thought at home that he showed as a boy the artist nature by his
skill in making little waxen images. An uncle on his mother's side
happened to be a sculptor. The home was poor, Lucian would have his
bread to earn, and when he was fourteen he was apprenticed to his
uncle that he might learn to become a sculptor. Before long, while
polishing a marble tablet he pressed on it too heavily and broke it.
His uncle thrashed him. Lucian's spirit rebelled, and he went home
giving the comic reason that his uncle beat him because jealous of
the extraordinary power he showed in his art.

After some debate Lucian abandoned training as a sculptor, studied
literature and rhetoric, and qualified himself for the career of an
advocate and teacher at a time when rhetoric had still a chief place
in the schools. He practised for a short time unsuccessfully at
Antioch, and then travelled for the cultivation of his mind in
Greece, Italy, and Gaul, making his way by use of his wits, as
Goldsmith did long afterwards when he started, at the outset also of
his career as a writer, on a grand tour of the continent with
nothing in his pocket. Lucian earned as he went by public use of
his skill as a rhetorician. His travel was not unlike the modern
American lecturing tour, made also for the money it may bring and
for the new experience acquired by it.

Lucian stayed long enough in Athens to acquire a mastery of Attic
Greek, and his public discourses could not have been without full
seasoning of Attic salt. In Italy and Gaul his success brought him
money beyond his present needs, and he went back to Samosata, when
about forty years old, able to choose and follow his own course in
life.