[185]. Roger Bacon, Opus Minus, Rolls Series, vol. xv, p. 313, speaks of “Hermes Mercurius, pater philosophorum.”
[186]. Stromata, bk. vi, ch. 4.
[187]. Ammianus Marcellinus, however, writing during the latter fourth century, says of Egypt: “Hic primum homines longe ante alios ad varia religionum incunabula, ut dicitur, pervenerunt et initia prima sacrorum caute tuentur condita scriptis arcanis.” Bk. xxii, ch. xvi, sec. 20. Again, in bk. xxii, ch. xiv, sec. 7, Ammianus speaks of the Egyptian mystical books as still extant.
[188]. F. J. Champagny, Les Antonins, vol. iii, p. 81 (Paris, 1863).
[189]. See article on “Hermes” in La Grande Encyclopédie by Berthelot who has made an extended study of the history of alchemy; and who, in his La Chimie au Moyen Age holds that Greek alchemistic treatises were continuously extant in Italy during the Dark Ages—a circumstance which diminishes the importance of Arabian influence on the study of the hermetic art in the later Middle Ages.
[190]. See Anthon’s Classical Dictionary, 1855 (no adequate account of Hermes Trismegistus exists in any of the more recent classical dictionaries).
[191]. The Poemander (or Pymander) has been reproduced in the Bath Occult Reprint Series (London, 1884) from the translation “from the Arabic by Dr. Everard, 1650.” It has an introduction by Hargrave Jennings, “author of the Rosicrucians,” giving some account of Hermes Trismegistus. Vol. ii in the same Bath Occult Reprint Series—which seems to have been instituted on behalf of “students of the occult sciences, searchers after truth and Theosophists”—is Hermes’ Virgin of the World. Besides Berthelot’s article, an account of Hermes may be found in pages 181–190 of The Literary Remains of the late Emanuel Deutsch (London, 1879). There is a French translation of the Poemander by Menard with an introductory essay which, however, Deutsch characterized as “deplorably shallow.”
[192]. J. B. Bury, Later Roman Empire (N. Y., 1899), vol. i, p. 208.
[193]. De Divinatione, bk. i, ch. 58. “Haec habui, inquit, de divinatione quae dicerem. Nunc illa testabor non me sortilegos neque eos qui quaestus causa hariolentur, ne psychomantia quidem quibus Appius amicus tuus uti solebat, agnoscere.”
[194]. For the arguments of Favorinus, see Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, bk. xiv; ch. 1. (Delphin & Variorum Classics [1824] ex editione Jacobi Gronovii.) Fragments of Favorinus’s writings are also to be found in Stobæus.