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ONE:Nothing, as Friedl?nder observes, shows so well what intense credulity prevailed at this time, with reference to phenomena of a marvellous description, as the success obtained by a celebrated impostor, Alexander of Abonuteichus, whose adventurous career may still be studied in one of Lucian��s liveliest pieces. Here it will be enough to mention225 that Alexander was a clever charlatan of imposing figure, winning manners, and boundless effrontery, who established himself in Abonuteichus, a small town in Paphlagonia, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, where he made a trade of giving oracles in the name of Ascl��pius. The god of healing was represented for the occasion by a large tame serpent fitted with a human head made of painted canvas and worked by horsehair strings. Sometimes the oracular responses were delivered by the mouth of the god himself. This was managed with the help of a confederate who spoke through a tube connected with the false head. Such direct communications were, however, only granted as an exceptional favour and for a high price. In most instances the answer was given in writing, and the fee charged for it only amounted to a shilling of our money. Alexander had originally fixed on Abonuteichus, which was his native place and therefore well known to him, as the seat of his operations, on account of the extraordinary superstition of its inhabitants; but the people of the adjacent provinces soon showed themselves to be nowise behind his fellow-townsmen in their credulity. The fame of the new oracle spread over all Asia Minor and Thrace; and visitors thronged to it in such numbers as sometimes to produce a scarcity of provisions. The prophet��s gross receipts rose to an average of 3,000l. a year, and the office of interpreting his more ambiguous responses became so lucrative that the two exeg��tes employed for this purpose paid each a talent a year (240l.) for the privilege of exercising it.It is not, then, surprising that the Academic and Peripatetic schools utterly failed to carry on the great movement inaugurated by their respective founders. The successors of Plato first lost themselves in a labyrinth of Pythagorean mysticism, and then sank into the position of mere moral instructors. The history of that remarkable revolution by which the Academy regained a foremost place in Greek thought, will form the subject of a future chapter: here we may anticipate so far as to observe that it was effected by taking up and presenting in its original purity a tradition of older date than Platonism, though presented under a new aspect and mixed with other elements by Plato. The heirs of Aristotle, after staggering on a few paces under the immense burden of his encyclopaedic bequest, came to a dead halt, and contented themselves with keeping the treasure safe until the time should arrive for its appropriation and reinvestment by a stronger speculative race.

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