That mankind is a unit;--that the history of the world, however
its waters divide,--whatever islands and deltas appear,--is one
stream;--how ridiculous it is to study the story of one nation or
group of nations, and leave the rest ignored, coming from your
study with the impression (almost universal,) that all that
counts of the history of the world is the history of your own
little corner of it:--these are some of the truths we should have
gathered from our survey of the few centuries we have so far
glanced at. For take that sixth century B.C. The world seems
all well split up. No one in China has ever heard of Greece; no
one in Italy of India. What do the Greeks know about Northern
Europe, or the Chinese about the Indians or Persians?--And yet we
find in Italy, in Persia, in India, in China, men appearing,--
phenomenal births,--evolved far above their fellows: six
of them, to do the same work: Founders of Religions, all
contemporary more or less; all presenting to the world and
posterity the same high passwords and glorious countersigns. Can
you conceive that their appearance, all in that one epoch, was a
matter of chance? Is not some prearrangement suggested,--a
_put-up job,_ as they say: a definite plan formed, and a definite
end aimed at? Then by whom? Can you escape the conclusion that,
behind all this welter of races and separate histories aloof or
barking at each other, there is yet somewhere, within the
ringfence of humankind, incarnate or excarnate, One Center from
which all the threads and currents proceed, and all the great
upward impulses are directed?
Those Six Teachers came, and did their work; then two or three
centuries passed; time enough for the seeds they sowed to sprout
a little; and we come to another phase of history, a new region
in time. High spiritual truth has been ingeminated in all parts
of the world where the ancient vehicle of truth-dissemination
(the Mysteries) has declined; A Teacher, a Savior, has failed to
appear only in the lands north and west of Italy, because there
among the Celts, and there alone, the Mysteries are still
effective:--so you may say the seeds of spirituality have been
well sown along a great belt stretching right across the Old
World. Why? In preparation for what? For something, we may
suppose. Certainly for something: for example, for the next two
thousand five hundred years,--the last quarter, I would say, of a
ten-millennium cycle, which was to end with a state of things
in which every part of the world should be know to, and in
communication with, every other part. So now in the age that
followed that of the Six Teachers, in preparation for that
coming time (our own), the attempt must be made to weld nations
into unities. Nature and Law compel it: whose direction now is
towards grand centripetalism, where before they had ordained
heterogeneity and the scattering and aloofness of peoples.
But Those who sent out the great six Teachers have a hand to play
here: they have to put the welding process through upon their
own designs. They start at the fountain of the cyclic impulses,
on the eastern rim of the world: as soon as the cycle rises
there, they strike for the unification of nations. Then they
follow the cycle westward. To West Asia?--Nothing could be done
there, because this was the West Asian pralaya; those parts must
wait for Mohammed. In Europe then,--Greece?--No; its time and
vigor had passed; and the Greeks are not a building people.
They must bide their time, then, till the wave hits Italy, and
what they have done in China, attempt to do there.
Only, what they had done in China was a mere Ts'in Shi Hwangti,--
because Laotse and Confucius had not failed spiritually to
prepare the ground,--they must send forth Adept-souled Augustus
and Tiberius to do,--if human wisdom and heroism could do it,--in
Italy;--because Pythagoras' Movement had failed.
The Roman Empire was the European attempt at a China; China was
the Asiatic creation of a Rome. We call the Asiatic creation,
_China, Ts'in-a;_ it may surprise you to know that they called
the European attempt by the same name: Ta _Ts'in,_ 'the Great
Ts'in.' Put the words _Augustus Primus Romae_ into Chinese, and
without much straining they might read, _Ta Ts'in Shi Hwangti._
The whole period of the Chinese manvantara is, from the
two-forties B.C. to the twelve-sixties A.D., fifteen centuries.
The whole period of the Roman Empire, Western and Eastern, is from
the forties B.C. to the Fourteen-fifties A.D., fifteen centuries.
The first phase of the Chinese Empire, from Ts'in Shi Hwangti to
the fall of Han, lasted about 460 years; the Western Roman
Empire, from Pharsalus to the death of Honorius, lasted about as
long. Both were the unifications of many peoples; both were
overturned by barbarians from the north: Teutons in the one
case, Tatars in the other. But after that overturnment, China,
unlike Rome, rose from her ashes many times, and still endures.
Thank the success of Confucius and Laotse; and blame the failure
of Pythagoreanism, for that!
But come now; let me draw up their histories as it were in
parallel columns, and you shall see the likeness clearly; you
shall see also, presently, how prettily time and the laws that
govern human incarnation played battledore and shuttlecock with
the two: what a game of see-saw went on between the East and West.
From 300 to 250 B.C. there was an orgy of war in which old Feudal
China passed away forever, and from which Ts'in emerged Mistress
of the world. From 100 to 50 B. C. there was an orgy of war in
which Republican Rome passed away forever, and out of which
Caesar emerged World-Master. Caesar's triumph came just two
centuries after Ts'in Shi Hwangti's accession; Kublai Khan the
Turanian, who smashed China, came just about as much before
Mohammed II the Turanian, who swept away the last remnant of Rome.
In the first cycles of the two there is a certain difference in
procedure. In China, a dawn twilight of half a cycle, sixty-five
years, from the fall of Chow to the Revival of Literature under
the second Han, preceded the glorious age of the Western Hans.
In Rome, the literary currents were flowing for about a half-cycle
before the accession of Augustus: that half-cycle formed a
dawn-twilight preceding the glories of the Augustan Age.
It was just when the reign of Han Wuti was drawing towards a
sunset a little clouded,--you remember Ssema Ts'ien's strictures
as to the national extravagance and its results,--that the
Crest-Wave egos began to come in in Rome. Cicero, eldest of
the lights of the great cycle of Latin literature, would have
been about twenty when Han Wuti died in 86. We counted the
first "day" of the Hans as lasting from 194 (the Revival of
the Literature) to the death of Han Wuti's successor in 63;
in which year, as we saw, Augustus was born. During the next
twenty years the Crest-Wave was rolling more and more into
Rome: where we get Julius Caesar's career of conquest;--
it was a time filled with wine of restlessness, and, you may
say, therewith 'drunk and disorderly.' Meanwhile (from 61
to 49) Han Suenti the Just was reigning in China. His "Troops
of justice" became, after a while, accustomed to victory;
but in defensive wars. Here it was a time of sanity and order,
as contrasted with the disorder in Rome; of pause and reflexion
compared with the action and extravagance of the preceding
Chinese age. It was Confucian and ethical; no longer Taoist
and daringly imaginative; Confucianism began to consolidate
its position as the state system. So in England Puritan
sobriety followed Elizabethanism. Han Wuti let nothing impede
the ferment of his dreams: Han Suenti retrenched, and walked
quietly and firmly. His virtues commanded the respect of Central
Asia: the Tatars brought him their disputes for arbitration,
and all the regions west of the Caspian sent him tribute.
China forwent her restless and gigantic designs, and took
to quietude and grave consideration.--So we may perhaps distribute
the characteristics of these two decades thus between the
three great centers of civilization: in China, the stillness
that follows an apex time; in India, creation at its apex; in
Rome, the confusion caused by the first influx of Crest-Wave Souls.
As Octavian rose to power, the House of Han declined. We hear of
a gorging Vitellius on the throne in the thirties; then of
several puppets and infants during the last quarter of the
century; in A.D. 1, of the dynasty overthrown by a usurper, Mang
Wang, who reigned until A.D. 25. Thus the heyday of Augustan
Rome coincides with the darkest penumbra of China. Then
Kwang-wuti, the eldest surviving Han prince, was reinstated; but
until two years before the death of Tiberius, he had to spend his
time fighting rebels. Now turn to Rome.
While Han Kwang-wuti was battling his way towards the restitution
of Han glories, Tiberius, last of the Roman Crest-Wave Souls, was
holding out grimly for the Gods until the cycle should have been
completed, and he could say that his and their work was done.
For sixty-five years he and his predecessor had been welding the
empire into one: now, that labor had been so far accomplished
that what dangerous times lay ahead could hardly imperil it. So
far it had been a case of Initiate appointing Initiate to succeed
him: Augustus, Tiberius;--but whom should Tiberius appoint?
There was no one. The cycle was past, and for the present Rome
was dead; and on the brink of that unfortunate place to which
(they say) the wicked dead must go. Tiberius finally had had to
banish Agrippina, her mischief having become too importunate.
You remember she was the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, and
Germanicus' widow. His patience with her had been marvelous.
Once, at a public banquet, to do her honor he had picked a
beautiful apple from the dish, and handed it to her: with a
scowl and some ostentation, she gave it to the attendant behind
her, as who should say: 'I know your designs; but you do not
poison me this time'; all present understood her meaning well.
Once, when he met her in the palace, and she passed him with some
covert insult, he stopped, laid a hand on her shoulder, and said:
"My little woman, it is no hurt to you that you do not reign."
But his patience only encouraged her in her machinations; and at
last he was compelled to banish her. Also to keep one of her
sons in strictest confinement; of which the historians have made
their for him discreditable tale: the truth is, it was an heroic
effort on his part to break the boy of his vices by keeping him
under close and continuous supervision. But that is more easily
said than done, sometimes; and this Drusus presently died a
madman. He then took the youngest son of Agrippina to live with
him at Capri; that he, Tiberius, might personally do the best
with him that was to be done; for he foresaw that this youth
Caius would succeed him; his own grandson, Tiberius Gemellus,
being much younger. He foresaw, too, that Caius, once on the
throne, would murder Gemellus; which also happened. But there
was nothing to be done. Had he named his grandson his successor,
a strong regent would have been needed to carry things through
until that successor's majority, and to hold the Empire against
the partisans of Caius. There was no such strong man in sight;
so, what had to come, had to come. _Apres lui le deluge:_
Tiberius knew that. _Le deluge_ was the four years' terror of
the reign of Caius, known as Caligula; who, through no good will
of his own, but simply by reason of his bloodthirsty mania, amply
revenged the wrongs done his pedecessor. Karma put Caligula on
the throne to punish Rome.
The reign was too short, even if Caligula had troubled his head
with the provinces, for him to spoil the good work done in them
during the preceding half-cycle. He did not so trouble his head;
being too busy murdering the pillars of Roman society. Then a
gentleman who had been spending the afternoon publicly kissing
his slippers in the theater, experienced, as they say, a change
of heart, and took thought to assassinate him on the way home;
whereupon the Praetorians, let loose and having a thoroughly good
time, happened on a poor old buffer of the royal house by the
name of Claudius; and to show their sense of humor, made him
emperor _tout de suite._ The senate took a high hand, and
asserted _its_ right to make those appointments; but Claudius
and the Praetorians thought otherwise; and the senate, after
blustering, had to crawl. They besought him to allow them the
honor of appointing him.--what a difference the mere turn of a
cycle had made: from Augustus bequeathing the Empire to
Tiberius, ablest man to ablest man, and all with senatoral
ratification; to the jocular appointment by undisciplined
soldiery of a sad old laughingstock to succeed a raging maniac.
Claudius was a younger brother of Germanicus; therefore
Tiberius' nephew, Caligula's uncle, and a brother-in-law to
Agrippina. Mr. Baring-Gould says that somewhere deep in him was
a noble nature that had never had a chance: that the soul of him
was a jewel, set in the foolish lead of a most clownish
personality. I do not know; certainly some great and fine
things came from him; but whether they were motions of his own
soul (if he had one), or whether the Gods for Rome's sake took
advantage of his quite negative being, and prompted it to their
own purposes, who can say?--Sitting down, and keeping still, and
saying nothing, the old man could look rather fine, even
majestic; one saw traces in him of the Claudian family dignity
and beauty. But let hm walk a few paces, and you noted that his
feet dragged and his knees knocked together, and that he had a
paunch; and let him get interested in a conversation, and you
heard that he first spluttered, and then roared. Physical
wakness and mental backwardness had made him the despair of
Augustus: he was the fool of the family, kept in the background,
and noticed by none. Tiberius, in search of a successor, had
never thought of him; had rather let things go to mad Caligula.
He had never gone into society; never associated with men of his
own rank; but chose his companions among small shopkeepers and
the 'Arries and 'Arriets of Rome, who, 'tickled to death' at
having a member of the reigning family to hobnob with them in
their back-parlors, would refrain from making fun of his
peculiatities. Caligula had enjoyed using him as a butt, and so
had spared his life. He had never even learned to behave at
table: and so, when he came to the throne, made a law that
table-manners should no longer be incumbent on a Roman gentleman.
All this is recorded of him; one would hardly believe it, but
that his portraits bear it out.*
------
* The accounts of Claudius and Nero are from _The Tragedy of the
Caesars,_ by S. Baring-Gould.
------
For all that he did well at first. He made himself popular with
the mob, cracking poor homely jokes with them at which they
laughed uproariously. He paid strict attention to business:
made some excellent laws; wisely extended Roman citizenship
among the subject peoples; undertook and pushed through useful
public works. Rome was without a decent harbor: corn from Egypt
had to be transshipped at sea and brought up the Tiber in
lighters; which resulted in much inconvenience, and sometimes
shortage of food in the city. Claudius went down to Ostia and
looked about him; and ordered a harbor dredged out and built
there on a large scale. The best engineers of the day said it
was impossible to do, and would not pay if done. But the old
fool stuck to his views and made them get to work; and they
found it, though difficult and costly, quite practicable; and
when finished, it solved the food problem triumphantly. This is
by way of example.--Poor old fool! it was said he never forgot a
kindness, or remembered an injury. He came soon, however, to be
managed by various freedmen and rascals and wives; all to the
end that aristocratic Rome should be well punished for its sins.
One day when he was presiding in the law courts, someone cried
out that he was an old fool,--which was very true.--and threw a
large book at him that cut his face badly,--which was very
unkind. And yet, all said, through him and through several fine
and statesmanlike measures he put through, the work of Augustus
and Tiberius in the empire at large was in many ways pushed
forward: he did well by the provinces and the subject races, and
carried on the grand homogenization of the world.
He reigned thirteen years; then came Nero. If one accepts the
traditional view of him, it is not without evidence. His
portraits suggest one ensouled by some horrible elemental; one
with no human ego in him at all. The accounts given of his moods
and actions are quite credible in the light of the modern medical
knowledge as to insanity; you would find men like Tacitus Nero
in most asylums. Neither Tacitus nor Suetonius was in the habit
of taking science as a guide in their transcriptions; they did
not, in dealing with Tiberius for example, suit their facts to
the probabilities, but just set down the worst they had heard
said. What they record of him is unlikely, and does not fit in
with his known actions. But in drawing Nero, on the contrary,
they made a picture that would surprise no alienist. Besides,
Tacitus was born some seventeen years after Tiberius died; but
he was fourteen years old at the death of Nero, and so of an age
to have seen for himself, and remembered. Nero did kill his
mother, who probably tried to influence him for good; and he did
kill Seneca, who certainly did. His reign is a monument to the
rottenness of Rome; his fall, a proof, perhaps, of the soundness
of the provinces. For when _they_ felt the shame of his conduct,
they rose and put him down; Roman Gaul and Germany and Spain and
the East did. Here is a curious indication: Galba, Otho, and
Vitellius, who made such a sorry thing of the two years (68 and
69) they shared in the Principate, had each done well as a
provincial governor. In the provinces, then, the Tiberian
tradition of honest efficient government suffered not much, if
any, interruption. The fact that Rome itself stood the nine
years of Nero's criminal insanity,--and even, so far as the mob
was concerned, liked it (for his grave was long kept strewn with
flowers)--shows what a people can fall to, that the Crest-Wave
had first made rotten, and then left soulless.
By the beginning of 70, things were comfortably in the hands of
Vespasian, another provincial governor; under whom, and his son
Titus after him, there were twelve years of dignified government;
and seven more of the same, and then seven or eight of tyranny,
under his second son, Domitian. Against the first two of these
Flavians nothing is to be said except that the rise of their
house to the Principate was by caprice of the soldiery.
Vespasian was an honest Sabine, fond of retiring to his native
farm; he brought in much good provincial blood with him into
Roman society.--Then in 96 came a revolution which placed the
aged senator Nerva on the throne; who set before himself the
definite policy--as it was intended he should--of replacing
personal caprice by legality and constitutionalism as the
instrument of government. He reigned two years, and left the
empire to Trajan; who was strong enough as a general to hold his
position, and as a statesman, to establish the principles of
Nerva. And so things began to expand again; and a new strength
became evident, the like of which had not been seen since (at
least) the death of Tiberius.
Octavian returned to Rome, sole Master of the world, in B.C. 29.
A half-cycle on from that brings us to 36 A.D., the year before
Tiberius died: that half-cycle was one, for the Empire all of
it, and for Rome most of it, of bright daylight. The next
half-cycle ends in 101, in the third year of Trajan: a time,
for the most part, of decline, of twilight. You will notice
that the Han day lasted the full thirteen decades before twilight
came; the Roman, but six decades and a half.
We ought to understand just how far this second Roman half-cycle
was an age of decline: just how much darkneww suffused the
twilight it was. We talk of representative government; as
if any government were ever really anything else. Men get
the government that represents them; that represent their
intelligence, or their laxity, or their vices:--whether it be
sent in by the ballot or by a Praetorian Guard with their caprice
and spears. In a pralayic time there is no keen national
consciousness, no centripetalism. There was none in Rome in
those days; or not enough to counteract the centrifugalism that
simply did not care. The empire held together, because Augustus
and Tiberius had created a centripetalism in the provinces; and
these continued in the main through it all to enjoy the good
government the first two emperors had made a tradition in them,
and felt but little the hands of the fools or madmen reigning in
Rome. And then, blood from the provinces was always flowing into
Rome itself; particularly in the Flavian time; and supplied or
fed a new centripetalism there which righted things in the next
half-cycle. It was Rome, not the provinces, that Nero and
Caligula represented in their day; the time was transitional;
you may call Otho and Vitellius the first bungling shots of the
provinces at having a hand in things at the center; wholesome
Vespasian was their first representative emperor: Nerva and
those that followed him represented equally the provinces and a
regenerated Rome.--This tells you what Nero's Rome was, and how
it came to tolerate Nero; when Vitellius came in with his band
of ruffians from the Rhine, and the streets flowed with blood day
after day, the places of low resort were as full as ever through
it all; while carnage reigned in the forums, riotous vice
reigned within doors.
But look outside of Rome, and the picture is very different. The
Spaniard, Gaul, Illyrian, Asiatic and the rest, were enjoying the
Roman Peace. There was progress; if not at the center,
everywhere between that and the periphery of civilization. Life,
even in Italy (in the country parts) was growing steadily more
cultured, serious, and dignified; and in all remote regions was
assimilating its standards to the best in Italy. From the
Scottish Lowlands to the Cataracts of the Nile a single people
was coming into being; it was a wide and well-tilled field in
which incarnate souls might grow. The satirists make lurid
pictures of the evils Rome; and the evils were there, with
perhaps not much to counter-balance them, _in Rome._ Paris has
been latterly the capital of civilization; and one of its phases
as such has been to be the capital of the seven deadly sins. The
sins are or were there: Paris provided for the sinners of the
world, in her capacity of world-metropolis; just as she provided
for the artists, the _litteratuers,_ and so on. Foolish people
drew from that the conclusion that therefore Frenchmen were more
wicked than other people: whereas in truth the life of
provincial France all along has probably been among the soundest
of any. So we must offset Martial's and Juvenal's pictures of
the calm and gracious life in the country: virtuous life, often,
with quiet striving after usefulness and the higher things. He
reveals to us, in the last quarter of the century, interiors in
northern Italy, by Lake Como; you should have found the like
anywhere in the empire. And where, since Rome fell, shall you
come on a century in which Britain, Gaul, Spain, Italy, the
Balkans, Asia and Africa, enjoyed a Roman or any kind of peace?
Be not deceived: there has been no such success in Europe since
as the empire that Augustus the Initiate made, and for which
Tiberius his disciple was crucified.
Yet they captured it, as I find things, out of the jaws of
failure and disaster. Failure: that of Pythagoreanism six
centuries before;--disaster: Caesar's conquest of Gaul and
destruction of the Mysteries there. Men come from the Masters of
the World to work on this plane or on that: to found an empire
perhaps, or to start a spiritual movement. Augustus came
commissioned to the former, not to the latter, work. Supposing
in his time the Gaulish Mysteries had been intact. We may trust
him to have established relations somehow: he would have had
close and friendly relations with the Gaulish hierophants; even
if he had conquered the people, he would not have put out their
light. But I imagine he would have found a means to union
without conquest. Then what would have happened? We have seen
that the cyclic impulse did touch Gaul at that time; it made her
vastly rich, hugely industrial;--as Ferero says, the Egypt of the
West. That, and nothing better than that, because she had lost
her spiritual center, and might not figure as the world Teacher
among nations. But, you say, Augustus proscribed Druidism--which
sounds like carrying on Julius' nefarious work. He did, I
believe;--but why? Because Julius had seen to it that the
white side of Druidism had perished. The Druids were magicians;
and now it was the dark magic and its practitioners that remained
among them,--at least in Gaul. So of course Augustus proscribed it.
Remember how France has stood, these last seven centuries, as the
teacher of the arts and civilization to Europe; and this idea
that she might have been, and should have been, something far
higher to the Roman world, need not seem at all extravagant. I
think it was a possibility; which Caesar had been sent by the
kings of night to forestall. And so, that Augustus lacked that
reinforcement by which he might have secured for Europe a unity
as enduring as the Chinese Teachers secured for the Far East.
And yet the Lodge did not leave Rome lightless; there was much
spiritual teaching in the centuries of the Empire; indeed, a new
out-breathing in each century, as an effort to retrieve the great
defeat;--and this has been the inner history of europe ever
since. This: raidings from the Godworld: swift cavalry
raidings, that took no towns as a rule, nor set up strongholds
here on hell's border; yet did each time, no doubt, carry off
captives. Set up no strongholds;--that is, until our own times;
so what we have missed is the continuous effort; the established
base 'but here upon this bank and shoal,' from which the shining
squadrons of the Gods might ride. Such a base was lost when
Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be
found. It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say,
abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but
the _membra disjecta_ of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished
age. With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work,
distilling out of them what they might of the ancient Theosophy.
So latterly H.P. Blavasky must gather up fragments in the East
for the nexus of her teaching; she must find seeds in old
sarcophagi, and plant and make them grow in this soil so
uncongenial; because there was no well-grown Tree patent to the
world, with whose undeniable fruitage she might feed the nations.
This was one great difficulty in her way; whe had to introduce
Theosphy into a world that had forgotten it ever existed.
So,--but with a difference,--in that first century. The
difference was that Pythagoreanism, the nexus, was only six
hundrd years away, and the memory of it fairly fresh. Stoicism
was the most serious living influence within the empire; a
system that concerned itself with right and brave living, and was
so far spiritual; but perhaps not much further. The best in men
reacted against the sensuality of the mid-century, and made
Stoicism strong; but this formed only a basis of moral grit for
the higher teaching; of which, while we know it was there,
there is not very much to say. I shall come to it presently;
meanwhile, to something else.--In literature, this was the cycle
of Spain: the Crest-Wave was largely there during the first
thirteen decades of the Christian era. Seneca was born in
Cordova about 3 B. C.; Hadrian, the last greatman of Spanish
birth (though probably of Italian race), died in 138. Seneca was
a Stoic: a man with many imperfections, of whom history cannot
make up its mind wholly to approve. He was Nero's tutor and
minister during the first five golden years of the reign; his
government was wise and beneficent, though, it is said, sometimes
upheld by rather doubtful means. In the growing gloom and horror
of the nightmare reign of Nero, he wrote many counsels of
perfection; his notes rise often, someone has said, to a sort of
falsetto shriek; but then, the wonder is he could sing at all in
such a hell's cacophony. A man with obvious weaknesses, perhaps;
but fighting hard to be brave and hopeful where there was nothing
in sight to encourage bravery or foster hope; when every moment
was pregnant with ghastly possibilities; when death and
abominable torture hobnobbed in the Roman streets with riots of
disgusting indulgence, abnormal lusts, filthiness parading
unabashed. He speaks of the horrors, the gruesome impalings;
deprecating them in a general way; not daring to come down to
particulars, and rebuke Nero. Well; Nero commanded the legions,
and was kittle cattle to rebuke. If sometimes you see tinsel and
tawdriness about poor Seneca, look a little deeper, and you seem
to see him writing it in agony and bloody sweat. . . . He was
among the richest men in Rome, when riches were a deadly peril:
he might even, had he been another man, have made himself
emperor; perhaps the worst thing against him is that he did
not. His counsels and aspirations were much better than his
deeds;--which is as much as to say his Higher Self than his
lower. He stood father-confessor to Roman Society: a Stoic
philosopher in high, luxurious, and most perilous places: he
cannot escape looking a little unreal. Someone in some seemingly
petty difficulties, writes asking him to sue his influence on his
behalf; and he replies with a dissertation on death, and what
good may lie in it, and the folly of fearing it. Cold comfort
for his correspondent; a tactless, strained, theatrical thing to
do, we may call it. But what strain upon his nerves, what
hideous knowledge of the times and of evils he did not see his
way to prevent, what haunting sense of danger, must have driven
him to that fervid hectic eloquence that now seems so unnatural!
One guesses there may be a place in the Pantheons or in Valhalla
of the heroes for this poor not untawdry not unheroic Seneca.
One sees in him a kind of Hamlet, hitting in timorous indecision
on the likely possibility of converting his Claudius by a string
of moral axioms and eloquence to a condition that should satisfy
the Ghost and undo the something rotten in the state.... Yet the
Gods must have been grateful to him for the work he did in
holding for Stoicism and aspiration a center in Rome during that
dreadful darkness. Perhaps only the very strongest, in his
position, could have done better; and then perhaps only by
killing Nero.*
------
* Dill: _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius._
------
But there was a greater than Seneca in Rome, even in Nero's
reign;--there intermittently, and not to abide: Appollonius of
Tyana, presumably the real Messenger of the age:--and by the
change that had come over life by the second century, we may
judge how great and successful. But there is not getting at the
reality of the man now. We have a _Life_ of him, written about a
hundred years after his death by Philostratus, a Greek sophist,
for the learned Empress Julia Domna, Septimius Severus' wife;
who, no doubt, chose for the work the best man to hand; but the
age of great literature was past, and Philostratus resurrects no
living soul. The account may be correct enough in outline; the
author was painstaking; visited the sites of his subject's
exploits, and pressed his inquiries; he claims to have based his
story on the work of Damis of Neneveh, a disciple of Apollonius
who accompanied him everywhere. But much is fabulous: there is
a gorgeous account of dragons' in India, and the methods used in
hunting them; and you know nothing of the real Apollonius when
you have read it all. Here, in brief, is the outline of the
story: Apollonius was born at Tyana in Cappodocia somewhere
about the year 1 A.D., and died in the reign of Nerva at nearly a
hundred: tradition ascribed to his birth its due accompaniment
of signs and portents. At sixteen he set himself under Pythagorean
discipline; kept silence absolute for five years; traveled,
healing and teaching, and acquired a great renown throughout
Asia Minor. He went by Babylon and Parthia to India; spent
some 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.
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." *
------
* _Encyclopaedia Britannica;_ article 'Quintilian'
------
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;
--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.
Now cyclic impulses waste; a second day of splendor will
commonly be found a Silver Age, where the first was Golden: it
will often be more perfect and refined, but much less vigorous,
than the first. So I should look for the second "day" of the
Hans to come on the whole with less light to shine and less
strength to endure than its predecessor; I should expect a
gentleness as of late afternoon in place of the old noontide
glory. But then there is the complication induced by Han
Kwang-wuti, who started his cycle in 35.... or more probably
his half-cycle;--I should look for it to be no more than that,
on account of this same wastage of the forces;--this also has
to be taken into consideration.
Brooding over the whole situation, I should foretell the history
of this second Han Dynasty in this way: from 35 to 67,--the
latter date the point where the old and new cycles intersect,--
would be a static time: of consolidation rather than expansion;
of the gathering of the wave, not of its outburst into any
splendor of foam. Between 67 and 100, or when the two cycles
coincide, I should look for great things and doings; for some
echo or repetition of the glories of Han Wuti,--perhaps for a
finishing and perfecting of his labors. From then on till 197 I
should expect static, but weakening conditions: static mainly
till 165, weakening rapidly after. Advise me, please, if this is
clear.--Well, if you have followed so far, you have a basis for
understanding what is to come.
The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kwang-wuti, is known as
that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason:--just as late in the
days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic
flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia,--
Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium,--so was Han
Kwang-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west,
eastward to Loyang or Honanfu,--the old Chow capital,--in Honan.
While Rome was weltering under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero,
China was recovering herself, getting used to a calm equanimity,
under Haii Kwang-wuti: the conditions in the two were as
opposite as the poles. She dwelt in quietness at home, and held
her own, and a little more, on the frontiers. In 57, two years
before Nero went mad and took the final plunge into infamy, Han
Kwang-wuti died, and Han Mingti succeeded him. As Nero went
down, Han Mingti went up. His ninth or tenth year, remember, was
to be that of the recurrence of the old Han cycle. It was the
year in which the provinces rose against Nero,--the lowest point
of all in Rome. I do not know that it was marked by anything
special in China; the fact being that all the Chinese sixties
were momentous.
In the third Year of his reign Han Mingti dreamed a dream: he
saw a serene and "Golden Man" descending towards him out of the
western heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he
spoke of it, the Golden God worshiped in the West,--the Buddha.
Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin Shi
Hwangti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:--
he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse
with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in
the night, and opened all doors for their escape. Buddhist
scriptures, probably, were among the books destroyed at the great
Burning. So there may have been Buddhists in China all through
the Han time; but if so, they were few, isolated and inconspicuous;
it is Han Mingti's proper glory, to have brought Buddhism in.
He liked well his brother's interpretation, and sent inquirers
into the west. In 65 they returned, with scriptures, and an
Indian missionary, Kashiapmadanga,--who was followed shortly by
Gobharana, another. A temple was built at Loyang, and under the
emperor's patronage, the work of translating the books began.--We
have seen before how some touch from abroad is needed to quicken
an age into greatness: such a touch came now to China with these
Indian Buddhists;--who, in all likelihood, may also have been in
their degree Messengers of the Lodge.
In the usual vague manner of Indian chronology, the years 57 and
78 A.D. are connected with the name of a great king of the Yueh
Chi, Kanishka, whose empire covered Northern India. Almost every
authority has a favorite point in time for his habitat; but
these dates, not so far apart but that he may well have been
reigning in both, will do as well as another. You will note that
72 A.D. (which falls between them) is a matter of thirteen
decades from 58 B.C., the date sometimes ascribed to that
much-legended Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Or, if we go back to the
(fairly) settled 321 B.C. of Chandragupta Maurya, and count
forward thirteen-decade periods from that, we get 191 for the end
of the Mauryas (it happened about then); 61 for Vikramaditya
(which may well be); 69 for Kanishka,--which also is likely
enough, and would make him contemporary with Han Mingti. As the
years 57 and 78 are both ascribed to him, it may possibly be that
they mark the beginning and end of his reign respectively.
We know very little about him, except that he was a very great
king, a great Buddhist, a man of artistic tastes, and a great
builder; that he loved the beautiful hills and valleys of
Cashmere; and that his reign was a wonderful period in sculptue,
--that of the Gandhara or Greco-Buddhist School. Again,
he is credited (by Hiuen Tsang) with convening the Fourth
Buddhist Council: following in this, as in other matters, the
example of Asoka. We are at liberty I suppose, if we like, to
assign that cyclic year 69 to the meeting of this Council: this
year or its neighborhood. So that all this may have had
something to do with the missionary activity that responded to
Han Mingti's appeal. But there is something else to remember;
something of far higher importance; namely, that during all this
period of her most uncertain chronology, India was in a peculiar
position: the Successors of the Buddha were more or less openly
at work there;--a long line of Adept leaders and teachers that
can be traced (I believe) through some thirteen centuries from
Sakya-muni's death. We may suppose, not unreasonably, that
Kashiapmadanga and Gobharana were disciples and emissaries of the
then Successor.
It is, so far, and with so little translated, extremely hard to
get at the undercurrents in these old Chinese periods; but I
suspect a strong spiritual influence, Buddhist at that, in the
great events of the years that followed. For China proceeded to
strike into history in such a way that the blow resounded, if not
round the world, at least round as much of it as was discovered
before Columbus; and she did it in such a nice, clean, artistic
and quiet way, and withal so thoroughly, that I cannot help
feeling that that glorious warriorlike Northern Buddhism of the
Mahayana had something to do with it.
It was not Han Mingti himself who did it, but one of his sevants;
of whom, it is likely, you have never heard; although east or
west there have been, probably, but one or two of his trade so
great as he, or who have mattered so much to history. His name
was Pan Chow; his trade, soldiering. He began his career of
conquest about the time the major Han Cycle was due to recur,--in
the sixties; maintained it through three reigns, and ended it at
his death about when the Eastern Han half-cycle, started in 35,
was due to close;--somewhere, that is, about 100 A.D., while
Trajan was beginning a new day and career of conquest in Rome.