Close on Courier’s great discovery followed a most unfortunate episode, for after carefully copying the new chapters Courier obliterated them by a black ink stain. It was natural that the jealous Furia should believe that Courier had intentionally upset his ink-pot over them. Courier himself in a letter to Renouard declared that inadvertently he had used as a marker some paper which was soaked in ink on the under side, and that made the blot.

The rage of Furia might itself have hindered the publication of Courier’s discovery and now a political complication arose as a new obstacle. Since the fame of his work was spreading, Elisa Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon, wished to have Courier’s publication dedicated to her and the prefect of Florence, the Baron Fauchet, announced her gracious wish at a formal dinner-party! Courier, who by now hated all Bonapartes, cut his Gordian knot by rushing out at Florence a Greek edition in fifty-two copies before the French edition which he was publishing at Paris appeared in 1810. The deed was done and neither Furia nor la Bonaparte could undo it.

The fame and scandal of Courier’s work of course came to the ears of the Ministry of War and orders were sent to General Sorbier, commandant of the artillery in Italy, to demand from Courier explanations of his absence from his squadron. Fortunately the general accepted Courier’s affirmation that he had never thought of deserting so that the Hellenist escaped being shot then, but fate pursued him.

On April 11, 1825, the body of Paul Louis Courier was found in a wood near his country home at Véretz. He had been assassinated. It was long believed that this was a political crime, “a kind of epilogue of secret vengeance in party politics” as Edmond Pilon puts it.[290] It might also have been the revenge of a philologist. Actually the shooting was the result of an embroglio with certain servants on his estate. Courier in 1814 had married Mlle Herminie Clavier, who managed his estate in his absence. She seems to have betrayed him both in business matters and affairs of the heart so that Courier separated from her and made new plans for the management of the estate. Five years after the murder the Department of Justice found that the assassins were certain servitors of Courier who had been dismissed because of their connivance with Madame Courier in her iniquities. Courier, whose dearest dream had been the pastoral life of Daphnis and Chloe, escaped the dangers of war and of prison only to be shot in the country he loved for petty personal spite.

Paul Louis Courier would, I am sure, have been happy to have part of his fame rest on his precious new chapters of the Pastorals, and to know that his beautiful translation of their four books lives on in one new edition after another.

VII
LUCIAN AND HIS SATIRIC ROMANCES: THE TRUE HISTORY AND LUCIUS OR ASS

“Lucian of Samosata [was] surnamed ‘The blasphemer,’ because in his dialogues he alleges that the things told of the gods are absurd.... He was at first an advocate in Antioch, but, having ill success in that, he turned to the composition of discourses, and his writings are innumerable. He is said to have been killed by dogs, he having been rabid against the truth. For in his ‘Life of Peregrinus’ he attacks Christianity and, wicked man, blasphemes against Christ himself. Wherefore for his madness he suffered meet punishment in this life, and hereafter with Satan he will be inheritor of the everlasting fire.”[291]

This is the meagre biography by Suidas of the great satirist who through nearly all of the second century held up the mirror of his frankness to reflect images of the Greek and Roman world. Suidas’ misrepresentation of Lucian’s allusions to the Christians and his fanciful picture of the sophist’s end vilify much of this traditional vita. From Lucian’s own writings more facts may be assembled.

Syrian by birth, he wrote in Greek and became a master of an Attic prose style. As a boy he was apprenticed to a sculptor uncle, but quickly left work with his hands for work with his tongue, studied rhetoric and oratory, practiced as an advocate at Antioch, became a professional sophist and travelled in Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Gaul; about A.D. 165 settled at Athens where he lived twenty years, then near the end of his life took an official post in Egypt under the Emperor and wrote an Apology for so doing. Suidas’ description of his writings as “innumerable” seems justified by the eighty-two prose works extant to say nothing of two mock tragedies and fifty-three epigrams, now considered spurious.

Though the great bulk of Lucian’s writings consists of Platonic and satiric dialogues, he enters into the scope of this book as a writer of the satiric or parody romance. For two of his writings, the True History and Lucius or Ass, establish for us this new type of Greek romance. His True History is a parody of all travellers’ tales from Odysseus’ to such as those of Antonius Diogenes in The Wonderful Things beyond Thule. Probably this work of Lucian had more literary influence than any of his other writings. His other romance, of which we have only an epitome, Lucius or Ass, is, I believe, a parody of the romance motivated mainly by religion. Its greatest value in its present syncopated form is that it outlines a contemporary Greek counterpart of the famous Latin novel, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and furnishes us with a touchstone for testing the pure gold of Apuleius’ originality.