The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Vol. 4

the periods of his life on which they throw light: The Vision, etc.
Pseud-—Demosthenes, Nigrinus, The Portrait-study and Defence (in which Lucian is Lycinus), The Way to Write History, The Double Indictment (in which he is The Syrian), The Fisher (Parrhesiades), 3 Swans and Amber, Alexander, Hermotimus (Lycinus), 13 Menippus and Icaromenippus (in which Menippus represents him), A Literary Prometheus, Herodotus, Zeuxis, Harmonides, The Scythian, The Death of Peregrine, The Book-fancier, Demonax, The Rhetorician's Vade Mecum, Dionysus, Heracles, A Slip of the Tongue, Apology for 'The Dependent Scholar.' Of these, The Vision is a direct piece of autobiography; there is intentional but veiled autobiography in several of the other pieces; in others again, conclusions can be drawn from comparison of his statements with facts known from external sources.

—Lucian lived from about 125 to about 200 A.D., under the Roman Emperors Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, Commodus, and perhaps Pertinax. He was a Syrian, born at Samosata on the Euphrates, of parents to whom it was of importance that he should earn his living without spending much time or money on education. His maternal uncle being a sculptor, he was apprenticed to him, having shown an aptitude for modeling in the wax that he surreptitiously scraped from his school writing-tablets. The apprenticeship lasted one day. It is clear that he was impulsive all through life; and when his uncle corrected him with a stick for breaking a piece of marble, he ran off home, disposed already to think he had had enough of sculpture. His mother took his part, and he made up his mind by the aid of a vision that came to him the same night.

—It was the age of the rhetoricians. If war was not a thing of the past, the shadow of the pax Romana was over all the small states, and the aspiring provincial's readiest road to fame was through words rather than deeds. The arrival of a famous