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