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Updated: June 11, 2025
I must say I think there is some excuse, Tychiades, both for your national liars and for the poets. The latter are quite right in throwing in a little mythology: it has a very pleasing effect, and is just the thing to secure the attention of their hearers. On the other hand, the Athenians and the Thebans and the rest are only trying to add to the lustre of their respective cities.
Why, have you ever known any one with such a strong natural turn for lying? Tychiades. Any number of them. Philocles. Then I can only say they must be fools, if they really prefer evil to good. Tychiades. Oh, that is not it. I could point you out plenty of men of first-rate ability, sensible enough in all other respects, who have somehow picked up this vice of romancing.
Do you still doubt, Tychiades, in the face of one convincing piece of evidence after another? 'God forbid! I cried; 'the doubter who should presume, thus to brazen it out in the face of Truth would deserve to have a golden sandal applied to him after the nursery fashion.
Now, Tychiades, if you had seen that, it would have been enough to convince you that there was something in incantations. 'Exactly, I replied. 'If I had seen it, I should have been convinced: as it is, you must bear with me if I have not your eyes for the miraculous. But as to Chrysis, I know her for a most inflammable lady.
In the opening of the Philopseudus, Lucian asks what it is that makes men so fond of a lie, and comments on their delight in romancing themselves, which is only equalled by the earnest attention with which they receive other people's efforts in the same direction. Tychiades goes on to describe his visit to Eucrates, a distinguished philosopher, who was ill in bed.
I must say, you have done well for your kind against the philosophers. And now look at it from the patron's point of view; does he get his money's worth? It strikes me the rich man does the kindness, confers the favour, finds the food, and it is all a little discreditable to the man who takes them. Si. Now, really, Tychiades, that is rather silly of you.
'Ah, but, Eucrates, said he, 'perhaps all that Tychiades means is, that a spirit only walks if its owner met with a violent end, if he was strangled, for instance, or beheaded or crucified, and not if he died a natural death.
Or if only he were made of wood instead of bronze, he might quite well be one of Daedalus's ingenious mechanisms you say he plays truant from his pedestal just like them and not the work of Demetrius at all. 'Take care, Tychiades; you will be sorry for this some day.
Take away the legendary treasures of Greece, and you condemn the whole race of ciceroni to starvation: sightseers do not want the truth; they would not take it at a gift. However, I surrender to your ridicule any one who has no such motive, and yet rejoices in lies. Tychiades. Very well: now I have just been with the great Eucrates, who treated me to a whole string of old wives' tales.
'Tychiades, if what I am now about to tell you is anything but the truth, then may I never have joy of these lads. It is well known to every one how fond I was of my sainted wife, their mother; and I showed it in my treatment of her, not only in her lifetime, but even after her death; for I ordered all the jewels and clothes that she had valued to be burnt upon her pyre.
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