In those sayings, I think, you get the man: perhaps a disciple only, and never actually a Master; perhaps never absolutely sure of himself, but only of his capacity and determination to do his duty day by day: his own duty, and not other men's:—never setting himself on a level with his Teacher; or thinking himself able, of his own abilities, to run the world, as Augustus had had the power and the mission to do,—but as probably no man might have had the power to do in Tiberius' time;—and by virtue of that faith, that high concentration on duty, carrying the world (but not Rome) through in spite of Rome, which had become then a thing incurable, nothing more than an infection and lamentable scab.

He left it altogether in his last years; its atmosphere and bitterness were too much for him. Form the quiet at Capri he continued to rule his provinces until the end; ever hoping that if he did his duty, someone or some spirit might arise in the senate to do theirs. Tacitus explains his retirement—as Roman society had explained it when it happened,—thus: Being then seventy-two years old, Tiberius, whose life up to that time had been irreproachable and untouched by gossip, went to Capri to have freedom and privacy for orgies of personal vice. But why did he not stay at Rome for his orgies: doing at Rome as the Romans did, and thereby perhaps earning a measure of popularity?

Over the bridge Augustus, western humanity had made the crossing; but on the further shore, there had to be a sacrifice to the Fates. Tiberius was the sacrifice. And that sacrifice was not in vain. We get one glimpse through provincial (and therefore undiseased) eyes of the empire he built up in the provinces. It is from Philo Judaeus, a Jewish Theosophist of Alexandria, who came to Rome in the reign of Caligula, Tiberius' successor. (Tiberius, it must be said, appointed no successor; there was none for him to appoint.) Caligula, says Philo,

"....succeeded to an empire that was well organized, tending everywhere to conceed—north, south, east, and west brought into friendship; Greeks and barbarians routed, soldiers and civilians linked together in the bonds of a happy peace."

That was the work of Tiberius.

In the Gospel narrative, Jesus is once made to allude to him; in the words quoted at the head of this paper: "Render unto Caesar"—who was Tiberius—"the things which are Caesar's" I think it is about time it should be done: that the wreath of honor should at last be laid on the memory of this brave, just, sane, and merciful man; this silent duty-doer, who would speak no word in his own defense; this Agent of the Gods, who endured all those years of crucifixion, that he might build up the Unity of Mankind.

Says Mr. Baring-Gould:

"In the galleries of Rome, of Naples, Florence, Paris, one sees the beautiful face of Tiberius, with that intellectual brow and sensitive mouth, looking pleadingly at the passer-by, as though seeking for someone who would unlock the secret of his story and vindicate his much aspersed memory."



XX. CHINA AND ROME: THE SEE-SAW

That mankind is a unit;—that the history of the world, however its waters divide,—whatever islands and deltas appear,—is one stream;—how ridiculous it is to study the story of one nation or group of nations, and leave the rest ignored, coming from your study with the impression (almost universal,) that all that counts of the history of the world is the history of your own little corner of it:—these are some of the truths we should have gathered from our survey of the few centuries we have so far glanced at. For take that sixth century B.C. The world seems all well split up. No one in China has ever heard of Greece; no one in Italy of India. What do the Greeks know about Northern Europe, or the Chinese about the Indians or Persians?—And yet we find in Italy, in Persia, in India, in China, men appearing,— phenomenal births,—evolved far above their fellows: six of them, to do the same work: Founders of Religions, all contemporary more or less; all presenting to the world and posterity the same high passwords and glorious countersigns. Can you conceive that their appearance, all in that one epoch, was a matter of chance? Is not some prearrangement suggested,—a put-up job, as they say: a definite plan formed, and a definite end aimed at? Then by whom? Can you escape the conclusion that, behind all this welter of races and separate histories aloof or barking at each other, there is yet somewhere, within the ringfence of humankind, incarnate or excarnate, One Center from which all the threads and currents proceed, and all the great upward impulses are directed?

Those Six Teachers came, and did their work; then two or three centuries passed; time enough for the seeds they sowed to sprout a little; and we come to another phase of history, a new region in time. High spiritual truth has been ingeminated in all parts of the world where the ancient vehicle of truth-dissemination (the Mysteries) has declined; A Teacher, a Savior, has failed to appear only in the lands north and west of Italy, because there among the Celts, and there alone, the Mysteries are still effective:—so you may say the seeds of spirituality have been well sown along a great belt stretching right across the Old World. Why? In preparation for what? For something, we may suppose. Certainly for something: for example, for the next two thousand five hundred years,—the last quarter, I would say, of a ten-millennium cycle, which was to end with a state of things in which every part of the world should be know to, and in communication with, every other part. So now in the age that followed that of the Six Teachers, in preparation for that coming time (our own), the attempt must be made to weld nations into unities. Nature and Law compel it: whose direction now is towards grand centripetalism, where before they had ordained heterogeneity and the scattering and aloofness of peoples.

But Those who sent out the great six Teachers have a hand to play here: they have to put the welding process through upon their own designs. They start at the fountain of the cyclic impulses, on the eastern rim of the world: as soon as the cycle rises there, they strike for the unification of nations. Then they follow the cycle westward. To West Asia?—Nothing could be done there, because this was the West Asian pralaya; those parts must wait for Mohammed. In Europe then,—Greece?—No; its time and vigor had passed; and the Greeks are not a building people. They must bide their time, then, till the wave hits Italy, and what they have done in China, attempt to do there.

Only, what they had done in China was a mere Ts'in Shi Hwangti,— because Laotse and Confucius had not failed spiritually to prepare the ground,—they must send forth Adept-souled Augustus and Tiberius to do,—if human wisdom and heroism could do it,—in Italy;—because Pythagoras' Movement had failed.

The Roman Empire was the European attempt at a China; China was the Asiatic creation of a Rome. We call the Asiatic creation, China, Ts'in-a; it may surprise you to know that they called the European attempt by the same name: Ta Ts'in, 'the Great Ts'in.' Put the words Augustus Primus Romae into Chinese, and without much straining they might read, Ta Ts'in Shi Hwangti. The whole period of the Chinese manvantara is, from the two-forties B.C. to the twelve-sixties A.D., fifteen centuries. The whole period of the Roman Empire, Western and Eastern, is from the forties B.C. to the Fourteen-fifties A.D., fifteen centuries. The first phase of the Chinese Empire, from Ts'in Shi Hwangti to the fall of Han, lasted about 460 years; the Western Roman Empire, from Pharsalus to the death of Honorius, lasted about as long. Both were the unifications of many peoples; both were overturned by barbarians from the north: Teutons in the one case, Tatars in the other. But after that overturnment, China, unlike Rome, rose from her ashes many times, and still endures. Thank the success of Confucius and Laotse; and blame the failure of Pythagoreanism, for that!

But come now; let me draw up their histories as it were in parallel columns, and you shall see the likeness clearly; you shall see also, presently, how prettily time and the laws that govern human incarnation played battledore and shuttlecock with the two: what a game of see-saw went on between the East and West.

From 300 to 250 B.C. there was an orgy of war in which old Feudal China passed away forever, and from which Ts'in emerged Mistress of the world. From 100 to 50 B. C. there was an orgy of war in which Republican Rome passed away forever, and out of which Caesar emerged World-Master. Caesar's triumph came just two centuries after Ts'in Shi Hwangti's accession; Kublai Khan the Turanian, who smashed China, came just about as much before Mohammed II the Turanian, who swept away the last remnant of Rome.

In the first cycles of the two there is a certain difference in procedure. In China, a dawn twilight of half a cycle, sixty-five years, from the fall of Chow to the Revival of Literature under the second Han, preceded the glorious age of the Western Hans. In Rome, the literary currents were flowing for about a half-cycle before the accession of Augustus: that half-cycle formed a dawn-twilight preceding the glories of the Augustan Age.

It was just when the reign of Han Wuti was drawing towards a sunset a little clouded,—you remember Ssema Ts'ien's strictures as to the national extravagance and its results,—that the Crest-Wave egos began to come in in Rome. Cicero, eldest of the lights of the great cycle of Latin literature, would have been about twenty when Han Wuti died in 86. We counted the first "day" of the Hans as lasting from 194 (the Revival of the Literature) to the death of Han Wuti's successor in 63; in which year, as we saw, Augustus was born. During the next twenty years the Crest-Wave was rolling more and more into Rome: where we get Julius Caesar's career of conquest;— it was a time filled with wine of restlessness, and, you may say, therewith 'drunk and disorderly.' Meanwhile (from 61 to 49) Han Suenti the Just was reigning in China. His "Troops of justice" became, after a while, accustomed to victory; but in defensive wars. Here it was a time of sanity and order, as contrasted with the disorder in Rome; of pause and reflexion compared with the action and extravagance of the preceding Chinese age. It was Confucian and ethical; no longer Taoist and daringly imaginative; Confucianism began to consolidate its position as the state system. So in England Puritan sobriety followed Elizabethanism. Han Wuti let nothing impede the ferment of his dreams: Han Suenti retrenched, and walked quietly and firmly. His virtues commanded the respect of Central Asia: the Tatars brought him their disputes for arbitration, and all the regions west of the Caspian sent him tribute. China forwent her restless and gigantic designs, and took to quietude and grave consideration.—So we may perhaps distribute the characteristics of these two decades thus between the three great centers of civilization: in China, the stillness that follows an apex time; in India, creation at its apex; in Rome, the confusion caused by the first influx of Crest-Wave Souls.

As Octavian rose to power, the House of Han declined. We hear of a gorging Vitellius on the throne in the thirties; then of several puppets and infants during the last quarter of the century; in A.D. 1, of the dynasty overthrown by a usurper, Mang Wang, who reigned until A.D. 25. Thus the heyday of Augustan Rome coincides with the darkest penumbra of China. Then Kwang-wuti, the eldest surviving Han prince, was reinstated; but until two years before the death of Tiberius, he had to spend his time fighting rebels. Now turn to Rome.

While Han Kwang-wuti was battling his way towards the restitution of Han glories, Tiberius, last of the Roman Crest-Wave Souls, was holding out grimly for the Gods until the cycle should have been completed, and he could say that his and their work was done. For sixty-five years he and his predecessor had been welding the empire into one: now, that labor had been so far accomplished that what dangerous times lay ahead could hardly imperil it. So far it had been a case of Initiate appointing Initiate to succeed him: Augustus, Tiberius;—but whom should Tiberius appoint? There was no one. The cycle was past, and for the present Rome was dead; and on the brink of that unfortunate place to which (they say) the wicked dead must go. Tiberius finally had had to banish Agrippina, her mischief having become too importunate. You remember she was the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, and Germanicus' widow. His patience with her had been marvelous. Once, at a public banquet, to do her honor he had picked a beautiful apple from the dish, and handed it to her: with a scowl and some ostentation, she gave it to the attendant behind her, as who should say: 'I know your designs; but you do not poison me this time'; all present understood her meaning well. Once, when he met her in the palace, and she passed him with some covert insult, he stopped, laid a hand on her shoulder, and said: "My little woman, it is no hurt to you that you do not reign." But his patience only encouraged her in her machinations; and at last he was compelled to banish her. Also to keep one of her sons in strictest confinement; of which the historians have made their for him discreditable tale: the truth is, it was an heroic effort on his part to break the boy of his vices by keeping him under close and continuous supervision. But that is more easily said than done, sometimes; and this Drusus presently died a madman. He then took the youngest son of Agrippina to live with him at Capri; that he, Tiberius, might personally do the best with him that was to be done; for he foresaw that this youth Caius would succeed him; his own grandson, Tiberius Gemellus, being much younger. He foresaw, too, that Caius, once on the throne, would murder Gemellus; which also happened. But there was nothing to be done. Had he named his grandson his successor, a strong regent would have been needed to carry things through until that successor's majority, and to hold the Empire against the partisans of Caius. There was no such strong man in sight; so, what had to come, had to come. Apres lui le deluge: Tiberius knew that. Le deluge was the four years' terror of the reign of Caius, known as Caligula; who, through no good will of his own, but simply by reason of his bloodthirsty mania, amply revenged the wrongs done his pedecessor. Karma put Caligula on the throne to punish Rome.

The reign was too short, even if Caligula had troubled his head with the provinces, for him to spoil the good work done in them during the preceding half-cycle. He did not so trouble his head; being too busy murdering the pillars of Roman society. Then a gentleman who had been spending the afternoon publicly kissing his slippers in the theater, experienced, as they say, a change of heart, and took thought to assassinate him on the way home; whereupon the Praetorians, let loose and having a thoroughly good time, happened on a poor old buffer of the royal house by the name of Claudius; and to show their sense of humor, made him emperor tout de suite. The senate took a high hand, and asserted its right to make those appointments; but Claudius and the Praetorians thought otherwise; and the senate, after blustering, had to crawl. They besought him to allow them the honor of appointing him.—what a difference the mere turn of a cycle had made: from Augustus bequeathing the Empire to Tiberius, ablest man to ablest man, and all with senatoral ratification; to the jocular appointment by undisciplined soldiery of a sad old laughingstock to succeed a raging maniac.

Claudius was a younger brother of Germanicus; therefore Tiberius' nephew, Caligula's uncle, and a brother-in-law to Agrippina. Mr. Baring-Gould says that somewhere deep in him was a noble nature that had never had a chance: that the soul of him was a jewel, set in the foolish lead of a most clownish personality. I do not know; certainly some great and fine things came from him; but whether they were motions of his own soul (if he had one), or whether the Gods for Rome's sake took advantage of his quite negative being, and prompted it to their own purposes, who can say?—Sitting down, and keeping still, and saying nothing, the old man could look rather fine, even majestic; one saw traces in him of the Claudian family dignity and beauty. But let hm walk a few paces, and you noted that his feet dragged and his knees knocked together, and that he had a paunch; and let him get interested in a conversation, and you heard that he first spluttered, and then roared. Physical wakness and mental backwardness had made him the despair of Augustus: he was the fool of the family, kept in the background, and noticed by none. Tiberius, in search of a successor, had never thought of him; had rather let things go to mad Caligula. He had never gone into society; never associated with men of his own rank; but chose his companions among small shopkeepers and the 'Arries and 'Arriets of Rome, who, 'tickled to death' at having a member of the reigning family to hobnob with them in their back-parlors, would refrain from making fun of his peculiatities. Caligula had enjoyed using him as a butt, and so had spared his life. He had never even learned to behave at table: and so, when he came to the throne, made a law that table-manners should no longer be incumbent on a Roman gentleman. All this is recorded of him; one would hardly believe it, but that his portraits bear it out.*

——— * The accounts of Claudius and Nero are from The Tragedy of the Caesars, by S. Baring-Gould. ———

For all that he did well at first. He made himself popular with the mob, cracking poor homely jokes with them at which they laughed uproariously. He paid strict attention to business: made some excellent laws; wisely extended Roman citizenship among the subject peoples; undertook and pushed through useful public works. Rome was without a decent harbor: corn from Egypt had to be transshipped at sea and brought up the Tiber in lighters; which resulted in much inconvenience, and sometimes shortage of food in the city. Claudius went down to Ostia and looked about him; and ordered a harbor dredged out and built there on a large scale. The best engineers of the day said it was impossible to do, and would not pay if done. But the old fool stuck to his views and made them get to work; and they found it, though difficult and costly, quite practicable; and when finished, it solved the food problem triumphantly. This is by way of example.—Poor old fool! it was said he never forgot a kindness, or remembered an injury. He came soon, however, to be managed by various freedmen and rascals and wives; all to the end that aristocratic Rome should be well punished for its sins. One day when he was presiding in the law courts, someone cried out that he was an old fool,—which was very true.—and threw a large book at him that cut his face badly,—which was very unkind. And yet, all said, through him and through several fine and statesmanlike measures he put through, the work of Augustus and Tiberius in the empire at large was in many ways pushed forward: he did well by the provinces and the subject races, and carried on the grand homogenization of the world.

He reigned thirteen years; then came Nero. If one accepts the traditional view of him, it is not without evidence. His portraits suggest one ensouled by some horrible elemental; one with no human ego in him at all. The accounts given of his moods and actions are quite credible in the light of the modern medical knowledge as to insanity; you would find men like Tacitus Nero in most asylums. Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius was in the habit of taking science as a guide in their transcriptions; they did not, in dealing with Tiberius for example, suit their facts to the probabilities, but just set down the worst they had heard said. What they record of him is unlikely, and does not fit in with his known actions. But in drawing Nero, on the contrary, they made a picture that would surprise no alienist. Besides, Tacitus was born some seventeen years after Tiberius died; but he was fourteen years old at the death of Nero, and so of an age to have seen for himself, and remembered. Nero did kill his mother, who probably tried to influence him for good; and he did kill Seneca, who certainly did. His reign is a monument to the rottenness of Rome; his fall, a proof, perhaps, of the soundness of the provinces. For when they felt the shame of his conduct, they rose and put him down; Roman Gaul and Germany and Spain and the East did. Here is a curious indication: Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, who made such a sorry thing of the two years (68 and 69) they shared in the Principate, had each done well as a provincial governor. In the provinces, then, the Tiberian tradition of honest efficient government suffered not much, if any, interruption. The fact that Rome itself stood the nine years of Nero's criminal insanity,—and even, so far as the mob was concerned, liked it (for his grave was long kept strewn with flowers)—shows what a people can fall to, that the Crest-Wave had first made rotten, and then left soulless.

By the beginning of 70, things were comfortably in the hands of Vespasian, another provincial governor; under whom, and his son Titus after him, there were twelve years of dignified government; and seven more of the same, and then seven or eight of tyranny, under his second son, Domitian. Against the first two of these Flavians nothing is to be said except that the rise of their house to the Principate was by caprice of the soldiery. Vespasian was an honest Sabine, fond of retiring to his native farm; he brought in much good provincial blood with him into Roman society.—Then in 96 came a revolution which placed the aged senator Nerva on the throne; who set before himself the definite policy—as it was intended he should—of replacing personal caprice by legality and constitutionalism as the instrument of government. He reigned two years, and left the empire to Trajan; who was strong enough as a general to hold his position, and as a statesman, to establish the principles of Nerva. And so things began to expand again; and a new strength became evident, the like of which had not been seen since (at least) the death of Tiberius.

Octavian returned to Rome, sole Master of the world, in B.C. 29. A half-cycle on from that brings us to 36 A.D., the year before Tiberius died: that half-cycle was one, for the Empire all of it, and for Rome most of it, of bright daylight. The next half-cycle ends in 101, in the third year of Trajan: a time, for the most part, of decline, of twilight. You will notice that the Han day lasted the full thirteen decades before twilight came; the Roman, but six decades and a half.

We ought to understand just how far this second Roman half-cycle was an age of decline: just how much darkneww suffused the twilight it was. We talk of representative government; as if any government were ever really anything else. Men get the government that represents them; that represent their intelligence, or their laxity, or their vices:—whether it be sent in by the ballot or by a Praetorian Guard with their caprice and spears. In a pralayic time there is no keen national consciousness, no centripetalism. There was none in Rome in those days; or not enough to counteract the centrifugalism that simply did not care. The empire held together, because Augustus and Tiberius had created a centripetalism in the provinces; and these continued in the main through it all to enjoy the good government the first two emperors had made a tradition in them, and felt but little the hands of the fools or madmen reigning in Rome. And then, blood from the provinces was always flowing into Rome itself; particularly in the Flavian time; and supplied or fed a new centripetalism there which righted things in the next half-cycle. It was Rome, not the provinces, that Nero and Caligula represented in their day; the time was transitional; you may call Otho and Vitellius the first bungling shots of the provinces at having a hand in things at the center; wholesome Vespasian was their first representative emperor: Nerva and those that followed him represented equally the provinces and a regenerated Rome.—This tells you what Nero's Rome was, and how it came to tolerate Nero; when Vitellius came in with his band of ruffians from the Rhine, and the streets flowed with blood day after day, the places of low resort were as full as ever through it all; while carnage reigned in the forums, riotous vice reigned within doors.

But look outside of Rome, and the picture is very different. The Spaniard, Gaul, Illyrian, Asiatic and the rest, were enjoying the Roman Peace. There was progress; if not at the center, everywhere between that and the periphery of civilization. Life, even in Italy (in the country parts) was growing steadily more cultured, serious, and dignified; and in all remote regions was assimilating its standards to the best in Italy. From the Scottish Lowlands to the Cataracts of the Nile a single people was coming into being; it was a wide and well-tilled field in which incarnate souls might grow. The satirists make lurid pictures of the evils Rome; and the evils were there, with perhaps not much to counter-balance them, in Rome. Paris has been latterly the capital of civilization; and one of its phases as such has been to be the capital of the seven deadly sins. The sins are or were there: Paris provided for the sinners of the world, in her capacity of world-metropolis; just as she provided for the artists, the litteratuers, and so on. Foolish people drew from that the conclusion that therefore Frenchmen were more wicked than other people: whereas in truth the life of provincial France all along has probably been among the soundest of any. So we must offset Martial's and Juvenal's pictures of the calm and gracious life in the country: virtuous life, often, with quiet striving after usefulness and the higher things. He reveals to us, in the last quarter of the century, interiors in northern Italy, by Lake Como; you should have found the like anywhere in the empire. And where, since Rome fell, shall you come on a century in which Britain, Gaul, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Asia and Africa, enjoyed a Roman or any kind of peace? Be not deceived: there has been no such success in Europe since as the empire that Augustus the Initiate made, and for which Tiberius his disciple was crucified.

Yet they captured it, as I find things, out of the jaws of failure and disaster. Failure: that of Pythagoreanism six centuries before;—disaster: Caesar's conquest of Gaul and destruction of the Mysteries there. Men come from the Masters of the World to work on this plane or on that: to found an empire perhaps, or to start a spiritual movement. Augustus came commissioned to the former, not to the latter, work. Supposing in his time the Gaulish Mysteries had been intact. We may trust him to have established relations somehow: he would have had close and friendly relations with the Gaulish hierophants; even if he had conquered the people, he would not have put out their light. But I imagine he would have found a means to union without conquest. Then what would have happened? We have seen that the cyclic impulse did touch Gaul at that time; it made her vastly rich, hugely industrial;—as Ferero says, the Egypt of the West. That, and nothing better than that, because she had lost her spiritual center, and might not figure as the world Teacher among nations. But, you say, Augustus proscribed Druidism—which sounds like carrying on Julius' nefarious work. He did, I believe;—but why? Because Julius had seen to it that the white side of Druidism had perished. The Druids were magicians; and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained among them,—at least in Gaul. So of course Augustus proscribed it.

Remember how France has stood, these last seven centuries, as the teacher of the arts and civilization to Europe; and this idea that she might have been, and should have been, something far higher to the Roman world, need not seem at all extravagant. I think it was a possibility; which Caesar had been sent by the kings of night to forestall. And so, that Augustus lacked that reinforcement by which he might have secured for Europe a unity as enduring as the Chinese Teachers secured for the Far East.

And yet the Lodge did not leave Rome lightless; there was much spiritual teaching in the centuries of the Empire; indeed, a new out-breathing in each century, as an effort to retrieve the great defeat;—and this has been the inner history of europe ever since. This: raidings from the Godworld: swift cavalry raidings, that took no towns as a rule, nor set up strongholds here on hell's border; yet did each time, no doubt, carry off captives. Set up no strongholds;—that is, until our own times; so what we have missed is the continuous effort; the established base 'but here upon this bank and shoal,' from which the shining squadrons of the Gods might ride. Such a base was lost when Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be found. It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say, abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but the membra disjecta of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished age. With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work, distilling out of them what they might of the ancient Theosophy. So latterly H.P. Blavasky must gather up fragments in the East for the nexus of her teaching; she must find seeds in old sarcophagi, and plant and make them grow in this soil so uncongenial; because there was no well-grown Tree patent to the world, with whose undeniable fruitage she might feed the nations. This was one great difficulty in her way; whe had to introduce Theosphy into a world that had forgotten it ever existed.

So,—but with a difference,—in that first century. The difference was that Pythagoreanism, the nexus, was only six hundrd years away, and the memory of it fairly fresh. Stoicism was the most serious living influence within the empire; a system that concerned itself with right and brave living, and was so far spiritual; but perhaps not much further. The best in men reacted against the sensuality of the mid-century, and made Stoicism strong; but this formed only a basis of moral grit for the higher teaching; of which, while we know it was there, there is not very much to say. I shall come to it presently; meanwhile, to something else.—In literature, this was the cycle of Spain: the Crest-Wave was largely there during the first thirteen decades of the Christian era. Seneca was born in Cordova about 3 B. C.; Hadrian, the last greatman of Spanish birth (though probably of Italian race), died in 138. Seneca was a Stoic: a man with many imperfections, of whom history cannot make up its mind wholly to approve. He was Nero's tutor and minister during the first five golden years of the reign; his government was wise and beneficent, though, it is said, sometimes upheld by rather doubtful means. In the growing gloom and horror of the nightmare reign of Nero, he wrote many counsels of perfection; his notes rise often, someone has said, to a sort of falsetto shriek; but then, the wonder is he could sing at all in such a hell's cacophony. A man with obvious weaknesses, perhaps; but fighting hard to be brave and hopeful where there was nothing in sight to encourage bravery or foster hope; when every moment was pregnant with ghastly possibilities; when death and abominable torture hobnobbed in the Roman streets with riots of disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings; deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions, and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril: he might even, had he been another man, have made himself emperor; perhaps the worst thing against him is that he did not. His counsels and aspirations were much better than his deeds;—which is as much as to say his Higher Self than his lower. He stood father-confessor to Roman Society: a Stoic philosopher in high, luxurious, and most perilous places: he cannot escape looking a little unreal. Someone in some seemingly petty difficulties, writes asking him to sue his influence on his behalf; and he replies with a dissertation on death, and what good may lie in it, and the folly of fearing it. Cold comfort for his correspondent; a tactless, strained, theatrical thing to do, we may call it. But what strain upon his nerves, what hideous knowledge of the times and of evils he did not see his way to prevent, what haunting sense of danger, must have driven him to that fervid hectic eloquence that now seems so unnatural! One guesses there may be a place in the Pantheons or in Valhalla of the heroes for this poor not untawdry not unheroic Seneca. One sees in him a kind of Hamlet, hitting in timorous indecision on the likely possibility of converting his Claudius by a string of moral axioms and eloquence to a condition that should satisfy the Ghost and undo the something rotten in the state.... Yet the Gods must have been grateful to him for the work he did in holding for Stoicism and aspiration a center in Rome during that dreadful darkness. Perhaps only the very strongest, in his position, could have done better; and then perhaps only by killing Nero.*

——— * Dill: Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. ———

But there was a greater than Seneca in Rome, even in Nero's reign;—there intermittently, and not to abide: Appollonius of Tyana, presumably the real Messenger of the age:—and by the change that had come over life by the second century, we may judge how great and successful. But there is not getting at the reality of the man now. We have a Life of him, written about a hundred years after his death by Philostratus, a Greek sophist, for the learned Empress Julia Domna, Septimius Severus' wife; who, no doubt, chose for the work the best man to hand; but the age of great literature was past, and Philostratus resurrects no living soul. The account may be correct enough in outline; the author was painstaking; visited the sites of his subject's exploits, and pressed his inquiries; he claims to have based his story on the work of Damis of Neneveh, a disciple of Apollonius who accompanied him everywhere. But much is fabulous: there is a gorgeous account of dragons' in India, and the methods used in hunting them; and you know nothing of the real Apollonius when you have read it all. Here, in brief, is the outline of the story: Apollonius was born at Tyana in Cappodocia somewhere about the year 1 A.D., and died in the reign of Nerva at nearly a hundred: tradition ascribed to his birth its due accompaniment of signs and portents. At sixteen he set himself under Pythagorean discipline; kept silence absolute for five years; traveled, healing and teaching, and acquired a great renown throughout Asia Minor. He went by Babylon and Parthia to India; spent some time there as the pupil of certain Teachers on a sacred mountain; they, it appears, expected his coming, received him and taught him; ever afterwards he spoke of himself as a disciple of the Indian Master Iarchus. Nothing in the book is more interesting than the curious light it throws on popular beliefs of the time in the Roman World as to the existence of these Indian masters of the Secret Wisdom;—India, of course, included the region north of the Himalayas. Later he visited the Gymnosophists of the Tebaid in Egypt; according to the account, these were of a lower standing than the Indian Adepts; and Apollonius came among them not as a would-be disciple, but as an equal, or superior.—He was persecuted in Rome by Nero; but over awed Tigellinus, Nero's minister, and escaped. He met Vespasian and Titus at Alexandria, soon after the fall of Jerusalem; and was among those who urged Vespasian to take the throne. He was arrested in Rome by Domitian, and tried on charges of sorcery and treason; and is said to have escaped his sentence and execution by the simple expedient of vanishing in broad daylight in court. One wonders why this from his defense before Domitian, as Philostratus gives it, has not attracted more comment; he says: "All unmixed blood is retained by the heart, which through the blood-vessels sends it flowing as if through canals over the entire body."—According to tradition, he rose from the dead, appeared to several to remove their doubts as to a life beyond death, and finally bodily ascended into heaven. Reincarnation was a very cardinal point in his teaching; perhaps the name of Neo-Pythagoreanism, given to his doctrine, is enough to indicate in what manner it illuminated the inner realms and laws which Stoicism, intent only on brave conduct and the captaincy of one's own soul, was unconcerned to inquire into. Another first century Neo-Pythagorean Teacher was Moderatus of Gades in Spain. The period of Apollonius's greatest influence would have corresponded with the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, from 69 to 83; the former, when he came to the throne, checked the orgies of vice and brought in an atmosphere in which the light of Thesophy might have more leave to shine. The certainty is that the last third of the first century wrought an enormous change: the period that preceded it was one of the worst, and the age that followed it, that of the Five Good Emperors, was the best, in known European history.—Under the Flavians, from 69 to 96,—or roughly, during the last quarter,—came the Silver Age, the second and last great day of Latin literature: with several Spanish and some Italian names,—foam of the Crest-Wave, these latter, as it passed over from Spain to the East. It will, by the way, help us to a conception of the magnitude of the written material at the disposal of the Roman world, to remember that Pliny the Elder, in preparing his great work on Natural History, consulted six thousand published authorities. That was in the reign of Nero; it makes one feel that those particular ancients had not so much less reading matter at their command than we have today.

Of the great Flavian names in literature, we have Tacitus; Pliny the Younger, with his bright calm pictures of life; Juvenal, with his very dark ones: these were Italians. Juvenal was a satirist with a moral purpose; the Spaniard Martial, contemporary, was a satirist without one. Martial drew from life, and therefore his works, though coarse, are still interesting. We learn from him what enormous activity in letters was to be found in those days in his native Spain; where every town had its center of learning and apostles and active propaganda of culture. Such things denote an ancient cultural habit, lapsed for a time, and then revived.

Another great Spainiard, and the best man in literature of the age, was Quintilian: gracious, wise, and of high Theosophic ideals, especially in education. He was born in A.D. 35; and was probably the greatest literary critic of classical antiquity. For twenty years, from 72 until his death, he was at the head of the teaching profession in Rome. The "teaching" was, of course, in rhetoric. Rome resounded with speech-makings; and Gaul, Spain, and Africa were probably louder with it than Rome. Though the end of education then was to turn out speech-makers,—as it is now to turn out money-makers,—I do not see but that the Romans had the best of it,—Quintilian saw through all to fundamental truths; he taught that your true speech-maker must be first a true man. He went thoroughly into the training of the orator,—more thoroughly, even from the standpoint of pure technique, than any other Greek or Roman writer;—but would base it all upon character, balance of the faculties,—in two words, Raja-Yoga. Pliny the Younger was among his pupils, and owed much to him; also is there to prove the value of Quintilian's method;—for Quintilian turned out Pliny a true gentlman. Prose in those days,—that is, rhetoric,—was tending ever more to flamboyancy and extravagance: a current which Quintilian stood against valiantly. We find in him, as critic, just judgment, sane good taste, wide and generous sympathies;—a tendency to give the utmost possible credit even where compelled in the main to condemn;—as he was in the case of Senaca. He had the faculty of hitting off in a phrase the whole effect of a man's style; as when he speaks of the "milky richness of Livy," and the "immortal swiftness of Sallust." *

——— * Encyclopaedia Britannica; article 'Quintilian' ———

So then, to sum up a little: I think we gain from these times a good insight into cyclic workings. First, we shall see that the cycles are there, and operative: action and reaction regnant in the world,—a tide in the affairs of men; and strong souls coming in from time to time, to manipulate reactions, to turn the currents at strategic points in time; making things, despite what evils may be ahead, flow on to higher levels than their own weight would carry them to: thus did Augustus and Tiberius; —or throwing them down, as the merry Julius did, from bright possibilities to a sad and lightless actuality. For perhaps we have been suffering because of Julius' exploit ever since; and certainly, no matter what Neros and Caligulas followed them, the world was a long time the better for the ground the great first two Principes captured from hell.—And next, we shall learn to beware of being too exact, precise, and water-tight with out computations and conceptions of these cycles: we shall see that nature works in curves and delicate wave-lines, not in broken off bits and sudden changes. Rome was going down in Tiberius' reign: she was bad enough then, heaven knows; though we may put her passing below the meridian at or near the end of it;— conveniently, in the year 36. And then, what with (1) the tenseness of the gloom and the severity of suffering in the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian;—and (2) the inflow of new and cleaner blood from the provinces at all times but especially under Vespasian; and above all, (3) the Theosophic impulse whose outward visible sign is the mission of Apollonius and Moderatus:—we find her ready to emerge into light in 96, when Nerva came to the throne, instead of having to wait the five more years for the end of the half-cycle;—although we may well suppose it took that time at least for Nerva and Trajan to clear things up and settle them. So we may keep this scheme of dates in memory as indicative: a (rough) half-cycle before 29 B.C., that of dawn and darkest hour preceding it; 29 B.C. to 36 A.D. daylight; 36 to 101, night and the beginnings of a new dawn.

And now we must turn to China.

Dusk came on in Rome with the death of Tiberius in A.D. 37; but what is dusk in the west is dawn in the east of the world. In 35 Han Kwang-wuti had put down the Crimson-Eyebrow rebellion, and seated himself firmly on the throne. The preceding half-cycle, great in Rome under Augustus and Tiberius, had been a time, first of puppet emperors, then of illegalism and usurpation, then of civil war. Han Kwang-wuti put an end to all that, and opened, in 35, a new cycle of his own.

But there is also an old cycle to be taken into account: the original thirteen-decade period of the Hans, that began in 194, and ended its first "day" in 63 or so,—to name convenient dates. I should, if I believed in this cyclic law, look for a recurrence of that: a new day to dawn, under its influence, in 66 or 67 A.D., thirteen decades after the old one ended,—and to last until 196 or 197. But on the other hand, here is Han Kwang-wuti starting things going in 35, a matter of thirty-two years ahead of time,—catching the flow of force just as it diminished in Rome.—And this thirty-two years, you may note, with what odd months we may suppose thrown in, is in itself a quarter-cycle.

Now cyclic impulses waste; a second day of splendor will commonly be found a Silver Age, where the first was Golden: it will often be more perfect and refined, but much less vigorous, than the first. So I should look for the second "day" of the Hans to come on the whole with less light to shine and less strength to endure than its predecessor; I should expect a gentleness as of late afternoon in place of the old noontide glory. But then there is the complication induced by Han Kwang-wuti, who started his cycle in 35.... or more probably his half-cycle;—I should look for it to be no more than that, on account of this same wastage of the forces;—this also has to be taken into consideration.

Brooding over the whole situation, I should foretell the history of this second Han Dynasty in this way: from 35 to 67,—the latter date the point where the old and new cycles intersect,— would be a static time: of consolidation rather than expansion; of the gathering of the wave, not of its outburst into any splendor of foam. Between 67 and 100, or when the two cycles coincide, I should look for great things and doings; for some echo or repetition of the glories of Han Wuti,—perhaps for a finishing and perfecting of his labors. From then on till 197 I should expect static, but weakening conditions: static mainly till 165, weakening rapidly after. Advise me, please, if this is clear.—Well, if you have followed so far, you have a basis for understanding what is to come.

The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kwang-wuti, is known as that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason:—just as late in the days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia,— Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium,—so was Han Kwang-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west, eastward to Loyang or Honanfu,—the old Chow capital,—in Honan.

While Rome was weltering under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, China was recovering herself, getting used to a calm equanimity, under Haii Kwang-wuti: the conditions in the two were as opposite as the poles. She dwelt in quietness at home, and held her own, and a little more, on the frontiers. In 57, two years before Nero went mad and took the final plunge into infamy, Han Kwang-wuti died, and Han Mingti succeeded him. As Nero went down, Han Mingti went up. His ninth or tenth year, remember, was to be that of the recurrence of the old Han cycle. It was the year in which the provinces rose against Nero,—the lowest point of all in Rome. I do not know that it was marked by anything special in China; the fact being that all the Chinese sixties were momentous.

In the third Year of his reign Han Mingti dreamed a dream: he saw a serene and "Golden Man" descending towards him out of the western heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he spoke of it, the Golden God worshiped in the West,—the Buddha. Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin Shi Hwangti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:— he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in the night, and opened all doors for their escape. Buddhist scriptures, probably, were among the books destroyed at the great Burning. So there may have been Buddhists in China all through the Han time; but if so, they were few, isolated and inconspicuous; it is Han Mingti's proper glory, to have brought Buddhism in.

He liked well his brother's interpretation, and sent inquirers into the west. In 65 they returned, with scriptures, and an Indian missionary, Kashiapmadanga,—who was followed shortly by Gobharana, another. A temple was built at Loyang, and under the emperor's patronage, the work of translating the books began.—We have seen before how some touch from abroad is needed to quicken an age into greatness: such a touch came now to China with these Indian Buddhists;—who, in all likelihood, may also have been in their degree Messengers of the Lodge.

In the usual vague manner of Indian chronology, the years 57 and 78 A.D. are connected with the name of a great king of the Yueh Chi, Kanishka, whose empire covered Northern India. Almost every authority has a favorite point in time for his habitat; but these dates, not so far apart but that he may well have been reigning in both, will do as well as another. You will note that 72 A.D. (which falls between them) is a matter of thirteen decades from 58 B.C., the date sometimes ascribed to that much-legended Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Or, if we go back to the (fairly) settled 321 B.C. of Chandragupta Maurya, and count forward thirteen-decade periods from that, we get 191 for the end of the Mauryas (it happened about then); 61 for Vikramaditya (which may well be); 69 for Kanishka,—which also is likely enough, and would make him contemporary with Han Mingti. As the years 57 and 78 are both ascribed to him, it may possibly be that they mark the beginning and end of his reign respectively.

We know very little about him, except that he was a very great king, a great Buddhist, a man of artistic tastes, and a great builder; that he loved the beautiful hills and valleys of Cashmere; and that his reign was a wonderful period in sculptue, —that of the Gandhara or Greco-Buddhist School. Again, he is credited (by Hiuen Tsang) with convening the Fourth Buddhist Council: following in this, as in other matters, the example of Asoka. We are at liberty I suppose, if we like, to assign that cyclic year 69 to the meeting of this Council: this year or its neighborhood. So that all this may have had something to do with the missionary activity that responded to Han Mingti's appeal. But there is something else to remember; something of far higher importance; namely, that during all this period of her most uncertain chronology, India was in a peculiar position: the Successors of the Buddha were more or less openly at work there;—a long line of Adept leaders and teachers that can be traced (I believe) through some thirteen centuries from Sakya-muni's death. We may suppose, not unreasonably, that Kashiapmadanga and Gobharana were disciples and emissaries of the then Successor.

It is, so far, and with so little translated, extremely hard to get at the undercurrents in these old Chinese periods; but I suspect a strong spiritual influence, Buddhist at that, in the great events of the years that followed. For China proceeded to strike into history in such a way that the blow resounded, if not round the world, at least round as much of it as was discovered before Columbus; and she did it in such a nice, clean, artistic and quiet way, and withal so thoroughly, that I cannot help feeling that that glorious warriorlike Northern Buddhism of the Mahayana had something to do with it.

It was not Han Mingti himself who did it, but one of his sevants; of whom, it is likely, you have never heard; although east or west there have been, probably, but one or two of his trade so great as he, or who have mattered so much to history. His name was Pan Chow; his trade, soldiering. He began his career of conquest about the time the major Han Cycle was due to recur,—in the sixties; maintained it through three reigns, and ended it at his death about when the Eastern Han half-cycle, started in 35, was due to close;—somewhere, that is, about 100 A.D., while Trajan was beginning a new day and career of conquest in Rome.



XXI. CHINA AND ROME: THE SEE-SAW (CONTINUED)

During the time of Chinese weakness Central Asia had relapsed from the control the great Han Wuti had imposed on it, and that Han Suenti had maintained by his name for justice; and the Huns had recovered their power. One wonders what these people were; of whom we first catch sight in the reign of the Yellow Emperor, nearly 3000 B.C.; and who do not disappear from history until after the death of Attila. During all those three millenniums odd they were predatory nomads, never civilized: a curse to their betters, and nothing more. And their betters were, you may say, every race they contacted.

It seems as if, as in the human blood, so among the races of mankind, there were builders and destroyers. I speculate as to the beginnings of the latter: they cannot be . . . races apart, of some special creation;—made by demons, where it was the Gods made men. . . . "To the Huns," says Gibbon, "a fabulous origin was assigned worthy of their form and manners,—that the witches of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction." But it seems to me that it is in times of intensive civilization, and in the slums of great cities, that Nature—or anti-Nature—originates noxious human species. I wonder if their forefathers were, once on a time, the hooligans and yeggmen of some very ancient Babylon Bowery or the East End of some pre-Nimrodic Nineveh? Babylon was a great city,—or there were great cities in the neighborhood of Babylon, before the Yellow Emperor was born. One of these may have had, God knows when, its glorious freedom-establishing revolution, its up-fountaining of sansculottes,—patriots whose predatory proclivities had erstwhile been checked of their free brilliance by busy-body tyrannical police;—and then this revolution may have been put down, and the men of the underworld who made turned out now from their city haunts, driven into the wilderness and the mountains,—may have taken,—would certainly have taken, one would say,—not to any industry, (they knew none but such as are wrought by night unlawfully in other men's houses); not to agriculture, which has ever had, for your free spirit, something of degradation in it;—but to pure patriotism, freedom and liberty, as their nature was: first to cracking such desultory cribs as offered,—knocking down defenseless wayfarers and the like: then to bolder raidings and excursions;—until presently, lo, they are a great people; they have ridden over all Asia like a scirocco; they have thundered rudely at the doors of proud princes,—troubling even the peace of the Yellow Emperor on his throne.

Well,—but isn't the stature stunted, physical, as well as mental and moral, when life is forced to reproduce itself, generation after generation, among the unnatural conditions of slums and industrialism? . . . Can you nourish men upon poisons century by century, and expect them to retain the semblance of men?

They had bothered Han Kwang-wuti; who could do little more than hold his own against them, and leave them to his successor to deal with as Karma might decree. Karma, having as you might say one watchful eye on Rome and Europe, and what need of chastisement should arise after awhile at that western end of the world, provided Han Mingti with this Pan Chow; who, being a soldier of promise, was sent upon the Hun war-path forthwith. Then the miracles began to happen. Pan Chow strolled through Central Asia as if upon his morning's constitutional: no fuss; no hurry; little fighting,—but what there was, remarkably effective, one gathers. Presently he found himself on the Caspian shore; and if he had left any Huns behind him, they were hardly enough to do more than pick an occasional pocket. He started out when the Roman provinces were rising to make an end of Nero; in the last year of Domitian, from his Caspian headquarters he determined to discover Rome; and to that end sent an emissary down through Parthia to take ship at the port of Babylon for the unknown West. The Parthians (who were all against the two great empires becoming acquainted, because they are making a good thing of it as middle-men in the Roman-Chinese caravan trade), knew better, probably, than to oppose Pan Chow's designs openly; but their agents haunted the quays at Babylon, tampered with west-going skippers, and persuaded the Chinese envoy to go no farther. But I wonder whether some impulse achieved flowing across the world from east to west at that time, even though its physical link or channel was thus left incomplete? It was in that very year that Nerva re-established constitutionalism and good government in Rome.

Pan Chow worked as if by magic: seemed to make no effort, yet accomplished all things. For nearly forty years he kept that vast territory in order, despite the huge frontier northward, and the breeding-place of nomad nations beyond. All north of Tibet is a region of marvels. Where you were careful to leave only the village blacksmith under his spreading chestnut-tree, or the innkeeper and his wife, for the sake of future travelers, let a century or two pass, and their descendants would be as the sea-sands for multitude; they would have founded a power, and be thundering down on an empire-smashing raid in Persia or China or India: Whether Huns, Sienpi, Jiujen, Turks, Tatars, Tunguses, Mongols, Manchus: God knows what all, but all destroyers. But as far as the old original Huns were concerned, Pan Chow settled their hash for them. Bag and baggage he dealt with them; and practically speaking, the land of their fathers knew them no more. Dry the starting tear! here your pity is misplaced. Think of no vine-covered cottages ruined; no homesteads burned; no fields laid waste. They lived mainly in the saddle; they were as much at home fleeing before the Chinese army as at another time. A shunt here; a good kick off there: so he dealt with them. It is in European veins their blood flows now;—and prides itself on its pure undiluted Aryanism and Nordicism, no doubt. I suppose scarcely a people in continental Europe is without some mixture of it; for they enlisted at last in all foraying armies, and served under any banner and chief.

Pan Chow felt that they belonged to the (presumably) barbarous regions west of the Caspian. Ta Ts'in in future might deal with them; by God's grace, Han never should. He gently pushed them over the brink; removed them; cut the cancer out of Asia. Next time they appeared in history, it was not on the Hoangho, but on the Danube. Meanwhile, they established themselves in Russia; moved across Central Europe, impelling Quadi and Marcomans against Marcus Aurelius, and then Teutons of all sorts against the whole frontier of Rome. In the sixties, for Han Mingti, Pan Chow set that great wave in motion in the far east of the world. Three times thirteen decades passed, and it broke and wasted in foam in the far west: in what we may call the Very First Battle of the Marne, when Aetius defeated Attila in 451. I can but think of one thing better he might have done: shipped them eastward to the remote Pacific Islands; but it is too late to suggest that now. But I wonder what would have happened if Pan Chow had succeeded in reaching his arm across, and grasping hands with Trajan? He had not died; the might of China had not begun to recede from its westward limits, before the might of Rome under that great Spaniard had begun to flow towards its limits in the east.

Through the bulk of the second century China remained static, or weakening. Her forward urge seems to have ended with the death of Pan Chow, or at the end of the half-cycle Han Kwang-wuti began in 35. We might tabulate the two concurrent Han cycles, for the sake of clearness, and note their points of intersection, thus:

—Western Han Cycle, 130 years

—Eastern Han Half-Cycle, 65 yrs

—35 A.D. Opened by Han Kwang-wuti.

—A static and consolidating time until 67 A.D., thirteen decades from the death of Han Chaoti. Introduction of Buddhism in 65.

—The period of Pan Chao's victories; the Golden Age of the Eastern Hans, lasting until (about):

—100 A. D. the end of the Eastern Han 'Day'; death of Pan Chow.

—Continuance of Day under this, and supervention of Night under this Cycle, produce:

—A static, but weakening period until:

—165, the year in which a new Eastern Han Day should begin. A weak recrudescence should be seen.

—197: the year in which the main or original Han Cycle should end. We should expect the beginnings of a downfall. By or before:

—230, the end of the second, feeble, Eastern Han Day, the downfall would have been completed.

Now to see how this works out.

The first date we have to notice is 165. Well; in the very scant notices of Chinese history I have been able to come on, two events mark this date; or rather, one marks 165, and the other 166. To take the latter first: we saw that at a momentous point in Roman history,—in the year of Nerva's accession, 96,—China tried to discover Rome. In 166 Rome actually succeeded in discovering China. This year too, as we shall see, was momentous in Roman history. You may call it a half cycle after the other; for probably the ambassadors of King An-Tun of Ta Ts'in who arrived at the court of Han Hwanti at Loyang in 166, had been a few years on their journey. You know King An-tun better by his Latin name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

The event for 165 is the foundation of the Taoist Church, under the half-legendary figure of its first Pope, Chang Taoling; whose lineal descendants and successors have reigned Popes of Taoism from their Vatican on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain in Kiangsi ever since. They have not adverertised their virtues in their names, however: we find no Innocents and Piuses here: they are all plain Changs; his reigning Holiness being Chang the Sixth-somethingth. It was from Buddhism that the Taoists took the idea of making a church of themselves. Taoism and Buddhism from the outset were fiercely at odds; and yet the main splendor of China was to come from their inner coalescence. Chu Hsi, the greatest of the Sung philosophers of the brilliant twelfth century A.D., says that "Buddhism stole the best features of Taoism; Taoism stole the worst features of Buddhism: as if the one took a jewel from the other, and the other recouped the loss with a stone." * This is exact: the jewel stolen by Buddhism was Laotse's Blue Pearl,—Wonder and Natural Magic; the stone that Taoism took instead was the priestly hierarchy and church organization, imitated from the Buddhists, that grew up under the successors of Chang Taoling.

——— * Chinese Literature: H.A. Giles ———

If Laotse founded any school or order at all, it remained quite secret. I imagine his mission was like Plato's, not Buddha's: to start ideas, not a brotherhood. By Ts'in Shi Hwangti's time, any notions that were wild, extravagant, and gorgeous were Taoism; which would hardly have been, perhaps, had there been a Taoist organization behind them;—although it is not safe to dogmatize. It was, at any rate, mostly an inspiration to the heights for the best minds, and for the masses (including Ts'in Shi Hwangti) a rumor of tremendous things. After Han Wuti's next successor, the best minds took to thinking Confucianly: which was decidedly a good thing for China during the troublous times before and after the fall of the Western Hans. Then when Buddhism came in, Taoism came to the fore again, spurred up to emulation by this new rival. I take it that Chang Taoling's activities round about this year 165 represent an impulse of the national soul to awakenment under the influence of the recurrence of the Eastern Han Day half-cycle. What kind of reality Chang Taoling represents, one cannot say: whether a true teacher in his degree, sent by the Lodge, around whom legends have gathered; or a mere dabbler in alchemy and magic. Here is the story told of him; you will note an incident or two in it that suggest the former possibility.

He retired to the mountains of the west to study magic, cultivate purity of life, and engage in meditation; stedfastly declining the offers of emperors who desired him to take office. Laotse appeared to him in a vision, and gave him a treatise in which were directions for making the 'Elixir of the Dragon and the Tiger.' While he was brewing this, a spirit came to him and said: "On the Pesung Mountain is a house of stone; buried beneath it are the Books of the Three Emperors (Yao, Shun, and Yu). Get these, practise the discipline they enjoin, and you will attain the power of ascending to heaven." He found the Pesung Mountain; and the stone house; and dug, and discovered the books; which taught him how to fly, to leave his body at will, and to hear all sounds the most distant. During a thousand days he disciplined himself; a goddess came to him, and taught him to walk among the stars; then he learned to cleave the seas and the mountains, and command the thunder and the winds. He fought the king of the demons, whose hosts fled before him "leaving no trace of their departing footsteps." So great slaughter he wrought in that battle that, we are told, "various divinities came with eager haste to acknowledge their faults." In nine years he gained the power of ascending to heaven. His last days were spent on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain; where, at the age of a hundred and twenty-three, he drank the elixir, and soared skyward in broad daylight;—followed (I think it was he) by all the poultry in his barnyard, immortalized by the drops that fell from the cup as he drank. He left his books of magic, and his magical sword and seal, to his descendants; but I think the Dragon-Tiger Mountain did not come into their possession until some centuries later.

I judge that the tales of the Taoist Sennin or Adepts, if told by some Chinese-enamored Lafcadio, would be about the best collection of fairy-stories in the world; they reveal a universe so deliciously nooked and crannied with bewildering possibilities:—as indeed this our universe is;—only not all its byways are profitable traveling. It is all very well to cry out against superstition; but we are only half-men in the West: we have lost the faculty of wonder and the companionship of extrahuman things. We walk our narrow path to nowhere safely trussed up in our personal selves: or we not so much walk at all, as lie still, chrysalissed in them:—it may be just as well, since for lack of the quality of balance, we are about as capable of walking at ease and dignity as is a jellyfish of doing Blondin on the tight-rope. China, in her pralaya and dearth of souls, may have fallen into the perils of her larger freedom, and some superstition rightly to be called degrading: in our Middle Ages, when we were in pralaya, we were superstitious enough; and being unbalanced, fell into other evils too such as China never knew: black tyrannies of dogmatism, burnings of heretics wholesale. But when the Crest-Wave Egos were in China, that larger freedom of hers enabled her, among other things, to achieve the highest heights in art: the Yellow Crane was at her disposal, and she failed not to mount the heavens; she had the glimpses Wordsworth pined for; she was not left forlorn. This merely for another blow at that worst superstition of all: Unbrotherliness, and our doctrine of Superior Racehood.—Many of the tales are mere thaumatolatry: as of the man who took out his bones and washed them once every thousand years; or of the man who would fill his mouth with rice-grains, let them forth as a swarm of bees to gather honey in the valley,—then readmit them into his mouth as to a hive, where they became rice again,—presumably "sweetened to taste." But in others there seems to be a core of symbolism and recognition of the fundamental things. There was a man once,—the tale is in Giles's Dictionary of Chinese Biography, but I forget his name—who sought out the Sennin Ho Kwang (his name might have been Ho Kwang); and found him at last in a gourd-flask, whither he was used to retire for the night. In this retreat Ho Kwang invited our man to join him; and he was enabled to do so; and found it, once he had got in, a fair and spacious palace enough. Three days he remained there learning; while fifteen years were passing in China without. Then Ho Kwang gave him a rod, and a spell to say over it; and bade him go his ways. He would lay the rod on the ground, stand astride of it, and speak the spell; and straight it became a dragon for him to mount and ride the heavens where he would. Thenceforth for many years he was a kind of Guardian Spirit over China: appearing suddenly wherever there was distress or need of help: at dawn in mountain Chungnan by Changan town in the north; at noon, maybe, by the southern sea; at dusk he might be seen a-dragon-back above the sea-mists rolling in over Yangtse;—and all in the same day. But at last, they say, he forgot the spell, and found himself riding the clouds on a mere willow wand;—and the wand behaving as though Newton had already watched that aggravating apple;—and himself, in due course dashed to pieces on the earth below.—There is some fine symbolism here; the makings of a good story.

And now we come to 197, "the year in which (to quote our tabulation above) the main or original Han Cycle should end," and in which "we should expect the beginnings of a downfall." The Empire, as empires go, is very old now: four hundred and forty odd years since Ts'in Shi Hwangti founded it; as old as Rome was (from Julius Caesar's time) when the East and West split under Arcadius and Honorius; nearly three centuries older than the British Empire is now;—the cyclic force is running out, centripetalism very nearly wasted. In these one-nineties we find two non-entitous brothers quarreling for the throne: who has eyes to see, now, can see that the days of Han are numbered. All comes to an end in 220, ten years before the third half-cycle (and therefore second 'day') of the Eastern Han series; there is not force enough left to carry things through till 230. Han Hienti, the survivor of the two brothers aforesaid, retired into private life; the dynasty was at an end, and the empire split in three. In Ssechuan a Han prince set up a small unstable throne; another went to Armenia, and became a great man there; but in Loyang the capital, Ts'ao Ts'ao, the man who engineered the fall of the Hans, set his son as Wei Wenti on the throne.

He was a very typical figure, this Ts'ao Ts'ao: a man ominous of disintegration. You cannot go far in Chinese poetry without meeting references to him. He rose during the reign of the last Han,—the Chien-An period, as it is called, from 196 to 221,—by superiority of energies and cunning, from a wild irregular youth spent as hanger-on of no particular position at the court,—the son of a man that had been adopted by a chief eunuch,—to be prime minister, commander of vast armies (he had at one time, says Dr. H. A. Giles, as many as a million men under arms), father of the empress; holder of supreme power; then overturner of the Han, and founder of the Wei dynasty. Civilization had become effete; and such a strong wildling could play ducks and drakes with affairs. But he could not hold the empire together. Centrifugalism was stronger than Ts'ao Ts'ao.

The cycles and all else here become confused. The period from 220 to 265—about a half-cycle, you will note, from 196 and the beginning of the Chien-An time, or the end of the main Han Cycle,—is known as that of the San Koue or Three Kingdoms: its annals read like Froissart, they say; gay with raidings, excursions, and alarms. It was the riot of life disorganized in the corpse, when organized life had gone. A great historical novel dealing with this time,—one not unworthy, it is said, of Scott,—remains to be translated. Then, by way of reaction, came another half-cycle (roughly) of reunion: an unwarlike period of timid politics and a super-refined effeminate court; it was, says Professor Harper Parker, "a great age of calligraphy, belles lettres, fans, chess, wine-bibbing and poetry-making." Then, early in the fourth century, China split up again: crafty ladylike Chinese houses ruling in the South; and in the north a wild medley of dynasties, Turkish, Tungus, Tatar, and Tibetan,— even some relics of the Huns: sometimes one at a time, sometimes half a dozen all together. Each barbarian race took on hastily something of Chinese culture, and in turn imparted to it certain wild vigorous qualities which one sees very well in the northern art of the period: strong, fierce, dramatic landscapes: Nature painted in her sudden and terrific moods. China was still in manvantara, though under obscuration; she still drew her moiety of Crest-Wave souls: there were great men, but through a lack of co-ordination, they failed to make a great empire or nation. So here we may take leave of her for a couple of centuries. Just why the vigor of the Crest-Wave was called off in the two-twenties, causing her to split then, we shall see presently. Back now to Rome, at the time of the death of Pan Chow the Hun-expeller and the end of the one glorious half-cycle of the Eastern Hans.

As China went down, Rome came up. Pan Chow died early in the reign of Trajan, the first great Roman conqueror since Julius Caesar; and only the Caspian Sea, and perhaps a few years, divided Trajan's eastern outposts from the western outposts of the Hans. We need not stay with this Spaniard longer than to note that here was a case where grand military abilities were of practical value: Trajan used his to subserve the greatness of his statesmanship; only a general of the first water could have brought the army under the new constitutional regime. The soldiers had been setting up Caesars ever since the night they pitched on old Claudius in his litter; now came a Caesar who could set the soldiers down.—His nineteen years of sovereignty were followed by the twenty-one of Hadrian: a very great emperor indeed; a master statesman, and queer mass of contradictions whose private life is much better uninquired into. He was a mighty builder and splendid adorner of cities; all that remained unsystematized in the Augustan system, he reduced to perfect system and order. His laws were excellent and humane; he introduced a special training for the Civil Service, which wrought enormous economies in public affairs: officials were no longer to obtain their posts by imperial appointment, which might be wise or not, but because of their own tested efficiency for the work.—Then came the golden twenty-three years of Antoninus Pius, from 138 to 161: a time of peace and strength, with a wise and saintly emperor on the throne. The flower Rome now was in perfect bloom: an urbane, polished, and ordered civilization covered the whole expanse of the empire. Hadrian had legislated for the down-trodden: no longer had you power of life and death over your slaves; they were protected by the law like other men; you could not even treat them harshly. True, there was slavery, —a canker; and there were the gladiatorial games; we may feel piously superior if we like. But there was much humanism also. There was no proletariat perpetually on the verge of starvation, as in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. If we can look back now and say, There this, that, or the other sign of oncoming decay; the thing could not last;—it will also be remarkably easy for us, two thousand years hence, to be just as wise about these present years 'of grace.' It is perhaps safe to say, —as I think Gibbon says—that there was greater happiness among a greater number then than there has been at any time in Christendom since. Gibbon calculates that there were twice as many slaves as free citizens: we do know that their number was immense,—that it was not unusual for one man to own several thousand. But they were well treated: often highly educated; might become free with no insuperable difficulty:—their position was perhaps comparable with that of slaves in Turkey now, who are insulted if you call them servants. Gibbon estimates the population at a hundred and twenty millions; many authorities think that figure too high; but Gibbon may well be right, or even under the mark,—and it may account for the rapid decline that followed the age of the Antonines. For I suspect that a too great population is a great danger, that hosts at such times pour into incarnation, besides those that have good right to call themselves human souls;—that the maxim "fewer children and better ones" is based upon deep and occult laws. China in her great days would never appear to have had more than from fifty to seventy millions: the present enormous figures have grown up only since the Manchu conquest.

There was no great stir of creative intellect and imagination in second century Rome: little noteworthy production in literature after Trajan's death. The greatest energies went into building; especially under Hadrian. The time was mainly static,—though golden. There were huge and opulent cities, and they were beautiful; there was enormous wealth; an even and widespread culture affecting to sweetness and light the lives of millions— by race Britons, Gauls, Moors, Asiatics or what not, but all proud to be Romans; all sharing in the blessings of the Roman Citizenship and Peace. Not without self-government, either, in local affairs: thus we find Welsh clans in Britain still with kings, and stranger still, with senates, of their own.

It was the quiet and perfect moment at the apex of a cycle: the moment that precedes descent. The old impulse of conquest flickered up, almost for the last time, under Trajan, some of whose gains wise Hadrian wisely abandoned. Under whom it was, and under the first Antonine, that the empire stood in its perfect and final form: neither growing nor decreasing; neither on the offensive nor actively on the defensive. Now remember the cycles: sixty-five years of manvantara under Augustus and Tiberius,—B.C. 29 to A. D. 36. Then sixty-five mostly of pralaya from 36 to 101; and now sixty-five more of mnavantara under the Five Good Emperors (or three of them), from 101 to 166.

But why stop at 166, you ask. Had not Marcus Aurelius, the best of them all, until 180 to reign?—He had; and yet the change came in 166; after that year Rome stood on the defensive until she fell. It was in that year, you will remember, that King An-tun Aurelius's envoys reached Loyang by way of Bumiah and the sea.

But note this: Domitian was killed, and Nerva came to the throne, and Rome had leave to breathe freely again, in five years before the half-cycle of shadows should have ended: the two years of Nerva, and the first three of Trajan, we may call borrowed by the dawning manvantara from the dusk of the pralaya that was passing. Now if we took the strictness of the cycles au very pied de lettre, we should be a little uneasy about the last five years of that manvantara; we should expect them at least to be filled with omens of coming evil; we should expect to find in them a dark compensation for the five bright years at the tail of the old pralaya.—Well, cycles have sometimes a pretty way of fulfilling expectations. For see what happened:—

Marcus Aurelius came to the throne in 161: a known man, not untried; one, certalnly, to keep the Golden Age in being,—if kept in being it might be. Greatly capable in action, saintly in life and ideals: what could Rome ask better? Or what had she to fear?—The king is the representative man: it must have been a wonderful Rome, we may note in passing, that was ruled by and went with and loved well those two saintly philosophic Antonines enthroned.—Nothing, then, could seem more hopeful. Under the circumstances it was rather a mean trick on the part of Father Tiber (to whom the Romans pray), that before a year was out he must needs be breeding trouble for his votaries: overflowing, the ingrate, and sweeping away large parts of his city; wasting fields and slaughtering men (to quote Macaulay again); drowning cattle wholesale, and causing shortage of supplies. And he does but give the hint to the other gods, it seems; who are not slow to follow suit. Earthquakes are the next thing; then fires; then comes in Beelzebub with a plague of insects. There is no end to it. The legions in Britain,—after all this long peace and good order,—grow frisky: mind them of ancient and profitable times when you might catch big fish in troubled waters;—and try to induce their general to revolt. Then Parthian Vologaeses sees his chance; declares war, annihilates a Roman army, and overruns Syria. Verus, co-emperor by a certain too generous unwisdom that remains a kind of admirable fly in the ointment of the character of Aurelius, shows his mettle against the Parthians,—taking his command as a chance for having a luxurious fling beyond the reach and supervision of his severe colleague;—and things would go ill indeed in the East but for Avidius Cassius, Verus' second in command. This Cassius returns victorious in 165, and brings in his wake disaster worse than any Parthians:—after battle, murder, and sudden death come plague, pestilence, and famine. In 166 the first of these latter three broke out, devastated Rome, Italy, the empire in general; famine followed;—it was thought the end of all things was at hand. It was the first stroke of the cataclysm that sent Rome down. . . . Then came Quadi and Marcomans, Hun-impelled, thundering on the doors of Pannonia; and for the next eleven years Aurelius was busy fighting them. Then Avidius Cassius revolted in Asia;—but was soon assassinated. Then the Christians emerged from their obscurity, preachers of what seemed anti-national doctrine; and the wise and noble emperor found himself obliged to deal with them harshly. He was wise and noble,—there is no impugning that; and he did deal with them harshly: we may regret it; as he must have regretted it then.

So the reign marks a definite turning-point: that at which the empire began to go down. In it the three main causes of the ruin of the ancient world appeared: the first of the pestilences that depopulated it; the first incursion of the barbarians that broke it down from without; the new religion that, with its loyalty primarily to a church, an imperium in imperior, undermined Roman patriotism from within. Nero's persecution of the Christians had been on a different footing: a madman's lust to be cruel, the sensuality that finds satisfaction in watching torture: there was neither statecraft nor religion in it; but here the Roman state saw itself threatened. It was threatened; but it is a pity Aurelius could find no other way.

In himself he was the culmination of all the good that had been Roman: a Stoic, and the finest fruit of Stoicism,—which was the finest fruit of philosophy unillumined (as I think) by the spiritual light of mysticism. He practised all the virtues; but (perhaps) we do not find in him that knowledge of the Inner Laws and Worlds which alone can make practise of the virtues a saving energy in the life of nations, and the imspiration of great ages and awakener of the hidden god in the creative imagination of man. The burden of his Meditations is self-mastery: a reasoning of himself out of the power of the small and great annoyances of life;—this is to stand on the defensive; but the spiritual World-Conqueror must march out, and flash his conquering armies over all the continents of thought. An underlying sadness is to be felt in Aurelius's writings. He lived greatly and nobly for a world he could not save... that could not be saved, so far as he knew. He died in 180; and another Nero, without Nero's artistic instincts, came to the throne in his son Commodus; pralaya, military rule, disruption, had definitely set in.

Now anciently a manvantara had begun in Western Asia somewhere about 1890 B.C.; had lasted fifteen centuries, as the wont of them appears to be; and had given place to pralaya about 390; and that, in turn, was due to end in or about 220 A.D. We should, if we had confidence in these cycles, look for what remained of the Crest-Wave in Europe to be wandering flickeringly eastward about this time. Hitherto it had been in two of the three world-centers of civilization: in China and in Europe; now for a few centuries it was to be divided between three.—I am irrigating the garden, and get a fine flow from the faucet, which gives me a sense of inward peace and satisfaction. Suddenly the fine flow diminishes to a miserable dribble, and all my happiness is gone. I look eastward, to the next garden below on the slope; and see my neighbors busy there: their faucet has been turned on, and is flowing royally; and I know where the water is going. The West-Asian faucet was due to be turned on in the two-twenties; now watch the spray from the sprinklers in the Chinese and Roman gardens. In those two-twenties we saw China split into three; and it rather looked as if the manvantara had ended. I shall not look at West Asia yet, but leave it for a future lecture. But in Europe, with Marcus Aurelius died almost the last Italian you could call a Crest-Wave Ego. The cyclic forces, outworn and old, produced after that no order that you can go upon: events followed each other higgledipiggledy and inertly;— but it was the Illyrian legions that put him on the throne. Note that Illyria: it is what we shall soon grow accustomed to calling Jugoslavia. Severus's reign of eighteen years, from 193 to 211, was the only strong one, almost the only one not disgraceful, until 268; by which time the Roman world was in anarchy, split into dozens, with emperors springing up like mushrooms everywhere. Then came a succession of strong soldiers who reestablished unity: Claudius Gothicaus, an Illyrian peasant; Aurelian, an Illyrian peasant; Tacitus, a Roman senator, for one year only; Probus, an Illyrian peasant; Caus, an Illyrian; then the greatest of all statesmen since Hadian, who refounded the empire on a new plan,—the Illyrian who began life as Docles the slave, rose to be Diocles the soldier, and finally, in 284, tiaraed Diocletian reigning with all the pomp and mystery and magnificence of an Eastern King of kings. He it was who felt the cyclic flow, and moved his capital to Nicomedia, which is about fifty miles south and east from Constaintinople.

One can speak of no Illyrian cycle; rather only of the Crest-Wave dropping a number of strong men there as it trailed eastward towards West Asia. The intellect of the empire, in that third century, and the spiritual force, all incarnated in the Roman West-Asian seats; in Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria, as we shall see in a moment. But you not how bueautifully orderly, in a geographical sense, are the movements of the Wave in Roman world and epoch: beginning in Italy in the first century B.C.; going west to Spain about A.D. 1,—and to Gaul too, though there kindling chiefly material and industrial greatness; passing through Italy again in the late first and in the second century, in the time of the Glavians and the five Good Emperors; then in the third like a swan flying eastward, with one wing, the material one, stretched over Illyria raising up mighty soldiers and administrators there, and the other, the spiritual wing, over Egypt, there fanning (as we shall see) the fires of esotericism to flame.

For it was in that third century, while disaster on disaster was engulfing the power and prestige of Rome, that the strongest spiritual movement of all the Roman period came into being. History would not take much note of the year in which a porter in Alexandria was born; so the birth-date of the man we come to now is unknown. It would have been, however, not later than 180; since he had among his pupils one man at least born not later than 185. According to Eusebius, he was born a Christian; and H.P. Blavatsky, in The Key to Theosophy, seems to accept, or at least not to contradict, this view. I think she often did allow popular views on non-essentials to pass, for lack of time and immediate need to contradict them. But Eusebius (of who she has much to say, and none of it complimentary to his truthfulness) is, I believe, the sole authority for it; and scholars since have found good reason for supposing that he was mixing this man with another of the same name, who was a Christian; whereas (it is thought) this man was not. Be that as it may, we know almost nothing about him; except that he began life as a porter, with the job of carrying goods in sacks; whence he got the surname Sakkophoros, latter shortened to Saccas;—from which you will have divined by this time that his personal name was Ammonius. We know also that early in the third century he had gathered disciples about him, and was teaching them a doctrine he called Theosophy; very properly, since it was and is the Wisdom of the gods or divine Wisdom. An eclectic system, as they say; wherein the truths in all such philosophies and religions as come handy were fitted together and set forth. But in truth all this was but the nexus of his teaching: Theosophy, then as now, is eclectic only in this sense: that some truth out of it underlies all religions and systems; which they derive from it, and it from them nothing.

All through the long West-Asian pralaya,—West-Asian includes Egyptian,—the seeds of the Esoteric Wisdom remained in those parts; they lacked vitalization, because the world-currents were not playing there then; but they survived in Egypt from the Egyptian Mysteries of old; and as in India you might have found men who knew about them, but not how to use them for the uplifting of the world,—so doubtless you should have found such men in Egypt during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Hence the statement of Diogenes Laertius, that the Theosophy of Ammonius Saccas originated with one Pot Ammun, a priest of Ptolemaic times: who, perhaps, was one of those who transmitted the doctrine in secret. The seeds were there, then; and how that the Crest Wave was coming back to West Asia, it was possible for Ammonius to quicken them; and this he did. But it had not quite come back; so he made nothing public. He wrote nothing; he had his circle of disciples, and what he taught is to be know from them. Among them was Origen, who was born, or became, a Christian; but who introduced into, or emphasized in, his Christianity much sound Theosophical teaching; very likely he was deputed to capture Christianity, or some part of it, for truth. Here I may offer a little explanation of something that may have puzzled some of us: it will be remembered that Mr. Judge says somewhere that Reincarnation was condemned by the Council of Constantinople; and that in a series of learned articles which appeared in THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH recently, the late Rev. S.J. Neill contradicted this asserion. The truth seems to be this: Origen taught, if not Reincarnation, at least the pre-existence of souls; and, says the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "It is true that many scholars deny that Origen [read, his teachings] was condemned by this council [of Constantinople, A.D. 553]; but Moller rightly holds that the condemnation is proved."

Another pupil of Ammonius was Cassius Longinus, born in 213 at Emessa (Homs) in Asia Minor. Later he taught Platonism for thirty years at Athens; then in the two-sixties went east to the court of Zenobia at Palmyra,—whose brilliant empire, though it fell before the Illyrian Aurelian, was a sign in its time that the Crest-Wave had come back to West Asia. Longinus became her chief counselor; it was by his advice that she resisted Aurelian;—who pardoned the Arab queen, and, after she had paraded Rome in his triumph, became very good friends with her; but condemned her counselor to death. But Longinus I think had failed to follow in the paths laid down for him by his Teacher: we find him in disagreement with that Teacher's successor.

Who was Plotinus, born of Roman parents at Lycopolis in Egypt. It is from his writings we get the best account of Ammonius' doctrine. He was with the latter until 243; then joined Gordian III's expedition against Persia, with a view to studying Persian and Indian philosophies at their source. But Gordian was assassinated; and Plotinus, after a stay at Antioch, made his way to Rome and opened a school there. This was in the so-called Age of the Thirty Tyrants, when the central government was at its weakest. Gallienus was emperor in Rome, and every province had an emperorlet of its own;—it was before the Illyrian peasant-soldiers had set affairs on their feet again. A lazy erratic creature, this Gallienus; says Gibbon: "In every art that he attempted his lively genius enable him to succeed; and, as his genius was destitute of judgement, he attempted every art, except the important ones of war and government. He was master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator, an elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and a most contemptible prince." Yet he had a curious higher side to his nature, wherewith he might have done much for humanity,—if he had ever bothered to bring it to the fore. He, and his wife, were deeply interested in the teachings of Plotinus. Such a man may sometimes be 'run,' and made the instrument of great accomplishment: a morass through which here and there are solid footholds; if you can find them, you may reach firm ground, but you must walk infinitely carefully. It is the old tale of the Prince with the dual nature, and the Initiate who tries to use him for the saving of the world,—and fails.

Plotinus knew what he was about. Was it last week we were talking of the endless need of the ages: a stronghold of the Gods to be established in this world, whence they might conduct their cyclic raidings? What had Pythagoras tried to do in his day?—Found a Center of Learning in the West, in which the Laws of Life, physical, mental, moral, and spiritual, should be taught. He did found it,—at Croton; but Croton was destroyed, and all the history of the next seven centuries suffered from the destruction. Then—it was seven centuries after his death,— Ammonius Saccas arose, and started things again; and left a successor who was able to carry them forward almost to the point where Pythagoras left them. For the fame of this Neo-Platonic Theosophy had traveled by this time right over the empire; and Plotinus in Rome, and in high favor with Gallienus, was a man on whom all eyes were turned. He proposed to found a Point Loma in Campania; to be called Platonopolis. Things were well in hand; the emperor and empress were enthusiastic:—as your Gallieneuses will be, for quarter of an hour at a time, over any high project. But certain of his ministers were against it; and he wobbled; and delayed; and thought of something else; and hung fire; and presently was killed. And Claudius, the first of the Illyrian emperors, who succeeded him, was much to busy defeating the Goths to come to Rome even,—much less could he pay attention to spiritual projects. Two years later Plotinus died, in 270;—and the chance was not to come again for more than sixteen centuries.