With such a profession, it is not surprising that a man of more wit than sympathy, found abundance of material in the follies of his age. Men were taking themselves desperately seriously,--preaching interminable Philosophy, saving their souls, and communing with gods and daemons in the most exasperating ways. Shams, impostures, and liars--so Lucian summed them up, and he did not conceal his opinion. Granted that the age had aspects quite beyond his comprehension, he gives a very vivid picture of it from the outside. This is what men were doing and saying around him--but why? Why, but from vanity and folly? Gods, philosophers, and all who take human life seriously, are deluged with one stream of badinage, always clever but not always in good taste. He has no purpose, religious or philosophic. If he attacks the gods, it is not as a Sceptic--the Sceptics are ridiculed as much as any one else in the _Sale of Lives_--men who know nothing, doubt of their own experience, and avow the end of their knowledge to be ignorance.[19] If he is what we nowadays loosely call sceptical, it is not on philosophic grounds. We should hardly expect him in his satirical pamphlets really to {205} grapple with the question of Philosophy, but he seems not to understand in the least why there should be Philosophy at all. He is master of no single system, though he has the catch-words of them all at his finger-ends. His most serious dialogue on Philosophy is the _Hermotimus_. "Lykinos" meets Hermotimus on his way to a lecture--a man of sixty who for many years has attended the Stoics. Into their argument we need not go, but one or two points may be noted. Hermotimus is a disciple, simple and persevering, who owns that he has not reached the goal of Happiness and hardly expects to reach it, but he presses bravely on, full of faith in his teachers. Under the adroit questions of Lykinos, he is forced to admit that he had chosen the Stoics rather than any other school by sheer intuition--or because of general notions acquired more or less unconsciously--like a man buying wine, he knew a good thing when he tasted it, and looked no further. Yes, says Lykinos, take the first step and the rest is easy--Philosophy depends on a first assumption--take the Briareus of the poets with three heads and six hands, and then work him out,--six eyes, six ears, three voices talking at once, thirty fingers--you cannot quarrel with the details as they come; once grant the beginning, and the rest comes flooding in, irresistible, hardly now susceptible of doubt. So in Philosophy, your passion, like the longing of a lover, blinded you to the first assumptions, and the structure followed.[20] "Do not think that I speak against the Stoics, through any special dislike of the school; my arguments hold against all the schools."[21] The end is that Hermotimus abandons all Philosophy for ever--not a very dramatic or probable end, as Plato and Justin Martyr could have told Lucian.