Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/22



best known and the most popular of our author's multifarious writings are his "Dialogues," many of which would form admirable dramatic scenes, containing more of the spirit of comedy, as we moderns understand it, than either the broad burlesque of Aristophanes or the somewhat sententious and didactic tone of Terence. The "Dialogues of the Gods," in which the old mythological deities are introduced to us as it were in undress, discussing their family affairs and private quarrels in the most familiar style, were composed with a double purpose by their writer. He not only seized upon the absurd points in religious fable as presenting excellent material for burlesque, but he indulged at the same time in the most caustic form of satire upon the popular belief, against which, long before his day, the intellect of even the heathen world had revolted. It is possible that his apprenticeship, brief as it was, to the manufacture of stone Mercuries helped to make him an iconoclast. The man who assists in the chiselling out of a god must know more or less that he "has a lie in his right