398 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE ignorance, and saintliness especially offended him. He was intended by his father for a sculptor, but broke away into literature. He began as a rhetorical sophist of the ordinary sort, then found his real vocation in satirical dialogues, modelled on Plato in point of style, but with the comic element outweighing the philosophical. In the last years of his life he accepted a government office in Egypt, and resumed his rhetorical efforts. He is an important figure, both as representing a view of life which has a certain permanent value for all ages, and also as a sign of the independent vigour of Eastern Hellenism when it escaped from its stat« patronage or rebelled against its educational duties. In philosophy, which is apt to be allied with educa- tion, and which consequently flourished under the early Empire, there is a large and valuable literature extant. There are two great philosophic doctors. Galen was a learned and bright, though painfully voluminous, writer, as well as a physician, in the time of Augustus. Sextus Empiricus, a contemporary of Caligula, was a member of the Sceptic school ; his two sets of books Against the Mathentatici, or professors of general learn- ing, and Against the Dogmatici, or sectarian philo- sophers, are full of strong thought and interesting material. There are two philosophical geographers — Strabo in the Augustan age, Ptolemy in the time of Marcus. The former was strongest on the practical and historical side, while Ptolemy's works on geography and on astronomy are the most capable and scientific that have come down to us from ancient times. An- other ' geographus,' Pausanias, who wrote his Tour of Greece {nepirj'yr]ai<i EXd8o<i), in ten 'books, under the
