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.