No More Learning

Lucian's influence upon Erasmus is even more important in writings other than his direct translations. The Praise of Folly, which electrified both the fools and the savants of Europe, is charged with the Lucianic current. In his priceless Colloquia Erasmus, like Lucian,
paints contemporary life in vivid colours but [145]
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is free from Lucian's taint of bitter pessi mism. 95 He seasons his observations, however, as he says elsewhere,*6 with both sal nigrum and sal candidum from his Lucianic salt cellar.
Lucianic reminiscences in the Colloquia may be culled almost at random. The Exorcism or The Apparition" for example, is a good pen dant to Lucian's Lie-Fancier, though the witty treatment is Erasmus's own; The Female Parliament,TM though patterned after Aristoph anes, contains almost more of Lucian; The CharonTM along with the Lucianic matter, in cludes suggestions of Aristophanes. But Eras mus is not hampered by his models. Charon's boat, old and rotten by this time, has just
foundered. Charon himself has made land, dripping from his immersion; his late pas sengers, the ghosts, are still swimming with the
Frogs I A new transport must be built, too staunch to be sunk by papal bulls or other ecclesiastical fauna smuggled on board. As to motive power the ghosts, whether commoners, monarchs or cardinals, reduced as they are to the least common denominator of democ racy, will have to do the rowing. The chief hitch is that there is no wood for shipbuilding,
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as the Elysian forests have been consumed in the burning of heretics!
Among the many comments in the Epistles, Erasmus's reference to the Hireling Professors emphasizes a condition as acute in his day as in Lucian's. 100 The impecunious litterateur was more or less dependent on powerful patrons. Erasmus himself was no complete exception to the rule, but it is to his everlasting credit that
he rejected the temptation to exchange his poverty and independence for a life of luxury and power. He refused to become a " red- hatted lackey of the Holy See. " 101 Lucian's scathing and witty sermon on the hireling doubtless helped him to save alive his own soul. He could honestly continue to preach from Lucian's texts. Again and again through the centuries literary semi-parasites ruefully,
and almost involuntarily, confess the truth of Lucian's picture.
Sir Thomas More's Latin translations from Lucian, inspired by Erasmus and inserted in his volume, included the Cynic, the Menippus
or Necromancy and the Lie-Fancier pseudes). More's own comments 102 are illu minating. Despite his unshakable devotion to the authority of the Church, for which he was
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to suffer martyrdom, he could, at this period, welcome the keen satire of Lucian as a pro phylactic. Even St. Chrysostom, he says in
reply to heckling ecclesiastics, included the Cynic, in part, in one of his homilies as a pro test against luxury and self-indulgence, while St. Augustine had been misled by some im- poster to accept as a Christian miracle what Lucian had ridiculed, under a different name, many years before him in the Philopseudes.
More's Utopia, which also belongs to Latin, not to English, literature, reflects, quite apart from Plato and St. Augustine, the humour and imagination of Lucian's True Story. It was translated into foreign vernaculars before it
was done into English. 103
Of this transition to the vernacular, with its
modicum of incidental " Lucianizing," we are also inevitably reminded by the " delectable dog-Latin " 104 of the anonymous Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum pitted, on occasion, against the full-dress Latin of Erasmus and Reuchlin. Two hundred years later, per contra, Voltaire, in Les trois empereurs en Sorbonne, resurrects Marcus Aurelius and others to shudder at the Latin of the theologians 1 In these dialogues, at any rate, is reflected Lu
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cian's mastery of the special form of mockery, where would-be defendants, whether gods or men, plead guilty by explaining.
The dramatic dialogue Eckius Dedolatus,10S published anonymously about 1530, is a not wholly negligible addition to this literary form descended from Plato, via Lucian, to the Col- loquia of Erasmus. Its content, also, now reminiscent of Lucian, now anticipating the coarser humour of Rabelais, is germane to our discussion.
The great German 106 humanists knew and used Lucian, whose satire was as flexible as Holy Writ itself for purposes of controversial citation. Johann Reuchlin, erudite linguist and crusader against the Obscurantists, found time to do some translating from the Dialogues of the Dead. 107 The satiric dialogue, with actual Lucianic content, became the most effective weapon for Ulrich von Hutten. 108 He wrote first in Latin but enlarged his audience by a later transfer to the vernacular, such as it then
was. He made use of Lucian's Cataplus (or " Crossing the Bar ") ; later, in his Phalaris- mus, he tipped with venom from Lucian's Tyrant the darts aimed at Duke Ulrich von Wittenberg; he modelled on Lucian's Hireling
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a dialogue against servility to patrons; drew on the Dialogues of the Dead
and notably on the Charon; and left for post humous publication his Arminius, modelled on the favourite twelfth Dialogue of the Dead. Still more to the point, he is generally accred ited with being one of the three joint authors of the Dialogi Virorum Obscurorum.
Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), the bril liant young Greek scholar, an admirer and friend of Erasmus in his youth but later a partisan of Luther, translated from the Greek Lucian's De Calumnia for his controversy at Wittenberg, just as, conversely, he had Grae- cized his own German name, Schwarzerd.
Among the numerous recruits to Lucianic interpretation Jacob Molsheym of Strasburg deserves especial mention for two reasons. He was a versatile contributor to both Greek and Latin scholarship and, inter alia, published in
1538 a translation of the whole of Lucian. In addition, it is only fair to rescue his personality from the incognito of " Micyllus " under which name, often misspelled, he usually appears, when cited. He owed this name to the fact that he took the role of the cobbler in a dramatization of Lucian's Cock. 109 " Micyllus,"
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it may be noted, is the same impecunious cob bler who won publicity by his attempted ex ploit of swimming the River in his lack of ready money for Charon's fare.
Turning from the German Humanists to France, in the first half of the sixteenth cen tury, we find an abundant menu of Lucianic suggestion and one less highly flavoured with theology.
Guillaume Bude (Budaeus),110 the famous progenitor of the College de France and close contemporary of Erasmus, was inevitably in spired, by attending the lectures of Lascaris, who brought out the editio princeps of Lucian, to make his own translations from the Samosa- tan. These translations, together with those by Erasmus, were soon to be used by Rabelais.
At this period also, in the entourage of Mar garet d'Angouleme, we find the witty Bona- venture Desperiers pressing the Lucianic dia logue into the mould of the French vernacular which, as yet, was not entirely ready for the service. 111 His Cymbalum" Mundi is a direct imitation of Lucian. This in fact," Saints- bury observes, " one of the many proofs of the vast influence which Lucian exercised over the Renaissance. " In his third dialogue, for
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example, the horse, able, by the intervention of Mercury, to hold a human conversation, re minds us of the Pythagoras-cock chatting with the cobbler and also endowed with the key to the situation by the kindness of the same god.
Just before the death of Erasmus the spirit of Lucianic mischief is reincarnated in Rabe- lais's more lusty Pantagruel and Gargantua. Grotesque as gargoyles his figures nevertheless, as Gildersleeve remarks,112 are " Lucianic in outline. " But though grotesque, Rabelais is not ill-proportioned. He is great in his grossness, his satire and imagination. The numerous comparisons of him with Lucian, Swift and
Voltaire are instructive in so far as the critic is equipped with complete knowledge of all of them and is not deflected from objectivity by partisan preference. When dealing with great virility mere details of imitation concern us, perhaps, as little as the challenge of sources for Homer. An artist, however, may take de tails from more than one model. The extrav
aganza, for example, in Pantagruel (II, Chapt.
is a clever contaminatio of Lucian's account in the True Story11" and the closing
scene in Plato's Republic. Epistemon's account of the Underworld, with its malicious list of
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certain eminent immigrants that he had met there, reminds us of how the souls in Plato's
" Vision of Er " instead of always
lives similar to their former incarnations, in some cases perversely fly to the other extreme or to some travesty on their former state. So Rabelais's Helen is courratiere (= courtier e) de chambrieres; Pope Alexander VI is a rat
catcher; pious Aeneas is a miller and shoul ders a bag of meal as handily as if it were the aged Anchises; Commodus is a bag-piper; Darius, instead of cleaning up Greece, is set to a task resembling the fifth labour of Her acles, less imposing, indeed, but a permanent job! The grim democracy, however, and the compulsion are Lucianic enough. The poor have become great; Diogenes plays the grand prelate and lords it over Alexander; Epictetus invites Epistemon to a carousal. With this
compare the item in Lucian's " True Story, where Diogenes in Elysium had so far changed his character as to marry the chummy Lais and would frequently, when in liquor, get up and dance and play drunken tricks. "
Passing over numerous other contributors to the dialogue literature, especially in Germany, mentioned by Rentsch in his invaluable mono
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graph, we come to the charming Hans Sachs, cobbler and mastersinger, who lived nearly a
quarter of a century longer than Rabelais. His Latin source for Lucian seems to have been the version by Vitus Btirler (1516). Though a layman, Sachs could, on occasion, cobble a Latin patch on his honest German sole-leather. His omniverous appetite rejects nothing from the Fall of Man to the contemporary theolog ical pitfalls and, inter alios, he expressly names Lucian with discriminating gusto among the sources for his Judicium Paridis:
Homerus und VergUius,
Ovidius, Lucianus,
Auch andre mehr gar Kunstenreich Doch in beschreybung ungeleich,
and in the third act of this comedy Paris's ap praisal of Juno has lost nothing of vividness in his homely but vigorous German.
In Die Himmelfahrt Margraff Albrechtz Hans Sachs transfers to his Charon the inexor able character of Lucian's Ferryman and his relentless stripping of the proud and rich: " Thou shalt not set foot " in my boat," says Charon to the Margraff, till thou hast laid aside all thy naughtiness and sins. "
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And, to take one more illustration, no debtor to Lucian's True Story, in all the goodly com pany from Rabelais to Baron Miinchhausen, pays back a larger interest on his borrowed talents than does Hans Sachs in his quaint Ger man description of his happy Schlaraffenland, where cooks would be but curious superfluities and where sturdy workmen solve the labor problem by dropping like ripe plums, not into the mouths of walking delegates, but each into a pair of working boots.
Before passing to writers, whose dates carry us over into the seventeenth century, mention may be made of the famous Satyre Minippee which appeared in 1594. Apart from the title itself, in which the Lucianic tradition is patent, and beneath the specific allusions to Rabe lais,114 there might be found a diffused, if tacit, adaptation of Lucian's satire to the new jour nalism, so to say, of the time.
After the first decades of the sixteenth cen tury not only was the Greek of Lucian acces sible to scholars but Latin versions of a considerable part of his writings were at the disposal of all who could read Latin.
and merrie dialogues, like those of Lucian " were included in the curriculum recommended
" Quick [iSS]
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for the English school-boy of seven years of age. We are not told specifically whether these were in Greek, Latin, or English, but, at about this time, Lucian was filtering through the Latin into various vernaculars. 115
Christopher Marlowe, whose untimely death in 1593 does not dissociate him from the group which binds the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries together, knew Lucian in Latin or Greek or both, and in his famous line on Helen: "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships? " recalls the cynical, but not
wholly unsympathetic, remark of Menippus when Helen's skull is identified for him amongst other specimens in the chill museum of Hades: " Was it for this thing, then, that the thousand ships were manned from all Hellas? "
In this same group, for example, are Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe whose mutual scur rilities were finally excluded from the market. They refer easily (if superficially) to Lucian in the frank amenities of their controversy. Thus Harvey, in Foure Lectures (1592), sums up an invective: " I overpasse Archilochus, Aristophanes, Lucian, Julian, Aretine and that whole venemous and viperous brood of old and new Raylers. " In Pierce's Supererogation
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he diagnoses Nashe's writings: "As true, peradventure, as Lucian's true. narrations or the heroicall historyes of Rabelais," etc. etc. Nashe replied with appropriate senti ments. Incidently, it may be noted, Nashe refers to the Syrian Goddess (a piece not often cited), which he had evidently read in the verse translation. In Anatomie
(1593)
of Absurdity (1589), defending fiction, he says: "In his
books De Siria Dea " . . . "Lucian an Hea then Poet wrote of that universall flood that was in the time of Noe. "
Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, close con temporaries (1570/1573 to 1637), and, on occasion, ardent adversaries, used Lucian freely. Dekker, for example, in the Devil let loose with his Anfwere to Pierce Pennylesse, borrowed with both hands from Lucian's fourth Dialogue of the"Dead, and, as has been
suggested,116 had also certainly read the Me- nippus of Lucian in John RastelPs translation and travestied it in his own fashion in his News front Hell. "
Ben Jonson's reminiscences of Lucian are numerous. Poetaster, for example, Act. IV,
Dek ker noticed this and in his Satiromastix, Act
Scene 5, is based on Lucian's Lexiphanes. [157]
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IV, Scene 2, makes his " Tucca " call the "Horace (-Jonson) " by the name of "Lu- cian. " This also indicates the contemporary pervasiveness of the Samosatan. Scene 5 of Act IV is more or less directly reminiscent of Lu- cian's Assembly of the Gods, and " the funda mental situation in the Silent Woman," as has been pointed out,117 " is Lucianic. " Volpone, an unrestrained satire on legacy hunters, draws
freely from this motif in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead — and, still more to the point, specifically mentions Lucian's Cock as model for this racy dialogue where 118 " Androgyno " gives the vital statistics of the transmigrations of his soul from Apollo, via Pythagoras, to his present hermaphroditic hostelry.
A tabulation, in parallel columns, of Vol pone and the Cock would show that Ben Jon son, while injecting new quips with coarser wit, has closely followed the framework in Lucian.
Beaumont, Cervantes and Shakespeare all died in 1616. (Beaumont and) Fletcher's 119 Four Plays or Moral Representations in One closes with the Triumph of Time. This is clearly modelled on Lucian's Timon and re tains the Aristophanic epiphany of the god
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Plutus, a vital prelude which is wholly lacking in "Shakespeare's " Timon of Athens. The
(=
For Shakespeare's use of Lucian, either through a Latin or an English version, we now120 have a sufficiently convincing argu ment, not only for Timon of Athens, of prob ably composite 121 authorship, but, more to the point, for the " Grave-scene of Hamlet. "
In the introduction to Don Quixote Cer vantes gives a nearer parallel to Lucian's How to Write History and to the opening of the
True Story than he does in the body of the work itself, with its special crusade against a creed of chivalry outworn, but even here we feel the Lucianic touch in the esoteric satire directed against braggarts and liars. We must, however, repeatedly adjust ourselves to the broadly farcical, whereas in Lucian's True Story all doubts and probabilities alike drop out of sight when once we have cleared the Pillars of Heracles.
Vedo, the brilliant compatriot and [iS9]
little drama closes leaving Anthropos
" Everyman ") famed for his wealth and with " Labour " also as his companion — a very moral though bouleversant addition. The type of Misanthrope is not preserved.
Que
LUCIAN, SATIRIST AND
younger contemporary of Cervantes, cuts many a sharp Lucianic silhouette, reminiscent of the Dialogues of the Dead, in his Visions (Suenos), published in 1627 — e. g. , the death-dealing physicians; the judges with deaf ears and re ceptive hands; the poets condemned in the Underworld to correct the poems of rivals; Solon as post mortem prosecutor of tyrants, from Pisistratus to Caligula. 122 There are also various less obvious reminiscences of the True
Story.
In France Cyrano de Bergerac, a little later,
continued the vogue of the True Story in his two posthumous pieces: Histoire comique des itats et empires de la lune (1656) and du soleil (1661). In addition to the reminiscences of Lucian's True Story in the Voyage to the Moon the parallels with the Icaromenippus are equally suggestive. For example, Cyrano's " Demon " of Socrates reminds us of the ap
parition of Empedocles in Icaromenippus; so, too, Cyrano's return to the earth in the arms of the " Demon " seems like a combination of Icaromenippus's trip to heaven in his flying-
machine and his return trip, with Hermes holding him by the ear! Cyrano's view of the outspread world recalls Lucian's love for
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aerial panoramas, as in the
Twice Accused, Charon and The Runaways.
Among the occasional close reproductions may be cited Cyrano's Lychnobii, as suggested by the Lychnopolis of the True Story.
Moliere, as we are told, spent five years in company with Cyrano de Bergerac and it would not be surprising to identify in him also some loan material from Lucian, incorporated as nonchalantly as his loot from Lucretius. In Le Misanthrope, however, where one might naturally look for reminiscence, the type set by Lucian in his Timon is so overlaid with the peevishness of the jealous lover that it emerges only dimly at the end of the play.
To attribute to the eagle intellect of Pascal, close contemporary of Moliere and Cyrano, in debtedness to Lucian would be far-fetched. Nevertheless no better parallel could be found for an intimate appraisal of Lucian's attitude towards the Stoic and Epicurean Schools of philosophy than Pascal's chapter Sur Epictete et Montaigne. It solves, so far as is possible, the impasse to which we are brought at the end of the Hermotimus, Lucian's would-be magnum opus. It repeats Lucian's open mock ery, in the Sale of Soul Samples, of the seep
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tic's equally balanced scales, yet explains how Lucian could find shelter for his own deep- dyed scepticism under the robe of the Epicu rean. And, in this connection, it may be noted that no one of the modern imitations of Lu- cian's Dialogues of the Dead is more success
ful than Traill's dialogue between Pascal and Lucian in his New Lucian.
Hickes's admirable translations from Lu
cian into English were published in
These were almost certainly not the first, but from this time on Lucian was accessible in the English vernacular and it is a temptation, here and there, to identify as a far-flung ripple of his influence what may be of quite independent origin. As to Butler's Hudibras, for example, it is safe to content ourselves with Saints- bury's 123 juxtaposition of Lucian, Butler and the authors of the Satire Minippke as being alike unrivalled in the adroitness with which they cause their characters to make themselves ridiculous. Such similarity in talent does not prove indebtedness.
In the foreshortened perspective of the cen turies we get the impression of a long, almost unbroken,124 procession of writers who have made more or less use of Lucian's Dialogues of
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the Dead. Many of these make use of the form only. Some " take the chaff and let the grain lie still. " But with some, as notably Erasmus, the grain fructifies.
Matthew Prior (1664-1672), in his four dialogues of worthy (or unworthy) dead men, makes his own stimulating contribution. His sarcasm on the futilities of philosophy, in the person of Locke, is as superficial as Lucian's own contempt for the exhibits of the " Human Understanding " in his day, though he plays with Montaigne's formula — "Que sais-je? " — with more objectivity than was usual with Lucian, the more serious missionary "agnostic. Cromwell, too, with the help of his porter,"
lays bare, quite in accord with Lucian's method, his own arrogance and greed of power, shel tered within his exterior pomp. Prior, however, as indeed, the general rule with those who make use of this literary form, fails to avail himself of a device characteristic of Lucian's dialogues. The introduction, usual in Lucian's dramatis personae, of some member of the permanent staff — like Aeacus, Clotho, Hermes or Pluto — gave a dramatic vividness and finish that we miss in the society of merely disinterred humans.
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" Dryden's " Lucian 126 is a different matter. The translation was not completed until after his death. He did not know the qualifications, nor even the names, of all the large number of translators, some of them very raw recruits, that were afterwards mustered in to fill up his skeleton company. His own contribution was the Life of Lucian which appears in Dry den's collected works. This demands mention here because the author's fame might still give currency to his banal misinterpretations of the formidable array of errors which he has man aged to accumulate at second-hand. Dryden has no sense of perspective for Lucian's times, and the subtler ironies seem to escape him altogether. His preachments on Christianity and morality are on a par with his introduction to his translation of Juvenal whose blast-fur nace he heats, with lascivious
seven times hotter than the Roman satirist was wont to heat it. It was fortunate for Lucian that Dryden, whether by the timely arrival of Death or by a lurking consciousness of his own inadequate acquaintance with the original, was restrained from translating himself the half- dozen, or fewer, passages in all Lucian's vol uminous writings which might have given him
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enthusiasm,
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another thin but convenient smoke-screen for expansive wantonness.
The vogue for the dialogue in
towards the end of the seventeenth century is repeated in France. Boileau gave impetus to imitations of Lucian by his Dialogue a la maniere de Lucien: les Hiros de roman. Although the authorized publication of this was delayed till 1 713, it had been privately re
cited much earlier and surreptitious, printed use of it had been made from memory by one of his hearers. This dialogue is no mere imita tion of the Dialogues of the Dead. It has its own originality and is Lucianic in a wider sense. It is from the True Story that Boileau borrows the suggestion for the rebellion of the damned, but this satire directed against the pseudo-heroes has more of the flavour of Lu cian's account, in his Fisher, of the false phi losophers and his summary treatment of the queer fish. Not every glittering goldfish is a Chrysippus, and Boileau's pseudo-heroes are stripped as naked as Lucian's dead and driven forth to punishment. Or, again, in the Frag ment d'un dialogue where Boileau picks flaws in Horace's bad French, — an inverted criti cism on the bad Latin of French poetasters, —
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we think of Lucian's crusade in his Lexiphanes against the would-be Atticists of his day.
Fontenelle's Dialogues des Morts were pub lished in 1683, dedicated: " A Lucien, aux champs filysiens. " In acknowledging his debt he is somewhat wooden and self-depreciatory but the dialogues themselves contain many a worthy touch, e. g. in his Charles V et £rasme, where Erasmus triumphs over the emperor, now " in reduced circumstances," only to be blighted presently by the discovery that to have "been born " avec un cerveau bien dis pose is just as unmarketable an asset in the " champs Elysiens " as to have had " un pere qui soit roi. " Thus Fontenelle outdoes Lucian's
own withering e'galite' in Hades.
His juxtaposition of the protagonists in his
dialogues is amusing enough. In Lucian's fa mous dialogue where Alexander the Great contends with Scipio and Hannibal for the hegemony there could be no doubt about the verdict, but in Fontenelle Alexander finds him self pitted against a greater and more in vincible conqueror, the famous Phryne! Or Dido complains to her confidante because Virgil has spoiled her reputation by a wholly
unsatisfactory and anachronistic affair with a [166]
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passe lover some two hundred and fifty years her senior. Or, again, the shade of the Greek physician, Erasistratus, has new blood pumped into his vacant veins by Dr. Harvey! All this is amusing enough but we are not always con scious, as we are in Lucian, of the grim verities of Pluto's realm. " Not seldom we feel," as Rentsch acutely observes,128 " that these con versations could just as well have taken place in a Paris salon. " Even in his Jugement de Pluton, with Hades in the title-role, Fontenelle still keeps one foot in the world above when the ante mortem trial of his own book takes place in the underworld, with Lucian himself acting as proxy and advocate for the author.
Le Sage early in the eighteenth century em bodies in his famous novels suggestions of Lu cian's influence, derived indirectly, perhaps, through Spanish and Italian intermediaries. In Le Diable Boiteaux he makes use 127 of the cock's tail-feather as a magic key, just as Lu cian does, and reminds us also of the satire on magic in the Lie-Fancier. In this novel and in
Une Journie des Parques, characterized by Saintsbury as "a keen piece of Lucianic satire," the debt, such as it involved spe cifically the satiric element but in his great
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novel Gil Bias it is the skill in narrative and incidents that recalls the True Story and, pos sibly through Cervantes, the Asinus of Lucian.
While Fontenelle, in the rapidly swelling flood of imitators of the Dialogues of the Dead, had used the form largely to introduce amusing conversations, his compatriot Fenelon made use of it often with a more serious purpose. One example must suffice. In his admirable dialogue (No. xv), Herodote et Lucien, the Father of History wishes that Lucian, by way of punishment for his superficial raillery, might be forced, in a new reincarnation, to go over Herodotus's itinerary and so verify the truth of all his statements. Lucian, expanding the idea to take in all his criticisms of life, coun ters, in good French: " Cela" seroit bien joli. I should then," he continues, pass from body to body through all the sects of the philos ophers whom I have derided. Thus I should
come to hold, one after another, all the mutu ally exclusive opinions that I have mocked. " This is the very essence of the situation at the end of the Hermotimus. But Fenelon, although he reproduces more vividly than Fontenelle this serious side of their common model, does not rest in Lucian 's negative pessimism. Eu
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ropean ethics in statesmanship, or in daily life, are illustrated by Lucianic parallels and whole somely castigated. For the years immediately preceding Fenelon these dialogues of his might well be used in adjusting the perspective of history.
Nor does Fenelon fail to note the more char acteristic humour of the original. Nothing, perhaps, in Lucian is neater than the meta physical and yet severely biological explana tion by Heracles of his dual post mortem assets. He stoutly maintains that the Heracles in heaven, enjoying conjugal bliss with Hebe, is one and the same, through all eternity, with the desiccated and lonely shade of Heracles in Hades! Fenelon includes this quip also in his second dialogue. Another choice Lucianic scene is recalled, not taken from the Dialogues of the Dead but staged by Lucian in the After- world in his True History, where young Cinyras elopes from heaven with Helen, " das
ewig Weibliche. " So Fenelon, in No. xx, re veals an intrigue between Alcibiades and Proserpine.
In 1726/7 Gulliver's Travels appeared. Swift was openly indebted 128 to Rabelais and, like Fontenelle, borrowed hints, here and there,
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from Cyrano de Bergerac. In various matters, however, like the interviewing of Homer and Aristotle with their commentators, and still more perhaps in the air of verisimilitude of the details, with which he surrounds the impos sible, we may recognize a more direct influence of Lucian's True Story.
Of all the expert critics who venture de tailed comparison of the four great writers inevitably brought into juxtaposition M. Mau rice Croiset, perhaps, is best entitled to speak
with authority. After brief but incisive words on his own compatriots, Rabelais and Voltaire, he renders129 this quite objective verdict: " Swift est peut-etre celui qui ressemble le plus a Lucien. . . . Seulement l'ecrivain anglais a plus de flegme et de parti pris; il y a quelque chose de plus voulu dans sa fantaisie, et par suite elle a moins de charme et variete. " Swift's bitter satire, we may add, recalls
Juvenal rather than the more genial humour of Lucian,
if we except the latter's more frankly polemical writings, like Alexander the Fake-Prophet.
Ludwig von Holberg, the Norwegian " foun der " of Danish literature, following in Swift's wake, published first in Latin and then in Dan
ish, in 1727, Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum, [170]
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a legatee of Lucian's True Story and, by its very title, a forerunner of Jules Verne in his Voyage au centre de la terre. This fantasy not only gained instant popularity in Denmark but
was widely translated from the Latin edition into the other languages.
130 When compared with Lucian, Swift, or other narrators of the impossible, it is not surprising that this work has failed to maintain its hold on readers. The marvels are not introduced with a humour sufficiently light and plausible to counteract irritation. The didactic application of the bouleversed " subterraneous " conditions to Holberg's contemporary world grows weari some. Occasionally there is a happy turn. All the inhabitants of the miniature continent be low are trees walking like men. When Klim effects his first landing he is attacked by a bull and seeks refuge in the bosom of the nearest tree whose sex and kinetic abilities he has not yet noticed. He receives a sudden box on the ear from an upper limb and is forthwith haled into court for taking liberties with the wife of the High Sheriff! But these human trees are too much with us and remain very naturally
wooden.
In eighteenth-century Germany, amazing use
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of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead was made by feeding imitations of them into the hopper of periodic journalism. This was as remarkable for its banality as for its volume. One example will suffice. A certain David Fassmann, begin ning in 1 718, published in Leipzig for twenty- two years a monthly periodical containing dia logues between dead men, distinguished and otherwise. These issues mounted up to more than 20,000 pages! That Lucian's influence could survive this wide-spread and long-con tinued abuse of his legacy incidentally, an other proof of his vitality.
Voltaire lived from 694-1 778. His obliga tions to Lucian and certain parallels between their lives are obvious enough. Lucian has been loosely called the Voltaire of the second cen tury and Voltaire the Lucian of the eighteenth. But the complexity of human life in the inter val had increased too much for such designa tions to be convertible. more accurate diag nosis demanded and has repeatedly been made by competent critics. 131 Since the middle of the nineteenth century possible to accord to Voltaire much fairer criticism than the preju diced abuse which he himself, for example, be stowed upon Rabelais. He no longer disposed
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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
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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
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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]
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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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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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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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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.