Paideia

As for the ethical character of Lucian, if we may trust to his own representation of himself, it deserves high praise.

In the dream, among the superior advantages offered by Paideia, he gives prominent place to the virtues of justice, mildness, and reasonableness.

In his revived philosophers, he declares himself to be a hater of falsehood, of imposture of arrogance of pride a lover of truth of beauty of sincerity and all things lovely he abandoned the profession of the law from disgust for its iniquity or for the fraudulent methods of its practisers he engages as he declares in the war against falsehood quite conscious that he is fighting a desperate battle that the vast majority are against him in his biography of his friend demonax his appreciation of that superior cynic exhibits him as a sympathetic admirer of true worth in one department of morals on the assumption of his having been the author of the scandalous erotes loves he has been made the subject of undeserved censure for its tedious dulness and its frigid and sophisticated tone alike foreign to lucian's manner prove it to be spurious it has been sometimes objected to Lucian's philosophical claims that he made no attempt to build anew upon the ruins of the religious system overthrown by him.

But in the first place, systems of faith or morals already abounded ad nauseum, and to have erected another system of philosophy would have been only to add to the existing confusions.