in Syria.  We hear of no man to be named as successor to Iamblichus; I imagine the great line of Teachers came to an end with him.  Yet, as we shall see, their impulse, or movement, or propaganda, did not cease then:  it did not fail to reach an arm down into secular history, and to light up one fiery dynamic soul on the Imperial Throne, who did all that a God-ensouled Man could do to save the dying Roman world.  Diocletian, that great but quite unillumined pagan, was dead; the new order, that subverted Rome at last, had been established by Constantine; and the House of Constantine, with all that it implied, was in power.  But a year or two before the death of Iamblichus it chanced that a Great Soul stole a march on the House of Constantine, and (as you may say) surreptitiously incarnated in it, for the Cause of the Gods and Sublime Perfection.  And to him, in his lonely and desolate youth, kept in confinement or captivity by the Christian on the throne, came one Maximus of Smyrna, a disciple of Iamblichus;—­ and lit in the soul of Prince Julian that divine knowledge of Theosophy wherewith afterwards he made his splendid and tragic effort for Heaven.

XXII.  EASTWARD HO!

The point we start out from this evening is, in time, the year 220 A.D., in place, West Asia:  220, or you may call it 226,—­ sixty-five years, a half-cycle, after 161 and the accession of Marcus Aurelius; and therewith, in Rome, the beginning of the seasons prophetic of decline.  So now we are in 226; look well around you; note your whereabouts;—­for there is no resting here.  You have seen? you have noted?  On again then, I beseech you; and speedily.  And, please, backwards:  playing as it were the crab in time; and not content till the whole pralaya is skipped, and you stand on the far shore, in the sunset of an elder day:  looking now forward, into futurity, from 390, perhaps 394 B.C.; over first a half-cycle of Persian decline,—­long melancholy sands and shingle, to—­there on the edge of the great wan water,—­that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from Alexander;—­and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end.  What a time it was that drifted into Limbo then!  One unit of history; one phase of the world’s life-story!  It had seen all those world-shaking Tiglath-pilesers eastward; all those proud Osirified kings by the Nile;—­and now it was over; had died in its last stronghold, Persia, and there was nowhere else for it to be reborn; and, after a decent half-cycle of lying in state under degenerate descendants of the great Darius, had been furied (cataclysmal obsequies!) beneath a landslide of Hellenistic Macedonianism.  Its old civilization, senile long since, was gone, and a new kind from the west superimposed;—­Babylon was a memory vague and splendid;—­the Assyrian had gone down, and should never re-arise:—­Egypt of the Pharaohs had fallen forever and ever;—­Aryan Persia was over-run;—­