But still more absurd than Philosophy was the growth of belief in the supernatural. Lucian's _Lover of Lies_ is a most illuminating book. Here are gathered specimens of the various {207} types of contemporary superstition--one would suspect the author of the wildest parody, if it were not that point by point we may find parallels in the other writers of the day. Tychiades (who is very like Lucian himself) tells how he has been visiting Eucrates and has dropped into a nest of absurdities. Eucrates is sixty and wears the solemn beard of a student of philosophy. He has a ring made of iron from gibbets and is prepared to believe everything incredible. His house is full of professed philosophers, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Platonic, advising him how to cure the pain in his legs, by wrapping round them a lion's skin with the tooth of a field mouse folded within it.[26] Tychiades asks if they really believe that a charm hung on outside can cure the mischief within, and they laugh at his ignorance. The Platonist tells a number of stories to prove the reasonableness of the treatment,--how a vine-dresser of his father's had died of snake-bite and been recovered by a Chaldaean, and how the same Chaldaean charmed (like the Pied Piper) all the snakes off their farm. The Stoic narrates how he once saw a Hyperborean flying and walking on water--"with those brogues on his feet that his countrymen habitually wear"--a man whose more ordinary feats were raising spirits, calling the dead from their graves, and fetching down the moon. Ion, the Platonist, confirms all this with an account of another miracle-worker--"everybody knows the Syrian of Palestine" who drives daemons out of men; "he would stand by the patient lying on the ground and ask whence they have come into the body; and, though the sick person does not speak, the daemon answers in Greek, or in some barbarian tongue, or whatever his own dialect may be, and explains how he entered into the man and whence he came. Then the Syrian would solemnly adjure him, or threaten him if he were obstinate, and so drive him out. I can only say I saw one, of a black smoky hue, in the act of coming out."[27] The Syrian's treatment was expensive, it appears. Celsus, as we shall see later on, has some evidence on this matter. The nationality of the magicians quoted in the book may be remarked--they are Libyan, Syrian, Arab, Chaldaean, Egyptian, and "Hyperborean."