Is the report true, father, that someone threw himself bodily into the fire, in the very face of the Olympic festivities, quite an elderly man, not a bad hand at such hocus-pocus? Selene told me, saying that she herself had seen him burning.

The Olympic games were timed to come at the full of the moon, and the cremation took place at moon-rise (Peregr., 36).

Yes, quite true, Apollo. If only it had never happened!

Was the old man so good? Was he not worthy of a death by fire?

Yes, that he was, very likely.

By dividing Apollo’s question and emphasising the negative in the second part, the translation seeks to reproduce the ambiguity of Zeus’s reply, which in the Greek is sufficiently subtle to have misled more than one scholar into the notion that Zeus (and therefore Lucian) is praising Peregrinus. Nothing could be farther from his (or Lucian’s) real thought, that the fellow deserved death. The ambiguity is of course deliberate, to foil and annoy “Scarabee” and his sort; cf. below, § 7.

But my point is that I remember having had to put up with a great deal of annoyance at the time on account of a horrid stench such as you might expect to arise from roasting human bodies. In fact, if I had not at once gone straight to Araby, I should have come to a sad end, you may depend on it, from the awfulness of the reek. Even as it was, amid all that fragrance and abundance of sweet scents, with frankincense in profusion, my nostrils hardly consented to forget and unlearn the taint of that odour; why, even now I almost retch at the memory of it!

What was his idea, Zeus, in doing that to himself, or what was the good of his getting incinerated by jumping into the blazing pyre?

Well, that criticism, my boy, you had better address first to Empedocles, who himself sprung into that crater in Sicily.

A terrible case of melancholia, that! But this man—what reason in the world did he have for wanting to do it?

I will repeat for you a speech of his own, which he delivered to the assembled pilgrims, defending himself before them for putting an end to himself.

He said, if my memory serves me—But who is this woman coming up in haste, excited and tearful, like someone suffering great wrongs? Stay, it is Philosophy, and she is calling upon me by name, in bitterness of spirit. Why the tears, my daughter? Why have you left the world and come here? Surely it cannot be that the common sort have once again combined against you as before, when they put Socrates to death through a charge brought by Anytus, and that you are fleeing from them for that reason?

Nothing of the sort, father. On the contrary, they—the multitude—spoke well of me and held me in honour, respecting, admiring, and all but worshipping me, even if they did not much understand what I said. But the others—how shall I style them?— those who say they are my familiars and friends and creep under the cloak of my name, they are the people who have done me the direst possible injuries.

Have the philosophers made a plot against you?

By no means, father. Why, they themselves have been wronged in common with me!

At whose hands, then, have you been wronged, if you have no fault to find either with the common sort or with the philosophers?

There are some, Zeus, who occupy a middle ground between the multitude and the philosophers. In deportment, glance, and gait they are like us, and similarly dressed; as a matter of fact, they want to be enlisted under my command and they enroll themselves under my name, saying that they are my pupils, disciples, and devotees. Nevertheless, their abominable way of living, full of ignorance, impudence, and wantonness, is no trifling outrage against me. Itis they, father, who have inflicted the wrongs that have made me flee.

This is a sad state of affairs, daughter. But in just what way have they wronged you?

See for yourself, father, whether the wrongs are trifling. When you observed that the life of man was full of wrongdoing and transgression because stupidity and high-handedness were ingrained in it, and disturbed it, you pitied humanity, harried as it was by ignorance, and therefore sent me down, enjoining me to see to it that they should stop wronging each other, doing violence, and living like beasts; that they should instead fix their eyes on the verities and manage their society more peaceably. Anyhow, you said to me in sending me down: “What men do and how they are affected by stupidity, daughter, you see for yourself. I pity them, and so, as I think that you alone might be able to cure what is going on, I have selected you from among us all and send you to effect the cure.”