astonishing strength of faith he created
out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure,
the singular outline of which he probably developed still more
in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings.
In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current
systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain
of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought
had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches
of physical science--which, suitably treated, afford even now
so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand,
and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws
lent themselves still more easily to such objects--played in this case,
as may readily be conceived, a considerable part. His theology
was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks
of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old
or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean,
and Egyptian secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incorporated
the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness
and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds,
so as to produce further harmonious confusion. The whole system obtained
its consecration--political, religious, and national--from the name
of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle
was "to promote order and to check disorder," the miracle-worker
and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy,
who was interwoven even with the legendary history of Rome,
and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum. As birth
and death are kindred with each other, so--it seemed--Pythagoras
was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend
of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria,
but also by its grave as the last protector of the sacred bird-lore.
But the new system was not merely marvellous, it also worked marvels;
Nigidius announced to the father of the subsequent emperor Augustus,
on the very day when the latter was born, the future greatness
of his son; nay the prophets conjured up spirits for the credulous,
and, what was of more moment, they pointed out to them the places
where their lost money lay. The new-and-old wisdom, such as it was,
made a profound impression on its contemporaries; men of the highest rank,
of the greatest learning, of the most solid ab