Representative of this type are the Teacher of Orators, ironical advice how to become a successful rhetorician by means of claptrap and impudence; Pseudo-sophist, a dialogue in which the interlocutors are Lucinus (i.e., Lucian) and a Solecist, and the discussion is of certain solecisms and the distinction of similar words and phrases; Lexiphanes, in which the interlocutors are Lucinus and Lexiphanes. The latter recites a Symposium composed by himself and packed with far-fetched phraseology and recondite words. Meeting a doctor he receives an emetic, which cures his distemper by causing him to disgorge a flood of abstruse vocables. There are interesting references to the Altar of Dosiades and the Alexandra of Lycophron. But the best specimen of his literary criticism is contained in the essay How History Should be Written, which belongs probably to an early period of his residence in Athens, and which contains sound, if not particularly profound, criticism. The description of the ideal orator (Hist. 45) may be quoted : "I would have the historian to be fearless and incorruptible, independent, a lover of frankness and truth, one who, as the comic poet says, will call a fig a fig and a spade a spade ; indulging neither hate nor affection, unsparing and unpitying, not shy nor shamefast, an impartial judge, benevolent towards both sides but giving neither more than its due ; knowing in his writing no land and no city, bowing to no authority and acknowledging no king, not con sidering what this man or that will think, but stating facts as they occurred." His remarks on the style appropriate to the historian are also admirable.
These include On the Dream, which is autobiographical; the Life of Demonax, an account of Dem onax of Cyprus, a cynic philosopher whose society Lucian en joyed at Athens (V it. Demon. I) ; Alexander, or the False Prophet, an indictment of the Paphlagonian religious impostor of that name—written after A.D. i8o, since in sec. 48 0E6s Mapicos, i.e., divus Marcus, implies that M. Aurelius (died March 17, 18o) was already dead ; On the Death of Peregrinus, written about i66, an account of the death of Peregrinus (Proteus) of Parium, who, after professing Christianity, became a cynic and finally committed suicide by publicly burning himself at Harpina near Olympia in A.D. 165, Lucian being an eye-witness (Peregr. 2). The references to Christianity in this dialogue (I i seq.) and in the Alexander (25 and 38) are of interest, particularly the references to Christ, "that great man who was crucified in Palestine be cause he introduced this religion into life" (Peregr. I 1), to the unsparing devotion of the Christians, and to their beliefs : "for these unhappy men have persuaded themselves that they will be immortal and live for ever; wherefore they despise death and willingly sacrifice themselves. Further, their first lawgiver has persuaded them that they are all brothers one of another, when once they renounce the gods of the Greeks and worship that crucified sophist and live in accordance with his laws" (Peregr. 13).
Lucius or the Ass seems not to be genuine. The story is that of one Lucius who, visiting Thessaly, sees his hostess transform herself by a drug into a bird. Trying the same
experiment, but using the wrong drug, he turns himself into an ass and goes through various adventures before he is able to procure roses (the antidote to the drug), which he eats and re gains human form. The same theme seems to have been used by Lucius of Patrae in the ist century A.D. (Phot. cod. 129) as it was again by Apuleius in his Metamorphoses in the 2nd century. The True History, in two books, is a novel of adventure, de scribing the marvellous experiences of certain voyagers who, setting sail from the Pillars of Hercules, are caught up into the air, fight for the men of the moon against the men of the sun over the colonization of the morning star, are swallowed, ship and all, by a huge sea-monster, from which they at last escape and voyage to the islands of the blest, etc. The writer warns the reader at the start : "I write of things which I have neither seen nor suffered nor learned from another, things which are not and never could have been, and therefore my readers should by no means believe them" (V.H. i. 4).
The satirical dialogues may be taken as the most mature and characteristic work of Lucian. In the Twice Accused Lucian is arraigned by Rhetoric on a charge of desertion (KaKwats). Rhetoric tells how she found him quite a youth, "still a barbarian in speech and all but dressed in the Assyrian fashion, wandering about Ionia and not knowing what to do with himself," and how she educated him in the art of speaking and made him famous, travelling with him not merely in Ionia and Greece but even so far afield as Italy and Gaul (Bis accus. 27). Lucian in his reply admits the benefits which he received from Rhetoric, but he pleads that it was only when he found her abandoning the Demosthenic style of oratory for a more meretricious fashion, "decking herself and wearing her hair in the manner of a courtesan, using paint and pencilling her eyes," that he resolved to desert her for Dialogue: "In any case it was well for me, a man of some 4o years of age, to be done with those tumults and lawsuits and to leave 'gentlemen of the jury' alone; to escape from tirades against tyrants and praise of princes, and to go to the Academy or the Lyceum and walk with this most ex cellent Dialogue, conversing quietly and requiring no praise or applause" (Bis accus. 32). On the other hand, Dialogue arraigns Lucian in an action for insult (60pts), complaining that whereas he (Dialogue) had previously held high discourse of the gods and nature and the universe, soaring high above the clouds, where Zeus drives his winged car, Lucian had dragged him down to earth and broken his wings, robbing him of his mask of tragedy and wisdom and substituting for it a mask of another sort, comic and satyric and almost ridiculous, associating him with jest and lampoon and cynicism and Eupolis and Aristophanes, "scoffers at serious things and mockers of what is well ordered," and finally Menippus, "a terrible dog who bit while he laughed" (Bis accus. 33). Lucian in reply substantially admits the accusation, but pleads that by abandoning the subtleties of philosophy and introducing comic relief he had caused Dialogue to "walk upon the earth after the manner of men" and thus to become more generally attractive.