of Polycarp's death, which we are distinctly told "was discussed everywhere among the heathen," seems possibly to correspond. Bishop Pearson appears to have considered the whole account as nothing more than a kind of travesty of the martyrdom of Ignatius, and in this idea he has been followed by many German scholars. It has been conjectured that possibly Lucian may have intended to satirise the contempt of death which he speaks of as a characteristic of the Christian sect, and that positive desire for martyrdom which we know from other authorities to have prevailed among some of them to a morbid degree, as a new development of cynicism.
But there seems no good reason to doubt the main accuracy of the account given by Lucian, or to attribute to him any sinister motive in telling the story as he does. The extraordinary fact of this self-immolation of Peregrinus is related, though briefly, by Christian writers—by Tatian, Tertullian, and Eusebius. Aulus Gellius, indeed, speaks of having known him in his earlier life, as living in a cottage in the suburbs of Athens, "a grave and earnest man," to whose wise discourse he had often listened with much pleasure. But a consummate impostor such as Lucian describes may well have succeeded in imposing upon the Roman antiquarian as upon the officers of the Christian Church.[1] He had
- ↑ See Noct. Att., xii, 11. Wieland, all whose remarks on Lucian deserve respect, thought his portrait of Peregrinus manifestly unfair, and wrote a kind of novelette, cast in the form of a Dialogue between Lucian and Peregrinus in Elysium, in which the latter gives a very different account of his life from
