m 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.

But of all manifestations of divinity the most patent was that which
haloed Vespasian. He expected it, Suetonius says, but it is doubtful if
any one else did. One night he dreamed that