Lucian in reply suggests various lines of self-defense: the compulsion of Chance, Fate or Necessity; admiration of his patron’s character; the drive of poverty, brought on by old age and ill health. But he rejects all these pleas. His real defense is the difference between being a parasite and slave in the house of a rich master and entering civil service to work for the state. Lucian explains the dignity and the responsibility of the post he has accepted in the service of the Emperor. “What better use can you make of yourself than if you join forces with your friends in the cause of progress, come out into the open, and let men see that you are loyal and zealous and careful of your trust, not what Homer calls a vain cumberer of the earth?”[314] Even this brief review of the writings which make up Lucian’s literary autobiography shows the conflicting forces which strove for dominance over his life. Sculpture and the Education of a Sophist first contended for his favor and his choice of the orator’s training never destroyed his life-long interest in art. Oratory which secured his service soon disillusionized him because of her cheap followers. Plato and his philosophical dialogues for a while controlled his mind and style, but, satire proving stronger in him than reflective thinking, he created a new form of dialogue allied to Comedy and Menippus for his medium of comment on the world. This form and the epistle he used for satirizing sophistry and oratory, philosophy and religion, always pointing out the counterfeit and the sham and distinguishing them from the tested gold of verities. This same sort of touch-stone he applied in his _Apology_ to his own life to vindicate his maintenance of personal freedom. The traveller, the sophist, the satirist, now become civil servant of the Emperor, admits no chain about his neck. As regards his literary art he has revealed that his main ideals are frankness, truth and freedom. In his works he establishes warm human contacts with his hearer or reader. His Greek style achieves a pure Attic simplicity of expression and by it, as Croiset says,[315] he clothes abstract ideas in words which give them body and form. The main qualities of his style, spirit and imagination, unite in the effective descriptions and narrations which fill his works. His wealth of ideas found expression in realistic details noted with keen observation and assembled in realistic series to give vitality to his prose. One work by Lucian is a specific treatise on writing and peculiarly significant for his literary autobiography. That is the essay on _How History Should Be Written_. It was composed as a letter to a friend Philo in the time of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. The occasion was the sudden spawning of a whole shoal of would-be historians after the Roman victories in the war with the Parthians (A.D. 165). Outraged by these scribblers, Lucian sets forth his thoughts on the True Historian.