Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 01 by Lucian of Samosata
page 28 of 366 (07%)
Providence has doomed to live on trust'; Lucian entirely refuses to
live on trust; he 'wants to know.' It was the wish of _Arthur
Clennam_, who had in consequence a very bad name among the _Tite
Barnacles_ and other persons in authority. Lucian has not escaped the
same fate; 'the scoffer Lucian' has become as much a commonplace as
'_fidus Achates_,' or 'the well-greaved Achaeans,' the reading of him
has been discountenanced, and, if he has not actually lost his place
at the table of Immortals, promised him when he temporarily left the
Island of the Blest, it has not been so 'distinguished' a place as it
was to have been and should have been. And all because he 'wanted to
know.'

His questions, of course, are not all put in the same manner. In the
_Dialogues of the Gods_, for instance, the mark of interrogation is
not writ large; they have almost the air at first of little stories
in dialogue form, which might serve to instruct schoolboys in the
attributes and legends of the gods--a manual charmingly done, yet a
manual only. But we soon see that he has said to himself: Let us put
the thing into plain natural prose, and see what it looks like with
its glamour of poetry and reverence stripped off; the Gods do human
things; why not represent them as human persons, and see what results?
What did result was that henceforth any one who still believed in the
pagan deities might at the cost of an hour's light reading satisfy
himself that his gods were not gods, or, if they were, had no business
to be. Whether many or few did so read and so satisfy themselves, we
have no means of knowing; it is easy to over-estimate the effect such
writing may have had, and to forget that those who were capable of
being convinced by exposition of this sort would mostly be those who
were already convinced without; still, so far as Lucian had any effect
on the religious position, it must have been in discrediting paganism
DigitalOcean Referral Badge