The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Vol. 4

Demosthenes, suggest (4). A common form of exhibition was for a sophist to appear before an audience and let them propose subjects, of which he must choose one and deliver an impromptu oration upon it.

A handwritten vertical bracket and a small arrow in the left margin highlight the passage concerning the author's knowledge of Latin.

Whatever his exact line was, he earned an income in Ionia, then in Greece, had still greater success in Italy, and appears to have settled for some time in Gaul, perhaps occupying a professorial chair there. The intimate knowledge of Roman life in some aspects which appears in The Dependent Scholar suggests that he also lived some time in Rome. He seems to have known some Latin, since he could converse with boatmen on the Po; but his only clear reference (A Slip of the Tongue, 13) implies an imperfect knowledge of it; and there is not a single mention in all his works, which are crammed with literary allusions, of any Latin author. He claims to have been during his time in Gaul one of the rhetoricians who could command high fees; and his descriptions of himself as resigning his place close about his lady’s (i.e. Rhetoric’s) person, and as casting off his wife Rhetoric because she did not keep herself exclusively to him, show that he regarded himself, or wished to be regarded, as having been at the head of his profession.

This brings us to about the year 160 A.D. We may conceive Lucian now to have had some of that yearning for home which he ascribes in the Patriotism even to the successful exile. He returned home, we suppose, a distinguished man at thirty-five, and enjoyed impressing the fact on his fellow citizens in The Vision. He may then have lived at Antioch as a rhetorician for some years, of which we have a memorial in The Portrait-study. Lucius Verus, M. Aurelius’s colleague, was at Antioch in 162 or 163 A.D. on his way to the Parthian war, and The Portrait-study is a panegyric Panegyric: A public speech or published text in praise of someone or something on Verus’s mistress Panthea, whom Lucian saw there.

A year or two later we find him migrating to Athens, taking