Illustrated history of ancient literature, oriental and classical

by John D. Quackenbos

Socrates.—Sentence is passed: nothing can save you.”

Collins.

Lucian is also famous in another line. His “True History,” a burlesque on the Munchausen stories of the old poets and historians, recounts the stirring adventures of a party of voyagers who sail westward from the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar). It describes their visit to the moon, their sojourn in a country where wine flowed in rivers, their twenty months’ experience inside of a sea-monster that swallowed their vessel, and their discovery of “the Island of the Blest,” with its golden-paved city and vines loaded with monthly fruitage. The lunarians happened to be engaged in war with the people of the sun, at the time of Lucian’s arrival, and he had the good fortune to witness a grand review of the lunar army. There were cavalry mounted on lettuce-winged birds, darters of millet-seed, garlic-fighters, wind-coursers, and archers who rode elephantine fleas. Spiders as large as islands hovered on their flanks. On the side of the sun were mustered horse-ants that covered two acres, archers on colossal gnats, slingers who discharged fetid radishes, and dog-headed men astride of winged acorns.—Had novel-writing been in vogue in Lucian’s time, he would no doubt have excelled in that department of fiction.

Pausanias, the Lydian geographer, was a contemporary of Lucian’s. It has been said that “no writer of antiquity except Herodotus has stored away so many valuable facts in a small volume” as he in his “Itinerary of Greece.” Pausanias made art items a special feature of his Itinerary.

Other Writers of the Second Century.—In the second century, Claudius Ptolemy, the astronomer, put forth his theory of the universe: that the earth is stationary and the centre of eight huge, hollow, crystal spheres, placed one within another. The moon he located in the nearest sphere, Mercury in the next, Venus in the third, the Sun in the fourth, Mars in the fifth, Jupiter in the sixth, and Saturn in the seventh. The eighth sphere he appropriated to the stars, which, despite their distance, were still visible through the transparent crystal. All these heavenly bodies he believed to revolve in their respective spheres around the earth. Ptolemy’s “Syntaxis,” or “Construction,” embodying these views, was received as authority until Copernicus, fourteen hundred years later, taught the true theory of the solar system.

In this century, also, Justin Martyr wrote his “Apologies” in defence of Christianity against paganism; and Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, his “Epistle to the Philippians”—both sealing their faith with their blood. From Irenæus, bishop of Lyons, we have inherited a valuable legacy in his “Treatise against Heresies.”

Origen, the gifted pupil of Cle’mens the Alexandrian, an ardent Christian philosopher, flourished in the third century. Among his writings, which, including his discourses, were numbered by thousands, are “Commentaries on the Scriptures,” in the preparation of which he was assisted by clerks who wrote in short-hand from his dictation. Origen also replied effectively to Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher who some years before had attacked Christianity in his “True Story,” a powerful and much-read work of the time.

Neo-Platonism.—The Academic philosophy, modified by its later professors and wrapped in a veil of mysticism, gave rise to the eclectic school of the Neo-Platonists, which was popular among the learned till the time of Constantine. The seeds of this philosophy were planted by Philo the Jew, mentioned on page 104 as attempting to reconcile Plato’s doctrines with the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Ammonius, of Alexandria, was the real founder of Neo-Platonism, which, as it left his hand, was a medley of Plato’s and Aristotle’s tenets harmonized with the leading doctrines of Christianity. Though Ammonius enjoined his disciples to keep the mysteries of his philosophy to themselves, Ploti’nus, one of his distinguished pupils, unfolded them in his writings and taught them publicly at Rome, where he went to live 244 A.D.

After Plotinus, Porphyry became a shining light of the Neo-Platonists; but he was an outspoken opponent of Christianity, maintaining that the world was without beginning, and denying the divinity of our Saviour. His work “Against the Christians” was afterward burned by order of the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great.