this treatment, and I left the Temple in good health and full of gratitude to the god."[51]

Pausanias

Pausanias speaks of "the buildings erected in our time by Antoninus a man of the Conscript Senate"—a Roman Senator in fact,[52]—in honour of Asklepios at Epidauros, a bath, three temples, a colonnade, and "a house where a man may die, and a woman lie in, without sin," for these actions were not "holy" within the sanctuary precincts, and had had to be done in the open air hitherto.

A more conspicuous patient of Asklepios is Ælius Aristides, the rhetorician. This brilliant and hypochondriacal person spent years in watching his symptoms and consulting the god about them. Early in his illness the god instructed him to record its details, and he obeyed with zest, though in after years he was not always able to record the minuter points with complete clearness. He was bidden to make speeches, to rub himself over with mud, to plunge into icy water, to ride, and, once, to be bled to the amount of 120 litres. As the human body does not contain anything like that amount of blood, and as the temple servants knew of no one ever having been "cut" to that extent—"at least except Ischyron, and his was one of the most remarkable cases," the god was not taken literally.[53] The regular plan was to sleep in the Temple, as already mentioned, and the god came. "The impression was that one could touch him, and perceive that he came in person; as if one were between asleep and awake, and wished to look out and were in an agony lest he should depart too soon,—as if one held one's ear and listened—sometimes as in a dream, and then as in a waking vision—one's hair was on end, and tears of joy were shed, and one felt light-hearted. And who among men could set this forth in words? Yet if there is one of the initiated, he knows and recognises [what I say]."[54]

None of the cases yet quoted can compare with the miracles of ancient days to be read in the inscriptions about the place—stories of women with child for three and five years, of the extraordinary surgery of the god, cutting off the head of a dropsical patient, holding him upside down to let the water run out and putting the head on again,—a mass of absurdities hardly to be matched outside The Glories of Mary. They make Lucian's Philopseudes seem tame.

There were other gods, beside Asklepios, who gave oracles in shrine and dream. Pausanias the traveller has left a book on Greece and its antiquities, temples, gods and legends of extraordinary value. "A man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould," as Dr Frazer characterizes him,—and therefore the more representative—he went through Greece with curious eyes and he saw much that no one else has recorded. At Sparta stood the only temple he knew of which had an upper story. In this upper story was an image of Aphrodite Morpho fettered[55]—a silly thing he thought it to fetter a cedar-wood doll. He particularly visited Phigalea, because of the "Black Demeter"—a curious enough image she had been, though by then destroyed.[56] He was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.[57] He tells us that the stony remnants of the lump of clay from which Prometheus fashioned the first man were still preserved,[58] and that the sceptre which Hephaistos made for Agamemnon received a daily sacrifice in Chæronea, Plutarch's city—"a table is set beside it covered with all sorts of flesh and cakes."[59] He has many such stories. He tells us too about a great many oracles of his day, of which that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia" is the most infallible"[60]—a curiously "suggestive superlative (apseudéstation). He is greatly interested in Asklepios, but for our present purpose a few sentences from his elaborate account of the ceremony with which Trophonius is consulted at Lebadea must suffice.

After due rites the inquirer comes to the oracle, in a linen tunic with ribbons, and boots of the country. Inside bronze railings is a pit of masonry, some four ells across and eight deep, and he goes down into it by means of a light ladder brought for the occasion. At the bottom he finds a hole, a very narrow one. "So he lays himself on his back on the ground, and holding in his hand barley cakes kneaded with honey, he thrusts his feet first into the hole, and follows himself endeavouring to get his knees through the hole. When they are through, the rest of his body is immediately dragged after them and shoots in, just as a man might be caught and dragged down by the swirl of a mighty and rapid river. Once they are inside the shrine the future is not revealed to all in one and the same way, but to one it is given to see and to another to hear. They return through the same aperture feet foremost.... When a man has come up from Trophonius, the priests take him in hand again, and set him on what is called the chair of Memory, which stands not far from the shrine; and, being seated there, he is questioned by them as to all he saw and heard. On being informed, they hand him over to his friends who carry him, still overpowered with fear, and quite unconscious of himself and his surroundings, to the building where he lodged before, the house of Good Fortune and the Good Dæmon. Afterwards, however, he will have all his wits as before, and the power of laughter will come back to him. I write not from mere hearsay: I have myself consulted Trophonius and have seen others who have done so. All who have gone down to Trophonius are obliged to set up a tablet containing a record of all they heard and saw."[61]

A man who has been through such an experience may be excused for believing much. While Pausanias kept his Greek habit of criticism and employs it on occasional myths and traditions, and particularly on stories of hell—though the fact of punishment after death he seems to accept—yet his travels and his inquiries made an impression on him. "When I began this work, I used to look on these Greek stories as little better than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia, my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronos [swallowing a foal instead of his child] is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition."[62]

Artemidorus of Daldia

Pausanias mentions several oracles and temples of Apollo in Greece and Asia Minor—one obscure local manifestation of the god he naturally enough omitted, but a fellow-citizen of the god preserves it. "It was in obedience to him, the god of my land, that I undertook this treatise. He often urged me to it, and in particular appeared visibly to me (enargôs epiotánti),[63] since I knew thee, and all but ordered me to write all this. No wonder that the Daldian Apollo, whom we call by the ancestral name of Mystes, urged me to this, in care for thy worth and wisdom, for there is an old friendship between Lydians and Phoenicians, as they tell us who set forth the legends of the land."[64] So writes Artemidorus to his friend Cassius Maximus of his treatise on the scientific interpretation of dreams—a work of which he is very proud. "Wonder not," he says, "at the title, that the name stands Artemidorus Daldianus, and not 'of Ephesus,' as on many of the books I have already written on other subjects. For Ephesus, it happens, is famous on her own account, and she has many men of note to proclaim her. But Daldia is a town of Lydia of no great renown, and, as she has had no such men, she has remained unknown till my day. So I dedicate this to her, my native-place on the mother's side, as a parent's due threptéria."[65]

Marcus Aurelius records his gratitude "that remedies have been shown to me by dreams, both others, and against blood-spitting and giddiness."[66] Plutarch, Pausanias, Aristides—dreams come into the scheme of things divine with all the devout of our period. Artemidorus is their humble brother—not the first to give a whole book to dreams, but proud to be a pioneer in the really scientific treatment of them—"the accuracy of the judgments, that is the thing for which, even by itself, I think highly of myself."[67] The critic may take it "that I too am quite capable of neologisms and persuasive rhetoric (ehuresilogein kaì pithaneùthai), but I have not undertaken all this for theatrical effect or to please the speech-mongers; I appeal throughout to experience, as canon and witness of my words," and he begs his readers neither to add to his books nor take anything away.[68] His writing is, as he says, quite free from "the stage and tragedy style."

Artemidorus takes himself very seriously. "For one thing, there is no book on the interpretation of dreams that I have not acquired, for I had great enthusiasm for this; and, in the next place, though the prophets (mánteôn) in the market-place are much slandered, and called beggars and quacks and humbugs by the gentlemen of solemn countenance and lifted eye-brows, I despised the slander and for many years I have associated with them—both in Greece, in cities and at festivals, and in Asia, and in Italy, and in the largest and most populous of the islands, consenting to hear ancient dreams and their results."[69] This patient research has resulted in principles of classification.[70] There are dreams that merely repeat what a man is doing (enúphnia); and others (óneipoi) which are prophetic. These last fall into two classes—theorematic dreams, as when a man dreams of a voyage, and wakes to go upon a voyage, and allegoric dreams. The latter adjective has a great history in regions more august, but the allegoric method is the same everywhere, as an illustration will show. A man dreamed he saw Charon playing at counters with another man, whom he called away on business; Charon grew angry and chased him, till he ran for refuge into an inn called "The Camel," and bolted the door, whereupon "the dæmon" went away, but one of the man's thighs sprouted with grass. Shortly after this dream he had his thigh broken—the one and sole event foretold. For Charon and the counters meant death, but Charon did not catch him, so it was shown that he would not die; but his foot was threatened, since he was pursued. The name of the inn hinted at the thigh, because of the anatomy of a camel's thigh; and the grass meant disuse of the limb, for grass only grows where the earth is left at rest.[71] The passage is worth remembering whenever we meet the word allegory and its derivatives in contemporary literature. Artemidorus has five books of this stuff—the last two dedicated to his son, and containing instances "that will make you a better interpreter of dreams than all, or at least inferior to none; but, if published, they will show you know no more than the rest."[72] The sentence suggests science declining into profession.

Apuleius

Far more brilliant, more amusing and more attractive than any of these men, whom we have considered since we left Lucian, is Apuleius of Madaura. Rhetorician, philosopher and man of science, a story-teller wavering between Boccaccio and Hans Andersen, he is above all a stylist, a pietist and a humorist. For his history we depend upon himself, and this involves us in difficulties; for, while autobiography runs through two of his works, one of these is an elaboration of a defence he made on a charge of magic and the other is a novel of no discoverable class but its own, and through both runs a vein of nonsense, which makes one chary of being too literal.

The novel is the Golden Ass—that at least is what St Augustine tells us the author called it.[73] Passages from this have been seriously used as sources of information as to the author. But there is another Ass, long attributed to Lucian though probably not Lucian's, and in each case the hero tells the tale in the first person, and the co-incidences between the Greek and the Latin make it obvious that there is some literary connexion between them, whatever it is. The scene is Greece and Thessaly, but not the Greece and Thessaly of geography, any more than the maritime Bohemia of Shakespeare. Yet in the last book Apuleius seems to have forgotten "Lucius of Patræ" and to be giving us experiences of his own which have nothing to do with the hero of the Ass, Greek or Latin.

The Apology of Apuleius

In the Apology he comes closer to his own career and he tells us about himself. Here he does not venture on the delightful assertion that he is the descendant of the great Plutarch, as the hero of the Ass does, but avows that, as his native place is on the frontiers of Numidia and Gætulia, he calls himself "half Numidian and half Gætulian"—just as Cyrus the Greater was "half Mede and half Persian." His city is "a most splendid colony," and his father held in turn all its magistracies, and he hopes not to be unworthy of him.[74] He and his brother inherited two million sesterces, though he has lessened his share "by distant travel and long studies and constant liberalities."[75] Elsewhere he tells us definitely that he was educated at Athens.[76] Everybody goes to the litterator for his rudiments, to the grammarian next and then to the rhetorician—"but I drank from other vessels at Athens," so "Empedocles frames songs, Plato dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus measures, Xenophon histories, Xenocrates satires; your Apuleius does all these and cultivates the nine Muses with equal zeal—with more will, that is, than skill."[77]

Like many brilliant men of his day he took to the strolling life of the rhetorician, going from city to city and giving displays of his powers of language, extemporizing wonderful combinations of words. Either he himself or some other admirer made a collection of elegant extracts from these exhibition-speeches, still extant under the title of Florida. His fame to-day rests on other works. In the course of his travels he came to Oea in his native-land, and there married the widowed mother of a fellow-student of his Athenian days. Her late husband's family resented the marriage; and affecting to believe that her affections had been gained by some sort of witchcraft, they prosecuted Apuleius on a charge of magic. The charge was in itself rather a serious one, though Apuleius made light of it. His defence is an interesting document for the glimpses it gives into North African society, with its Greek, Latin, and Punic elements. The younger stepson has fallen into bad hands; "he never speaks except in Punic,—a little Greek, perhaps, surviving from what he learnt of his mother; Latin he neither will nor can speak."[78] On family life, on marriage customs, on the registration of births (c. 89);—on the personal habits of the defendant, his toothpowder (and a verse he made in its praise) and his looking-glass, we gain curious information. Above all the speech sheds great light on the inter-relations of magic and religion in contemporary thought. A few points may be noticed.

What, asks the prosecution, is the meaning of this curious interest Apuleius has in fish? It is zoological, says Apuleius; I have written books on fish, both in Greek and Latin,—and dissected them. That curious story, too, of the boy falling down in his presence? As to that, Apuleius knows all about divination by means of boys put under magical influence; he has read of it, of course, but he does not know whether to believe or not; "I do think with Plato," he owns to the court (or to his readers), "that between gods and men, in nature and in place intermediary, there are certain divine powers, and these preside over all divinations and the miracles of magicians. Nay, more, I have the fancy that the human soul, particularly the simple soul of a boy, might, whether by evocation of charm or by mollification of odour, be laid to sleep, and so brought out of itself into oblivion of things present, and for a brief space, all memory of the body put away, it might be restored and returned to its own nature, which is indeed immortal and divine, and thus, in a certain type of slumber, foretell the future."[79] As for the boy in question, however, he is so ricketty that it would take a magician to keep him standing.

Then those mysterious "somethings" which Apuleius keeps wrapped up in a napkin? "I have been initiated in many of the mysteries of Greece. Certain symbols and memorials of these, given to me by the priests, I sedulously preserve. I say nothing unusual, nothing unknown. To take one instance, those among you who are mystæ of Father Liber [Bacchus] know what it is you keep laid away at home, and worship in secret, far from all profane eyes. Now, I, as I said, from enthusiasm for truth and duty toward the gods, I have learnt many sacred mysteries, very many holy rites, and divers ceremonies"—the audience will remember he said as much three years ago in his now very famous speech about Æsculapius—"then could it seem strange to anyone, who has any thought of religion, that a man, admitted to so many divine mysteries, should keep certain emblems of those holy things at home, and wrap them in linen, the purest covering for things divine?" Some men—the prosecutor among them—count it mirth to mock things divine; no, he goes to no temple, has never prayed, will not even put his hand to his lips when he passes a shrine,—why! he has not so much as an anointed stone or a garlanded bough on his farm.[80]

One last flourish may deserve quotation. If you can prove, says Apuleius, any material advantage accruing to me from my marriage, "then write me down the great Carmendas or Damigeron or his ... Moses or Jannes or Apollobeches or Dardanus himself, or anyone else from Zoroaster and Ostanes downwards who has been famous among magicians."[81] Several of these names occur in other authors,[82] but the corruption is more interesting. Has some comparative fallen out, or does his conceal another name? Is it ihs, in fact,—a reference to Jesus analogous to the suggestion of Celsus that he too was a magician?

The philosophical works of Apuleius need not detain us, but a little space may be spared to his book On the God of Socrates, where he sets forth in a clear and vivid way that doctrine of dæmonic beings, which lies at the heart of ancient religion, pre-eminently in this period, from Plutarch onwards. His presentment is substantially the same as Plutarch's, but crisper altogether, and set forth in the brilliant rhetoric, to which the Greek did not aspire, and from which the African could not escape, nor indeed wished to escape.

Plato, he says, classifies the gods in three groups, distinguished by their place in the universe.[83] Of the celestial gods some we can see—sun, moon and stars[84] (on which, like a true rhetorician, he digresses into some fine language, which can be omitted). Others the mind alone can grasp (intellectu eos rimabundi contemplamur)—incorporeal natures, animate, with neither beginning nor end, eternal before and after, exempt from contagion of body; in perfect intellect possessing supreme beatitude; good, but not by participation of any extraneous good, but from themselves. Their father, lord and author of all things, free from every nexus of suffering or doing—him Plato, with celestial eloquence and language commensurate with the immortal gods, has declared to be, in virtue of the ineffable immensity of his incredible majesty, beyond the poverty of human speech or definition—while even to the sages themselves, when by force of soul they have removed themselves from the body, the conception of God comes, like a flash of light in thick darkness—a flash only, and it is gone.[85]