INTRODUCTION.

Lucian, in Greek Loukianos, was a Syrian, born about the year 120 at Samosata, where a bend of the Euphrates brings that river nearest to the borders of Cilicia in Asia Minor.  He had in him by nature a quick flow of wit, with a bent towards Greek literature.  It was thought at home that he showed as a boy the artist nature by his skill in making little waxen images.  An uncle on his mother’s side happened to be a sculptor.  The home was poor, Lucian would have his bread to earn, and when he was fourteen he was apprenticed to his uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor.  Before long, while polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it.  His uncle thrashed him.  Lucian’s spirit rebelled, and he went home giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of the extraordinary power he showed in his art.

After some debate Lucian abandoned training as a sculptor, studied literature and rhetoric, and qualified himself for the career of an advocate and teacher at a time when rhetoric had still a chief place in the schools.  He practised for a short time unsuccessfully at Antioch, and then travelled for the cultivation of his mind in Greece, Italy, and Gaul, making his way by use of his wits, as Goldsmith did long afterwards when he started, at the outset also of his career as a writer, on a grand tour of the continent with nothing in his pocket.  Lucian earned as he went by public use of his skill as a rhetorician.  His travel was not unlike the modern American lecturing tour, made also for the money it may bring and for the new experience acquired by it.

Lucian stayed long enough in Athens to acquire a mastery of Attic Greek, and his public discourses could not have been without full seasoning of Attic salt.  In Italy and Gaul his success brought him money beyond his present needs, and he went back to Samosata, when about forty years old, able to choose and follow his own course in life.

He then ceased to be a professional talker, and became a writer, bold and witty, against everything that seemed to him to want foundation for the honour that it claimed.  He attacked the gods of Greece, and the whole system of mythology, when, in its second century, the Christian Church was ready to replace the forms of heathen worship.  He laughed at the philosophers, confounding together in one censure deep conviction with shallow convention.  His vigorous winnowing sent chaff to the winds, but not without some scattering of wheat.  Delight in the power of satire leads always to some excess in its use.  But if the power be used honestly—­and even if it be used recklessly—­no truth can be destroyed.  Only the reckless use of it breeds in minds of the feebler sort mere pleasure in ridicule, that weakens them as helpers in the real work of the world, and in that way tends to retard the forward movement.  But on the whole, ridicule adds more vigour to the strong than it takes from the weak, and has its use even when levelled against what is good and true.  In its own way it is a test of truth, and may be fearlessly applied to it as jewellers use nitric acid to try gold.  If it be uttered for gold and is not gold, let it perish; but if it be true, it will stand trial.