LIFE OF LUCIAN.

There were many of the name of Lucian among the ancients, eminent in several ways, and whose names have reached posterity with honour and applause. Suidas mentions one, as a man of singular probity, who, having discharged the administration of the chief prefect of the Oriental empire,* under Arcadius, with extraordinary justice and praise of the people, drew on himself the envy and hate of the courtiers (the constant attendant of eminent virtue and merit), and the anger of the emperor himself; and was at last murdered by Rufinus.t

Among those, who were eminent for their learning, were some divines and philosophers. Of the

* A.D. 375. Rufinus was chief prefect of the East. The person here alluded to was only count of fifteen provinces. Dryden, writing from memory, confounded the offices of the murderer and murdered. See the next note.

+ Gibbon thus narrates the catastrophe :-"The extreme parsimony of Rufinus left him only the reproach and envy of ill-gotten wealth. His dependents served him without attachment; the universal hatred of mankind was repressed only by the influence of servile fear. The fate of Lucian proclaimed to the East, that the prefect, whose industry was much abated in the dispatch of ordinary business, was active and indefatigable in the pursuit of revenge. Florentius, the oppressor of Gaul, and the enemy of Julian), Lucian (the son of the prefect had employed a considerable part of his inheritance, the fruit of rapine and corruption, to purchase the friendship of Rufinus, and the high office of Count of the East. magistrate imprudently departed from the maxims of the But the new court and of the times; disgraced his benefactor, by the contrast of a virtuous and temperate administration; and presumed to refuse an act of injustice, which might have tended to the profit of the emperor's uncle. Arcadius was easily persuaded to resent the supposed insult; and the prefect of the East resolved to execute in person the cruel vengeance which he meditated against this ungrateful delegate of his power. He performed, with incessant speed, the journey of seven or eight hundred miles, from Constantinople to Antioch, entered the capital of Syria at the dead of night, and spread universal consternation among a people ignorant of his design, but not

former, we find one in St. Cyprian, to whom the fourth and seventeenth epistles are inscribed. There was another, priest of the church of Antioch, who, as Suidas assures us, reviewed, corrected, and restored to its primitive purity, the Hebrew Bible; and afterward suffered martyrdom, at Nicomedia, under Maximian.* A third was a priest of Jerusalem, who not only made a figure among the learned of his own age,t but, as Gesnerus observes, conveyed his reputation to posterity by the remains of his writings.

But none of this name has met with the general applause of so many ages, as Lucian the philo

The

ignorant of his character. The count of the fifteen provinces of the East was dragged, like the vilest malefactor, before the arbitrary tribunal of Rufinus. Notwithstanding the clearest evidence of his integrity, which was not impeached even by the voice of an accuser, Lucian was condemned, almost without a trial, to suffer a cruel and ignominious punishment. ministers of the tyrant, by the order, and in the presence, of their master, beat him on the neck with leather thongs, armed at the extremities with lead; and when he fainted under the violence of the pain, he was removed in a close litter to conceal his dying agonies from the eyes of the indignant city. No sooner had Rufinus perpetrated this inhuman act, the sole object of his expedition, than he returned amidst the deep and silent curses of a trembling people, from Antioch to Constantinople; and his diligence was accelerated by the hope of accomplishing, without delay, the nuptials of his daughter with the emperor of the East."--GIBBON's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iii. p. 209.

The punctuation throughout this piece is so inaccurate, and the paragraphs so strangely divided, that it must have been printed from a copy very carelessly written. In the present passage, we find Rafiany, instead of Rufinus.-MALONE.

* A.D. 312. He suffered for favouring the Arians.-MALONE. † A.D. 415. He was minister of Caphargamala, and pretended to have been instructed by a dream of the burial-place of the proto-martyr Stephen, Gamaliel, and other saints. See GIBBON'S History, vol. iii. p. 97.

Several other persons of this name, besides those here mentioned, are enumerated by Fabricius. Bibl. Græc. iv. 508.

sopher and eminent sophist, who was author of the following Dialogues, of whose birth, life, and death, I shall give you all I could collect of any certain and historical credit.

He had not the good fortune to be born of illustrious or wealthy parents, which give a man a very advantageous rise on his first appearance in the world; but the father of our Lucian laboured under so great a straitness of estate, that he was fain to put his son apprentice to a statuary, whose genius for the finer studies was so extraordinary and so rare; because he hoped from that business, not only a speedy supply to his own wants, but was secure that his education in that art would be much less expensive to him.*

He was born in Samosata, a city of Syria, not far from the river Euphrates; and for this reason, he calls himself more than once an Assyrian, and a Syrian; but he was derived from a Greek original, his forefathers having been citizens of Patras in Achaia.

We have nothing certain as to the exact time of his birth. Suidas confirms his flourishing under the Emperor Trajan; but then he was likewise before him. Some mention the reign of Adrian; but it cannot be fixed to any year or consulate.†

The person he was bound to was his uncle, a man of a severe and morose temper, of whom he was to learn the statuary's and stone-cutter's art; for his father observing our Lucian, now a boy, of his own head, and without any instructor, made various

* [It may be taken as certain that Dryden, at the full maturity of his art, would never have passed for press such a sentence as this, exemplifying as it does most of the worst faults which he more than any one else corrected.-ED.]

+ Dr. Franklin seems disposed to fix on the year 90. [His date is now generally fixed at cir. 120-200.-ED.]

figures in wax, he persuaded himself, that if he had a good master, he could not but arrive to an uncommon excellence in it.

But it happened, in the very beginning of his time, he broke a model, and was very severely called to account for it by his master. He, not liking this treatment, and having a soul and genius above any mechanic trade, ran away home.

After which, in his sleep, there appeared to him two young women, or rather the tutelar goddesses of the statuary art, and of the liberal sciences, hotly disputing of their preference to each other; and on a full hearing of both sides, he bids adieu to statuary, and entirely surrenders himself to the conduct of virtue and learning. And as his desires of improvement were great, and the instructions he had, very good, the progress he made was as considerable, till, by the maturity of his age and his study, he made his appearance in the world. Though it is not to be supposed, that there is anything of reality in this dream, or vision, of Lucian, which he treats of in his works, yet this may be gathered from it, that Lucian himself, having consulted his genius, and the nature of the study his father had allotted him, and that to which he found a propensity in himself, he quitted the former, and pursued the latter, choosing rather to form the minds of men than their statues.

In his youth, he taught rhetoric in Gaul, and in several other places. He pleaded likewise at the bar in Antioch, the capital of Syria; but the noise of the bar disgusting, and his ill success in causes disheartening him, he quitted the practice of rhetoric and the law, and applied himself to writing.

He was forty years old, when he first took to philosophy. Having a mind to make himself known in Macedon, he took the opportunity of speaking

in the public assembly of all that region. In his old age, he was received into the imperial family, and had the place of intendant of Egypt,* after he had travelled through almost all the known countries of that age to improve his knowledge in men, manners, and arts; for some writers made this particular observation on his travel into Gaul, and residence in that country, that he gained there the greatest part of his knowledge in rhetoric, that region being in his age, and also before it, a nursery of eloquence and oratory, as Juvenal, Martial, and others, sufficiently witness.t

The manner of his death is obscure to us, though it is most probable he died of the gout. Suidas alone tells a story of his being worried to death, and devoured by dogs, returning from a feast; which being so uncommon a death, so very improbable, and attested only by one author, has found little credit with posterity. If it be true, that he was once a Christian, and afterwards became a renegade to our belief, perhaps some zealots may have invented this tale of his death, as a just and signal punishment for his apostacy. All men are willing to have the miracle, or at least the wonderful providence, go on their side, and will be teaching God Almighty what he ought to do in this world, as well as in the next; as if they were proper judges of his decrees, and for what end he prospers some, or punishes others, in this life. Ablancourt, and our learned countryman Dr. Mayne, look on the story as a fiction: and, for my part, I can see no reason either to believe he ever professed Chris

* Procurator principis. Under Marcus Aurelius.

+ See Juv. Sat. i. 44; vii. 148; xv. 111. Quintil. lib. x. cap. 3.

Dr. Jasper Mayne, who published a translation of some select dialogues of Lucian, in folio, in 1664.