ches, in which his
wit--for Lucian was really witty--had full scope. As an instance of his
manner I shall quote a short passage from the dialogue _Timon_. It is Zeus
who speaks; he has given Hermes orders to send the god of wealth to Timon,
who has wasted his fortune by his liberality and is now abandoned by his
false friends. Then he goes on: "As to the flatterers you speak of and
their ingratitude, I shall deal with them another time, and they will meet
with their due punishment as soon as I have had my thunderbolt repaired.
The two largest darts of it were broken and blunted the other day when I
got in a rage and flung it at the sophist Anaxagoras, who was trying to
make his disciples believe that we gods do not exist at all. However, I
missed him, for Pericles held his hand over him, but the bolt struck the
temple of the Dioscuri and set fire to it, and the bolt itself was nearly
destroyed when it struck the rock." This sort of thing abounds in Lucian,
even if it is not always equally amusing and to the point. Now there is
nothing strange in the fact that a witty man for once should feel inclined
to make game of the old mythology; this might have happened almost at any
time, once the critical spirit had been awakened. But that a man, and
moreover an essayist, who had to live by the approval of his public,
should make it his trade, as it were, and that at a time of vigorous
religious reaction, seems more difficult to account for. Lucian's
controversial pamphlets against superstition cannot be classed off-hand
with his _Dialogues of the Gods_; the latter are of a quite different and
far more harmless character. The fact is rather that mythology at this
time was fair game. It was cut off from its connexion with religion--a
connexion which in historical times was never very intimate and was now
entirely severed. This had been brought about in part by centuries of
criticism of the most varied kind, in part precisely as a result of the
religious reaction which had now set in. If people turned during this time
to the old gods--who, however, had been considerably contaminated with new
elements--it was because they had nothing else to turn to; but what they
now looked for was something quite different from the old religion. The
powerful tradition which had bound members of each small community--we
should say, of each township--to its familiar gods, with all that belonged
to them, was now in process of dissolution; in the larger