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.*

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* Dill:   Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius.
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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