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.” *

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* Encyclopaedia Britannica; article ‘Quintilian’
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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;