De Morte Peregrini

Best wishes from Lucian to Cronius.[*](The greeting here employed (its sense might perhaps be more adequately rendered by “Good issues to all your doings”) marks Cronius as a Platonist. Lucian himself (Lapsus, 4) ascribes its origin to Plato, and he employs it in addressing the philosopher Nigrinus (I, p. 98). A Platonist named Cronius is more than once mentioned by Porphyry, but to identify the two would contribute next to nothing to our knowledge of either. )

Unlucky Peregrinus, or, as he delighted to style himself, Proteus,[*](Cf. Aulus Gellius, XII, 11: philosophum nomine Peregrinum, cui postea cognomentum Proteus factum est, virum gravem et constantem, etc. Lucian calls him Peregrinus Proteus in Demonax, 21 (I, p. 156), but simply Proteus the Cynic in adv. Indoct., 14 (III, p. 192), and he is Proteus to the Philostrati (cf. Vit. Soph. II, 1, 33 and for the elder Philostratus the title of his lost work Proteus the Cynic ; or, the Sophist), to Tatian (Orat. ad Graecos, 25), and to Athenagoras (Legat. de Christian., 26). The name Peregrinus is used in Aulus Gellius, VIII, 3, Ammianus Marcellinus, X XIX, 1, 39, Tertullian ad Martyres, 4, and Eusebius, Chron., Vol. II, p. 170, Schéne. From the passage in Gellius cited above we can infer only that he did not hear the sobriquet Proteus when he was in Athens. The manner of its employment by Lucian is sufficient evidence that it did not originate with Lucian, or after the death of Peregrinus. It was probably applied to him towards the close of his career. That it bears a sense very like what Lucian attributes to it is clear from Maximus of Tyre, VIII, 1. In § 27 Lucian professes to have heard that he wanted to change it to Phoenix after his decision to immolate himself. ) has done exactly what Proteus in Homer did.[*](The transformations of the sea-god in his effort to escape from Menelaus, who wanted to consult him, are told in the Odyssey, IV, 454-459. ) After turning into everything for the sake of notoriety and achieving any number of transformations, here at last he has turned into fire; so great, it seems, was the love of notoriety that eae be him. And now your genial friend has got imself carbonified after the fashion of Empedocles, except that the latter at least tried to escape

I think I can see you laughing heartily at the old man’s drivelling idiocy—indeed, I hear you give tongue as you naturally would: “Oh, the stupidity ! Oh, the vainglory! Oh”—everything else that we are in the habit of saying about it all. Well, you are doing this at a distance and with far greater security, but I said it right by the fire and even earlier in a great crowd of listeners, angering some of them—as many as admired the old man’s fool-hardiness; but there were others beside myself who laughed at him. However, I narrowly missed getting torn limb from limb for you by the Cynics just as Actaeon was by his dogs or his cousin Pentheus by the Maenads.

The complete mise en scéne of the affair was as follows. You know, of course, what the playwright was like and what spectacular performances he presented his whole life long, outdoing Sophocles and Aeschylus. As for my part in it, as soon as I came to Elis, in going up? by way of the gymnasium I overheard a Cynic bawling out the usual street-corner invocations to Virtue in a loud, harsh voice, and abusing everyone without exception. Then his harangue wound up with Proteus, and to the best

“Does anyone dare,” he said, ‘to call Proteus vainglorious, O Earth, O sun, O rivers, O sea, O Heracles, god of our fathers!—Proteus, who was imprisoned in Syria, who renounced five thousand talents in favour of his native land, who was banished from the city of Rome, who is more conspicuous than the sun, who is able to rival Olympian Zeus himself? Because he has resolved to depart from life by way of fire, are there people who attribute this to vainglory? Why, did not Heracles do so? Did not Asclepius and Dionysus,[*](The cases of Dionysus and Asclepius were not quite parallel. Zeus could not have Asclepius raising the dead, and so transferred his activities to a higher sphere by means of the thunderbolt. It was Semele, the mother of Dionysus, whom his other bolt carbonised; but as it certainly effected, even if only incidentally, the translation of Dionysus, and as one of the epigrams in the Anthology (XVI, 185) similarly links Dionysus with Heracles as having achieved immortality by fire, it is hard to see why so many editors have pruned the exuberance of Theagenes by excising mention of Dionysus from his remarks. Cf. Parl. of the Gods, 6 (p. 425). ) by grace of the thunderbolt? Did not Empedocles end by leaping into the crater?”

When Theagenes[*](We learn elsewhere in this piece that Theagenes lived in Patras and had property worth fifteen talents, obtained by lending money. Bernays (Lucian und die Kyniker, pp. 13-18) is very likely right in thinking this to be the man whose death in Rome is described by Galen (Meth. Med., 13, 15: X, 909 Kiihn), but he makes rather too much of tha passage as an endorsement of Theagenes. ; )—for that was the bawler’s , name—said that, I asked a bystander, “What is the meaning of his talk about fire, and what have Heracles and Empedocles to do with Proteus?” “Before long,” he replied, “Proteus is going to burn himself up at the Olympic festival.” “How,” said I, “and why?” Then he undertook to tell me, but the Cynic was bawling, so that it was impossible to hear anyone else. I listened, therefore, while he flooded