Abstract

Adam Smith’s famous account of Hume’s death, in his letter to Strahan, included a reference to what Hume had been reading shortly before his death, Lucian’s “Dialogues of the Dead.” But when one reads those, one becomes puzzled by Smith’s report that Hume had been trying out excuses to delay death, for no such scene occurs in those Lucian dialogues. Fortunately Smith’s was not the only letter written about exactly what Lucian dialogue Hume was reading