eason that the Spaniards
eradicated the Moors: because the West Asian tide, to which
Moors and Carthaginians belonged, had ebbed or was ebbing, and
the European tide was flowing high. Hamilcar indeed, and
Hannibal, seem to have been touched by cyclic impulses, and to
have felt that a Spanish Empire might have received the influx
which a West Asian town in Africa could not. But Italy's turn
came before Spain's; and all Hamilcar's haughty heroism, and
Hannibal's magnanimous genius, went for nothing; and Rome, the
admirable and unlovely, that had suffered the Caudine Forks, and
then conquered Samnium and beheaded that noble generous Samnite
Gaius Pontius, conquered in turn the conqueror at Cannae, and did
for his reputation what she had done with the Samnite hero's
person: chopped its head off, and dubbed him in perfect
sincerity 'perfidus Hannibal.' Over that corpse she stood, at
the end of the third century B.C., mistress of Italy and the
Italian islands; with proud Carthage at her feet; and the old
cultured East, that had known of her existence since the time of
Aristotle at least, now keenly aware of her as the strongest
thing in the Mediterranean world.

Now while she had been a little provincial town in an Italy deep
in pralaya, Numa's religion, what remained of it, had been enough
to keep her life from corruption. Each such impulse from the
heaven-world's, in its degree, an elixiral tincture to sweeten
life and keep it wholesome; some, like Buddhism, being efficient
for long ages and great empires; some only for tiny towns like
early Rome. What we may call the exoteric basis of Numaism
was a ritual of many ceremonies connected with home-life and
agriculture, and designed to keep alive a feeling for the
sacredness of these. It was calculated for its cycle: you could
have given no high metaphysical system to peasant-bandits of
that type;--you could not take the Upanishads to Afghans or
Abyssinians today. But as soon as that cycle was ended, and Rome
was called on to come out into the world, there was need of a new
force and a new sanction.

Has it occurred to you to wonder why, in that epochal sixth
century B.C., when in so many lands the Messengers of Truth
were turning away from the official Mysteries, and preaching
their Theosophy upon a new plan broadcast among the peoples,
Pythagoras, after wandering the east and west to gather up the
threads of wisdom, should have elected not to return to Greece,