LUCIAN.
CHAPTER I.
BIOGRAPHICAL.
Lucian (Lucianus, or Lycinus, as he sometimes calls himself) was born about A.D. 120, or perhaps a few years later, at Samosata, on the bank of the Euphrates, at that time the capital city of Commagene, and perhaps better known a century later from its heresiarch bishop, Paul. What we know of our author's life is chiefly gathered from incidental notices scattered through his numerous writings. Of his youthful days he has given what is probably a truthful account in a piece which he has entitled "The Dream." This appears to have been written in his successful later years (when men are most disposed to be open and honest about their early antecedents), and recited as a kind of prologue to his public readings of his works, before his fellow-citizens of Samosata. He tells us that his parents, who seem to have been in humble circumstances, held a council of the friends of the family to consult what should be done with their boy. They came to the conclusion that a liberal education was not to be thought of, because of the expense. The next best thing, for a lad who had already no doubt given token of some ability, was to choose some calling which should still be of an intellectual rather than a servile character. This is his own account of what took place in the family council:—
"When one proposed one thing and one another, according to their fancies or experience, my father turned to my maternal uncle—he was one of the party, and passed for an excellent carver of Mercuries[1]—'It is impossible,' said he, politely, 'in your presence, to give any other art the preference. So take this lad home with you, and teach him to be a good stone-cutter and statuary: for he has it in him, and is clever enough, as you know, with his hands.' He had formed this notion from the way in which I used to amuse myself in moulding wax. As soon as I left school, I used to scrape wax together, and make figures of oxen and horses, and men too, with some cleverness, as my father thought. This accomplishment had earned me many a beating from my schoolmasters; but at this moment it was praised as a sign of natural talent, and sanguine hopes were entertained that I should speedily become master of my new profession, from this early plastic fancy. So, on a day which was counted lucky for entering on my apprenticeship, to my uncle I was sent. I did not at all object to it myself: I thought I should find the work amusing enough, and be very proud when I could show my playmates how I could make gods, and cut out other little figures for myself and my special friends. But an accident happened to me, as is not uncommon with beginners. My uncle put a chisel in my hand, and bid me work it lightly over a slab of marble that lay in the shop, quoting at the same time the common proverb, 'Well begun is half done.' But, leaning too hard upon it, in my awkwardness, the slab broke; and my uncle, seizing a whip that lay at hand, made me pay my footing in no very gentle or encouraging fashion; so the first wages I earned were tears."
"I ran off straight home, sobbing and howling, with the tears running down my cheeks. I told them there all about the whip, and showed the wheals; and with loud complaints of my uncle's cruelty, I added that he had done it all out of envy,—because he was afraid I should soon make a better artist than himself. My mother was extremely indignant, and vented bitter reproaches against her brother."[2]
Of course, with the mother in such mood, we readily understand that young Lucian never went back to the shop. "I went to sleep," he says, "with my eyes full of tears, and that very night I had a dream." This dream, which the author goes on to relate, is a reproduction, adapted to suit the circumstances, of the well-known "Choice of Hercules." How far Lucian actually dreamed it, or thought he dreamed it, is impossible to say. He was imaginative enough, no doubt, to have pictured it all to himself in his sleep; or a youth who had hit upon so ingenious an explanation of his uncle's beating him was equally capable of inventing a dream for the family edification; or (and this is the most likely supposition) the practised fabulist might have only adopted it as an apposite parable for the audience before whom he related it. The dream was this: Two female figures seemed to have laid hold of him on either side, and struggled so fiercely for the possession that he felt as if he were being torn in two. "The one figure was of coarse and masculine aspect, with rough hair and callous hands, with her robe high-girt, and covered with dust—very like my uncle the stone-cutter when he was polishing his work; the other had a lovely face and graceful bearing, and was elegantly dressed." The first is "Statuary," who offers him, if he will follow her, an ample maintenance, good health, and possibly fame. He is not to be discouraged at her rough appearance; such, at first starting in life, were Phidias, Myron, and Praxiteles. The other graceful lady is "Liberal Education." She reminds him that he had already made some slight acquaintance with her: but much is still wanting. She will make her votary acquainted with all the noblest things which the noblest men in all times have done, and said, and written; she will adorn his soul with temperance, justice, gentleness, prudence, and fortitude; with the love of the beautiful, and the thirst for knowledge. Nay, she will give him that which all men covet—immortality. Her rival can but offer him the work and position of a mere labourer, earning his living by his hands, one of the vulgar herd, obliged to bow before his superiors, and working according to his patrons' taste.[3]
Lucian hardly waited, he says, for the termination of this divine creature's speech, before he sprang up, turned his back upon her rival, and threw himself into her embraces. "No doubt," he slyly observes, "the recollection of the flogging which my brief acquaintance with the other lady had got me the day before contributed not a little to my choice." The rejected claimant gnashed upon him savagely with her teeth, and then, "stiffening like a second Niobe," she was—very appropriately—turned into stone.[4]
Whatever truth there might be in the vision, Lucian's choice was made. How he found the means for the further education that was needful, we are not told; but he got himself trained in some way as a Rhetorician. That science was not only very popular, but its professors, when once they had made themselves a name, were pretty well paid. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius was himself a most liberal patron of this as of other sciences, and maintained public lectures on jurisprudence, with which rhetoric was directly connected, both at Rome and in the provinces.
For some time after his education was completed, he seems to have wandered up and down Ionia, with very precarious means of support, exercising his profession, among other places, at Antioch, where he must have come into contact more or less with the new sect called "Christians,"—with what result we shall partly see hereafter. By degrees he got into some practice as an advocate: but not meeting with the success which he hoped for in that line, he took to composing orations for others to deliver, and to giving lectures upon rhetoric and the art of public speaking. In this latter capacity he travelled a good deal, as was the custom for all professors in those days, and delivered his lectures and declamations in the towns of Syria, Greece, Italy, and Gaul. It was in the last-named country—always a rich harvest-field, as we gather from Juvenal,[5] for travelling orators and lecturers on law—that he seems to have been most successful, and he continued there for ten years.
Whether he eventually grew tired of his profession, as some expressions in his writings would lead us to think, or whether he had made enough money by it to enable him to devote himself to the more strictly literary life to which his tastes and abilities alike pointed,—-he gave up the study and the practice of Rhetoric in about his fortieth year. He cast off his old mistress, he says, because he had grown tired of her false ways: "she was always painting her face and tiring her head," and otherwise misbehaving herself, and he would endure it no longer. She had led him a very unquiet life of it, he declares, for some years. He makes poor Rhetoric, indeed, say in her defence in the same Dialogue, and with at least some degree of truth, that she had taken him up when he was young, poor, and unknown, had brought him fame and reputation, and lastly in Gaul had made him a wealthy man.[6] It is possible that the declining reputation in which the science, owing to the abuses introduced by unworthy professors, was beginning to be held throughout Greece, may have been one great reason for his withdrawing from it.
He delivered his last lecture on the subject at Thessalonica,—where he would again meet with, or at least hear something of, the members of the Christian Church. Thence he returned to his native town of Samosata, found his father still alive there,[7] and soon removed him and his whole family into Greece. He devoted the rest of his life to the study of philosophy and to his literary work, living in good style at Athens. It was here, as he tells us himself, that he got rid of his "barbarous Syrian speech," and perfected himself in that pure Attic diction which is marvellous in a writer who was virtually a foreigner. For such Greek as was spoken in Syria during the Empire was, as Lucian confesses, little better than a patois. To these years of his life at Athens are naturally assigned those Dialogues of his which have in them so much of the Aristophanic spirit and manner. There also he enjoyed the friendship of Demonax of Cyprus, who, if we may trust the character which his friend gives of him in the little biographical sketch which bears his name, well deserved to be called an eclectic philosopher. His philosophy, combining some of the highest tenets of the Socratic school with the contempt of riches and luxury affected by the Cynics, was, says Lucian, "mild, cheerful, and benevolent," and he lived respected to the end of his long life, "setting an example of moderation and wisdom to all who saw and heard him."[8]
Lucian still travelled occasionally, and on one occasion paid a visit to the reputed oracle of the arch-impostor Alexander, at Abonoteichos in Paphlagonia, of which he gives a very graphic account. This man exercised an extraordinary influence over the credulity not only of his own countrymen but of strangers also. Lucian's zeal against such sham pretenders here brought him into some trouble, and went near to cost him his life. Alexander, who had specially invited him to an audience, held out his hand, according to custom, for his visitor to kiss; whereupon Lucian, by way of active protest against an imposture which he had already denounced, bit it so hard as actually to lame him for some time. The Prophet affected to treat the thing as a practical joke, but, when Lucian was leaving the country, gave private orders to the captain and crew of the vessel to fling the malicious unbeliever overboard—a fate which he only escaped through the unusual tender-heartedness of the Asiatic captain.
He seems to have become poorer again in his later years, and to have occasionally taken up his old profession. But at last the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (or, as Wieland rather thinks, Commodus) offered him an official appointment (something like that of Recorder, or Clerk of the Courts) at Alexandria in Egypt. His chief duties were, as he tells us, to preside over the courts of justice and to keep the records.[9] He thought it necessary to write an "Apology" for accepting this position; for it happened that he had just put forth an essay (which will come under notice hereafter) on the miseries of a state of dependence on great men, and was conscious that his enemies might take occasion to sneer at so stout a champion of independence thus consenting to sell himself for office. He must have felt like Dr Johnson when he consulted his friends as to the propriety of his accepting the pension offered by Lord Bute, after the bitter definitions of the words "pension" and "pensioner" which he had given in the first edition of his Dictionary. The promotion did not come until, as he says, he "had one foot already in Charon's boat," for he must have been above seventy years old when he received it: but the emoluments were fairly good; he was allowed to perform the office by deputy, so that it did not interfere with his busy literary leisure at Athens, and he lived many years to enjoy it. He is said to have been a hundred years old when he died, but nothing certain is known of the date or manner of his death. It has been conjectured with much probability that in his later years he was troubled with the gout, a disorder to which he more than once makes allusion in his writings, very much in the tone of one who spoke from painful experience; and he has left two humorous mock-tragic dramatic scenes in which Gout is personified as the principal character. The torments of which she is the author to mankind are amusingly exaggerated. Philoctetes is made out to have been a sufferer, not from the bite of the snake or from the poisoned arrow, but simply from gout in his foot—enough to account for any amount of howls and lamentations, such as are put in his mouth by Sophocles; and Ulysses must have died by the same enemy, and not, as was fabled, by the poisonous spine of a sea-urchin.
It has been impossible, in the compass of this volume, even to notice all the works of this active and versatile writer, a descriptive catalogue of which would alone fill some pages. Nor has the common order of arrangement been here followed, but the Dialogues and other pieces have been grouped as seemed most convenient.
Though Lucian was always a popular writer, he has not found many modern translators. The formidable number of his works has no doubt been one reason for this. Spence's translation (1684) is termed by Dryden "scandalous." The version by "Eminent Hands," published in 1711, to which is prefixed a "Life" by Dryden, is very incorrect, though some of the pieces are rendered with considerable spirit. Tooke's translation (1820) is also full of the blunders of imperfect scholarship, though the English is often racy and good. Dr Franklin's is, on the whole, that which does most justice to the original. But no English translator approaches in point of excellence the admirable German version by Wieland.
- ↑ The figures of Mercury so commonly set up in the streets and at the gates of houses were mere busts without arms, and could not have required any very great amount of art in their production.
- ↑ "The Dream," 2-4.
- ↑ Wieland well remarks that the art of sculpture must have been very much on the decline, both in point of merit and reputation, to lead the writer to speak of it in such slighting terms.
- ↑ "The Dream," 6-14.
- ↑ See his Satires, vii. 175, and xv. 111.
- ↑ "The Double Accusation," 27 and 31.
- ↑ "Alexander," 56.
- ↑ Lucian gives us a number of conversational anecdotes of Demonax,—one of the few collections of classical ana. Perhaps the best is this. A certain sophist from Sidon, very fond of praising himself, was boasting that he understood all systems of philosophy. "If Aristotle calls me to the Lyceum, I can follow him: if Plato invites me to the Academy, I will meet him there: if Zeno to the Porch, I am ready: if Pythagoras calls upon me, I can be silent." Rising up quietly among the audience—"Hark!" said Demonax, addressing him—"Pythagoras calls you." There was evidently something in common between the two friends in their views upon religions questions. When a neighbour asked Demonax to accompany him to the temple of Æsculapius to pray for the recovery of his son, the philosopher replied—"Do you suppose that the god is deaf, that he cannot hear us where we are?"—Life of Demonax, 14, 27.
- ↑ "Apology," 12.