THE
LIFE OF LUCIAN.
The Dialogues of Lucian were translated by Walter Moyle, Sir Henry Shere, Charles Blount, and others, and seem to have been intended for publication about 1696, when our author supplied the following prefatory life. The design was, however, for a time laid aside, and the work did not appear until 1711 several years after Dryden’s death. Hence the preface wants those last corrections, which, I suspect, Dryden contented himself with bestowing upon the proof sheets, as they came from press. I have followed several of Mr Malone’s judicious, and indeed indispensable, corrections of the printed copy.
THE
LIFE OF LUCIAN.
The writing a life is at all times, and in all circumstances, the most difficult task of an historian; and, notwithstanding the numerous tribe of biographers, we can scarce find one, except Plutarch, who deserves our perusal, or can invite a second view. But if the difficulty be so great where the materials are plentiful, and the incidents extraordinary, what must it be when the person, that affords the subject, denies matter enough for a page? The learned seldom abound with action, and it is action only that furnishes the historian with things agreeable and instructive. It is true, that Diogenes Laertius, and our learned countryman Mr Stanley,[30] have both written the “Lives of the Philosophers;” but we are more obliged to the various principles of their several sects, than to any thing remarkable that they did, for our entertainment.
But Lucian, as pleasing and useful as he was in his writings, in the opinion of the most candid judges, has left so little of his own affairs on record, that there is scarce sufficient to fill a page, from his birth to his death.
There were many of the name of Lucian among the ancients, eminent in several ways, and whose names have reached posterity with honour and applause. Suidas mentions one, as a man of singular probity, who, having discharged the administration of the chief prefect of the Oriental empire,[31] under Arcadius, with extraordinary justice and praise of the people, drew on himself the envy and hate of the courtiers, (the constant attendant of eminent virtue and merit,) and the anger of the emperor himself; and was at last murdered by Rufinus.[32]
Among those, who were eminent for their learning, were some divines and philosophers. Of the former, we find one in St Cyprian, to whom the fourth and seventeenth epistles are inscribed. There was another, priest of the church of Antioch, who, as Suidas assures us, reviewed, corrected, and restored to its primitive purity, the Hebrew Bible; and afterward suffered martyrdom, at Nicomedia, under Maximilian.[33] A third was a priest of Jerusalem, who not only made a figure among the learned of his own age,[34] but, as Gesnerus observes, conveyed his reputation to posterity by the remains of his writings.
But none of this name has met with the general applause of so many ages, as Lucian the philosopher and eminent sophist, who was author of the following Dialogues, of whose birth, life, and death, I shall give you all I could collect of any certain and historical credit.