I
Nature is manifold, not infinite, though the extent of the resources of
which she can dispose almost enables her to pass for such. Her cards
are so multitudinous that the pairs are easily shuffled into ages so
far asunder that their resemblance escapes remark. But sometimes her
mischievous daughter Fortune manages to thrust these duplicates into
such conspicuous places that their similarity cannot pass unobserved,
and Nature is caught plagiarising from herself. She is thus detected
dealing a king—or knave—a second time in the person of a king who has
already fallen from her pack as an emperor. Brilliant, careless,
selfish, yet good-natured _vauriens_, the Roman Emperor Gallienus and
our Charles the Second excelled in every art save the art of reigning,
and might have excelled in that also if they would have taken the
trouble. The circumstances of their reigns were in many respects as
similar as their characters. Both were the sons of grave and strict
fathers, each of whom had met with terrible misfortunes: one deprived
of his liberty by his enemies, the other of his head by his own
subjects. Each of the sons had been grievously vexed by rebels, but
Charles’s troubles from this quarter had mostly ended where those of
Gallienus began. Each saw his dominions ravaged by pestilence in a
manner beyond all former experience. The Goths destroyed the temple of
the Ephesian Diana, and the Dutch burned the English fleet at Chatham.
Charles shut up the Exchequer, and Gallienus debased the coinage.
Charles accepted a pension from Louis XIV., and Gallienus devolved the
burden of his Eastern provinces on a Syrian Emir. Their tastes and
pursuits were as similar as their histories. Charles excelled as a wit
and a critic; Gallienus as a poet and a gastronomer. Charles was
curious about chemistry, and founded the Royal Society. In the third
century the conception of the systematic investigation of nature did
not exist. Gallienus, therefore, could not patronise exact science; and
the great literary light of the age, Longinus, irradiated the court of
Palmyra. But the Emperor bestowed his favour in ample measure on the
chief contemporary philosopher, Plotinus, who strove to unite the
characters of Plato and Pythagoras, of sage and seer. Like Schelling in
time to come, he maintained the necessity of a special organ for the
apprehension of philosophy, without perceiving that he thereby
proclaimed philosophy bankrupt, and placed himself on the level of the
Oriental hierophants, with whose sublime quackeries the modest sage
could not hope to contend. So extreme was his humility, that he would
not claim to have been consciously united to the Divinity more than
four times in his life; without condemning magic and thaumaturgy, he
left their practice to more adventurous spirits, and contented himself
with the occasional visits of a familiar demon in the shape of a
serpent. He experienced, however, frequent visitations of trance or
ecstasy, sometimes lasting for a long period; and it may have been in
one of these that he was inspired by the idea of asking the Emperor for
a decayed city in Campania, there to establish a philosophic
commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato’s Republic as the
degeneracy of the times would allow.
“I cannot,” said Gallienus, when the project had been explained to him,
“object in principle to aught so festive and jocose. The age is turned
upside down; its comedians are lamentable, and its sages ludicrous. It
must moreover, I apprehend, be sated with the earthquakes, famines,
pestilences, and barbarian invasions with which it hath been
exclusively regaled for so long, and must crave something enlivening,
of the nature of thy proposition. But whether, when we arrive at the
consideration of ways and means, I shall find my interview with my
treasurer enlivening, is gravely to be questioned. I have heard
homilies enough on my prodigality, which merely means that I prefer
spending my treasures on myself to saving them for my successor, whose
title will probably have been acquired by cutting my throat.”
“I know,” said Plotinus, “that the expenses of administering an empire
must necessarily be prodigious. I am aware that the principal generals
are only kept to their allegiance by enormous bribes. I well understand
that the Empress must have pearls, and that the Roman populace must
have panthers; and that, since Egypt has revolted, the hippopotamus is
worth his weight in gold. I am further aware that the proposed colossal
statue of your Majesty in the same metal, including a staircase, with
room in the head for a child, like another Pallas in the brain of Zeus,
must alone involve very considerable outlay. But I am encouraged by
your Majesty’s wise and statesmanlike measure of debasing the currency;
since, money having become devoid of value, there can be no difficulty
in devoting any amount of it to any purpose required.”
“Plotinus,” said Gallienus, “in this age the devil is taking the
hindmost, and we are the hindmost. There are tidings to-day of a new
earthquake in Bithynia, and three days’ darkness, also of outbreaks of
pestilence, and incursions of the barbarians, too numerous as well as
too disagreeable to mention. At this moment some revolted legion is
probably forcing the purple upon some reluctant general; and the
Persian king, a great equestrian, is doubtless mounting his horse by
the aid of my father’s back. If I had been an old Roman, I should by
this time have avenged my father, but I am a man of my age. Take the
money for thy city, and see that it yields me some amusement at any
rate. I assume, of course, that thou wilt exercise severe economy, and
that cresses and spring water will be the diet of thy philosophers.
Farewell, I go to Gaul to encounter Postumus. Willingly would I leave
him in peace in Gaul if he would leave me in peace in Italy; but I
foresee that if I do not attack him there he will attack me here. As if
the Empire were not large enough for us all! What an ass the fellow
must be!”
And so Gallienus changed his silk for steel, and departed for his
Gallic campaign, where he bore himself more stoutly than his light talk
would have led those who judged him by it to expect. Plotinus, provided
with an Imperial rescript, undertook the regulation of his
philosophical commonwealth in Campania, where a brief experience of
architects and sophists threw him into an ecstasy, not of joy, which
endured an unusually long time.