[147:2] Or, in some Gnostic systems, of the Mother.
[148:1] Harrison, Prolegomena, Appendix on the Orphic tablets.
[148:2] Ap. Metamorphoses, xi.
[149:1] 2 Cor. xii. 2 and 3 (he may be referring in veiled language to himself); Gal. i. 12 ff.; Acts ix. 1-22. On the difference of tone and fidelity between the Epistles and the Acts see the interesting remarks of Prof. P. Gardner, The Religious Experience of St. Paul, pp. 5 ff.
[149:2] Porphyry, Vita Plotini, 23. 'We have explained that he was good and gentle, mild and merciful; we who lived with him could feel it. We have said that he was vigilant and pure of soul, and always striving towards the Divine, which with all his soul he loved. . . . And thus it happened to this extraordinary man, constantly lifting himself up towards the first and transcendent God by thought and the ways explained by Plato in the Symposium, that there actually came a vision of that God who is without shape or form, established above the understanding and all the intelligible world. To whom I, Porphyry, being now in my sixty-eighth year, profess that I once drew near and was made one with him. At any rate he appeared to Plotinus "a goal close at hand." For his whole end and goal was to be made One and draw near to the supreme God. And he attained that goal four times, I think, while I was living with him—not potentially but in actuality, though an actuality which surpasses speech.'
[150:1] C. I. G., vol. xii, fasc. 3; and Bethe in Rhein. Mus., N. F., xlii, 438-75.
[150:2] Irenaeus, i. 13, 3.
[150:3] Bousset, chap. vii; Reitzenstein, Mysterienreligionen, p. 20 ff., with excursus; Poimandres, 226 ff.; Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, pp. 121 ff.
[152:1] Eur. fr. 484.
[152:2] R. G. E.3, pp. 135-40. I do not touch on the political side of this apotheosis of Hellenistic kings; it is well brought out in Ferguson's Hellenistic Athens, e. g. p. 108 f., also p. 11 f. and note. Antigonus Gonatas refused to be worshipped (Tarn, p. 250 f.). For Sallustius's opinion, see below, p. 223, chap. xviii ad fin.