With the exception of a very small number of statements, of which the
truth is by no means certain, all that we know of Lucian is derived
from his own writings. And any reader who prefers to have his facts at
first rather than at second hand can consequently get them by reading
certain of his pieces, and making the natural deductions from them.
Those that contain biographical matter are, in the order corresponding
to the periods of his life on which they throw light, _The Vision,
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_), _Swans
and Amber, Alexander_, _Hermotimus_ (_Lycinus_), _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, M. Aurelius and 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 statuary, he was apprenticed to him, having shown an aptitude
for modelling 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 statuary. 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 rhetorician to lecture was one of
the important events in any great city's annals; and Lucian's works are
full of references to the impression these men produced, and the envy
they enjoyed. He himself was evidently consumed, during his youth and
early manhood, with desire for a position like theirs. To him, sleeping
with memories of the stick, appeared two women, corresponding to
_Virtue_ and _Pleasure_ in Prodicus's _Choice of Heracles_—the working
woman _Statuary_, and the lady _Culture_. They advanced their claims to
him in turn; but before _Culture_ had completed her reply, the choice
was made: he was to be a rhetorician. From her reminding him that she
was even now not all unknown to him, we may perhaps assume that he
spoke some sort of Greek, or was being taught it; but he assures us
that after leaving Syria he was still a barbarian; we have also a
casual mention of his offering a lock of his hair to the Syrian goddess
in his youth.
He was allowed to follow his bent and go to Ionia. Great Ionian cities
like Smyrna and Ephesus were full of admired sophists or teachers of
rhetoric. But it is unlikely that Lucian's means would have enabled him
to become the pupil of these. He probably acquired his skill to a great
extent by the laborious method, which he ironically deprecates in _The
Rhetorician's Vade mecum_, of studying exhaustively the old Attic
orators, poets, and historians.
He was at any rate successful. The different branches that a
rhetorician might choose between or combine were: (1) Speaking in court
on behalf of a client; (2) Writing speeches for a client to deliver;
(3) Teaching pupils; (4) Giving public displays of his skill. There is
a doubtful statement that Lucian failed in (1), and took to (2) in
default. His surviving rhetorical pieces (_The Tyrannicide, The
Disinherited, Phalaris_) are declamations on hypothetical cases which
might serve either for (3) or (4); and _The Hall, The Fly, Dipsas_, and
perhaps _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.
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 on Verus's mistress Panthea, whom Lucian
saw there.
A year or two later we find him migrating to Athens, taking his father
with him, and at Athens he settled and remained many years. It was on
this journey that the incident occurred, which he relates with such a
curious absence of shame in the _Alexander_, of his biting that
charlatan's hand.
This change in his manner of life corresponds nearly with the change in
habit of mind and use of his powers that earned him his immortality.
His fortieth year is the date given by himself for his abandonment of
Rhetoric and, as he calls it, taking up with Dialogue, or, as we might
say, becoming a man of letters. Between Rhetoric and Dialogue there was
a feud, which had begun when Socrates five centuries before had fought
his battles with the sophists. Rhetoric appeals to the emotions and
obscures the issues (such had been Socrates's position); the way to
elicit truth is by short question and answer. The Socratic method,
illustrated by Plato, had become, if not the only, the accredited
instrument of philosophers, who, so far as they are genuine, are
truth-seekers; Rhetoric had been left to the legal persons whose object
is not truth but victory. Lucian's abandonment of Rhetoric was
accordingly in some sort his change from a lawyer to a philosopher. As
it turned out, however, philosophy was itself only a transitional stage
with him.
Already during his career as a rhetorician, which we may put at 145-164
A.D., he seems both to have had leanings to philosophy, and to have
toyed with dialogue. There is reason to suppose that the _Nigrinus_,
with its strong contrast between the noise and vulgarity of Rome and
the peace and culture of Athens, its enthusiastic picture of the charm
of philosophy for a sensitive and intelligent spirit, was written in
150 A.D., or at any rate described an incident that occurred in that
year; and the _Portrait-study_ and its _Defence_, dialogues written
with great care, whatever their other merits, belong to 162 or 163 A.D.
But these had been excursions out of his own province. After settling
at Athens he seems to have adopted the writing of dialogues as his
regular work. The _Toxaris_, a collection of stories on friendship,
strung together by dialogue, the _Anacharsis_, a discussion on the
value of physical training, and the _Pantomime_, a description slightly
relieved by the dialogue form, may be regarded as experiments with his
new instrument. There is no trace in them of the characteristic use
that he afterwards made of dialogue, for the purposes of satire.
That was an idea that we may suppose to have occurred to him after the
composition of the _Hermotimus_. This is in form the most philosophic
of his dialogues; it might indeed be a dialogue of Plato, of the merely
destructive kind; but it is at the same time, in matter, his farewell
to philosophy, establishing that the pursuit of it is hopeless for
mortal man. From this time onward, though he always professes himself a
lover of true philosophy, he concerns himself no more with it, except
to expose its false professors. The dialogue that perhaps comes next,
_The Parasite_, is still Platonic in form, but only as a parody; its
main interest (for a modern reader is outraged, as in a few other
pieces of Lucian's, by the disproportion between subject and treatment)
is in the combination for the first time of satire with dialogue.
One more step remained to be taken. In the piece called _A literary
Prometheus_, we are told what Lucian himself regarded as his claim to
the title of an original writer. It was the fusing of Comedy and
Dialogue—the latter being the prose conversation hat had hitherto been
confined to philosophical discussion. The new literary form, then, was
conversation, frankly for purposes of entertainment, as in Comedy, but
to be read and not acted. In this kind of writing he remains, though he
has been often imitated, first in merit as clearly as in time; and
nearly all his great masterpieces took this form. They followed in
rapid succession, being all written, perhaps, between 165 and 175 A.D.
And we make here no further comment upon them, except to remark that
they fall roughly into three groups as he drew inspiration successively
from the writers of the New Comedy (or Comedy of ordinary life) like
Menander, from the satires of Menippus, and from writers of the Old
Comedy (or Comedy of fantastic imagination) like Aristophanes. The best
specimens of the first group are _The Liar_ and the _Dialogues of the
Hetaerae;_ of the second, the _Dialogues of the Dead_ and _of the Gods,
Menippus_ and _Icaromenippus, Zeus cross-examined;_ of the third,
_Timon, Charon, A Voyage to the lower World, The Sale of Creeds, The
Fisher, Zeus Tragoedus, The Cock, The double Indictment, The Ship_.
During these ten or more years, though he lived at Athens, he is to be
imagined travelling occasionally, to read his dialogues to audiences in
various cities, or to see the Olympic Games. And these excursions gave
occasion to some works not of the dialogue kind; the _Zeuxis_ and
several similar pieces are introductions to series of readings away
from Athens; The _Way to write History_, a piece of literary criticism
still very readable, if out of date for practical purposes, resulted
from a visit to Ionia, where all the literary men were producing
histories of the Parthian war, then in progress (165 A.D.). An
attendance at the Olympic Games of 169 A.D. suggested _The Death of
Peregrine_, which in its turn, through the offence given to Cynics, had
to be supplemented by the dialogue of _The Runaways. The True History_,
most famous, but, admirable as it is, far from best of his works,
presumably belongs to this period also, but cannot be definitely
placed. The _Book-fancier_ and _The Rhetorician's Vade mecum_ are
unpleasant records of bitter personal quarrels.
After some ten years of this intense literary activity, producing,
reading, and publishing, Lucian seems to have given up both the writing
of dialogues and the presenting of them to audiences, and to have lived
quietly for many years. The only pieces that belong here are the _Life
of Demonax_, the man whom he held the best of all philosophers, and
with whom he had been long intimate at Athens, and that of Alexander,
the Asiatic charlatan, who was the prince of impostors as Demonax of
philosophers. When quite old, Lucian was appointed by the Emperor
Commodus to a well-paid legal post in Egypt. We also learn, from the
new introductory lectures called _Dionysus_ and _Heracles_, that he
resumed the practice of reading his dialogues; but he wrote nothing
more of importance. It is stated in Suidas that he was torn to pieces
by dogs; but, as other statements in the article are discredited, it is
supposed that this is the Christian revenge for Lucian's imaginary
hostility to Christianity. We have it from himself that he suffered
from gout in his old age. He solaced himself characteristically by
writing a play on the subject; but whether the goddess Gout, who gave
it its name, was appeased by it, or carried him off, we cannot tell.