riend Timotheus, I think you are about seventy-five
years of age.

_Timotheus._ Nigh upon it.

_Lucian._ Seventy-five years, according to my calculation, are
equivalent to seventy-five gods and goddesses in regulating our
passions for us, if we speak of the amatory, which are always thought
in every stage of life the least to be pardoned.

_Timotheus._ Execrable!

_Lucian._ I am afraid the sourest hang longest on the tree. Mimnermus
says:

In early youth we often sigh
Because our pulses beat so high;
All this we conquer, and at last
We sigh that we are grown so chaste.

_Timotheus._ Swine!

_Lucian._ No animal sighs oftener or louder. But, my dear cousin, the
quiet swine is less troublesome and less odious than the grumbling and
growling and fierce hyena, which will not let the dead rest in their
graves. We may be merry with the follies and even the vices of men,
without doing or wishing them harm; punishment should come from the
magistrate, not from us. If we are to give pain to any one because he
thinks differently from us, we ought to begin by inflicting a few
smart stripes on ourselves; for both upon light and upon grave
occasions, if we have thought much and often, our opinions must have
varied. We are always fond of seizing and managing what appertains to
others. In the savage state all belongs to all. Our neighbours the
Arabs, who stand between barbarism and civilization, waylay
travellers, and plunder their equipage and their gold. The wilier
marauders in Alexandria start up from under the shadow of temples,
force us to change our habiliments for theirs, and strangle us with
fingers dipped in holy water if we say they sit uneasily.

_Timotheus._ This is not the right view of things.

_Lucian._ That is never the right view which lets in too much light.
About two centuries have elapsed since your religion was founded. Show
me the pride it has humbled; show me the cruelty it has mitigated;
show me the lust it has extinguished or repressed. I have now been
living ten years in Alexandria; and you never will accuse me, I think,
of any undue partiality for the system in which I was educated; yet,
from all my observation, I find no priest or elder, in your community,
wise, tranquil, firm, and sedate as Epicurus, and Carneades, and Zeno,
and Epictetus; or indeed in the same degree as some who were often
called forth into political and military life; Epaminondas, for
instance, and Pho