Promptly on Apollonius he loosed his bull-dog, Tigellin, prefect of police.

Tigellin caught him.  “What have you with you?” he asked.

“Continence, Justice, Temperance, Strength and Patience,” Apollonius answered.

“Your slaves, I suppose.  Make out a list of them.”

Apollonius shook his head.  “They are not my slaves; they are my masters.”

“There is but one,” Tigellin retorted—­“Nero.  Why do you not fear him?”

“Because the god that made him terrible made me without fear.”

“I will leave you your liberty,” muttered the startled Tigellin, “but you must give bail.”

“And who,” asked Apollonius superbly, “would bail a man whom no one can enchain?” Therewith he turned and disappeared.

At that time Nero was in training to suffocate a lion in the arena.  A few days later he killed himself.  Simultaneously there came news from Syracuse.  A woman of rank had given birth to a child with three heads.  Apollonius examined it.

“There will be three emperors at once,” he announced.  “But their reign will be shorter than that of kings on the stage.”

Within that year Galba, who was emperor for an instant, died at the gates of Rome.  Vitellius, after being emperor in little else than dream, was butchered in the Forum; and Otho, in that fine antique fashion, killed himself in Gaul.  Apollonius meanwhile was in Alexandria, predicting the purple to Vespasian, the rise of the House of Flavia; invoking Jupiter in his protege’s behalf; and presently, the prediction accomplished, he was back in Rome, threatening Domitian, warning him that the House of Flavia would fall.

The atmosphere was then charged with the marvellous; the world was filled with prodigies, with strange gods, beckoning chimeras and credulous crowds.  Belief in the supernatural was absolute; the occult sciences, astrology, magic, divination, all had their adepts.  In Greece there were oracles at every turn, and with them prophets who taught the art of adultery and how to construe the past.  On the banks of the Rhine there were girls who were regarded as divinities, and in Gaul were men who were held wholly divine.

Jerusalem too had her follies.  There was Simon the Magician, founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles—­an impudent self-made god, who pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva—­a deification, parenthetically, which was accepted by Nicholas, his successor, a deacon of the church, who raised her to the eighth heaven as patron saint of lust.  To him, as to Simon, she was Ennoia, Prunikos, Helen of Troy.  She had been Delilah, Lucretia.  She had prostituted herself to every nation; she had sung in the by-ways, and hidden robbers in the vermin of her bed.  But by Simon she was rehabilitated.  It was she, no doubt, of whom Caligula thought when he beckoned to the moon.  In Rome she had her statue, and near it was one to Simon, the holy god.