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Rh and often from country to country displaying his ability as a speaker before the educated classes. In this way Lucian travelled through Ionia and Greece to Italy and even to Gaul, and won much wealth and fame. Samples of his repertory are still extant among his works—declamations like the Phalaris, essays on abstract themes like Slander, descriptions, appreciations, and depreciations. But although a field like this afforded ample scope for the ordinary rhetorician, it could not display the full talent of a Lucian. His bent for satire, which crops out even in his writings of this period, had to find expression, and ultimately found it in the satiric dialogue. In a sense, then, what he says is true, that he abandoned Rhetoric: but only in a very limited sense. In reality he changed only his repertory, not his profession, for his productions continued to be presented in the same manner and for the same purpose as of old—from a lecture-platform to entertain an audience.

Rightly to understand and appreciate Lucian, one must recognise that he was not a philosopher nor even a moralist, but a rhetorician, that his mission in life was not to reform society nor to chastise it, but simply to amuse it. He himself admits on every page that he is serious only in his desire to please, and he would answer all charges but that of dullness viii