In the Nigrinus Lucian makes that philosopher describe himself as "sitting as it were aloft in a crowded theatre surveying the actions of men, some capable of affording amusement and laughter, others calculated to try the firmest heart" (Nigrin. i8). If the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy as the KnbEvTiis Corparcros (an interested party who takes no part in the action) is comparable to that of the Wedding Guest, Lucian in his role of the laughing philosopher may be compared to the Casual Spectator, for whom in his detachment and unconcern all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. This is a notion to which Lucian again and again recurs, e.g., Menippus i6 : "You have often seen, I imagine, on the stage those tragic actors who, according to the exigencies of the play, appear now as Creon and now as Priam or Agamemnon, and the same person, who a little before had with great dignity represented Cecrops or Erechtheus, comes forth at the bidding of the poet as a menial; and, when the drama is ended, each doffs his gold-bespangled dress and lays aside his mask and stepping down from his still-boots walks about, a poor and humble man, no longer Agamemnon the son of Atreus, or Creon the son of Menoeceus, but Polus son of Charicles of Sun ium, or Satyrus son of Theogeiton of Marathon." This detached and external point of view is obtained in the Menippus by a de scent to Hades; and so, too, in the Dialogues of the Dead (with which may be classed the Cataplus) the theme is the contempla tion of the fugitive vanities of human life from the point of view of those for whom "what comes after life" (ra µeT& TOP Oiov, Mort. Dialog. i. i) is no longer a matter of speculation but a present reality. In the Icaromenippus, on the other hand, the vantage-ground is got by an ascent to Heaven ; in the Charon by piling upon Ossa Pelion, then Oeta, then Parnassus, whence Charon with his guide Hermes contemplates a series of celebrities, and, beholding the futility of human endeavour, is moved to cry "0 foolish men! Wherefore are ye so busied about these things? Cease from your labours, for ye will not live for ever. None of
those earthly dignities is abiding, and a man can carry none of them with him when he dies, but must depart naked, while his house and lands and gold will own one master after another" (Charon 20). In the Anacharsis we have Greek institutions as they present themselves to the eye of a barbarian, and a justifi cation of them against his criticisms.
Besides the dialogues already referred to may be mentioned the Hermotimus (written when Lucian was 4o years of age, Herm. 13), the upshot of which is that all philosophy is vanity; the ship, emphasizing the vanity of human wishes ; the Symposium, describing a riotous banquet at which the philosophers behave rather worse than others; the Sale of Lives, in which the lives of various philosophers are auctioned at market value; the Tinton, in which the Athenian misanthrope (whose tower was seen by Pausanias, i. 3o) is restored to wealth to find himself once more the centre of a crowd of flatterers.
The English writer whom Lucian most recalls is Swift, who, as he probably took the idea of Gulliver's Travels from the True History, may have found the inspiration for the Letter of Advice to a Young Poet in the Teacher of Orators. In ease and lucidity of style Lucian's Greek (founded on the best Attic models and only in some minute details aberrant from them) is not inferior; and if he suggests less of the saeva indignatio of the conventional satirist, that may well mean not any lack of personal conviction and moral earnestness but a stricter fidelity to what he conceived to be the function of the satirist—ridentem dicere verum.