Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/421

 PLUTARCH AND LUCIAN 397 Among the Sophists we must class the oft- quoted Athen^us, a native of Naucratis, in Egypt, who wrote his Banquet-Philosophers, in fifteen books, about the end of the second century. The guests are all learned men of the time of Marcus Aurelius, and the book gives their conversation. An extraordinary conversation it is. They discuss every dish and every accessory of banqueting in a spirit compounded of ' Notes and Queries ' and an anti- quarian encyclopaedia. All that there is to know about wine vessels, dances, cooking utensils, eels, the weak- nesses of philosophers, and the witticisms of notorious ' hetairai,' is collected and tabulated with due care. What- ever sources Athenaeus used, he must have been a man of enormous reading and a certain sense of humour ; and the book, misleading as its devotion to convivial subjects makes it, forms a valuable instrument for the study of antiquities. The greatest of the second -century Sophists was LuciAN. He and Plutarch are the only writers of the period who possess a real importance to the world, who talk as no one else can talk, and who continue to attract readers on their own merits. Lucian has been compared to Erasmus in general cast of mind. He is learned, keen-eyed, before all things humorous ; too anxious for honesty, too critical, and too little inspired, to be carried into the main currents of his time. He lived through the great reformation and literary revival of Marcus, but he seems not to have shared in it. He read philosophy deeply and widely, but always as an outsider and with an amused interest in its eccentricities. To judge from the amount of personal apologia in his writings, he seems to have suffered much from personal attacks, especially on the part of the Cynics, whose combination of dirt, 27