Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
the ocean of life would stagnate; and zeal, devotion, eloquence, would
become dead carcasses, collapsing and wasting on unprofitable sands.
The vices of some men cause the virtues of others, as corruption is
the parent of fertility.
_Timotheus._ O my cousin! this doctrine is diabolical.
_Lucian._ What is it?
_Timotheus._ Diabolical; a strong expression in daily use among us. We
turn it a little from its origin.
_Lucian._ Timotheus, I love to sit by the side of a clear water,
although there is nothing in it but naked stones. Do not take the
trouble to muddy the stream of language for my benefit; I am not about
to fish in it.
_Timotheus._ Well, we will speak about things which come nearer to
your apprehension. I only wish you were somewhat less indifferent in
your choice between the true and the false.
_Lucian._ We take it for granted that what is not true must be false.
_Timotheus._ Surely we do.
_Lucian._ This is erroneous.
_Timotheus._ Are you grown captious? Pray explain.
_Lucian._ What is not true, I need not say, must be untrue; but that
alone is false which is intended to deceive. A witness may be
mistaken, yet would not you call him a false witness unless he
asserted what he knew to be false.
_Timotheus._ Quibbles upon words!
_Lucian._ On words, on quibbles, if you please to call distinctions
so, rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck
ineradicably in a million hearts, and envenomed every hour throughout
their hard pulsation. On a winged word hath hung the destiny of
nations. On a winged word hath human wisdom been willing to cast the
immortal soul, and to leave it dependent for all its future happiness.
It is because a word is unsusceptible of explanation, or because they
who employed it were impatient of any, that enormous evils have
prevailed, not only against our common sense, but against our common
humanity. Hence the most pernicious of absurdities, far exceeding in
folly and mischief the worship of threescore gods; namely, that an
implicit faith in what outrages our reason, which we know is God's
gift, and bestowed on us for our guidance, that this weak, blind,
stupid faith is surer of His favour than the constant practice of
every human virtue. They at whose hands one prodigious lie, such as
this, hath been accepted, may reckon on their influence in the
dissemination of many smaller, and may turn them easily to their own
account. Be sure they will do it sooner or later. The fly floats on
the surface for a while, but up springs the fish at last and swallows
it.
_Timotheus._ Was ever man so unjust as you are? The abominable old
priesthoods are avaricious and luxurious: ours is willing to stand or
fall by maintaining its ordinances of fellowship and frugality. Point
out to me a priest of our religion whom you could, by any temptation
or entreaty, so far mislead, that he shall reserve for his own
consumption one loaf, one plate of lentils, while another poor
Christian hungers. In the meanwhile the priests of Isis are proud and
wealthy, and admit none of the indigent to their tables. And now, to
tell you the whole truth, my Cousin Lucian, I come to you this morning
to propose that we should lay our heads together and compose a merry
dialogue on these said priests of Isis. What say you?
_Lucian._ These said priests of Isis have already been with me,
several times, on a similar business in regard to yours.
_Timotheus._ Malicious wretches!
_Lucian._ Beside, they have attempted to persuade me that your
religion is borrowed from theirs, altering a name a little and laying
the scene of action in a corner, in the midst of obscurity and ruins.
_Timotheus._ The wicked dogs! the hellish liars! We have nothing in
common with such vile impostors. Are they not ashamed of taking such
unfair means of lowering us in the estimation of our fellow-citizens?
And so, they artfully came to you, craving any spare jibe to throw
against us! They lie open to these weapons; we do not: we stand above
the malignity, above the strength, of man. You would do justly in
turning their own devices against them: it would be amusing to see how
they would look. If you refuse me, I am resolved to write a Dialogue
of the Dead, myself, and to introduce these hypocrites in it.
_Lucian._ Consider well first, my good Timotheus, whether you can do
any such thing with propriety; I mean to say judiciously in regard to
composition.
_Timotheus._ I always thought you generous and open-hearted, and quite
inaccessible to jealousy.
_Lucian._ Let nobody ever profess himself so much as that: for,
although he may be insensible of the disease, it lurks within him, and
only waits its season to break out. But really, my cousin, at present
I feel no symptoms: and, to prove that I am ingenuous and sincere with
you, these are my reasons for dissuasion. We believers in the Homeric
family of gods and goddesses, believe also in the locality of Tartarus
and Elysium. We entertain no doubt whatever that the passions of men
and demigods and gods are nearly the same above ground and below; and
that Achilles would dispatch his spear through the body of any shade
who would lead Briseis too far among the myrtles, or attempt to throw
the halter over the ears of any chariot horse belonging to him in the
meads of asphodel. We admit no doubt of these verities, delivered down
to us from the ages when Theseus and Hercules had descended into Hades
itself. Instead of a few stadions in a cavern, with a bank and a bower
at the end of it, under a very small portion of our diminutive Hellas,
you Christians possess the whole cavity of the earth for punishment,
and the whole convex of the sky for felicity.
_Timotheus._ Our passions are burnt out amid the fires of
purification, and our intellects are elevated to the enjoyment of
perfect intelligence.
_Lucian._ How silly then and incongruous would it be, not to say how
impious, to represent your people as no better and no wiser than they
were before, and discoursing on subjects which no longer can or ought
to concern them. Christians must think your Dialogue of the Dead no
less irreligious than their opponents think mine, and infinitely more
absurd. If indeed you are resolved on this form of composition, there
is no topic which may not, with equal facility, be discussed on
earth; and you may intersperse as much ridicule as you please, without
any fear of censure for inconsistency or irreverence. Hitherto such
writers have confined their view mostly to speculative points,
sophistic reasonings, and sarcastic interpellations.
_Timotheus._ Ha! you are always fond of throwing a little pebble at
the lofty Plato, whom we, on the contrary, are ready to receive (in a
manner) as one of ourselves.
_Lucian._ To throw pebbles is a very uncertain way of showing where
lie defects. Whenever I have mentioned him seriously, I have brought
forward, not accusations, but passages from his writings, such as no
philosopher or scholar or moralist can defend.
_Timotheus._ His doctrines are too abstruse and too sublime for you.
_Lucian._ Solon, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, are more sublime, if truth
is sublimity.
_Timotheus._ Truth is, indeed; for God is truth.
_Lucian._ We are upon earth to learn what can be learnt upon earth,
and not to speculate on what never can be. This you, O Timotheus, may
call philosophy: to me it appears the idlest of curiosity; for every
other kind may teach us something, and may lead to more beyond. Let
men learn what benefits men; above all things, to contract their
wishes, to calm their passions, and, more especially, to dispel their
fears. Now these are to be dispelled, not by collecting clouds, but by
piercing and scattering them. In the dark we may imagine depths and
heights immeasurable, which, if a torch be carried right before us, we
find it easy to leap across. Much of what we call sublime is only the
residue of infancy, and the worst of it.
The philosophers I quoted are too capacious for schools and systems.
Without noise, without ostentation, without mystery, not quarrelsome,
not captious, not frivolous, their lives were commentaries on their
doctrine. Never evaporating into mist, never stagnating into mire,
their limpid and broad morality runs parallel with the lofty summits
of their genius.
_Timotheus._ Genius! was ever genius like Plato's?
_Lucian._ The most admired of his Dialogues, his _Banquet_, is beset
with such puerilities, deformed with such pedantry, and disgraced with
such impurity, that none but the thickest beards, and chiefly of the
philosophers and the satyrs, should bend over it. On a former occasion
he has given us a specimen of history, than which nothing in our
language is worse: here he gives us one of poetry, in honour of Love,
for which the god has taken ample vengeance on him, by perverting his
taste and feelings. The grossest of all the absurdities in this
dialogue is, attributing to Aristophanes, so much of a scoffer and so
little of a visionary, the silly notion of male and female having been
originally complete in one person, and walking circuitously. He may be
joking: who knows?
_Timotheus._ Forbear! forbear! do not call this notion a silly one:
he took it from our Holy Scriptures, but perverted it somewhat. Woman
was made from man's rib, and did not require to be cut asunder all
the way down: this is no proof of bad reasoning, but merely of
misinterpretation.
_Lucian._ If you would rather have bad reasoning, I will adduce a
little of it. Farther on, he wishes to extol the wisdom of Agathon by
attributing to him such a sentence as this:
'It is evident that Love is the most beautiful of the gods, _because_
he is the youngest of them.'
Now, even on earth, the youngest is not always the most beautiful; how
infinitely less cogent, then, is the argument when we come to speak of
the Immortals, with whom age can have no concern! There was a time
when Vulcan was the youngest of the gods: was he, also, at that time,
and for that reason, the most beautiful? Your philosopher tells us,
moreover, that 'Love is of all deities the most _liquid_; else he
never could fold himself about everything, and flow into and out of
men's souls.'
The three last sentences of Agathon's rhapsody are very harmonious,
and exhibit the finest specimen of Plato's style; but we, accustomed
as we are to hear him lauded for his poetical diction, should hold
that poem a very indifferent one which left on the mind so superficial
an impression. The garden of Academus is flowery without fragrance,
and dazzling without warmth: I am ready to dream away an hour in it
after dinner, but I think it insalutary for a night's repose. So
satisfied was Plato with his _Banquet_, that he says of himself, in
the person of Socrates, 'How can I or any one but find it difficult to
speak after a discourse so eloquent? It would have been wonderful if
the brilliancy of the sentences at the end of it, and the choice of
expression throughout, had not astonished all the auditors. I, who can
never say anything nearly so beautiful, would if possible have made my
escape, and have fairly run off for shame.' He had indeed much better
run off before he made so wretched a pun on the name of Gorgias. 'I
dreaded,' says he, 'lest Agathon, _measuring my discourse by the head
of the eloquent Gorgias, should turn me to stone_ for inability of
utterance.'
Was there ever joke more frigid? What painful twisting of unelastic
stuff! If Socrates was the wisest man in the world, it would require
another oracle to persuade us, after this, that he was the wittiest.
But surely a small share of common sense would have made him abstain
from hazarding such failures. He falls on his face in very flat and
very dry ground; and, when he gets up again, his quibbles are