—­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.