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All this is combined with the narratorial voice, dialect, and mannerisms of Herodotus – the Herodotus of ethnography and travelogue, especially of the Egyptian logos. First of all, the text is written in Herodotus’s dialect, literary Ionic. It is one of a number of texts which revive the elderly dialect in the imperial period (Lightfoot 2003: 91–97); they do so to show off, to recapture some of the literary prestige of the authors who wrote in it. Aretaeus, for example, a medical writer, revives the dialect of the Hippocratic corpus; Arrian also revives Ionic for the purposes of a specialist ethnographic monograph on India. What these texts show is that – although the twin processes of normalization and hypercorrection in the manuscript tradition have done their best to bewilder the scholar who would seek to determine what any given author originally wrote – there were numerous ways of breathing life back into Ionic, and one argument in favor of Lucian’s authorship is that the Ionic of DDS is closest to the Ionic forms in other certainly Lucianic texts and to that of another text, the Astrologia, which is also assigned to him, though again controversially.