For Lucian's actual cita tion or
reminiscences
of Latin authors, see below, p.
Allinson - Lucian, Satirist and Artist
He no longer disposed
[172]
is
it
A is
1
is
is,
lucian's creditors and debtors
of as merely a nihilistic sceptic. Lucian's de structive criticism is more thoroughgoing. Vol taire, however, is still more remote from Eras mus, who is the best interpreter of Lucian's best work and able, with his more optimistic humanism, to counteract the poison of pessi mism while, at the same time, he adapts to the needs of his own day the wholesome, if bitter, satire of the Greek iconoclast. Voltaire's " sniggering and semi-virile indecency," how ever, — to quote Mr. Saintsbury's somewhat caustic phrase 132 — does not prevent the vivid use, especially in his dialogues, of as much of Lucian's spirit as he had chosen to understand.
His dialogue, Lucien, firasme et Rabelais,133 gives good illustration. In this Voltaire himself masquerades under the guise of Erasmus. The three have rendezvous, presumably in Hades. Lucian informs himself as to the vital statistics of his two distinguished " epigoni " and then sits down to read presentation copies of their works in order to bring himself up to date. In the end all three go off in company with the newly-arrived Dean Swift. The " big four " have formed a syndicate with Voltaire as
General Manager.
Apart from the dialogues, Lucian's True
[ i73]
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
Story is reflected in Micromigas and in Can- dide. In Candide also we get an echo of the Hermotimus, and Lucian's paralyzing agnosti cism in the conclusion of this dialogue has re- enforcement in Voltaire's Gallimatias Dra- matique, where the Chinese refuse to give heed to the ex parte preaching of Jesuit or Jansenist, Puritan, Quaker, Anglican, Lutheran, Mussul man or Jew.
The Dialogues of the Dead by George Lord Lyttleton (1760) are specifically modelled upon Lucian, Fenelon and Fontenelle. They have, however, their own distinction and originality. The author takes antiquity and himself with naive seriousness. He explains his method in detail and prides himself upon his intelligence in selecting his interlocutors wholly from those who are no longer living. He is at pains to de
fend himself against any possible charge of paganism in introducing Elysium, Minos, Mer cury, Charon and Styx, which are, as he ob serves, " necessary Allegories in this way of writing " and not the underlying beliefs of a " catholic mind! " Without clearly realizing
he thus retains, on occasion, though imper fectly, one of Lucian's most important artistic devices. For example, Addison and Swift refer
[174]
it,
lucian's creditors and debtors
the question of precedence to Mercury. Mer cury, too, has to intervene in a violent quarrel between a deceased North American savage and an English duellist. The savage, like the cobbler in Lucian, starts to swim across the Styx not, however, because he cannot pay the fare, but because he is unwilling to set foot in the same boat with the immoral duellist 1
The last dialogue, Plutarch — Charon — and a modem Bookseller, is one of three written by an anonymous friend and, as a
Lucianic dialogue, is the best in the collection. The bookseller furnishes an amusing pendant to the stock character of the " tyrant " in Lu cian who tries to beg off from punishment.
Friederich Earle Raspe published (1785), in
English, Baron Miinchhausen's Narrative
his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Rus sia. In this famous work we find undisguised, sometimes almost verbatim, imitations of Lu cian's still germinant narrative in the True Story. 134
Of the great German group, overlapping into the nineteenth century, Lessing knew Lucian, but evidently found him little akin to his seri ous purposes. 185
Wieland, the famous translator of Lucian at [175]
of
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND
the end of the eighteenth century, essayed also to imitate his favourite author in his Gesprdche in Mysium and is reminiscent of him in his ro mance Don Sylvio von Rosalva written in the manner of Don Quixote. Precisely, however, in connection with Lucian he calls down on his own head the irony and satire of his two greater compatriots and successors. —
Schiller in his distichs 136 suggestive also of the Hermotimus — has a meeting between Lucian and Wieland who had tried to white wash the cynic Peregrinus Proteus. Peregri- nus, in fact, sends up word to Wieland that this is love's labour lost: " ich war doch ein
Lump! " — and when Wieland asks Lucian whether he is now reconciled with the philoso phers, Schiller makes Lucian's corpse reply somewhat ironically: "Softly, my friend! While I was chastising" the fools I have often plagued also the wise!
Goethe's attack on Wieland is over-bitter in his farce, Gotter, Helden und Wieland, but he shows, incidentally, his insight into Lucianic satire. His Hercules, for example, is a replica of Lucian's Heracles in the sixteenth Dialogue of the Dead; and Lucian as well as Aeschylus might, perhaps, be traced in the acrid lines of
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Goethe's Prometheus, and still more confi dently may we catch in Faust's pessimistic monologue the despair of the disillusioned Stoic neophyte, Hermotimus.
And, again, a tale in Lucian's Lie-Fancier is openly reproduced by Goethe in his witty poem, Der Zauberlehrling where the Magi cian's Prentice by means of the magic formula turns the broom — (instead of the Lucianic pestle or bar of the door — an unessential vari ant) — into an efficient body-servant. The out come in both versions is the same. The Rev. Richard Barham, however, Goethe's junior by some forty years, makes two innovations in his rollicking Lay of St. Dunstan. He substitutes, as in Goethe, a broom-stick for the bar or pestle and, as in the other two versions, the
broom, or bar, is cut in two by the frightened tyro in magic who has failed to secure the sec ond formula which will cause the over-orga nized valet to revert again to inorganic mat ter. The two halves now bring twice as fast what was ordered. In Lucian and Goethe the order was for water and the Master in each case arrives just in time to save the pupil from drowning. The Reverend Mr. Barham, how ever, less temperate than the Greek or German,
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LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
changes water into wine and causes " Peter the Lay Brother " to order up such unlimited drinks that a tragedy results. He is unequal to the supply and is drowned before he can be rescued from the officious bar-tenders.
In Lucian's Menippus or Necromancy, we are told that our shadows, inseparable com panions during life and therefore well-informed about all our doings, testify against us after death. This idea, which may go back to Lu cretius,137 is skilfully inverted by von Cham- isso in Peter Schlemihl's Wunderbare Ge-
schichte (1814), or, "The Man Without a Shadow. " 138 And E. T. A. Hoffman, Die Ge- schichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbilde (1815), developed this conceit by causing one of his
heroes to sign away his mirror reflection, thus putting him in much the same class with Peter Schlemihl.
Turning again to England we may mention,
in addition to Barham, the following reminders of Lucian in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Imaginary Conversa tions of Walter Savage Landor, enlarged to six volumes during some thirty years of his long, ebullient life, reproduce too many phases of human experience to be described under
[178]
sample
any
lucian's creditors and debtors
one rubric. Parallel lives, or deaths for that matter, reflect Plutarch. Herodotus, the dra matists and Plato furnish points of departure; but Landor's self dominates the matter. It is not, however, mere fancy to feel Lucian's spirit in the polemic dialogues, and the actual con versation between Lucian and Titnotheus is Lucian to the life — sealed, signed and deliv ered. It is not reminiscent of the Dialogues of the Dead so much as it is of the destructive method of the Hermotimus, albeit the slippery and sloppy ecclesiastic, Timotheus, is too im pervious to logic to realize, as does the Stoic undergraduate at the end of Lucian's dialogue, that he has no position remaining — not even a mathematical point. Unlike Erasmus, Landor is not careful to temper Lucian's bitterness and
gives himself up to unreasoned prejudice more often than did Lucian himself .
The juxtaposition of Thomas L. Beddoes and Lucian must be more tentative as there is no open reference to Lucian. The rejected title, however, for Death's Jest Book, " Charonic Steps," found in the MS. of 1832, would have been a near-Lucian signature. Even his de tailed delight in the pageantry of Death, in " the swift, theatrical transitions " 138 that at
[ 179]
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
tend the transfer of monarchs to the democracy of Hades, need not, of course, come from his familiarity" with Lucian. And the vivid " Dance of Death in Death's Jest Book may be only one more reminder of this motif, so wide-spread
in mediaeval art.
For the reminiscences in the nineteenth cen
tury,140 the following names may serve to in dicate, though in different ways and in vary ing degrees, the persistence of the literary tradition.
Edward Bulwer Lytton published The New Timon anonymously in 1847, the Year that Beddoes died. This melodramatic novel in verse has nothing in common with Lucian,
apart from the title, and his misanthrope is a vague distortion of the accepted type. More reminiscent of Lucian in his True Story is the story of the subterranean realm, entitled The Coming Race. This highly imaginative work reechoes Holberg's Iter Subterraneum, to which it is much superior, though in its didactic seri ousness it lacks utterly the humour of Lucian's fantasies.
Robert Browning, in his poem Pheidippides, perpetuates a mistake made by Lucian himself, who confuses 141 the Herodotean courier be
[180]
lucian's creditors and debtors
tween Athens and Sparta with the soldier Eucles, or Thersippus, who ran in full armour, after the battle, from Marathon to Athens. Plutarch had recorded the story in De Gloria Atheniensium but Lucian chose to ignore, or was actually ignorant of, his account. Brown ing's mind was richly furnished with Greek lit erature, Lucian included. In Pippa Passes:1*2
As some Greek dog-sage, dead and merry, Hellward bound in Charon's wherry
is a snap-shot of the Cynic, Menippus, en voy age. Browning would not have balked at the anachronism of translating the title, Cataplus, as the Hellbent Voyage.
James Anthony Froude was, as might be ex pected, an eager and sympathetic interpreter of Lucian to the nineteenth century. He includes Lucian among his Short Studies on Great Sub jects 143 and his occasional inaccuracies, due to a jaunty reliance on his memory, do not seri ously detract from the value of his vivid sketch. These, indeed, are forgotten in the verve with which he translates part of the Tragical Zeus. His summation (p. 214), finally, is noteworthy: " Lucian more than any other writer, pagan or Christian, enables us to see what human beings
[181]
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND
were, how they lived, what they thought, felt, said and did in the centuries when paganism was expiring and Christianity was taking its place. "
Jules Verne published in 1 864 his Voyage au centre de la terre, and in 1865 De la terre a la lune. Although it is a far cry from the nine teenth to the second century, there seems to be no reason to differ from the usual opinion that traces back the inventions of his fantasy through Cyrano de Bergerac in the seventeenth century, via, perhaps, the Iter Subterraneum
of Holberg in the eighteenth, to the True Story and Icaromenippus of Lucian.
Walter Pater's chapter, in Marius the Epi curean, entitled " A Conversation Not Imagi nary," is worth a whole volume of " Imaginary Conversations," so far as an actual appraisal of Lucian is concerned. Pater, in his own bril liant way, works into this chapter the content of the Hermotimus which, although imitated less continuously through the centuries than the Dialogues of the Dead and the True Story,
has been again and again a stimulant to our author's more thoughtful readers. One rather violent change is made by Pater in Lucian 's dramatis personae. Lucian's sixty-year -old
[182]
ARTIST
lucian's creditors and debtors
Stoic undergraduate, who has barely reached the foot-hills of the steep height of Virtue, is turned into an eager beginner in his early youth. This alters the perspective materially but it is done for artistic reasons and we cannot quarrel with
the result in Pater's exquisite setting.
To turn to Andrew Lang's Letters to Dead
Authors, ranging, more widely than Pe trarch's,144 from Homer to Pepys, is to raise the curtain and to watch across the brilliant foot lights of his facetiae the entrances and all too sudden exits of dead actors who still take their unerring cues from life. Into the seven brief pages devoted to " Lucian of Samosata " Lang compacts more that is vital to an understanding of Lucian, more that recalls, to those who al ready know him well, the versatility of his fan tasy than seems credible in so small a compass. Incidentally, the parody on the Sale of Soul Samples is so perfect that one grieves to think that Lucian himself, on receipt of the letter, must fail, from ignorance of the world of to day, to detect all the nuances of delicate satire.
" The literary device of Dialogues of the Dead, that maintained its popularity from Lucian down to Lyttleton, and from Lyttleton up to
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LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
Landor," 145 reappears in altered and much ex panded form in the three hundred pages of Marion Crawford's With the Immortals, but Lucian's ghost gives forth no whisper at the behest of the cold-storage battery installed by Crawford in the outraged Mediterranean. The nearest reminder is the immortal ghost of Heine, happily selected by Crawford as pro tagonist.
The New Lucian, by Henry D. Traill,146 re habilitates with vigour and wit the often ill- used Dialogues of the Dead. The dialogue be tween Lucian and Pascal, so happily paired, is a special contribution to Lucianic study.
Lucian, finally, is not wholly forgotten, even in this industrial twentieth century. Fridtjof Nansen's In Northern Mists (ion) is the work of a scholar as well as a famous explorer. The very frequent use that he makes of Lu cian's True Story, along with other Greek sources, from the Odyssey on, reenforces our conception of Lucian's influence, aside from his familiar place in literature, as an active ele ment through oral tradition in the extension, if not the creation, of popular beliefs concern ing the uncharted mysteries of the physical
world.
[184]
lucian's creditors and debtors
Especially in Chapter rx, entitled "Wine- land the Good," Nansen's metamorphosis of the " Islands of the Blest " and the " Elysian Fields," etc. , into the derivative Germanic Schlaraffenland, and other congeners, is at once a stimulating study in comparative Irish and Scandinavian folk-lore and, what is more to our purpose, furnishes copious parallels for Lu cian's True Story. These details are so numer ous and so striking that Nansen concludes: " It looks as if Lucian's stories had reached Ireland
{e. g. , by Scandinavian travellers or through
long before the Navigatio Brandani was written. "147 If Nansen is right Lucian in the underworld must often have been vexed at having his fantasy thus turned into fact!
Further details might be mentioned. Nansen, in his subsequent volume,148 draws a parallel between the fabulous chasm — the Norse " Gin- nungagap " — and Lucian's most unbridled flight of fancy when his ship, in the True Story, comes suddenly upon the one-thousand-furlong- deep chasm of air dividing the sea.
A nobler work by Lucian, The Charon, is also cited by Nansen, with parallels from the Norse and Germanic tradition, for the essential
[185]
Arabs? )
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
idea of the " Ferry of Death. " But the vari ants are as striking as the resemblances — the Scandinavian Acheron and Styx are as wide as the North Sea!
As tail-piece to this first quarter of the twen tieth century, we may close with a reference to the Lucianic Dialogue between Socrates in Hades and Certain Men of the Present Day, by W. F. R. Hardie. 149 This is written in Greek more academically flawless than Lucian's. Here De Valera comes off badly when he tries to ex plain to Socrates his notion of " freedom, free to slay herself. " Lloyd George has his atten tion called to his inconsistency in " black guarding landholders, though a farmer him self ":
tovs yfjv exovras XotSopw yeupyds &v.
A Coue patient, like an aspiring horse walking the rollers of an old-time threshing machine, repeats his formula: " I'm growing better every day"
ailv fiekriuv, ^eXrUtiv aiev kixavTOv
ccofxi. re kcli \fsvxyv «Ml xar' ffixap iyd>,
as well he might if he could write such good Greek or would read attentively Lucian's Lie
[186]
lucian's creditors and debtors
Fancier! Satire is still as sanatory in the twen tieth as in the second century. As a part of our " Debt to Greece " it also, like Kipling's Banjo, draws
the world together, link by link: Yea, from Delos up to Limerick and back!
[187]
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
Grateful acknowledgment of indebtedness for various helpful references is made to Dr. G. Alder Blumer; to Pro fessors J. C. Adams of Yale, Jos. Jastrow of Wisconsin, A. Trowbridge of Princeton; to Director L. E. Rowe of the R. I. School of Design; to the author's colleagues: Professors Clough, Crowell, Hastings, Koopman, and R. M. Mitchell; and also to Professor G. H. Chase and the Fogg Museum, Harvard, and Director B. H. Hill of Athens and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for their courtesies in ob taining the illustrations. Also to Messrs. Ginn and Co. for permission to use matter in Allinson's Lucian (College Series of Greek Authors).
1. For a different emphasis see the able article " Lucian
the Sophist," by Emily J. Putnam, in Classical Philology,
iv. 162-177 (1909).
2. Cf. M. Croiset, La Vie et les Oeuvres de Lucien, Paris,
1882, p. 390.
3. Op. cit. , p. 393. For detailed illustration of Lucian's
influence see below, Chapter VIII, pp. 130-187.
4. Cf. A. D. Fraser, " The Age of the Extant Columns
of the Olympieium at Athens," in Art Bulletin, iv. (1921). The temple, newly oriented on the Pisistratus site, was be gun by Antiochus Epiphanes but left unfinished at his death in 164 B. C. and finished and dedicated by Hadrian in 131 A. D.
5. Only as a very recherche piece of satire could this be assigned to Lucian.
6. Cf. Franz Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, New Haven and London, 1922, p. 17 et passim. See, also, his Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, New York and London, 1912, p. 53: "It is to their (i. e. , the Greeks') everlasting honour that, amid the tangle of precise observations and superstitious fancies which made
[191]
NOTES
up the priestly lore of the East, they discovered and utilised the serious elements, while neglecting the rubbish. "
7. For such an imaginary banquet at the villa of Atticus, see Roads from Rome, A. C. E. Allinson, New York, 1922,
pp. 104-215-
8. See Suidas, article AovKiavSs; Photius, Biblioth. 128;
Lactantius, Inst, div. , 1. 9; Eunapius, Lives of the Philos ophers, preface — cited and discussed by Croiset, op. cit. , Chapter I.
9. Or by 117 a. d. if bom under the Emperor Trajan as Suidas vaguely asserts. Croiset, op. cit. , pp. 2 and 52, argues for 125 AJ).
10. Harmon's rendering. (See Bibliography. )
11. Pro Lapsu in Salutando, 13.
For Lucian's actual cita tion or reminiscences of Latin authors, see below, p. 125
(Chapter VIII).
12. See B. L. Gildersleeve, Essays and Studies, Baltimore,
1890, p. 108, on Lucian's Complete Rhetorician.
13. If we include Asinus, Suit of Sigma against Tau, and
the Syrian Goddess.
14. Text and translation in The Loeb Classical Library
(by A. M. Harmon) will occupy eight vols, when com pleted.
15. M. Croiset (op. cit. ), decides tentatively for 4 or 5 periods: (a) Works written before Lucian's " conversion " from Rhetoric; (b) His first essays in a new genre — under the influence of Middle and New Comedy; (b. 2) The large Menippean group; (c) Maturer products under influence of Old Comedy; (d) Writings of his old age. More arbitrary is the chronological arrangement of P. M. Bolderman, Studia Lucianea, Leyden, 1898: (1) Those before 155 A. D. ; (2) From 155-165 a. d. ; (3) From 165-180 A. D. ; (4) After 180 a. d. This is usefully concrete.
16. Vera Historia, II. 21. 17. Icaromenippus, 18. 18. Dial. Mort. , 21.
19. Juvenal, Sat. , II. 4:
quamquam plena omnia gypso Chrysippi invenias.
[192]
NOTES
20. Apologia, 15. Rohde (see Bibliography), p. 324. 31. See Icaromenippus, 13.
22. Erasmus, for example, see below, page 147.
23. B. L. Gildersleeve, op. cit. , p. 351.
24. Epitrepontes, 179K, F. G. Allinson in The Loeb Clas sical Library, p. 126.
25. Cf. Franz Cumont, op. cit. , p. 39.
26. See Peregrinus, 11-13.
27. Cataplus or " The Voyage Down. "
28. Interlocutor also in the Cock, see below, p. 101. For
his literary immortality, see below, p. 150.
29. Franz Cumont (op. cit. , p. 106), compares Lucian's journey to heaven with " the three stages " of the journey
to Paradise "widely entertained in the East. " He adds: " A trace of this belief seems to linger " in Saint Paul's ref erence to being " lifted to the third heaven " (2 Corinth. , 12, 2). For the hero carried up to heaven by an eagle in the Persian epic of Firdausi, " an ancestor probably of the eagle in Chaucer's House of Fame," see W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, New York, 1904, p. 69.
30. See Timon, 10.
31. Also of other post-Aristotelian philosophies. Compare Menander, 549K and 556K, English translation by F. G. Allinson, in The Loeb Classical Library, New York and London, 1021.
32. Philopseudes, or The Maker and Lover of Lies.
33. See below, p. 177, and add St. Patrick's extermination of snakes, etc. , in Ireland, modelled after Lucian.
34. Cf. Franz Cumont, op. cit. , especially pp. 8 and 23.
35. See photographs, fronting page 109, of the coin of Ionopolis (= Abonuteichos, cf. Pape, Griech. Eigennamen, s. v. ) and of the bronze statuette of the snake-god, Glykon, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See Museum Bulletin, Vol. II. 2, 1904.
36. Compare the curious mechanism found in the excava tions at ancient Corinth by which, as interpreted by Direc tor B. H. Hill of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, an unseen " prophet " could give oracular answers through a concealed passage.
[193]
NOTES
37. For references see Allinson, Lucian, op. cit. , pp. xv
and 205-6.
38. Odyssey, VII. 115 ft.
39. For further details, obligations to Antonius Diogenes,
and coincidences with the Arabian Nights, see below, p. 124. 40. Unless we assume that it was borrowed, en bloc, from the lost Comedy of Antiphanes, see below, p. 122. See also
pp. 161, 180.
41. See below, pp. 1278.
42. See illustration opposite page 109.
43. For discussion of the testimony of Athenagoras, Phil-
ostratus, Eusebius, and Ammianus Marcellinus, see Allinson, Lucian, op. cit. , pp. 202-204.
44. Sandys (see Bibliography), Vol. I, pp. 320-321, how ever, is inclined to follow the opinion of Hemsterhuis that Lucian does not refer to Pollux.
45. For a happy paraphrase of the untranslatable blun ders, see the version by the Fowlers (see Bibliography).
46. E. g. , The Pseudopurist or Solecist.
47. See Harmon, Lucian, Vol. I, p. 395.
48. For Lucian's use or ridicule of predecessors, see be
low, p. 124, note; for his Vera Historia, see Rohde, p. 196
Bibliography), for his preeminence in parody, cf. Rohde, p. 206, note to 210, for Thule, p. 260; and for Lu cian's relation" to Hesiod, Comedy, etc. , and to the mediaeval Utopias, see The Greek Land of Cockaigne," by Campbell Bonner, Transactions of the American Philological Asso ciation, XLI. 175-185 (1910).
(cf.
49. See, for example, in True Story, II. 28, the mockery of the prophylactic given to Odysseus by Hermes, Od. , X. 288 ff.
50. See below, p. 185, for Nansen's comparison with the Norse " Ginnungagap. "
51. Accepted by Croiset, op. cit. , see pp. 63 and 204; also H. W. Smyth, Greek Dialects, Oxford, 1894, pp- 116-119, for Lucian's Ionism.
52. Translated (expurgated) by E. J. Smith in Selections from Lucian, Harper's, New York, 1892.
53. For pedigree of the " Ass," see The Metamorphoses [194]
NOTES
Ascribed to Lucius of Patrae, by B. F. Perry (Princeton dissertation, ioio). Sandys (op. cit. ), Vol. I, p. 310, ac cepts the Ass as Lucianic, as does Von Christ (cf. Bibliog raphy), 2nd part, 2nd half, p.
[172]
is
it
A is
1
is
is,
lucian's creditors and debtors
of as merely a nihilistic sceptic. Lucian's de structive criticism is more thoroughgoing. Vol taire, however, is still more remote from Eras mus, who is the best interpreter of Lucian's best work and able, with his more optimistic humanism, to counteract the poison of pessi mism while, at the same time, he adapts to the needs of his own day the wholesome, if bitter, satire of the Greek iconoclast. Voltaire's " sniggering and semi-virile indecency," how ever, — to quote Mr. Saintsbury's somewhat caustic phrase 132 — does not prevent the vivid use, especially in his dialogues, of as much of Lucian's spirit as he had chosen to understand.
His dialogue, Lucien, firasme et Rabelais,133 gives good illustration. In this Voltaire himself masquerades under the guise of Erasmus. The three have rendezvous, presumably in Hades. Lucian informs himself as to the vital statistics of his two distinguished " epigoni " and then sits down to read presentation copies of their works in order to bring himself up to date. In the end all three go off in company with the newly-arrived Dean Swift. The " big four " have formed a syndicate with Voltaire as
General Manager.
Apart from the dialogues, Lucian's True
[ i73]
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
Story is reflected in Micromigas and in Can- dide. In Candide also we get an echo of the Hermotimus, and Lucian's paralyzing agnosti cism in the conclusion of this dialogue has re- enforcement in Voltaire's Gallimatias Dra- matique, where the Chinese refuse to give heed to the ex parte preaching of Jesuit or Jansenist, Puritan, Quaker, Anglican, Lutheran, Mussul man or Jew.
The Dialogues of the Dead by George Lord Lyttleton (1760) are specifically modelled upon Lucian, Fenelon and Fontenelle. They have, however, their own distinction and originality. The author takes antiquity and himself with naive seriousness. He explains his method in detail and prides himself upon his intelligence in selecting his interlocutors wholly from those who are no longer living. He is at pains to de
fend himself against any possible charge of paganism in introducing Elysium, Minos, Mer cury, Charon and Styx, which are, as he ob serves, " necessary Allegories in this way of writing " and not the underlying beliefs of a " catholic mind! " Without clearly realizing
he thus retains, on occasion, though imper fectly, one of Lucian's most important artistic devices. For example, Addison and Swift refer
[174]
it,
lucian's creditors and debtors
the question of precedence to Mercury. Mer cury, too, has to intervene in a violent quarrel between a deceased North American savage and an English duellist. The savage, like the cobbler in Lucian, starts to swim across the Styx not, however, because he cannot pay the fare, but because he is unwilling to set foot in the same boat with the immoral duellist 1
The last dialogue, Plutarch — Charon — and a modem Bookseller, is one of three written by an anonymous friend and, as a
Lucianic dialogue, is the best in the collection. The bookseller furnishes an amusing pendant to the stock character of the " tyrant " in Lu cian who tries to beg off from punishment.
Friederich Earle Raspe published (1785), in
English, Baron Miinchhausen's Narrative
his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Rus sia. In this famous work we find undisguised, sometimes almost verbatim, imitations of Lu cian's still germinant narrative in the True Story. 134
Of the great German group, overlapping into the nineteenth century, Lessing knew Lucian, but evidently found him little akin to his seri ous purposes. 185
Wieland, the famous translator of Lucian at [175]
of
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND
the end of the eighteenth century, essayed also to imitate his favourite author in his Gesprdche in Mysium and is reminiscent of him in his ro mance Don Sylvio von Rosalva written in the manner of Don Quixote. Precisely, however, in connection with Lucian he calls down on his own head the irony and satire of his two greater compatriots and successors. —
Schiller in his distichs 136 suggestive also of the Hermotimus — has a meeting between Lucian and Wieland who had tried to white wash the cynic Peregrinus Proteus. Peregri- nus, in fact, sends up word to Wieland that this is love's labour lost: " ich war doch ein
Lump! " — and when Wieland asks Lucian whether he is now reconciled with the philoso phers, Schiller makes Lucian's corpse reply somewhat ironically: "Softly, my friend! While I was chastising" the fools I have often plagued also the wise!
Goethe's attack on Wieland is over-bitter in his farce, Gotter, Helden und Wieland, but he shows, incidentally, his insight into Lucianic satire. His Hercules, for example, is a replica of Lucian's Heracles in the sixteenth Dialogue of the Dead; and Lucian as well as Aeschylus might, perhaps, be traced in the acrid lines of
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Goethe's Prometheus, and still more confi dently may we catch in Faust's pessimistic monologue the despair of the disillusioned Stoic neophyte, Hermotimus.
And, again, a tale in Lucian's Lie-Fancier is openly reproduced by Goethe in his witty poem, Der Zauberlehrling where the Magi cian's Prentice by means of the magic formula turns the broom — (instead of the Lucianic pestle or bar of the door — an unessential vari ant) — into an efficient body-servant. The out come in both versions is the same. The Rev. Richard Barham, however, Goethe's junior by some forty years, makes two innovations in his rollicking Lay of St. Dunstan. He substitutes, as in Goethe, a broom-stick for the bar or pestle and, as in the other two versions, the
broom, or bar, is cut in two by the frightened tyro in magic who has failed to secure the sec ond formula which will cause the over-orga nized valet to revert again to inorganic mat ter. The two halves now bring twice as fast what was ordered. In Lucian and Goethe the order was for water and the Master in each case arrives just in time to save the pupil from drowning. The Reverend Mr. Barham, how ever, less temperate than the Greek or German,
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changes water into wine and causes " Peter the Lay Brother " to order up such unlimited drinks that a tragedy results. He is unequal to the supply and is drowned before he can be rescued from the officious bar-tenders.
In Lucian's Menippus or Necromancy, we are told that our shadows, inseparable com panions during life and therefore well-informed about all our doings, testify against us after death. This idea, which may go back to Lu cretius,137 is skilfully inverted by von Cham- isso in Peter Schlemihl's Wunderbare Ge-
schichte (1814), or, "The Man Without a Shadow. " 138 And E. T. A. Hoffman, Die Ge- schichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbilde (1815), developed this conceit by causing one of his
heroes to sign away his mirror reflection, thus putting him in much the same class with Peter Schlemihl.
Turning again to England we may mention,
in addition to Barham, the following reminders of Lucian in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Imaginary Conversa tions of Walter Savage Landor, enlarged to six volumes during some thirty years of his long, ebullient life, reproduce too many phases of human experience to be described under
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one rubric. Parallel lives, or deaths for that matter, reflect Plutarch. Herodotus, the dra matists and Plato furnish points of departure; but Landor's self dominates the matter. It is not, however, mere fancy to feel Lucian's spirit in the polemic dialogues, and the actual con versation between Lucian and Titnotheus is Lucian to the life — sealed, signed and deliv ered. It is not reminiscent of the Dialogues of the Dead so much as it is of the destructive method of the Hermotimus, albeit the slippery and sloppy ecclesiastic, Timotheus, is too im pervious to logic to realize, as does the Stoic undergraduate at the end of Lucian's dialogue, that he has no position remaining — not even a mathematical point. Unlike Erasmus, Landor is not careful to temper Lucian's bitterness and
gives himself up to unreasoned prejudice more often than did Lucian himself .
The juxtaposition of Thomas L. Beddoes and Lucian must be more tentative as there is no open reference to Lucian. The rejected title, however, for Death's Jest Book, " Charonic Steps," found in the MS. of 1832, would have been a near-Lucian signature. Even his de tailed delight in the pageantry of Death, in " the swift, theatrical transitions " 138 that at
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tend the transfer of monarchs to the democracy of Hades, need not, of course, come from his familiarity" with Lucian. And the vivid " Dance of Death in Death's Jest Book may be only one more reminder of this motif, so wide-spread
in mediaeval art.
For the reminiscences in the nineteenth cen
tury,140 the following names may serve to in dicate, though in different ways and in vary ing degrees, the persistence of the literary tradition.
Edward Bulwer Lytton published The New Timon anonymously in 1847, the Year that Beddoes died. This melodramatic novel in verse has nothing in common with Lucian,
apart from the title, and his misanthrope is a vague distortion of the accepted type. More reminiscent of Lucian in his True Story is the story of the subterranean realm, entitled The Coming Race. This highly imaginative work reechoes Holberg's Iter Subterraneum, to which it is much superior, though in its didactic seri ousness it lacks utterly the humour of Lucian's fantasies.
Robert Browning, in his poem Pheidippides, perpetuates a mistake made by Lucian himself, who confuses 141 the Herodotean courier be
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tween Athens and Sparta with the soldier Eucles, or Thersippus, who ran in full armour, after the battle, from Marathon to Athens. Plutarch had recorded the story in De Gloria Atheniensium but Lucian chose to ignore, or was actually ignorant of, his account. Brown ing's mind was richly furnished with Greek lit erature, Lucian included. In Pippa Passes:1*2
As some Greek dog-sage, dead and merry, Hellward bound in Charon's wherry
is a snap-shot of the Cynic, Menippus, en voy age. Browning would not have balked at the anachronism of translating the title, Cataplus, as the Hellbent Voyage.
James Anthony Froude was, as might be ex pected, an eager and sympathetic interpreter of Lucian to the nineteenth century. He includes Lucian among his Short Studies on Great Sub jects 143 and his occasional inaccuracies, due to a jaunty reliance on his memory, do not seri ously detract from the value of his vivid sketch. These, indeed, are forgotten in the verve with which he translates part of the Tragical Zeus. His summation (p. 214), finally, is noteworthy: " Lucian more than any other writer, pagan or Christian, enables us to see what human beings
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were, how they lived, what they thought, felt, said and did in the centuries when paganism was expiring and Christianity was taking its place. "
Jules Verne published in 1 864 his Voyage au centre de la terre, and in 1865 De la terre a la lune. Although it is a far cry from the nine teenth to the second century, there seems to be no reason to differ from the usual opinion that traces back the inventions of his fantasy through Cyrano de Bergerac in the seventeenth century, via, perhaps, the Iter Subterraneum
of Holberg in the eighteenth, to the True Story and Icaromenippus of Lucian.
Walter Pater's chapter, in Marius the Epi curean, entitled " A Conversation Not Imagi nary," is worth a whole volume of " Imaginary Conversations," so far as an actual appraisal of Lucian is concerned. Pater, in his own bril liant way, works into this chapter the content of the Hermotimus which, although imitated less continuously through the centuries than the Dialogues of the Dead and the True Story,
has been again and again a stimulant to our author's more thoughtful readers. One rather violent change is made by Pater in Lucian 's dramatis personae. Lucian's sixty-year -old
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Stoic undergraduate, who has barely reached the foot-hills of the steep height of Virtue, is turned into an eager beginner in his early youth. This alters the perspective materially but it is done for artistic reasons and we cannot quarrel with
the result in Pater's exquisite setting.
To turn to Andrew Lang's Letters to Dead
Authors, ranging, more widely than Pe trarch's,144 from Homer to Pepys, is to raise the curtain and to watch across the brilliant foot lights of his facetiae the entrances and all too sudden exits of dead actors who still take their unerring cues from life. Into the seven brief pages devoted to " Lucian of Samosata " Lang compacts more that is vital to an understanding of Lucian, more that recalls, to those who al ready know him well, the versatility of his fan tasy than seems credible in so small a compass. Incidentally, the parody on the Sale of Soul Samples is so perfect that one grieves to think that Lucian himself, on receipt of the letter, must fail, from ignorance of the world of to day, to detect all the nuances of delicate satire.
" The literary device of Dialogues of the Dead, that maintained its popularity from Lucian down to Lyttleton, and from Lyttleton up to
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LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
Landor," 145 reappears in altered and much ex panded form in the three hundred pages of Marion Crawford's With the Immortals, but Lucian's ghost gives forth no whisper at the behest of the cold-storage battery installed by Crawford in the outraged Mediterranean. The nearest reminder is the immortal ghost of Heine, happily selected by Crawford as pro tagonist.
The New Lucian, by Henry D. Traill,146 re habilitates with vigour and wit the often ill- used Dialogues of the Dead. The dialogue be tween Lucian and Pascal, so happily paired, is a special contribution to Lucianic study.
Lucian, finally, is not wholly forgotten, even in this industrial twentieth century. Fridtjof Nansen's In Northern Mists (ion) is the work of a scholar as well as a famous explorer. The very frequent use that he makes of Lu cian's True Story, along with other Greek sources, from the Odyssey on, reenforces our conception of Lucian's influence, aside from his familiar place in literature, as an active ele ment through oral tradition in the extension, if not the creation, of popular beliefs concern ing the uncharted mysteries of the physical
world.
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Especially in Chapter rx, entitled "Wine- land the Good," Nansen's metamorphosis of the " Islands of the Blest " and the " Elysian Fields," etc. , into the derivative Germanic Schlaraffenland, and other congeners, is at once a stimulating study in comparative Irish and Scandinavian folk-lore and, what is more to our purpose, furnishes copious parallels for Lu cian's True Story. These details are so numer ous and so striking that Nansen concludes: " It looks as if Lucian's stories had reached Ireland
{e. g. , by Scandinavian travellers or through
long before the Navigatio Brandani was written. "147 If Nansen is right Lucian in the underworld must often have been vexed at having his fantasy thus turned into fact!
Further details might be mentioned. Nansen, in his subsequent volume,148 draws a parallel between the fabulous chasm — the Norse " Gin- nungagap " — and Lucian's most unbridled flight of fancy when his ship, in the True Story, comes suddenly upon the one-thousand-furlong- deep chasm of air dividing the sea.
A nobler work by Lucian, The Charon, is also cited by Nansen, with parallels from the Norse and Germanic tradition, for the essential
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LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND ARTIST
idea of the " Ferry of Death. " But the vari ants are as striking as the resemblances — the Scandinavian Acheron and Styx are as wide as the North Sea!
As tail-piece to this first quarter of the twen tieth century, we may close with a reference to the Lucianic Dialogue between Socrates in Hades and Certain Men of the Present Day, by W. F. R. Hardie. 149 This is written in Greek more academically flawless than Lucian's. Here De Valera comes off badly when he tries to ex plain to Socrates his notion of " freedom, free to slay herself. " Lloyd George has his atten tion called to his inconsistency in " black guarding landholders, though a farmer him self ":
tovs yfjv exovras XotSopw yeupyds &v.
A Coue patient, like an aspiring horse walking the rollers of an old-time threshing machine, repeats his formula: " I'm growing better every day"
ailv fiekriuv, ^eXrUtiv aiev kixavTOv
ccofxi. re kcli \fsvxyv «Ml xar' ffixap iyd>,
as well he might if he could write such good Greek or would read attentively Lucian's Lie
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Fancier! Satire is still as sanatory in the twen tieth as in the second century. As a part of our " Debt to Greece " it also, like Kipling's Banjo, draws
the world together, link by link: Yea, from Delos up to Limerick and back!
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NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
Grateful acknowledgment of indebtedness for various helpful references is made to Dr. G. Alder Blumer; to Pro fessors J. C. Adams of Yale, Jos. Jastrow of Wisconsin, A. Trowbridge of Princeton; to Director L. E. Rowe of the R. I. School of Design; to the author's colleagues: Professors Clough, Crowell, Hastings, Koopman, and R. M. Mitchell; and also to Professor G. H. Chase and the Fogg Museum, Harvard, and Director B. H. Hill of Athens and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for their courtesies in ob taining the illustrations. Also to Messrs. Ginn and Co. for permission to use matter in Allinson's Lucian (College Series of Greek Authors).
1. For a different emphasis see the able article " Lucian
the Sophist," by Emily J. Putnam, in Classical Philology,
iv. 162-177 (1909).
2. Cf. M. Croiset, La Vie et les Oeuvres de Lucien, Paris,
1882, p. 390.
3. Op. cit. , p. 393. For detailed illustration of Lucian's
influence see below, Chapter VIII, pp. 130-187.
4. Cf. A. D. Fraser, " The Age of the Extant Columns
of the Olympieium at Athens," in Art Bulletin, iv. (1921). The temple, newly oriented on the Pisistratus site, was be gun by Antiochus Epiphanes but left unfinished at his death in 164 B. C. and finished and dedicated by Hadrian in 131 A. D.
5. Only as a very recherche piece of satire could this be assigned to Lucian.
6. Cf. Franz Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, New Haven and London, 1922, p. 17 et passim. See, also, his Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans, New York and London, 1912, p. 53: "It is to their (i. e. , the Greeks') everlasting honour that, amid the tangle of precise observations and superstitious fancies which made
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NOTES
up the priestly lore of the East, they discovered and utilised the serious elements, while neglecting the rubbish. "
7. For such an imaginary banquet at the villa of Atticus, see Roads from Rome, A. C. E. Allinson, New York, 1922,
pp. 104-215-
8. See Suidas, article AovKiavSs; Photius, Biblioth. 128;
Lactantius, Inst, div. , 1. 9; Eunapius, Lives of the Philos ophers, preface — cited and discussed by Croiset, op. cit. , Chapter I.
9. Or by 117 a. d. if bom under the Emperor Trajan as Suidas vaguely asserts. Croiset, op. cit. , pp. 2 and 52, argues for 125 AJ).
10. Harmon's rendering. (See Bibliography. )
11. Pro Lapsu in Salutando, 13.
For Lucian's actual cita tion or reminiscences of Latin authors, see below, p. 125
(Chapter VIII).
12. See B. L. Gildersleeve, Essays and Studies, Baltimore,
1890, p. 108, on Lucian's Complete Rhetorician.
13. If we include Asinus, Suit of Sigma against Tau, and
the Syrian Goddess.
14. Text and translation in The Loeb Classical Library
(by A. M. Harmon) will occupy eight vols, when com pleted.
15. M. Croiset (op. cit. ), decides tentatively for 4 or 5 periods: (a) Works written before Lucian's " conversion " from Rhetoric; (b) His first essays in a new genre — under the influence of Middle and New Comedy; (b. 2) The large Menippean group; (c) Maturer products under influence of Old Comedy; (d) Writings of his old age. More arbitrary is the chronological arrangement of P. M. Bolderman, Studia Lucianea, Leyden, 1898: (1) Those before 155 A. D. ; (2) From 155-165 a. d. ; (3) From 165-180 A. D. ; (4) After 180 a. d. This is usefully concrete.
16. Vera Historia, II. 21. 17. Icaromenippus, 18. 18. Dial. Mort. , 21.
19. Juvenal, Sat. , II. 4:
quamquam plena omnia gypso Chrysippi invenias.
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NOTES
20. Apologia, 15. Rohde (see Bibliography), p. 324. 31. See Icaromenippus, 13.
22. Erasmus, for example, see below, page 147.
23. B. L. Gildersleeve, op. cit. , p. 351.
24. Epitrepontes, 179K, F. G. Allinson in The Loeb Clas sical Library, p. 126.
25. Cf. Franz Cumont, op. cit. , p. 39.
26. See Peregrinus, 11-13.
27. Cataplus or " The Voyage Down. "
28. Interlocutor also in the Cock, see below, p. 101. For
his literary immortality, see below, p. 150.
29. Franz Cumont (op. cit. , p. 106), compares Lucian's journey to heaven with " the three stages " of the journey
to Paradise "widely entertained in the East. " He adds: " A trace of this belief seems to linger " in Saint Paul's ref erence to being " lifted to the third heaven " (2 Corinth. , 12, 2). For the hero carried up to heaven by an eagle in the Persian epic of Firdausi, " an ancestor probably of the eagle in Chaucer's House of Fame," see W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages, New York, 1904, p. 69.
30. See Timon, 10.
31. Also of other post-Aristotelian philosophies. Compare Menander, 549K and 556K, English translation by F. G. Allinson, in The Loeb Classical Library, New York and London, 1021.
32. Philopseudes, or The Maker and Lover of Lies.
33. See below, p. 177, and add St. Patrick's extermination of snakes, etc. , in Ireland, modelled after Lucian.
34. Cf. Franz Cumont, op. cit. , especially pp. 8 and 23.
35. See photographs, fronting page 109, of the coin of Ionopolis (= Abonuteichos, cf. Pape, Griech. Eigennamen, s. v. ) and of the bronze statuette of the snake-god, Glykon, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. See Museum Bulletin, Vol. II. 2, 1904.
36. Compare the curious mechanism found in the excava tions at ancient Corinth by which, as interpreted by Direc tor B. H. Hill of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, an unseen " prophet " could give oracular answers through a concealed passage.
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NOTES
37. For references see Allinson, Lucian, op. cit. , pp. xv
and 205-6.
38. Odyssey, VII. 115 ft.
39. For further details, obligations to Antonius Diogenes,
and coincidences with the Arabian Nights, see below, p. 124. 40. Unless we assume that it was borrowed, en bloc, from the lost Comedy of Antiphanes, see below, p. 122. See also
pp. 161, 180.
41. See below, pp. 1278.
42. See illustration opposite page 109.
43. For discussion of the testimony of Athenagoras, Phil-
ostratus, Eusebius, and Ammianus Marcellinus, see Allinson, Lucian, op. cit. , pp. 202-204.
44. Sandys (see Bibliography), Vol. I, pp. 320-321, how ever, is inclined to follow the opinion of Hemsterhuis that Lucian does not refer to Pollux.
45. For a happy paraphrase of the untranslatable blun ders, see the version by the Fowlers (see Bibliography).
46. E. g. , The Pseudopurist or Solecist.
47. See Harmon, Lucian, Vol. I, p. 395.
48. For Lucian's use or ridicule of predecessors, see be
low, p. 124, note; for his Vera Historia, see Rohde, p. 196
Bibliography), for his preeminence in parody, cf. Rohde, p. 206, note to 210, for Thule, p. 260; and for Lu cian's relation" to Hesiod, Comedy, etc. , and to the mediaeval Utopias, see The Greek Land of Cockaigne," by Campbell Bonner, Transactions of the American Philological Asso ciation, XLI. 175-185 (1910).
(cf.
49. See, for example, in True Story, II. 28, the mockery of the prophylactic given to Odysseus by Hermes, Od. , X. 288 ff.
50. See below, p. 185, for Nansen's comparison with the Norse " Ginnungagap. "
51. Accepted by Croiset, op. cit. , see pp. 63 and 204; also H. W. Smyth, Greek Dialects, Oxford, 1894, pp- 116-119, for Lucian's Ionism.
52. Translated (expurgated) by E. J. Smith in Selections from Lucian, Harper's, New York, 1892.
53. For pedigree of the " Ass," see The Metamorphoses [194]
NOTES
Ascribed to Lucius of Patrae, by B. F. Perry (Princeton dissertation, ioio). Sandys (op. cit. ), Vol. I, p. 310, ac cepts the Ass as Lucianic, as does Von Christ (cf. Bibliog raphy), 2nd part, 2nd half, p.
