De Morte Peregrini

Lucian to Cronius. Greeting.

Poor dear Peregrine—or Proteus, as he loved to call himself,—has quite come up to his namesake in Homer. We have seen him under many shapes: countless have been his transformations for glory’s sake; and now—'tis his last appearance—we see him in the shape of fire. So vast was his ambition. Yes, Cronius; all that is left of the best of men is a handful of ashes, It’s just like Empedocles; only with a difference. That philosopher would fain have sneaked into his crater unobserved: not so our high-souled friend, He bides his time till all Greece is mustered in full force—constructs a pyre of the largest dimensions—and jumps on top in the eyes of all the world, having briefly addressed the nation a few days before on the subject of his daring enterprise!

I fancy I see you chuckling away at the old dotard; or rather I hear you blurting out the inevitable comments— 'Mere imbecility’ — ‘Mere clap-trap’ ‘Mere...’ everything else that we are accustomed to attribute to these gentry. But then you are far enough off to be comparatively safe: now I made my remarks before a vast audience, in the very moment of cremation (and before it for that matter), exciting thereby the indignation of all the old fool’s admirers, though there were a few who joined in the laugh against him. I can tell you, I was within an ace of being torn limb from limb by the Cynics, like Actaeon among the dogs, or his cousin Pentheus among the Maenads.—

But I must sketch you the whole drama in detail. As to our author, I say nothing: you know the man, you know the sublime utterances that marked his earthly course, outvoicing Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Well, the first thing I did when I got to Elis was to take

‘Proteus,’ he cried, ‘Proteus vain-glorious? Who dares name the word? Earth! Sun! Seas! Rivers! God of our fathers, Heracles! Was it for this that he suffered bondage in Syria? that he forgave his country a debt of a million odd? that he was cast out of Rome,—he whose brilliance exceeds the Sun, fit rival of the Lord of Olympus? ”Tis his good will to depart from life by fire, and they call it vain-glory!_ What other end had Heracles? Twas the thunderbolt, methinks, that slew Asclepius, Dionysus[*](The allusion to Dionysus is unexplained. The Greek requires a fiery death, not the fiery birth, for which see Dionysus and Semele in Notes.)? 'Twas in the crater that Empedocles sought death?’

Theagenes (our friend with the lungs) had got thus far, when I asked one of the bystanders what all this meant about ‘fire,’ and what Heracles and Empedocles had got to do with Proteus?—‘Proteus,’ he replied, ‘will shortly cremate himself, at the Olympic games.’—'But how,’ I asked, ‘and why?’ He did his best to explain, but the Cynic went on .awling, and it was quite out of the question to attend to anything else. I waited on to the end. It was one torrent of wild fanegyric on Proteus. The sage of Sinope, Antisthenes his master,—nay, Socrates himself—none of them were so much as to be compared with him. Zeus was invited to contend for the preeminence. Subsequently however it seemed advisable to leave the two on some sort of equality.