“And what can they want with an amphitheatre?” groaned Plotinus.
“They say it is for lectures,” replied Porphyry;
“I trust there is no truth in the rumour that the head of the Stoics is three parts owner of a lion of singular ferocity.”
“I must see to this as soon as I can get about,” said Plotinus, turning to the accounts. “What’s this? To couch and litter for head of Peripatetic school!”
“Who is so enormously fat,” explained Porphyry, “that these conveniences are really indispensable to him. The Peripatetic school is positively at a standstill.”
“And no great matter,” said Plotinus; “its master Aristotle was at best a rationalist, without perception of the supersensual. What’s this? To Maximus, for the invocation of demons.”
“That,” said Porphyry, “is our own Platonic dirty linen, and I heartily wish we were washing it elsewhere. Thou must know, dear master, that during thy trance the theurgic movement has attained a singular development, and that thou art regarded with disdain by thy younger disciples as one wholly behind the age, unacquainted with the higher magic, and who can produce no other outward and visible token of the Divine favour than the occasional companionship of a serpent.”
“I would not assert that theurgy may not be lawfully undertaken,” replied Plotinus, “provided that the adept shall have purified himself by a fast of forty months.”
“It may be from neglect of this precaution,” said Porphyry, “that our Maximus finds it so much easier to evoke the shades of Commodus and Caracalla than those of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius; and that these good spirits, when they do come, have no more recondite information to convey than that virtue differs from vice, and that one’s grandmother is a fitting object of reverence.”
“I fear this must expose Platonic truth to the derision of Epicurean scoffers,” remarked Plotinus.