hand." The unhesitating faith in which (apparently) he accepts the truth of all the popular legends about Jupiter and his court, treating them in the most matter-of-fact and earnest way, and assuming their literal truth in every detail, makes the satire all the more pungent. To have sifted the heap of legends into false and true, or to have explained that this was only a poetical illustration, or that an allegorical form of truth, would not have damaged the popular creed half so much as this representation of the Olympian deities under all the personal and domestic circumstances which followed, as necessary corollaries, from their supposed relations to each other. We need not wonder that the charge of atheism was hurled against him by all the defenders, honest or dishonest, of the national worship. Many as had been the blows struck against it by satirists and philosophers, Lucian's was, if not the hardest, the most deadly of all.
The Dialogue called "Prometheus," though it stands alone, and is not classed among the "Dialogues of the Gods," is quite of the same character with these, and may be regarded as a kind of prologue to the series. As a punishment for the offence which he has given to Jupiter, Prometheus is being chained down upon Mount Caucasus, the idea of the scene being borrowed undoubtedly from the tragedy of Æschylus. The executioners of the punishment, however, in this case, are Vulcan and Mercury alone, without the aid of Strength and Force. The victim protests against the cruelty and injustice of his doom, and the mean and
