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84 amidst the many-tinted clouds of apocryphal history. Men whose character was so open to suspicion were quite as much exposed to satire as to panegyric. Lucian has described an itinerant prophet of this description in his Alexander Abonoteichos, one of his best compositions. Like Apollonius, Alexander is a man of prepossessing exterior and imposing appearance, witty and clever, a zealous disciple of Pythagoras, much devoted to Æsculapius, a great seer, and, moreover, a pupil of the sage of Tyana. But beyond all this he is an infamous impostor who prostitutes his natural advantages to the most shameful ends. The picture may possibly be overdrawn, as all Lucian's pictures were. He is not more personal in the case of Apollonius than he is in that of a confirmed Christian in his Peregrinus. He wished to concentrate all the dark sides of such a character in the person of an imaginary individual, but he has succeeded, meanwhile, in giving us a caricature of that same reality which Philostratus has also given us in a more than flattered form. The history of philosophy