Philosophy and myth are not, however, the only elements in his dialogues: there is also a dramatic dimension. Thus he wrote The Divine Sign of Socrates -with the
liberation of Thebes from Spartan occupation in 3 79 B.C. as background (above, p. 148). The adventure story, told again in the life of Pelopidas, is punctuated by
discussions on prophecy and the most splendid of the myths. In the Eroticus, again, he weaves a contemporary intrigue-a widow has enticed a younger man to marry her-
into a discourse on homosexual and heterosexual love, Platonic in detail but very un-Platonic in conclusions. For all their dependence on tradition-not only Plato's
Symposium, Critias, and Phaedrus, but a Hellenistic inheritance, now only dimly discernible-Plutarch's dialogues are works of powerful originality. More than any of the
other authors we have here selected for consideration, he is a witness to the deepening religious and theological consciousness of the age. In The Decline of the Oracles, he
portrays a Spartan called Cleombrotus, freshly arrived in Delphi from the desert shores of the Red Sea. This personage advances views on 'demons' which there is good
reason to think Plutarch does not take seriously; but the description of Cleombrotus' mission in life passes well for Plutarch's own:
Fond of seeing and learning, having adequate means and not thinking it worth while to acquire more, he employed his leisure for such travels, and assembled information
(historia) to be the material of what he himself called 'philosophy with theology as its goal'.
Not that Plutarch would wish to seek out holy men in the desert. He stayed at home, and they came to him.
Lucian
The second great Greek writer of the period was born in Plutarch's latter years, around the beginning of the reign of Hadrian.
Lucian is in many ways Plutarch's antithesis. He came, not from the old heartland of Greece, but-much more typically of the period-from the more recently Hellenized East.
His home was Samosata on the Euphrates, capital of the defunct kingdom of Commagene, one of whose princes-Philopappus-had been a friend of Plutarch's at Athens. His
education would be quite different from Plutarch's, and this indeed is evident from their writing. Plutarch's Greek, allusive and classicizing as it is, is a link in a continuous
tradition, passing through Hellenistic writing back to classical times. Lucian's-he claims it was his second language, Syriac being the first-is pure imitation (mimesis) of the
classical models, fascinatingly flexible, but clearly an artificial creation. There are other contrasts too. Plutarch takes religious belief, especially men's hopes and fears for
what follows death, with great and humane seriousness. For Lucian all this is mockery. The judgement of the dead, the ferryman of the souls, 'and all the Vain, Infernal
Trumpery', are for him simply the setting for a rather simple form of satire; visions, ghosts, magic are the contemptible inventions of charlatans whom it is the honest man's
business to expose. Again: what Plutarch tells us of his life is evidently true. We believe in his regard for his father and his grandfather, his affectionate marriage, and his
sorrow at his little daughter's death. Lucian, by contrast, gives us a stylized picture which it is foolish to treat as autobiography. We are not bound to believe in the family
council that apprenticed him to his sculptor uncle, or his vision of Education (Paideia), or his abandonment of Rhetoric for Dialogue at the age of forty. We recall that
Socrates too started as a sculptor, and Ovid's vision of Elegy and Tragedy (Amores 3. 1) is all too similar to Lucian's. A good deal of what Lucian says about himself is no
more to be trusted than the voyage to the moon that he recounts so persuasively in the first person in True Stories.
Even his claim to have been the first to adapt the philosophical dialogue to comic purposes is hard to sustain. To go no further back, there is something of this in Plutarch-
notably in Gryllus, where one of Circe's new pigs converses with Odysseus-and the evidence of Varro and Horace suggests the Hellenistic model of an earlier Syrian Greek,
Menippus of Gadara, held by some to be a main source of Lucian's ideas. That Menippus' writings were a significant model is doubtful. More important than any such
borrowing is Lucian's relentless exploitation of the limited range of classical texts that everybody knew, and his ingenuity in using the same motifs again and again. He does
indeed have his originality, and it may well be that the 'miniature dialogue', in which he excelled, is one place where we should look for it. It was in this form that he
composed his dialogues of the dead, of the gods, of the nymphs and deities of the sea, and of the educated prostitutes (hetairai) of comedy. Like the epigram, the letter, and
the apophthegm-all of which flourished in this period-the miniature dialogue is directed at a readership which finds long texts trying. It has a clear connection with the
elementary rhetorical exercises of narrative, anecdote, and description, and indeed with the even more elementary game of paraphrase. Yet in Lucian's hands it has real
charm. We enjoy Doris' suggestion that Polyphemus really only likes Galatea because her complexion reminds him of the milk and cream cheese in which his riches lie. We
admire the ecphrasis of Europa and the bull as seen with the eyes of Zephyrus, the West Wind, or Zeus' pleased revelation to Ganymede of who he really is. We relish the
mild salaciousness of the conversations between the innocent young prostitute and her hopeful and ambitious mother- so long, that is, as we suspend any social feelings
towards the widow whose only resource is to employ her daughter in this way. Lucian is sometimes regarded almost as a socialist before his time. This is to take him much
too seriously. To see virtue in the poor and wickedness in the wealthy is a standard rhetorical pose of the age. And Lucian's consistent aim is to entertain.