olis could have been founded; and there was no time for
any of those Illyrians to think of such things.--even if they had
had it in them to do so, as they had not:--witness Aurelian's
execution of Longinus. The time had gone by for that highest of
all victories: as it might have gone by in our own day, but for
events in Chicago, in February, 1898. When Porphyry died in 304,
he left a successor indeed; but now one that did not concern
himself with Rome.

It was Iamblichus, born in the Lebanon region; we do not know in
what year; or much about him at all, beyond that he was an
aristocrat, and well-to-do; and that he conducted his Theosophic
activities mainly from his native city of Chalcis. he died
between 330 and 333; thus through thirteen decades, from the
beginning of the third century, these four great Neo-Platonist
Adepts were teaching Theosophy in the Roman world;--Ammonius in
Egypt; Plotinus and Porphyry,--the arm of the Movement stretched
westward to save, if saved they might be, the Roman west Europe,
--in Rome itself; then, since that was not be done, Iamblichus in
Syria. We hear of no man to be named as successor to Iamblichus;
I imagine the great line of Teachers came to an end with him.
Yet, as we shall see, their impulse, or movement, or propaganda,
did not cease then: it did not fail to reach an arm down into
secular history, and to light up one fiery dynamic soul on the
Imperial Throne, who did all that a God-ensouled Man could do to
save the dying Roman world. Diocletian, that great but quite
unillumined pagan, was dead; the new order, that subverted Rome
at last, had been established by Constantine; and the House of
Constantine, with all that it implied, was in power. But a year
or two before the death of Iamblichus it chanced that a Great
Soul stole a march on the House of Constantine, and (as you may
say) surreptitiously incarnated in it, for the Cause of the Gods
and Sublime Perfection. And to him, in his lonely and desolate
youth, kept in confinement or captivity by the Christian on the
throne, came one Maximus of Smyrna, a disciple of Iamblichus;--
and lit in the soul of Prince Julian that divine knowledge of
Theosophy wherewith afterwards he made his splendid and tragic
effort for Heaven.

XXII. EASTWARD HO!

The point we start out from this evening is, in time, the year
220 A.D., in place, West Asia: 220, or you may call it 226,--
sixty-five years, a half-cycle, after 161