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