features, and another was the prophet's own marriage with the Goddess Selene. On the first day of these mysteries the following proclamation was made:—"If any atheist, Christian, or Epicurean has come to espy our holy rites, let him flee hence." Alexander then cried, "Turn out the Christians"; and the crowd responded in chorus, "Turn out the Epicureans." Lucian—who himself was friendly to the Epicureans—laid some ingenious traps for Alexander's oracle, and records some of the absurd answers which he received. On one occasion he personally visited Alexander at Abonoteichos:—
"On coming into the room," he says, "I found a throng of people about Alexander; but luckily I had brought two soldiers with me. He extended his hand for me to kiss, as usual; I pressed it to my lips, and gave it such a bite that I nearly maimed him. The bystanders were ready to beat or strangle me for the sacrilege; they had already been annoyed by my addressing him as 'Alexander,' and not as 'Prophet.' He, however, bore it right manfully, pacified them, and promised to render me quite docile, so as to illustrate the goodness of his god in softening the roughest natures. Then he ordered the rest to withdraw, and proceeded to remonstrate with me. 'What motive can you have,' he said, 'for treating us thus, when I could do so much to help you?' For my part," says Lucian, "I was only too glad to meet these advances, when I saw how narrow my escape had been; and presently I came out of the room on amicable terms with him—a fresh miracle in the eyes of his admirers."
In another of Lucian's pieces—the Philopseudes, or "lie-fancier"—there is, I think, an allusion to this interview. A person asks what it is that makes so many people take a positive pleasure in telling untruths; and his friend suggests the motive of
