Delphi Complete Works of Lucian

by Lucian Samosata

The Graeco-Roman world was as settled and peaceful, as conscious of its imperial responsibilities, as susceptible to boredom, as greedy of amusement, could show as numerous a leisured class, and believed as firmly in money, as our own. What is more important for our purpose, it was questioning the truth of its religion as we are to-day questioning the truth of ours. Lucian was the most vehement of the questioners. Of what played the part then that the Christian religion plays now, the pagan religion was only one half; the other half was philosophy. The gods of Olympus had long lost their hold upon the educated, but not perhaps upon the masses; the educated, ill content to be without any guide through the maze of life, had taken to philosophy instead. Stoicism was the prevalent creed, and how noble a form this could take in a cultivated and virtuous mind is to be seen in the Thoughts of M. Aurelius. The test of a religion, however, is not what form it takes in a virtuous mind, but what effects it produces on those of another sort. Lucian applies the test of results alike to the religion usually so called, and to its philosophic substitute. He finds both wanting; the test is not a satisfactory one, but it is being applied by all sorts and conditions of men to Christianity in our own time; so is the second test, that of inherent probability, which he uses as well as the other upon the pagan theology; and it is this that gives his writings, even apart from their wit and fancy, a special interest for our own time. Our attention seems to be concentrated more and more on the ethical, as opposed to the speculative or dogmatic aspect of religion; just such was Lucian’s attitude towards philosophy.

  Some minor points of similarity may be briefly noted. As we read the Anacharsis, we are reminded of the modern prominence of athletics; the question of football versus drill is settled for us; light is thrown upon the question of conscription; we think of our Commissions on national deterioration, and the schoolmaster’s wail over the athletic Frankenstein’s monster which, like Eucrates in The Liar, he has created but cannot control. The ‘horsy talk in every street’ of the Nigrinus calls up the London newsboy with his ‘All the winners.’ We think of palmists and spiritualists in the police-courts as we read of Rutilianus and the Roman nobles consulting the impostor Alexander. This sentence reads like the description of a modern man of science confronted with the supernatural: ‘It was an occasion for a man whose intelligence was steeled against such assaults by scepticism and insight, one who, if he could not detect the precise imposture, would at any rate have been perfectly certain that, though this escaped him, the whole thing was a lie and an impossibility.’ The upper-class audiences who listened to Lucian’s readings, taking his points with quiet smiles instead of the loud applause given to the rhetorician, must have been something like that which listens decorously to an Extension lecturer. When Lucian bids us mark ‘how many there are who once were but cyphers, but whom words have raised to fame and opulence, ay, and to noble lineage too,’ we remember not only Gibbon’s remark about the very Herodes Atticus of whom Lucian may have been thinking (‘The family of Herod, at least after it had been favoured by fortune, was lineally descended from Cimon and Miltiades’), but also the modern carriere ouverte aux talents, and the fact that Tennyson was a lord. There are the elements of a socialist question in the feelings between rich and poor described in the Saturnalia; while, on the other hand, the fact of there being an audience for the Dialogues of the Hetaerae is an illustration of that spirit of humani nihil a me alienum puto which is again prevalent today. We care now to realize the thoughts of other classes besides our own; so did they in Lucian’s time; but it is significant that Francklin in 1780, refusing to translate this series, says: ‘These dialogues exhibit to us only such kind of conversation as we may hear in the purlieus of Covent Garden — lewd, dull, and insipid.’ The lewdness hardly goes beyond the title; they are full of humour and insight; and we make no apology for translating most of them. Lastly, a generation that is always complaining of the modern over-production of books feels that it would be at home in a state of society in which our author found that, not to be too singular, he must at least write about writing history, if he declined writing it himself, even as Diogenes took to rolling his tub, lest he should be the only idle man when Corinth was bustling about its defences.

  As Lucian is so fond of saying, ‘this is but a small selection of the facts which might have been quoted’ to illustrate the likeness between our age and his. It may be well to allude, on the other hand, to a few peculiarities of the time that appear conspicuously in his writings.

  The Roman Empire was rather Graeco-Roman than Roman; this is now a commonplace. It is interesting to observe that for Lucian ‘we’ is on occasion the Romans; ‘we’ is also everywhere the Greeks; while at the same time ‘I’ is a barbarian and a Syrian. Roughly speaking, the Roman element stands for energy, material progress, authority, and the Greek for thought; the Roman is the British Philistine, the Greek the man of culture. Lucian is conscious enough of the distinction, and there is no doubt where his own preference lies. He may be a materialist, so far as he is anything, in philosophy; but in practice he puts the things of the mind before the things of the body.

  If our own age supplies parallels for most of what we meet with in the second century, there are two phenomena which are to be matched rather in an England that has passed away. The first is the Cynics, who swarm in Lucian’s pages like the begging friars in those of a historical novelist painting the middle ages. Like the friars, they began nobly in the desire for plain living and high thinking; in both cases the thinking became plain, the living not perhaps high, but the best that circumstances admitted of, and the class — with its numbers hugely swelled by persons as little like their supposed teachers as a Marian or Elizabethan persecutor was like the founder of Christianity — a pest to society. Lucian’s sympathy with the best Cynics, and detestation of the worst, make Cynicism one of his most familiar themes. The second is the class so vividly presented in The dependent Scholar — the indigent learned Greek who looks about for a rich vulgar Roman to buy his company, and finds he has the worst of the bargain. His successors, the ‘trencher chaplains’ who ‘from grasshoppers turn bumble-bees and wasps, plain parasites, and make the Muses mules, to satisfy their hunger-starved panches, and get a meal’s meat,’ were commoner in Burton’s days than in our own, and are to be met in Fielding, and Macaulay, and Thackeray.

  Two others of Lucian’s favourite figures, the parasite and the legacy-hunter, exist still, no doubt, as they are sure to in every complex civilization; but their operations are now conducted with more regard to the decencies. This is worth remembering when we are occasionally offended by his frankness on subjects to which we are not accustomed to allude; he is not an unclean or a sensual writer, but the waters of decency have risen since his time and submerged some things which were then visible.

  A slight prejudice, again, may sometimes be aroused by Lucian’s trick of constant and trivial quotation; he would rather put the simplest statement, or even make his transition from one subject to another, in words of Homer than in his own; we have modern writers too who show the same tendency, and perhaps we like or dislike them for it in proportion as their allusions recall memories or merely puzzle us; we cannot all be expected to have agreeable memories stirred by insignificant Homer tags; and it is well to bear in mind by way of palliation that in Greek education Homer played as great a part as the Bible in ours. He might be taken simply or taken allegorically; but one way or the other he was the staple of education, and it might be assumed that every one would like the mere sound of him.

  We may end by remarking that the public readings of his own works, to which the author makes frequent reference, were what served to a great extent the purpose of our printing-press. We know that his pieces were also published; but the public that could be reached by hand-written copies would bear a very small proportion to that which heard them from the writer’s own lips; and though the modern system may have the advantage on the whole, it is hard to believe that the unapproached life and naturalness of Lucian’s
dialogue does not owe something to this necessity.

  4. LUCIAN AS A WRITER

  With all the sincerity of Lucian in The True History, ‘soliciting his reader’s incredulity,’ we solicit our reader’s neglect of this appreciation. We have no pretensions whatever to the critical faculty; the following remarks are to be taken as made with diffidence, and offered to those only who prefer being told what to like, and why, to settling the matter for themselves.

  Goethe, aged fourteen, with seven languages on hand, devised the plan of a correspondence kept up by seven imaginary brothers scattered over the globe, each writing in the language of his adopted land. The stay-at-home in Frankfort was to write Jew-German, for which purpose some Hebrew must be acquired. His father sent him to Rector Albrecht. The rector was always found with one book open before him — a well-thumbed Lucian. But the Hebrew vowel-points were perplexing, and the boy found better amusement in putting shrewd questions on what struck him as impossibilities or inconsistencies in the Old-Testament narrative they were reading. The old gentleman was infinitely amused, had fits of mingled coughing and laughter, but made little attempt at solving his pupil’s difficulties, beyond ejaculating Er narrischer Kerl! Er narrischer Junge! He let him dig for solutions, however, in an English commentary on the shelves, and occupied the time with turning the familiar pages of his Lucian [Footnote: Wahrheit und Dichtung, book iv. ]. The wicked old rector perhaps chuckled to think that here was one who bade fair to love Lucian one day as well as he did himself.

  For Lucian too was one who asked questions — spent his life doing little else; if one were invited to draw him with the least possible expenditure of ink, one’s pen would trace a mark of interrogation. That picture is easily drawn; to put life into it is a more difficult matter. However, his is not a complex character, for all the irony in which he sometimes chooses to clothe his thought; and materials are at least abundant; he is one of the self-revealing fraternity; his own personal presence is to be detected more often than not in his work. He may give us the assistance, or he may not, of labelling a character Lucian or Lycinus; we can detect him, volentes volentem, under the thin disguise of Menippus or Tychiades or Cyniscus as well. And the essence of him as he reveals himself is the questioning spirit. He has no respect for authority. Burke describes the majority of mankind, who do not form their own opinions, as ‘those whom Providence has doomed to live on trust’; Lucian entirely refuses to live on trust; he ‘wants to know.’ It was the wish of Arthur Clennam, who had in consequence a very bad name among the Tite Barnacles and other persons in authority. Lucian has not escaped the same fate; ‘the scoffer Lucian’ has become as much a commonplace as ‘fidus Achates,’ or ‘the well-greaved Achaeans,’ the reading of him has been discountenanced, and, if he has not actually lost his place at the table of Immortals, promised him when he temporarily left the Island of the Blest, it has not been so ‘distinguished’ a place as it was to have been and should have been. And all because he ‘wanted to know.’

  His questions, of course, are not all put in the same manner. In the Dialogues of the Gods, for instance, the mark of interrogation is not writ large; they have almost the air at first of little stories in dialogue form, which might serve to instruct schoolboys in the attributes and legends of the gods — a manual charmingly done, yet a manual only. But we soon see that he has said to himself: Let us put the thing into plain natural prose, and see what it looks like with its glamour of poetry and reverence stripped off; the Gods do human things; why not represent them as human persons, and see what results? What did result was that henceforth any one who still believed in the pagan deities might at the cost of an hour’s light reading satisfy himself that his gods were not gods, or, if they were, had no business to be. Whether many or few did so read and so satisfy themselves, we have no means of knowing; it is easy to over-estimate the effect such writing may have had, and to forget that those who were capable of being convinced by exposition of this sort would mostly be those who were already convinced without; still, so far as Lucian had any effect on the religious position, it must have been in discrediting paganism and increasing the readiness to accept the new faith beginning to make its way. Which being so, it was ungrateful of the Christian church to turn and rend him. It did so, partly in error. Lucian had referred in the Life of Peregrine to the Christians, in words which might seem irreverent to Christians at a time when they were no longer an obscure sect; he had described and ridiculed in The Liar certain ‘Syrian’ miracles which have a remarkable likeness to the casting out of spirits by Christ and the apostles; and worse still, the Philopatris passed under his name. This dialogue, unlike what Lucian had written in the Peregrine and The Liar, is a deliberate attack on Christianity. It is clear to us now that it was written two hundred years after his time, under Julian the Apostate; but there can be no more doubt of its being an imitation of Lucian than of its not being his; it consequently passed for his, the story gained currency that he was an apostate himself, and his name was anathema for the church. It was only partly in error, however. Though Lucian might be useful on occasion (‘When Tertullian or Lactantius employ their labours in exposing the falsehood and extravagance of Paganism, they are obliged to transcribe the eloquence of Cicero or the wit of Lucian’ [Footnote: Gibbon, Decline and Fall, cap. xv.]), the very word heretic is enough to remind us that the Church could not show much favour to one who insisted always on thinking for himself. His works survived, but he was not read, through the Middle Ages. With the Renaissance he partly came into his own again, but still laboured under the imputations of scoffing and atheism, which confined the reading of him to the few.

  The method followed in the Dialogues of the Gods and similar pieces is a very indirect way of putting questions. It is done much more directly in others, the Zeus cross-examined, for instance. Since the fallen angels

  reasoned high

  Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate —

  Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute —

  And found no end, in wandering mazes lost,

  these subjects have had their share of attention; but the questions can hardly be put more directly, or more neatly, than in the Zeus cross-examined, and the thirtieth Dialogue of the Dead.

  He has many other interrogative methods besides these, which may be left to reveal themselves in the course of reading. As for answering questions, that is another matter. The answer is sometimes apparent, sometimes not; he will not refrain from asking a question just because he does not know the answer; his role is asking, not answering. Nor when he gives an answer is it always certain whether it is to be taken in earnest. Was he a cynic? one would say so after reading The Cynic; was he an Epicurean? one would say so after reading the Alexander; was he a philosopher? one would say Yes at a certain point of the Hermotimus, No at another. He doubtless had his moods, and he was quite unhampered by desire for any consistency except consistent independence of judgement. Moreover, the difficulty of getting at his real opinions is increased by the fact that he was an ironist. We have called him a self-revealer; but you never quite know where to have an ironical self-revealer. Goethe has the useful phrase, ‘direct irony’; a certain German writer ‘makes too free a use of direct irony, praising the blameworthy and blaming the praiseworthy — a rhetorical device which should be very sparingly employed. In the long run it disgusts the sensible and misleads the dull, pleasing only the great intermediate class to whom it offers the satisfaction of being able to think themselves more shrewd than other people, without expending much thought of their own’ (Wahrheit und Dichtung, book vii). Fielding gives us in Jonathan Wild a sustained piece of ‘direct irony’; you have only to reverse everything said, and you get the author’s meaning. Lucian’s irony is not of that sort; you cannot tell when you are to reverse him, only that you will have sometimes to do so. He does use the direct kind; The Rhetorician’s Vade mecum and The Parasite are examples; the latter is also an example (unless a translator, who is condemned not to ski
p or skim, is an unfair judge) of how tiresome it may become. But who shall say how much of irony and how much of genuine feeling there is in the fine description of the philosophic State given in the Hermotimus (with its suggestions of Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and of the ‘not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble’), or in the whimsical extravagance (as it strikes a modern) of the Pantomime, or in the triumph permitted to the Cynic (against ‘Lycinus’ too) in the dialogue called after him? In one of his own introductory lectures he compares his pieces aptly enough to the bacchante’s thyrsus with its steel point concealed.

  With his questions and his irony and his inconsistencies, it is no wonder that Lucian is accused of being purely negative and destructive. But we need not think he is disposed of in that way, any more than our old-fashioned literary education is disposed of when it has been pointed out that it does not equip its alumni with knowledge of electricity or of a commercially useful modern language; it may have equipped them with something less paying, but more worth paying for. Lucian, it is certain, will supply no one with a religion or a philosophy; but it may be doubted whether any writer will supply more fully both example and precept in favour of doing one’s thinking for oneself; and it may be doubted also whether any other intellectual lesson is more necessary. He is nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri, if ever man was; he is individualist to the core. No religion or philosophy, he seems to say, will save you; the thing is to think for yourself, and be a man of sense. ‘It was but small consolation,’ says Menippus, ‘to reflect that I was in numerous and wise and eminently sensible company, if I was a fool still, all astray in my quest for truth.’ Vox populi is no vox dei for him; he is quite proof against majorities; Athanasius contra mundum is more to his taste. “What is this I hear?” asked Arignotus, scowling upon me; “you deny the existence of the supernatural, when there is scarcely a man who has not seen some evidence of it?” “Therein lies my exculpation,” I replied; “I do not believe in the supernatural, because, unlike the rest of mankind, I do not see it; if I saw, I should doubtless believe, just as you all do.”’ That British schoolboys should have been brought up for centuries on Ovid, and Lucian have been tabooed, is, in view of their comparative efficacy in stimulating thought, an interesting example of habent sua fata libelli.