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