Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/175

 LUCIAN.

I.

, a native of Samosata in northern Syria, lived in the middle and latter part of the second century; the date of his birth and of his death is unknown. Early in life he adopted the calling of a rhetorician, or "sophistes," lecturing in Ionia, Syria, Greece, Italy, and Gaul. Afterwards he settled at Athens, and devoted himself to the literary work which made his fame. It is his peculiar distinction in the history of letters that he was the first to employ the form of dialogue, not on grave themes, but as a vehicle of comedy and satire. He intimates this claim in the piece entitled The Twice-accused, which is so called because Lucian is there arraigned by personified Rhetoric on the one part and by Dialogue on the other. Rhetoric upbraids him with having forsaken her for the bearded Dialogus, the henchman of philosophy; while Dialogus complains that the Syrian has dragged him from his philosophical heaven to earth, and given him a tragic instead of a comic mask. Lucian's dialogoies blend