Paulus, after a word with his mother and Esther, desired Longinus to favor them with his company. Sherbets and other refreshments were brought. They all sat down on the semicircular wicker settle at the corner of the roof, under the bower-like branches of the large rhododendron; a small lamp was held for Paulus by the Jewish serving-man, and Paulus read the letter aloud to that sympathetic group. Extracts we will give, in the substance, concerning two occurrences. The first, as the reader sees, the listening circle learned from Dionysius; but we have it in reality from Plutarch, upon whose narrative Eusebius and many other weighty authorities and grave historians have commented.
The captain and owner (for he was both) of the vessel in which Dion sailed back from Egypt to Athens was an Egyptian of the name of Thramnus (some call him Thamus). He said that a very weird thing had happened to him in his immediately previous trip, which had been from Greece to Italy. Dion was at the time at Heliopolis, in Egypt, with his friend, the celebrated philosopher Apollophanes, who, though (like Dion himself) only between twenty and thirty, had already (in this also resembling Dion) obtained an almost world-wide fame for eloquence, astronomical science, and general learning. When Thramnus had neared the Echinades Islands, the wind fell, a sudden calm came, and they had to drop anchor near Paxos. The night was sultry; every one was on deck. Suddenly, from the lonely shore, a loud, strange voice hailed the captain: "Thramnus!" it cried. None answered. Again, louder than human, came the cry, "Thramnus!" Still none answered. For the third time, "Thramnus!" was thundered from the lonely coast. Then Thramnus himself called out: "Who hails? What is it?" Shrill and far louder than before was the voice in reply: "When you reach the Lagoon of Palus, announce then that the Great Pan is dead."
Thereupon, everything became silent, save the sluggish wash of the waves under the vessel's side. A sort of council was at once held on board; and first they took a note of the exact date and the hour. They found that it was exactly the ninth hour of the sixth jeria, or day, in the month of March, in the fourth year (according with Phlegon's corrected and checked astronomical chronology) of the two hundred and second Olympiad: in other words, this, being translated into modern reckoning, means, six in the afternoon of Friday, the 25th of March, in the thirty-third year of our Lord.
Dion breaks off in his letter here to remark: "You will learn presently what happened to me and to Apollophanes, and to the whole renowned city of Heliopolis, at the same hour exactly of that same day; and it is the coincidence between the two occurrences which has fixed them so deeply in my mind."
Well; he proceeds to say that Thramnus, having asked his passengers, who happened to be unusually numerous, whether they considered he ought to obey this mysterious mandate, and having suggested himself that, if, on their reaching Palus, or Pelodes, the wind held fair, they should not lose time by stopping, but if the wind were there to fail, and they were forced to halt at that place, then it might be no harm to pay attention to the injunction, and see what came of it, they were all unanimously of his opinion. Thereupon, as though by some design, in the midst of a calm the breeze sprang up freshly again, and they proceeded on their way. When they came to the indicated spot, all were again on deck, unable to forget the strange incident at Paxos; and, on a sudden, the wind fell, and they were becalmed.
Thramnus, accordingly, after a pause, leaned over the ship's side, and, as loudly as he could, shouted that the great Pan was dead. No sooner had the words been pronounced than all round the vessel were heard a world of sighs issuing from the deep and in the air, with groans, and moanings, and long, wild, bitter wailings innumerable, as though from vast unseen multitudes and a host of creatures plunged in dismay and despair. Those on board were stricken with amazement and terror. When they arrived in Rome, and were recounting the adventures of their voyage, this wild story sent its rumor far and near, and made such an impression that it reached the ears of Tiberius Cæsar, who was then in the capital. He sent for Thramnus and several of the passengers, as Plutarch records for us, particularly one, Epitherses, who afterward, at Athens, with his son Æmilianus, and the traveller Philip, used often to tell the story till his death. Tiberius, after ascertaining the facts, summoned all the learned men who chanced then to be in Rome, and requested their opinion.
Their opinion, which is extant, matters little. The holy fathers who have investigated this occurrence are divided in their views. It must be remembered that Plutarch relates another truly wonderful fact universal in its range, as being notoriously simultaneous with the singular local adventure above described—the sudden silence of Delphi, and all the other famous pagan oracles, from the 8th day before the Kalends of April, in the 202d Olympiad, at six P.M. At that hour, on that day (March 25, Friday, Anno Domini 33), those oracles were stricken dumb, and nevermore returned answers to their votaries. Coupling these phenomena together, in presence of a thousand other portents, the holy fathers think, one party of them, that the enemy of man and of God, and that enemy's legions, were grieving and wailing, at the hour which Plutarch specifies (the time of evening, and on the very day, when our Lord died), at the redemption just then consummated; others, that the Almighty permitted nature "to sigh through all her works," in sympathy with the voluntary sufferings of her expiring Lord.
"Now, hearken," proceeded Dion in his letter, "to how I was occupied, hundreds of miles away, in Heliopolis, at the time, the very hour of the very day, when so wild and weird a response came from the powers of the air and the recesses of the deep to those who shouted forth, amid a calm on the silent breast of the Ægean Sea, that the great Pan ('the great All,' 'the universal Lord,' as you, my friends, are aware it means in Greek) had died!
"I had gone out, shortly before the sixth hour on this sixth day, to take a stroll in the tree-shaded suburbs of Heliopolis, with my friend Apollophanes. Suddenly, the sun, in a horrible manner, withdrew its light so effectually that we saw the stars. It was the time of the Hebrew Pasch, and the season of the month when the moon is at the full, and the period of an eclipse, or of the moon's apparent conjunction with the sun, was well known not to be then; independently of which, two unexampled and unnatural portents, contrary to the laws of the heavenly bodies, occurred: first, the moon entered the sun's disc from the east; secondly, when she had covered the disc and touched the opposite diameter, instead of passing onward, she receded, and resumed her former position in the sky. All the astronomers will tell you that these two facts, and also the time of the eclipse itself, are equally in positive deviation from the otherwise everlasting laws of the sidereal or planetary movements. I felt that either this universal frame was perishing or the Lord and Pilot of nature was himself suffering; and I turned to Apollophanes, and, 'O light of philosophy, glass of science!' I said, 'explain to me what this means.'
"Before answering me, he required that we should together apply the astronomical rule, or formula, of Philip Aridæus; after doing which with the utmost care, he said: 'These changes are supernatural; there is some stupendous revolution or catastrophe occurring in divine affairs, affecting the whole of the Supreme Being's creation.'