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Unlucky Peregrinus, or, as he delighted to style himself, Proteus,Cf. Aulus Gellius, XII, 11: philosophum nomine Peregrinum, cui postea cognomentum Proteus factum est, virum gravem et constantem, etc. Lucian calls him Peregrinus Proteus in Demonax, 21 (I, p. 156), but simply Proteus the Cynic in adv. Indoct., 14 (III, p. 192), and he is Proteus to the Philostrati (cf. Vit. Soph. II, 1, 33 and for the elder Philostratus the title of his lost work Proteus the Cynic; or, the Sophist), to Tatian (Orat. ad Graecos, 25), and to Athenagoras (Legat. de Christian., 26). The name Peregrinus is used in Aulus Gellius, VIII, 3, Ammianus Marcellinus, X XIX, 1, 39, Tertullian ad Martyres, 4, and Eusebius, Chron., Vol. II, p. 170, Schéne. From the passage in Gellius cited above we can infer only that he did not hear the sobriquet Proteus when he was in Athens. The manner of its employment by Lucian is sufficient evidence that it did not originate with Lucian, or after the death of Peregrinus. It was probably applied to him towards the close of his career. That it bears a sense very like what Lucian attributes to it is clear from Maximus of Tyre, VIII, 1. In § 27 Lucian professes to have heard that he wanted to change it to Phoenix after his decision to immolate himself. has done exactly what Proteus in Homer did.The transformations of the sea-god in his effort to escape from Menelaus, who wanted to consult him, are told in the Odyssey, IV, 454-459. After turning into everything for the sake of notoriety and achieving any number of transformations, here at last he has turned into fire; so great, it seems, was the love of notoriety that eae be him. And now your genial friend has got imself carbonified after the fashion of Empedocles, except that the latter at least tried to escape observation when he threw himself into the crater,Of Aetna; it was said that the manner of his death remained unknown until the mountain cast up one of his golden sandals. while this gentleman waited for that one of the Greek festivals which draws the greatest crowds, heaped up a very large pyre, and leaped into it before all those witnesses; he even addressed the Greeks on the subject not many days before his venture.
