he has perhaps been the most read, the most quoted, the best loved, and
the most carefully edited.

THE GREEK HISTORIANS.--Greek historians multiplied about this period. To
mention only the most notable: Arrian, philosopher, disciple of
Epictetus, and historian of the expedition of Alexander; Appian, who
wrote the history of the Roman people from their origin until the time of
Trajan; Dion Cassius, who also compiled Roman history in a sustained
manner full of elegance and nobility; Herodian, historian of the
successors of Marcus Aurelius, who would only narrate what he had himself
witnessed, a showy writer who seems over-polished and a little
artificial.

A historian of a highly individualistic character was Diogenes of
Laertius, who wrote the _Lives of Philosophers_, being very little
of a philosopher himself and too prone to drop into anecdotage, but
interesting and invaluable to us because of the scanty information we
possess about ancient philosophy.

LUCIAN.--Immeasurably superior to those just cited since Plutarch, Lucian
of Samosata (Syria) may be regarded as the Voltaire of antiquity--witty,
sceptical, amusing, even comic. He was primarily a lecturer, wandering
like a sophist from town to town, in order to talk in vivacious,
animated, nimble, and paradoxical fashion. Then he was a polygraphic
writer, producing treatises, satires, and pamphlets on the most diverse
subjects. He wrote against the Christians, the pagans, the philosophers,
the prejudiced, sometimes against common sense. Amongst his works were
_The Way to Write History_, partly serious, partly sarcastic; _The
Dialogues of the Dead_, moralising and satirical, imitated much later
in very superior fashion by Fontenelle; _The Dialogues of the Gods_,