To say that Lucian[205] is the Aristophanes of post-Christian Greek may seem a feeble and obvious attempt at epigram. But, so far as criticism is concerned, it has a propriety [Sidenote: _Lucian._] which takes it out of the category of the forcible-feeble. Not only are the two writers alike (giving weight for age) in the purity of their respective styles; not only are they alike in the all-dissolving irony and the staunch Toryism of their satire on innovations; but their critical attitudes are (when once more due allowance has been made for circumstances and seasons) curiously similar. Neither is a literary critic first of all or by profession,—though Lucian’s date, the state of literature in his time, and his being in the main a prose writer, give him a sort of “false air” of being this. Both dislike innovations of phrase, at least as much because they are innovations as because they are actually in bad taste. Both hate “conceit,” and neologism, at least as vehemently because such things happen to be associated with opinions obnoxious to them as because they dislike the things themselves. And consequently (though again, for reasons easily given, less apparently in Lucian’s case than in Aristophanes), the critical work of both, though displaying astonishing acuteness, is rather a special phase, a particular function of a general attitude of satiric contemplation of life, than criticism pure and simple. In both, yet again, the combination of critical temperament and literary power makes what they have to say on the subject of extraordinary interest. Yet once more, in this case as in the former, the interest lies a little outside the path of strict criticism. What Lucian has to tell us is perhaps best, as it is certainly most memorably, summed up in the epigram attributed to him (and I am sure not unworthily) in the _Anthology_— “Lucian wrote this, knowing old things and vain— For vain is also that which men think wise: No human thought is wholly clear and plain; What thou ador’st is scorn in others' eyes.”[206] We do not get much beyond this cheerful doctrine in his more directly critical utterances. Much acuteness has been ascribed to the πῶς δεῖ ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν.[207] But one had [Sidenote: _The_ How to Write History.] hardly need be a Lucian to see that the historian (or anybody else) must understand his subject, and know how to set it forth: though it may be very freely granted that a strict application of the doctrine would make considerable gaps on the shelves of libraries, or rather would leave very few books on them. Indeed the whole tractate, though very sound sense, is in more ways than one a prologue to the _True History_. And from its opening account of the unlucky Abderites and their epidemic of tragedy, through its application of the story of Diogenes rolling his tub, to its demure assertion at the end that the tub _is_ rolled, the irony is sufficiently apparent. Footnote 205: