The writings of Lucian contain many allusions to the doctors, diseases, and medicines of his time.[1283] On the whole he confirms Galen’s picture. Numerous passages show that the medical profession was held in high esteem, and Lucian himself first went to Rome in order to consult an oculist. At the same time Lucian satirizes the quacks and medical superstition of the time, as we have already seen, and describes several statues which were believed to possess healing powers. In the burlesque tragedy on gout, _Tragodopodagra_, whose authenticity, however, is questioned, the disease personified is triumphant, and the moral seems to be that all the remedies which men have tried are of no avail. On the other hand, Lucian wrote seriously of the African snake whose bite causes one to die of thirst (_De dipsadibus_). He admits that he has never seen anyone in this condition and has not even been in Libya where these snakes are found, but a friend has assured him that he has seen the tombstone epitaph of a man who had died thus, a rather indirect mode of proof which we are surprised should satisfy the author of _How to Write History_. Lucian also repeats the common notion that persons bitten by a mad dog can be cured only by a hair or other portion of the same animal.[1284] [Sidenote: Inevitable intermingling of scepticism and superstition.] Our chapter which set out to note cases of scepticism in regard to superstition has ended by including a great deal of such superstition. The sceptics themselves seem credulous on some points, and Lucian’s satire perhaps more reveals than refutes the prevalence of superstition among even the highly educated. The same is true of other literary satirists of the Roman Empire whose jibes against the astrologers and their devotees only attest the popularity of the art and who themselves very probably meant only to ridicule its more extreme pretensions and were perhaps at bottom themselves believers in the fundamentals of the art. Our authors to some extent, as we have pointed out, provided an arsenal of arguments from which later Christian writers took weapons for their assaults upon pagan magic and astrology. But sometimes subsequent writers confused scepticism with credulity, and the influence of our authors upon them became just the opposite of what they intended. Thus Ammianus Marcellinus, the soldier-historian of the falling Roman Empire upon whom Gibbon placed so much reliance, was so attached to divination that he even quoted its arch-opponent, Cicero, in support of it. For he actually concludes his discussion of the subject in these words: “Wherefore in this as in other matters Tully says most admirably,‘Signs of future events are shown by the gods.’”[1285] [Sidenote: Lucian on writing history.]