Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/161

Rh historian's pages that we are following Oldham and Swift.

We have seen the bitter and unsparing ridicule which, not without a purpose, Lucian brings to bear against the fables which passed under the name of religion in his day. But, if he laughed at Greek mythology, he hated the strange and outlandish superstitions which he saw creeping in at Athens and at Rome. He threw something of his own feeling into the remonstrance of the "old families" of Olympus, when they saw dog-headed monsters like Anubis, and apes and bulls from Memphis, introduced into the sacred circle. We have no need to depend upon satirists like Horace, or Juvenal, or Lucian—we need only go to the pages of the historian Tacitus—to learn how the superstitions of Egypt and Asia were gaining favour with the aristocracy of Rome. "Never," says Wieland, "was the propensity to supernatural prodigies and the eagerness to credit them more vehement than in this very enlightened age. The priestcraft of Upper Egypt, the different branches of magic, divination, and oracles of all kinds, the so-called occult sciences, which associated mankind with a fabulous world of spirts, and pretended to give them the control over the powers of nature, were almost universally respected. Persons of all ranks and descriptions—great lords and ladies, statesmen, scholars, the recognised and paid professors of the Pythagorean, the Platonic, the Stoic, and even the Aristotelian school, thought on these topics exactly