Such is life in the city, but a trip to the country is worse. Thermopolis had to hold his lady’s puppy for her in the jolting carriage and the miserable little dog kept licking his beard for relics of yesterday’s dinner and finally laid a litter of puppies in the philosopher’s cloak. Other services of the parasite include listening to the rich man’s literary compositions and delivering a lecture on philosophy to the lady while her hair is being dressed or at the dinner-table. And in the midst of a discourse on virtue a maid brings her a letter from a paramour which she answers at once with a yes.
In time, envy and slander or the disabilities of old age cause the parasite’s downfall and he is discarded on the rubbish heap. Such a career can best be depicted in a symbolic painting of a hill on whose summit golden Wealth resides. Hope, Deceit, Slavery help the traveller start on the ascent. But Toil then escorts him on. And finally Old Age, Insolence and Despair lead him until he is ejected by a hidden back door, naked, deformed, ruined. Repentance meeting him cannot save him. Timocles is urged before making his decision about the post offered him to meditate on this picture and on Plato’s famous words: “God is not at fault; the fault is his who maketh the choice.”[310] This essay alone would justify Croiset’s great tribute to Lucian’s independence of thought: “among his contemporaries Lucian stands alone as an intelligence of a remarkable force and independence which nothing could tame.”[311]
It was natural that, when later Lucian accepted a post in civil service in Egypt, he should anticipate reminders of his essay on Parasites for Pay on the part of his friends and foes. His Apology[312] answers their imaginary criticisms of his inconsistencies. It is written in the form of a letter to a friend. Lucian assures this Sabinus that he knows Sabinus enjoyed his recent essay on Parasites, but now must be full of amazement at his friend’s accepting a salaried post in Egypt. He imagines receiving an epistle from Sabinus to this effect:[313]
“The difference between your precept and practice is infinitely more ridiculous; you draw a realistic word-picture of that servile life; you pour contempt on the man who runs into the trap of a rich man’s house, where a thousand degradations, half of them self-inflicted, await him; and then in extreme old age, when you are on the border between life and death, you take this miserable servitude upon you and make a sort of circus exhibition of your chains. The conspicuousness of your position will only make the more ridiculous that contrast between your book and your life.”
Lucian in reply suggests various lines of self-defense: the compulsion of Chance, Fate or Necessity; admiration of his patron’s character; the drive of poverty, brought on by old age and ill health. But he rejects all these pleas. His real defense is the difference between being a parasite and slave in the house of a rich master and entering civil service to work for the state. Lucian explains the dignity and the responsibility of the post he has accepted in the service of the Emperor.
“What better use can you make of yourself than if you join forces with your friends in the cause of progress, come out into the open, and let men see that you are loyal and zealous and careful of your trust, not what Homer calls a vain cumberer of the earth?”[314]
Even this brief review of the writings which make up Lucian’s literary autobiography shows the conflicting forces which strove for dominance over his life. Sculpture and the Education of a Sophist first contended for his favor and his choice of the orator’s training never destroyed his life-long interest in art. Oratory which secured his service soon disillusionized him because of her cheap followers. Plato and his philosophical dialogues for a while controlled his mind and style, but, satire proving stronger in him than reflective thinking, he created a new form of dialogue allied to Comedy and Menippus for his medium of comment on the world. This form and the epistle he used for satirizing sophistry and oratory, philosophy and religion, always pointing out the counterfeit and the sham and distinguishing them from the tested gold of verities. This same sort of touch-stone he applied in his Apology to his own life to vindicate his maintenance of personal freedom. The traveller, the sophist, the satirist, now become civil servant of the Emperor, admits no chain about his neck.
As regards his literary art he has revealed that his main ideals are frankness, truth and freedom. In his works he establishes warm human contacts with his hearer or reader. His Greek style achieves a pure Attic simplicity of expression and by it, as Croiset says,[315] he clothes abstract ideas in words which give them body and form. The main qualities of his style, spirit and imagination, unite in the effective descriptions and narrations which fill his works. His wealth of ideas found expression in realistic details noted with keen observation and assembled in realistic series to give vitality to his prose.
One work by Lucian is a specific treatise on writing and peculiarly significant for his literary autobiography. That is the essay on How History Should Be Written. It was composed as a letter to a friend Philo in the time of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. The occasion was the sudden spawning of a whole shoal of would-be historians after the Roman victories in the war with the Parthians (A.D. 165). Outraged by these scribblers, Lucian sets forth his thoughts on the True Historian.
Since the barbarian war began, says Lucian, everyone is writing history. It is just as when an epidemic of madness at Abdera made all the people chant tragedies. It recalls too Diogenes, who, when Corinth was in danger of a siege from Philip and the citizens were hurrying defense measures, kept rolling his jar up and down hill that he might seem as busy as the rest of the world. Lucian’s advice will include the faults of historians which are to be avoided, the virtues to be cultivated.