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.