But his contemporaries had the advantage of us in recognizing Lucian’s sources and parodies more readily than we can. For us, Antonius Diogenes, Ctesias and Iambulus are lost. Yet Photius records that the romance of Antonius Diogenes, _The Wonders beyond Thule_, was the chief source of Lucian’s _True History_. So many, however, are the sources which Lucian used to forward his avowed purpose of furnishing relaxation accompanied by some learning, that scholars have busied themselves for years tracing parallels with Greek and Latin authors.[328] Allinson remarks wisely: “In general, it seems safe to conclude that Lucian regarded the writings of predecessors and contemporaries as an open quarry from which he first built up his own style and then picked out material to imbed, with an artist’s skill, in the parti-coloured mosaic of his satire.”[329] Some idea of Lucian’s parody of his sources may be gained, even though Antonius Diogenes is lost, from his incidental flings at great Greeks and from his constant references to Homer which are a mixture of admiration and irony. So when he saw Cloudcuckooland he remembered Aristophanes the poet, “a wise and truthful man whose writings are distrusted without reason.”[330] On the Island of the Blessed he did not find Plato for he preferred to live in the city of his imagination under his own constitution and laws. Yet he might well have been in Elysium for the inhabitants are most Platonic in sharing their wives.[331] The solemn treaty which ended the wars between the Men of the Sun and the Men of the Moon has a comical resemblance to the treaty between Athens and Sparta which Thucydides records though it is signed by Fireman, Hotman, and Burner, by Nightman, Moonman and Allbright.[332] Herodotus comes in for more imitation, for he furnishes stories of ants bigger than foxes,[333] of dog-headed men,[334] of men who feed on odors,[335] of a feast of lanterns in Egypt,[336] of a floating island,[337] of the sea freezing,[338] of a breeze that bears the perfume of Arabia.[339] But when Lucian solemnly imitates these exaggerations, we feel he has his tongue in his cheek and our suspicion is confirmed when he consigns Ctesias and Herodotus to the limbo of Liars in the Island of the Wicked.[340]