RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Lucian the Martyr Luciau of Samosata
resolved to simulate the life of a great ascetic, and after a training in Egypt went to Rome, where he attracted great attention by his cynical freedom of speech, especially by his unmeasured attacks upon the mild and just emperor. The prefect of the city banished him, which only increased his fame. He went to Greece, and continued his assaults on the social order, choosing the great Olympic gatherings for special manifestations. At the third which he attended, finding his reputation declining, he announced that he would burn himself alive at the next; and this Lucian says he actually did, claiming to have been an eye-witness of the occurrence as well as part author of the legends which were soon spread abroad in relation to the Cynic's death. He closes by relating some further instances of the baseness of Peregrinus, which he asserts that he witnessed on a voyage from Troas to Syria.
A brief investigation of the historical basis for this story is now in order. There is no reason to doubt the existence of a Cynic philosopher named Peregrinus Proteus. The oldest notice of him is
possibly that of Aulus Gellius (xii. 11),
3. Histor- who met him at Athens and speaks
ical Basis well of him. His remarkable suicide
of the is mentioned by Athenagoras (" Apol-
Peregrinus. ogy," xxvi.; ANF, ii. 143), Tertullian
(Ad martyras, iv.; ANF, iii. 695), and Eusebius (Chron. ad ann. 2181; Marcus Aurelius, v.), as well as by Philostratus (Vitce sophistarum, II., i.) and Ammianus Marcellinus (XXIX., i. 39); there is no doubt that it caused a great sensation. A column was erected to him in his birthplace, and was supposed to be the seat of an oracle. Eusebius gives the date of his death as 165 a.d., and there is no reason to question this, or Lucian's statement that it was at the fourth Olympic meeting which he attended. The banishment from Rome would then fall at latest in 152-153; and the Christian episode between 140 and 150. That Tatian and the later apologists say nothing of his having been a Christian for a time is not surprising, even if they knew it. It is most unlikely that Lucian invented it; but it is, on the other hand, not probable that he got his details at first hand. Zahn's theory that he intended his account of the Cynic's death as a parody of Christian martyrdom will not hold. The whole point of the work, as directed against Cynicism, would be lost; and though Lucian knows that the Christians willingly give up their lives for their faith, so far from using this to explain the act of Peregrinus, he contrasts their sincere self-sacrifice with the mingled fear of death and mania for notoriety which he attributes to Peregrinus. Assuming the main facts — that Peregrinus was for a time a Christian, and as such was imprisoned, but afterward released, and that he later abandoned Christianity, it is worth while to see what Lucian knew of Christianity and what his judgment of it was, taking his sketch as a document belonging to about 170 and relating primarily to Syrian Christianity.
The Christians are, then, a religious association in which a man crucified in Palestine is venerated. He has brought into life " new mysteries," and as the first lawgiver of the sect has convinced his
followers that, when they have renounced the old gods and begun to worship him and live according to his laws, they are to consider them- 4. Lucian's selves as brothers. They are per- Knowledge suaded that they are immortal, whereof Chris- fore they despise death and meet it tianity. cheerfully and voluntarily. They consider all temporal goods as of small importance and hold them in common. They adhere closely to each other, and take incredible pains when any interest of the community is in question, considering it a general calamity when a brother is imprisoned. When Peregrinus was in prison, " very early in the morning aged widows and orphan children might be seen waiting near the place, and the leading men among them gained over the guards that they might pass the night with him. Many meals were sent in to him, their holy writings were read even from the cities of the province
of Asia came certain who were sent by the Christians in the name of their communities, to aid, defend, or comfort him." Every detail in this account might be paralleled in Christian literature from the first epistle of Clement to Tertullian, De jejunio, and the detail of the envoys from the cities of Asia Minor is confirmed by the epistles of Ignatius—though there is not the slightest evidence of any direct employment by Lucian of Christian sources. The fact is simply that Lucian has named the essential characteristics of the Christian body as they presented themselves to a clear-sighted, disinterested observer, thus strengthening the evidence presented by Christian writers. So far from relying on Christian documents, Lucian does not seem to know the Christian writers of the second century; the prisoner in Syria has as little in common with Ignatius as the death of Peregrinus has with the martyrdom of Polycarp. While one can not assert positively that Lucian never read a line of a Christian author, the proof that he did is not forthcoming. For all this, his knowledge of Christianity is not so " vague and superficial " as Keim would have us believe. He brings none of the customary charges against the Christians, not even that of hostility to the empire. Christianity seems to be in his eyes a harmless movement. He considers it, indeed, without any token of sympathy; but he, the accomplished mocker, does not mock at the simplicity of the Christians which the impostor turns to his account. He finds it of course absurd that they should adore the crucified " sophist "; but their unshaken consciousness of brotherhood under all trials and their contempt for death are mentioned only as characteristic differentiae. And it is these very Christians who, outside of the cultivated city-dwellers and the Epicureans, are the only people in the world to detect the hollowness of the pretentions of the false prophet Alexander of Abonoteichos; in fact, it is against them that the first denunciation of Alexander is uttered {Alexander, xxv., xxxviii.). In a word, in the Peregrinus, where he has poured out the fulness of his bitterest scorn upon the Cynics, he has contented himself with drawing an accurate picture of the Christians. It was not to be expected that he should set out to glorify them; what is remarkable
Lucidus Luckock