The author of a dialogue preserved among those of Lucian gives an unsurpassed description of the demeanour of the polished Athenian citizen, amidst his narrow circumstances, overagainst the genteel and rich travelling public of doubtful culture or else undoubted coarseness; how the rich foreigner has been weaned from appearing in the public bath with a host of attendants, as if he were not otherwise certain of his life in Athens and there were no peace in the land; and how he was weaned from showing himself on the street with his purple dress by people making the friendly inquiry whether it was not that of his mamma. He draws a parallel between Roman and Athenian existence; in the former the burdensome banquets and the still more burdensome brothels, the inconvenient convenience of the swarms of menials and the domestic luxury, the troubles of a dissolute life, the torments of ambition, all the superfluity, the multifariousness, the unrest of the doings of the capital; in the latter the charm of poverty, the free talk in the friendly circle, the leisure for intellectual enjoyment, the possibility of peace and of joy in life--"How couldest thou," one Greek in Rome asks another, "leave the light of the sun, Hellas, and its happiness and its freedom for the sake of this crowd?" In this fundamental keynote all the more finely and purely organised natures of this epoch are agreed; the very best Hellenes would rather not exchange with the Romans. There is hardly anything equally pleasing in the literature of the imperial period with the already mentioned Euboean idyll of Dio; it depicts the existence of two families of hunters in the lonely forest, whose property consists of eight goats, a cow without a horn, and a fine calf, four sickles and three hunting-spears, who know nothing either of gold or of taxes, and who, when placed before the raging burgess-assembly of the city, are by the latter dismissed at length unmolested to joy and to freedom. [Sidenote: Plutarch.]