andon. Again we see
them at their evening rendezvous, at the banquets where philosophers,
poets, sophists, painters, artists of every sort,--in fact, the whole
Bohemia of Athens,--gather round them. We get hints of all the stages of
the revel, from the sparkling wit and the jolly good-fellowship of the
early evening, to the sodden disgust that comes with daybreak when the
lamps are poisoning the fetid air and the remnants of the feast
are stale.

We are not to look upon the letters of Alciphron as embodying a literary
unity. He did not attempt to write one single symmetrical epistolary
romance; but the individual letters are usually slight sketches of
character carelessly gathered together, and deriving their greatest
charm from their apparent spontaneity and artlessness. Many of them
are, to be sure, unpleasantly cynical, and depict the baser side of
human nature; others, in their realism, are essentially commonplace; but
some are very prettily expressed, and show a brighter side to the
picture of contemporary life. Those especially which are supposed to
pass between Menander, the famous comic poet, and his mistress Glycera,
form a pleasing contrast to the greed and cynicism of much that one
finds in the first book of the epistles; they are true love-letters, and
are untainted by the slightest suggestion of the mercenary spirit or the
veiled coarseness that makes so many of the others unpleasant reading.
One letter (i. 6) is interesting as containing the first allusion found
in literature to the familiar story of Phryne before the judges, which
is more fully told in Athenaeus.

The imaginary letter was destined to play an important part in the
subsequent history of literature. Alciphron was copied by Aristaenetus,
who lived in the fifth century of our era, and whose letters have been
often imitated in modern times, and by Theophylactus, who lived in the
seventh century. In modern English fiction the epistolary form has been
most successfully employed by Richardson, Fanny Burney, and, in another
_genre_, by Wilkie Collins.

The standard editions of Alciphron are those of Seiler (Leipzig, 1856)
and of Hercher (Paris, 1873), the latter containing the Greek text with
a parallel version in Latin. The letters have not yet been translated
into English. The reader may refer to the chapter on Alciphron in the
recently published work of Salverte, 'Le Roman dans la Grece Ancienne'
(The Novel in Ancient Greece: Paris, 1893). Th