Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/15

 she will give him that which all men covet—immortality. Her rival can but offer him the work and position of a mere labourer, earning his living by his hands, one of the vulgar herd, obliged to bow before his superiors, and working according to his patrons' taste.

Lucian hardly waited, he says, for the termination of this divine creature's speech, before he sprang up, turned his back upon her rival, and threw himself into her embraces. "No doubt," he slyly observes, "the recollection of the flogging which my brief acquaintance with the other lady had got me the day before contributed not a little to my choice." The rejected claimant gnashed upon him savagely with her teeth, and then, "stiffening like a second Niobe," she was—very appropriately—turned into stone.

Whatever truth there might be in the vision, Lucian's choice was made. How he found the means for the further education that was needful, we are not told; but he got himself trained in some way as a Rhetorician. That science was not only very popular, but its professors, when once they had made themselves a name, were pretty well paid. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius was himself a most liberal patron of this as of other sciences, and maintained public lectures on jurisprudence, with which rhetoric was directly connected, both at Rome and in the provinces.