the Antonine age seem to have expended themselves chiefly on the popular pleasures and external adornments of life, or a revival, often in the grossest and most absurd forms, as we shall see in a later chapter, of the superstitions of the past. With all its humanitarian sentiment and all its material glories, the Roman world had entered on that fatal incline, which, by an unperceived yet irresistible movement, led on to the sterilisation of the higher intellect, and the petrifaction of Roman society which ended in the catastrophe of the fifth century. The triumphs and splendour of corporate life in the age of the Antonines are certainly a dazzling spectacle. Yet to the student who is more occupied with the painful moral education of the race, the interest lies in a different direction. It was a worldly age, but it was also an age ennobled by a powerful protest against worldliness. And in this chapter we shall study a great movement, which, under the name of philosophy or culture, called the masses of men to a higher standard of life. This movement, like all others of the same kind, had its impostors who disgraced it. Yet the man who has pursued them with such mordant ridicule and pitiless scorn, the man who was utterly sceptical as to the value of all philosophic effort, in the last resort approaches very near to the view of human life which was preached by the men whom he derides.(1799) Lucian belonged to no philosophic school; he would himself have repudiated adhesion to any system. The advice of Teiresias to Menippus, when he sought him in the shades, would certainly have been Lucian’s to any young disciple who consulted him. Have done with all these verbal subtleties and chimeras; swear allegiance to no sect; make the best of the present; and take things generally with a smile.(1800) Yet who can read the _Dialogues of the Dead_ without feeling that there is a deeper and more serious vein in Lucian than he would confess? Although he poured his contempt upon the Cynic street preachers, although in the _Auction of Lives_ the Cynic’s sells for the most paltry price, the Cynic alone is allowed to carry with him across the river of death his characteristic qualities, his boldness and freedom of speech, his bitter laughter at the follies and illusions of mankind.(1801) There are many indications in these dialogues that, if Lucian had turned Cynic preacher, he would have waged the same war on the pleasures and illusory ambitions of man, he would have outdone the Cynics in brutal frankness of exposure and denunciation, as he would have surpassed them in rhetorical and imaginative charm of style.(1802) He has a vivid and awful conception of Death, the great leveller, and sees all earthly wealth and glory in the grey light of the land where all things are forgotten. Rank and riches, beauty and strength, the lust of the eye and the pride of life, are all left behind on the borders of the realm of