eat. The highest of them are
no higher than my tunic; but they are high enough to trample on the
necks of those wretches who throw themselves on the ground before
them.

_Timotheus._ Was Alexander of Macedon no higher?

_Lucian._ What region of the earth, what city, what theatre, what
library, what private study, hath he enlightened? If you are silent, I
may well be. It is neither my philosophy nor your religion which casts
the blood and bones of men in their faces, and insists on the most
reverence for those who have made the most unhappy. If the Romans
scourged by the hands of children the schoolmaster who would have
betrayed them, how greatly more deserving of flagellation, from the
same quarter, are those hundreds of pedagogues who deliver up the
intellects of youth to such immoral revellers and mad murderers! They
would punish a thirsty child for purloining a bunch of grapes from a
vineyard, and the same men on the same day would insist on his
reverence for the subverter of Tyre, the plunderer of Babylon, and the
incendiary of Persepolis. And are these men teachers? are these men
philosophers? are these men priests? Of all the curses that ever
afflicted the earth, I think Alexander was the worst. Never was he in
so little mischief as when he was murdering his friends.

_Timotheus._ Yet he built this very city; a noble and opulent one when
Rome was of hurdles and rushes.

_Lucian._ He built it! I wish, O Timotheus! he had been as well
employed as the stone-cutters or the plasterers. No, no: the wisest of
architects planned the most beautiful and commodious of cities, by
which, under a rational government and equitable laws, Africa might
have been civilized to the centre, and the palm have extended her
conquests through the remotest desert. Instead of which, a dozen of
Macedonian thieves rifled a dying drunkard and murdered his children.
In process of time, another drunkard reeled hitherward from Rome, made
an easy mistake in mistaking a palace for a brothel, permitted a
stripling boy to beat him soundly, and a serpent to receive the last
caresses of his paramour.

Shame upon historians and pedagogues for exciting the worst passions
of youth by the display of such false glories! If your religion hath
any truth or influence, her professors will extinguish the promontory
lights, which only allure to breakers. They will be assiduous in
teaching the young and ardent that great abilities do not constitute
great men