The Philosopher And Society In Late Antiquity Illustrated Andrew Smith

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6. THE PHILOSOPHER AND SOCIETY
IN LATE ANTIQUITY

8. THE PHILOSOPHER
AND SOCIETY
IN LATE ANTIQUITY
Edited by
Andrew Smith
Contributors:
Karin Alt, Polymnia Athanassiadi, Robbert van den Berg,
John Dillon, Mark Edwards, Garth Fowden, Robin Lane Fox,
Aideen Hartney, Dominic J. O’Meara, Alexandrine Schniewind,
Andrew Smith, Richard Sorabji, Edward Watts
The Classical Press of Wales
Essays in Honour of
Peter Brown

9. v
First published in 2005 by
The Classical Press of Wales
15 Rosehill Terrace, Swansea SA1 6JN
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
www.classicalpressofwales.co.uk
Distributor in the United States of America:
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© 2005 The contributors
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system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 0–9543845-8-X
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Ernest Buckley, Clunton, Shropshire
Printed and bound in the UK by Cambridge University Press
The Classical Press of Wales, an independent venture, was founded in 1993, initially to support
the work of classicists and ancient historians in Wales and their collaborators from further afield.
More recently it has published work initiated by scholars internationally . While retaining a special
loyalty to Wales and the Celtic countries, the Press welcomes scholarly contributions from all parts
of the world.
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from Germany. After much careful protection, the Red Kite now thrives – in Wales and beyond.

10. v
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction Andrew Smith (University College, Dublin) vii
1. Philosophy as a profession in late antiquity 1
John Dillon (Trinity College, Dublin)
2. Movers and Shakers 19
Robin Lane Fox (New College, Oxford)
3. The social concern of the Plotinian sage 51
Alexandrine Schniewind (Université de Genève)
4. Action and contemplation in Plotinus 65
Andrew Smith (University College, Dublin)
5. Man and daimones: do the daimones influence man’s life? 73
Karin Alt (Freie Universität, Berlin)
6. A Neoplatonist ethics for high-level officials: Sopatros’
Letter to Himerios 91
Dominic J. O’Meara (Université de Fribourg)
7. Live unnoticed! The invisible Neoplatonic politician 101
Robbert van den Berg (University of Leiden)
8. Apamea and the Chaldaean Oracles: A holy city and
a holy book 117
Polymnia Athanassiadi (University of Athens)
9. Sages, cities and temples: Aspects of late antique pythagorism? 145
Garth Fowden (Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity,
National Research Foundation, Athens)
10. Asceticism and administration in the life of St John Chrysostom 171
Aideen Hartney (Dublin)

11. vi vii
11. Where Greeks and Christians meet: Two incidents in
Panopolis and Gaza 189
Mark Edwards (Christ Church, Oxford)
12. Divine names and sordid deals in Ammonius’ Alexandria 203
Richard Sorabji (King’s College, London)
13. An Alexandrian Christian response to fifth-century
Neoplatonic influence 215
Edward Watts (University of Indiana)
14. Appendix: Harran, the Sabians and the late Platonist ‘movers’ 231
Robin Lane Fox (New College, Oxford)
Index 245
Contents

12. vi vii
INTRODUCTION
Andrew Smith
The papers comprising this book were originally given at a conference in
University College Dublin held in honour of Peter Brown who has done so
much to illuminate the world of late antiquity. The aim of the conference
was to bring together philosophers and historians to discuss the relation-
ship of philosophers to society in late antiquity. The emphasis naturally
fell on Neoplatonists, both because they were the dominant philosophical
movement and because their philosophy would seem to have promulgated
an escapist attitude to the world around them. Omne corpus fugiendum
est is one of the leading ideas espoused by Augustine from his reading of
the libri Platonici. Did the Neoplatonists exaggerate one side of a delicate
balance of tensions clearly visible in the works of Plato himself? Or is such
an exaggeration a misreading of the evidence? Such a balance was never
going to be easy to express, let alone to act out in life and the following
papers, which range from the discussion of metaphysical principles to the
practical engagement of philosophers, do at least demonstrate the many
nuances of which we need to be aware if we are to appreciate this. But in
general they point to a greater and more meaningful involvement in the
world than the conventional handbooks are accustomed to admit.
Our enquiry begins with an account by John Dillon of the way
in which the Neoplatonic schools operated. He takes the examples of
Plotinus in Rome, Iamblichus in Apamea and Proclus in Athens. In fact
the schools were never large affairs and were mostly dependent on some
local patron for support and even accommodation, although the Academy
in Athens, at least in Proclus’ time, had a considerable endowment and its
head possessed his own house. Even so the number of students was small.
Proclus probably had no more than six in his inner circle at any one time.
The atmosphere was quite informal. The more general lectures would have
attracted a larger following, whilst wealthy patrons were often at the same
time pupils. In all of these respects the late antique school of philosophy
differed little from its forbears. The same expectation of public service was
also continued, although that became increasingly difficult in a Christian
milieu. Plotinus, Iamblichus and Proclus were not disconnected from the

13. viii
Introduction
ix
Introduction
outside world. Plotinus had close contacts with the court of Gallienus,
Iamblichus with Licinius, and Proclus was involved in the public affairs of
Athens. In each case it would appear that external political relations played
a significant role in the continued good fortunes of the establishment. In
fact after the demise of Licinius, Iamblichus’ school had to go underground
for a time. Heads of schools also seemed to use the services of distinguished
patrons or pupils who had influence in high places not only as a means
of securing their own survival but as a channel through which to bestow
their own services to society as men of probity and justice. Even within the
schools their activity of teaching was demanding and their devotion to their
students exemplary; yet time could still be found for writing, contempla-
tion and prayer.
Robin Lane Fox analyses the impact of late antique philosophers on
others and in turn the impact of society on them. The former he categorizes
as ‘shakers’, those who seriously influenced others, the latter as ‘movers’,
those who finally yielded to the impossible pressures around them and took
the route of exit. Philosophers continued, in so far as they could in the new
Christian environment, to act as intermediaries between ruled and rulers as
they had done in previous centuries, as men of trust and impartiality who
could exercise parrhsiva. Even the theurgically inclined, e.g. Sopater and
Proclus, could use their powers for the good of society. Marinus praises
Proclus’ active involvement in civic affairs, whilst Damascius explicitly
praises the practical virtues. On another front, philosophers like Plotinus
and Porphyry had a profound impact of an intellectual and spiritual nature
on non-professional philosophers such as Ambrose, Augustine, Nigidius
and Theodorus who was consul in 399. Synesius is another example of an
ambassador, administrator and military commander who was profoundly
influenced by his philosophical teachers. On the other side are the ‘movers’.
But when Proclus, for example, went into enforced exile from Athens for
a period, this was only after he had spoken out strongly against what Robin
Lane Fox argues may well have been the conversion of the Parthenon into
a church. And the seven philosophers who went to Persia after the demise
of the Academy in 529 were still politically engaged enough to concern
themselves with the laxity of morals and the suppression of the poor in
Persia. Priscianus, one of their number, even composed a work tailored to
the needs of the philosophical novice and ruler of Persia.
If we now turn to the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, we may be
inclined to regard him as an other-worldly figure and, seeing little discus-
sion of practical ethics in the Enneads, ask ourselves whether he addressed
himself only to the sage, the philosopher who, like himself, has already
reached the goal of assimilation to the divine. Alexandrine Schniewind

14. viii
Introduction
ix
Introduction
argues strongly for exactly the opposite. Plotinus in fact addressed himself
primarily to those who had not reached but were on their way to the goal.
His portrayal of the sage acts as a model for their encouragement. The
sage and the ordinary man are not opposed. The latter may be regarded
as a sage in potentiality and each one of us contains both a higher and
lower self so that becoming a sage is simply the discovery of one’s higher
self and allowing it to guide the lower. The higher educates the lower just
as the ordinary man initially needs the guidance of the sage, who, because
his higher self is already in control of the lower, can provide others with
guidance which he communicates through discursive reason. But it is in
fact our higher part which the sage primarily addresses. And when, in an
exaggerated way, Plotinus claims that the sage does not pity the suffering
of others, it is the suffering of the lower part to which he refers and which
the individual must himself learn to put into context. The sage thus does
‘descend to the cave’ in the sense of bringing his message to others in
imitation of the generosity of the Good. Plotinus thus presents us with an
ethics for the ordinary man expressed in the form of a discourse concerning
the sage.
A similar evaluation is made by Andrew Smith who explores the
metaphysical principles which allow Plotinus to reconcile the life of
contemplation and of action. The metaphysical principles governing the
relationship of higher to lower entities and their counterpart in the theory
of productive contemplation lie also at the root of the relationship between
the contemplative and practical aspects of human existence. And although
human souls normally contemplate only intermittently, unlike the perfectly
balanced World Soul, we too, Plotinus sometimes says, can strive to be
like the World Soul which can combine its contemplative activity with its
cosmic functions.
Whilst Plotinus might have held himself somewhat aloof from the
religious experience of everyday life, this is hardly true of his colleagues
and successors who were very much in touch with this aspect of daily
life. It is in this context that Karin Alt explores the world of daimons,
a world which belongs primarily to the sphere of popular belief, but which
proved particularly attractive to some philosophers like Porphyry and
Iamblichus who were deeply concerned with the relationship of philosophy
to religion. Of course Plato had laid the groundwork, particularly for the
notion of the daimon as intermediary. Other Platonists, and one thinks
primarily of Xenocrates and Plutarch, developed a daimonology and it is
Xenocrates who first introduces the notion of evil daimons. Plotinus only
twice discusses daimons at any great length and that too in an attempt
to reconcile apparently discordant passages in Plato. It is indicative of

15. x
Introduction
xi
Introduction
Plotinus’ independent stance that he shows no great interest in the topic
for its own sake. This is in marked contrast to Porphyry who is concerned to
reconcile philosophical interpretations with popular practice. A prominent
case is his interest in evil daimons who are attracted to blood sacrifice.This
attraction is but one of the reasons why Porphyry advises us to replace blood
sacrifice with ‘spiritual sacrifices’. And yet civic loyalty sometimes permits
the philosopher to participate in such traditional sacrifices, though without
eating the flesh. In his letter to Marcella, in which he is less concerned with
the general need for abstinence from the eating of flesh, he is even more
positive about popular belief. It is only to be expected that Iamblichus
would support many of the beliefs mentioned by Porphyry whilst at the
same time clarifying some issues, e.g. the status of the personal daimon,
which had been left in the air by Porphyry. But Sallustius’ comparative
silence on daimons and his rejection of evil daimons is surprising. Was
this perhaps a sign of accommodation with an unsympathetic and even
dangerous Christian officialdom?
Political involvement, too, became increasingly difficult for fully
committed Platonists. And yet Dominic O’Meara adds to our examples
of politically engaged Neoplatonists a network of educated individuals
connected with Iamblichus and argues for a neoplatonically-inspired theory
of political action and duty. In his letter to his son Himerius, a middle-
ranking official, Sopator (a decurion in Apamea and son of the politically
distinguished Sopator, the pupil of Iamblichus) advises that concern for
the ‘good life’ of those under him should dictate his relationship with
his superiors, whilst he should himself exercise a providential care for his
charges. This exercise of moral and political virtue is also a stage on his
way to becoming like god who exercises providential care over the world.
The practical virtuous activity that is relevant to the situation of political
responsibility determines the sort of advice that is given to the adminis-
trator rather than the enunciation of some absolute ideal. The applicability
of this philosophical advice is also seen in Iamblichus’ evaluation of law
as an expression of virtue and the view of the administration of justice as
something to be exercised within the context of an alert and constructive
concern for human welfare, where punishment, for example, is conceived
as primarily therapeutic. This demonstrates the practical political involve-
ment of the philosophically educated whose active care is an integral part
of the search for the transcendent.
In contrast Robbert van den Berg argues strongly for the fundamental
tension in Platonism between contemplation and action, particularly in
the more extreme manifestations of the philosophical and fully engaged
political life. When the Neoplatonists do advocate such a rapprochement it

16. x
Introduction
xi
Introduction
is more like that of the Platonic demiurge than the philosopher-king. The
former, as interpreted by Proclus, is left to contemplate alone while taking
care of his providential duties through the agency of subordinates – the
younger gods. Similarly Proclus’ Parmenides may live an undisturbed philo-
sophical life by handing over to the younger Zeno the task of discoursing
with Socrates. Themistius, who chides contemporary philosophers with
their lack of external engagement, proves himself the exception when
actively involving himself in politics. Moreover the Epicurean invocation
to ‘live unnoticed’ had even become ascribed to the Pythagoreans by later
Neoplatonists.
Polymnia Athanassiadi identifies another practical involvement of the
Neoplatonists in the establishing of the ‘sacred text’ as a locus for the divine
presence in the universe. The second century ad saw a change in attitudes
towards the primacy of the written sacred text over the oral tradition.
It is in this period that both Jews and Christians established canonical
scriptural texts. The pagan version is seen particularly in the Chaldaean
Oracles which, like their Jewish and Christian counterparts, soon became,
as definitive texts, the object of careful exegesis. Porphyry, Iamblichus and
later Proclus were the protagonists. For Proclus the Chaldaean Oracles were
more important than Plato. Athenassiadi argues that the temple of Bel at
Apamea was probably the location of the Chaldaean text itself.
Garth Fowden traces the significance in late antiquity of Pythagoras
both as a man of god and as one who is involved in civic life. Plotinus,
too, lived in a city (Rome) rather than in some rural retreat, Iamblichus
was in Apamea and Proclus in Athens. Indeed Pythagoras as well as Apol-
lonius were more widely recognized as attested by their portrait busts in
Aphrodisias. We should also note that the diffidence expressed in the attri-
bution of Epicurean withdrawal to Pythagoras expresses probably no more
than a justified concern about possible Christian suppression. The godlike
Pythagoras was also the model for the frequent combination of philosopher
and ‘priest’, found above all in Proclus. Many of these philosopher-priests
were extraordinarily active in their support of pagan cults both locally and
internationally. Their presence was ‘discreet but effective’ and Damascius’
Life of Isidore is a rich source of names and anecdotes to illustrate this point.
The more discreet philosophers, such as Chrysanthius, Priscus, Themistius
and Synesius, were left unmolested or pursued successful public careers,
whilst the more flamboyant, such as Maximus of Ephesus, came to a sticky
end. And though their activities were more obvious to their fellow sages
than, say, to Christian officialdom, some, at least, of what they did came
to the attention of Christian writers who even when mocking pagan
philosophers at least recognize their existence as a distinct social group.

17. xii
Introduction
xiii
Introduction
The conflict between the life of contemplation and the active life is also
found amongst Christians, and Aideen Hartney examines the instructive
case of John Chrysostom who faced the dichotomy of the ascetic life and
that of ecclesiastical administration. At first he dealt with this by an escape
from the city into the countryside to live the life of a monk. De sacerdote
is in effect an apologia for his own act of escape from the city. Yet the very
polarity of his life as an ascetic and as Episcopal administrator was curiously
bridged by his strong reformist engagement with the corruption of city
life and his practical support for the poor. This reconciliation reached its
climax in his period as bishop of Constantinople when he seemed able to
combine ascetic ideals with the practical activity of preacher and protector
of the poor, although the implementation of his ideal would have involved
the rejection of most recognizable civic institutions and their replacement
by ascetic-living family units.
Mark Edwards explores with two examples the subtle relationship of
pagan and Christian in late antiquity. The alchemist Zosimus of Gaza,
who is characterized as a sort of third-century Teilhard de Chardin with
his theory of spiritualized materiality, is not to be regarded as a confused
syncretist, but rather as a master of assimilation in the way in which he
combined Christian beliefs and alchemy. Edwards’ second example, the
destruction of the pagan temple of Marnas in Gaza, is not so much an
example of persecution as a case of pragmatic political collusion between
clergy and emperor. These two examples should warn us to be wary of
clear battle lines between pagans and Christians. The scene is less clear and
Proclus, who had himself visited the Marneion, need not be regarded as
totally out of joint with the times in his defence of pagan traditions.
But Proclus’ religiosity and support of theurgy is not the only form of
valid Neoplatonism, as Richard Sorabji demonstrates in his examination
of the stance of Ammonius in Alexandria. His starting point is the critical
report of Damascius on Ammonius’ accommodation with the Patriarch of
Alexandria which allowed him to continue teaching. This accommodation,
he argues, was not a rejection of strict Neoplatonic theology, nor an aban-
doning of teaching Plato, nor the betraying of the hiding places of fellow
Neoplatonists, but rather an agreement to omit the discussion of pagan
religious practice in his school. The evidence is contained in the omission
from his commentary on Aristotle’s de interpretatione of any discussion of
divine names. He also notes the absence from the Alexandrian tradition of
commentaries on the Orphics and the Chaldaean Oracles. The reservation
of Ammonius and subsequent Alexandrian Neoplatonism in this regard
is striking when compared with the activities of Proclus, Damascius and
Horapollo whose school had been closed for over-zealous proselytizing.

18. xii
Introduction
xiii
Introduction
Damascius may have regarded this as a betrayal, but it was a betrayal only
of his kind of Neoplatonism and Ammonius may be doing no more than
following in the footsteps of the religious moderates, Plotinus, Porphyry
and Aedesius.
Further insights into the relationship between Christians and Neopla-
tonists, and into the influence the latter had in fifth-century Alexandria,
is provided by Edward Watts’ analysis of the intended audience of the
Theophrastus of Aeneas, bishop of Gaza, and of the Ammonius of Zacharias.
The former, though written in Gaza, was aimed at an audience of cultural
equals in Alexandria. The dialogue is the composition of an educated rheto-
rician who presents a Christian view of important and topical arguments
about the eternity of the universe, but without a reference to Christ or
Christianity, in a non-confrontational dialogue with his equals. Zacharias,
on the other hand, aims his work at a different and more sensitive audience,
the Christian students attending the philosophical schools in Alexandria.
His Ammonius is confrontational. He names his opponents and ridicules
them as they fail to convince their Christian interlocutors in debate. The
work lacks the suave literary finish of Aeneas with his learned references
to Greek literature and mythology which are replaced by overt biblical
citations. Zacharias’ Life of Severus provides important information about
the background of student and intellectual life in the Alexandrian schools.
Zacharias had been a staunch supporter of the philoponoi, lay Christian
groups attached to monasteries. Their student wing provided support
cells for Christian students attending the predominantly Neoplatonic
philosophical lectures. Edward Watts argues that the Ammonius was
written for such groups in order to strengthen their Christian convictions
and undermine the natural authority of their pagan teachers. It is, then,
a strong testimony to the cultural power exercised by Neoplatonic teachers
like Ammonius and Gessius.
Finally, in an appendix, Robin Lane Fox disputes the thesis of Tardieu
that the seven Neoplatonists who left the Academy settled in Harran
(Carrhae) after leaving Persia and there founded a Neoplatonic school
which survived until the tenth century as the source for an Abbasid Platonic
revival and subsequently the source of Arabic Platonism. The evidence that
the seven were in Harran, let alone founded a long-lasting school, is shown
to be largely conjectural. It is more probable that a tradition continued in
Emesa. The Arabic tradition was more likely inspired by individual reading
of chance surviving works in compendia.
One serious omission from our enquiry has been the artistic dimension,
an area which has been greatly illuminated by the recent work of Paul

19. xiv
Introduction
1
Zanker. It is instructive to note that the Ostia head of ‘Plotinus’ which
displays the ascetic features of the bearded philosopher with up-turned
eyes, looking for inspiration from above, is almost certainly not a portrait
of Plotinus, but probably of a local worthy from Ostia.
1
Although we have
lost a possible portrait of Plotinus we have gained the understanding that
men of affairs wished to be portrayed as transcendent philosophers. It is
a fashion confirmed by a series of sarcophagi mostly from Rome, the most
impressive of which shows the deceased on one side as pater familias in the
toga and on the other as philosopher wearing the khiton.
2
Philosophers did
influence those around them. But it is also a reciprocal influence as we have
seen so often in this collection of papers, for philosophers, even Neoplaton-
ists, were also sensitive and responsive to the needs of their communities.
The final blow to that interaction came with the gradual change of that
community from Hellenism to Christianity and the consequent transmis-
sion of the perennial conflict of action and contemplation to a Christian
milieu.
I would like to record my thanks to the Dublin Centre for the Study of
the Platonic Tradition under whose auspices this conference was held and
to the following for generous financial support: the Faculty of Arts and
the College Research Committee, University College Dublin; the Higher
Education Authority research programme in Mediterranean and Near
Eastern Studies, Trinity College Dublin; and the graduate students of the
Department of Classics in University College for their help and practical
support.
Notes
1
See Paul Zanker, Die Maske des Socrates (Munich 1995) p. 213, ill. 122f =
Ostia, Museo 68 (Helbig IV 3136).
2
See Zanker, ibid. pp. 259–67, ill. 148.

20. xiv
Introduction
1
1
PHILOSOPHY AS A PROFESSION
IN LATE ANTIQUITY
John Dillon
In the spring of 263, in his thirtieth year, the philosopher Porphyry, origi-
nally of Tyre, but for some years previously studying with the distinguished
Platonist Longinus at Athens, decided on a career move, and set out with
one companion for Rome, to join the circle of the rather avant-garde and
somewhat mysterious philosopher Plotinus.
1
What sort of a set-up he
found when he got there, and what sort of a set-up he had left behind him
in Athens, is part of what I now wish to enquire into.
In fact, as Porphyry tells us in his Life of Plotinus (ch. 5), he found
nothing much going on at all when he arrived, since Plotinus was enjoying
his summer vacation (tou` Plwtivnou ta;" qerina;" a[gonto" ajrgouv"), and not
holding regular classes.
2
But when school resumed in October,
3
what did
he find himself faced with?
One of the first things we have to do, I think, when approaching the
study of ancient centres of higher learning, whether philosophical, medical,
legal, or rhetorical, is to think small. Even the model of the mediaeval
university presents us with something far too elaborate. A nearer analogue
to the situation in late antiquity, which was put to me many years ago in
Berkeley by Peter Brown himself, and which I find most attractive, might
be found in what we know of the centres of learning in the mediaeval
Arab world, from Seville and Cordoba to Baghdad or Ispahan, where even
a world-famous sheikh would gather with his little flock of students, who
might themselves have come to sit at his feet from any quarter of the Arab-
dominated world, in nothing more formal than an alcove of a mosque, or
a corner of its courtyard, and expound his doctrine, after which teacher and
students would adjourn to his house for dinner and further discussion.
4
Similarly, Porphyry, arriving at Plotinus’ school in Rome, joins a very
simple and informal institution indeed, by modern standards. But how
representative, after all, was the school of Plotinus of late antique philo-
sophical schools in general? Here, I think, on the analogy of Sherlock
Holmes’ dog that fails to bark, one may take note of certain interesting

21. 2
John Dillon
3
Philosophy as a profession in late antiquity
features of Porphyry’s narrative.
5
Porphyry, certainly, is neither blind to,
nor reticent about, Plotinus’ various eccentricities, but at no point does he
suggest that the general organization of the school, or Plotinus’ position
in it, is noticeably peculiar. This I find significant. Porphyry, after all, as
I say, had come to Plotinus from Longinus in Athens. He was presumably
also familiar with the establishment of the Platonic diadochus Eubulus,
even if Longinus was not himself part of that establishment.
6
Yet he does
not note in the Life any startling change of structure, such as from a large,
organized ‘research institute’ to a totally personal, informal group of
‘friends’. Certainly, he notes that Plotinus’ method of commentary was
remarkable (ch. 14), but this in itself emphasizes that the overall set-up
was not a shock to him at all. My conclusion from this is that Plotinus’
school – apart from the personality of the Master himself – was not in
any essential way different in structure from that of any other teacher of
philosophy in these centuries.
What, then, was Plotinus’ situation? As far as we can gather from
Porphyry’s narrative, he lived, when Porphyry knew him, and presumably
for some considerable time before that, in the house of a wealthy widow
called Gemina (ch. 9).
7
The household included Gemina’s daughter, also
called Gemina, and a number of young boys and girls who had been
entrusted to Plotinus’ care on the death of their parents. Whether this was
Gemina’s only residence, or just a house belonging to her, is not clear, but
it was obviously a fairly large and elaborate establishment, in which young
ladies and middle-aged philosophers could live decently together.
Around Plotinus in this establishment was gathered a circle of ‘compan-
ions’ – Porphyry does not speak of pupils (mathetai), only of compan-
ions, hetairoi. These companions may be divided into three classes: (1)
wealthy patrons, (2) close companions, and (3) more casual auditors. The
first category is not, of course, exclusive of the other two, but the latter
two categories represent, I think, the same distinction that can be found
in earlier centuries in the schools of such figures as Plutarch’s mentor
Ammonius, and that of Aulus Gellius, L. Calvenus Taurus, between young
men who attended philosophical lectures to complete their education (as
was the case, for instance, with budding lawyers or rhetoricians like Aulus
Gellius or Apuleius), and serious students of Platonism, who would go on
to become masters themselves, and one of whom would normally be their
master’s chosen successor.
In Plotinus’ case, patrons included the wealthy senators Castricius
Firmus, Marcellus Orontius, Sabinillus, and Rogatianus,
8
the last of
whom went rather overboard, giving away all his possessions and adopting
the philosophic way of life. This did wonders for his gout, it seems, but

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presumably rather lessened his usefulness as a patron. The others, however,
seem to have found philosophy compatible with the bios praktikos. Castri-
cius Firmus was a particularly good friend. Plotinus was always welcome,
one gathers, at his country estate at Minturnae, and when the philosopher
was afflicted with his final illness in 269, it was to an estate adjacent to this
in Campania that he retired (V.Plot. ch. 2). This estate belonged to, and
was presumably bequeathed to him by, a prosperous doctor of Arabian
extraction by the name of Zethus, who had himself been given it by Castri-
cius – interesting patterns of patronage are revealed here.
9
‘His wants,’
Porphyry tells us, ‘were provided in part out of Zethus’ estate, and for the
rest were furnished from Minturnae, where Castricius’ property lay.’ We
see in all this Castricius providing very much the same range of services for
Plotinus as, back in the second century, we find Herodes Atticus providing
for Calvenus Taurus in Athens.
10
Plotinus’ patrons actually came to include the Emperor Gallienus
himself, and his wife Salonina (V.Plot. ch. 12), which imperial favour led
Plotinus to propose the rather wild project of establishing a philosophic
city on a ruined site in Campania, to be called Platonopolis and to be
run in accordance with Plato’s Laws – presumably with Plotinus and
his friends acting as a kind of Nocturnal Council. This project came to
nothing, in fact, Porphyry tells us, by reason of opposition by certain
parties at court.
11
The presence on the scene of the lady Gemina and of Castricius goes
some way to answer, perhaps, a question which must occur to the modern
observer. What were the financial arrangements, in an ancient philosophic
school, between master and pupil? Such indelicate matters are, after all,
never mentioned in our sources – though endowments are, much later,
in the case of the Academy in Athens.
12
The answer is, I would suggest,
that financial arrangements were left quite vague, in accordance with the
philosophic inhibition, dating from Socrates himself, against taking fees
for imparting knowledge. The pupil was expected to provide for himself
(Porphyry, at least, had a house or apartment of his own, V.Plot. ch. 11),
and perhaps to contribute to such communal meals as were held. The
pupil’s father, or he himself, if he were mature and rich, might make the
philosopher ‘presents’ of various sorts, but such matters would not be
regulated to the extent of constituting anything like an explicit fee. As far
as one can observe from the sources available to us, one simply presented
oneself at the establishment of the philosopher of one’s choice and hoped to
be allowed to enter his circle. It is thus that Porphyry arrives at the school
of Plotinus, and it is thus, nearly two centuries later, that Proclus arrives at
the school of Syrianus and Plutarchus.
13

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About attending lectures there was, it seems, no great difficulty.
Plotinus’ lectures, at least, were open to all (V.Plot. ch. 1). Amelius was
once able to bring along a friend of his who was a noted portrait painter,
to make sketches surreptitiously for a portrait of Plotinus, and no notice,
it seems, was taken of this by the great man (though here his students were
in collusion against him). Visitors in town might drop in unexpectedly – as
did once, to Plotinus’ great confusion, his former fellow-pupil Origenes
(ch. 3). In Proclus’ case, a century and a half later, it would seem that he
just turned up to a lecture by Syrianus,
14
and then commended himself to
Syrianus and one of his inner circle of followers, Lachares, by ostentatiously
worshipping the rising moon as he left the house at the end of the session
– as a result of which, it would seem, Syrianus asked him to stay to dinner,
and subsequently received him into his circle.
Moving on from Plotinus, I merely note the school of Porphyry, since
we know virtually nothing about it, save that it existed. He presumably
set it up, in Rome, on the ashes of that of Plotinus (which seems to have
simply dissolved at his death), after his return to Rome from self-imposed
exile in Lilybaeum in Sicily some time after the death of Plotinus in 269,
perhaps in the mid-270s. The philosopher Iamblichus is declared by
Eunapius to have studied with him (and previously with a sort of deputy
of his, one Anatolius, Eunap. V.Phil. V 1: 467), and we know the names of
a number of other pupils, such as Gedalius, to whom he dedicated his vast
commentary on Aristotle’s Categories. The school will have continued for
upwards of thirty years (his death is generally fixed at shortly after 305). It
is possible that his wife Marcella (to whom he addresses a rather pompous
epistle at around the turn of the century) filled for him something of the
same role as Gemina did for Plotinus. At any rate, reading between the
lines of the distinctly defensive proem to his epistle, we may gather that
there were many relations of Marcella (who was a widow with five children,
her husband having been a ‘friend’ – perhaps an aristocratic disciple – of
Porphyry) who were highly indignant at the marriage, and who had been
making trouble. Despite Porphyry’s high-minded denial, there must have
been an estate there worth fighting about.
If we turn from the uncertainties surrounding Porphyry to the school estab-
lished by Iamblichus at Apamea after his departure from Porphyry, we find
more or less the same degree of informality manifesting itself as we saw in
that of Plotinus.
15
Iamblichus, it would seem, returned from his sojourn
in Rome to his native Syria some time in the late third century, and estab-
lished himself in Apamea, a flourishing town in the Orontes valley, already
notable as the birthplace (and perhaps also the place of work) of Numenius,

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and the town to which Plotinus’ senior pupil Amelius had retired in the
late 260s. Amelius himself was probably already dead by the time Iambli-
chus arrived
16
(though his protégé Hostilianus Hesychius, to whom he
bequeathed his library,
17
may well still have been around). The important
factor, though, from Iamblichus’ point of view, was the existence of a local
patron, in the person of Sopater, scion of a prominent local family, who
may or may not have been acquainted with him previously.
We come upon him, in Eunapius’ narrative, already well established
in Apamea, with a flourishing school, including members from Cappa-
docia (Aedesius and Eustathius), and even mainland Greece (Theodorus
of Asine and Euphrasius). The school appears to have had at its disposal
more than one suburban estate (proasteion, V.Phil. 1, 12: 458), whether
provided through the beneficence of Sopater, or from Iamblichus’ own
resources, on which the disciples could live a communal life. It seems that
Iamblichus imposed something of a Pythagorean regime on his followers
– as a back-up to which, no doubt, his Pythagorean Sequence was composed,
a set of ten works, put together largely from extracts from previous works,
and serving as an introduction to all aspects of ‘Pythagorean’ philosophy.
Eunapius tells us (V.Phil. 1, 5: 458) that he devoted himself unstintingly
(aphthonos) to his pupils, merely retiring occasionally by himself to pray
and meditate – a custom which led to the growth of wild rumours about
levitation and suchlike!
The business of the school would seem to have involved, after the study
of the basic principles of Pythagorean philosophy, first, a course in the
logic of Aristotle (if we may conclude that from the existence of a massive
commentary by Iamblichus on the Categories, and some evidence of ones
on the De Interpretatione and Prior Analytics as well), and then the study
of a carefully-selected sequence of Platonic dialogues, designed to take
one through the philosophy of Plato in a coherent order. We are given
some account of this in the Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philos-
ophy, a (probably) sixth-century compilation (ch. 26).
18
First there came
a sequence of ten dialogues, beginning with the First Alcibiades, which
inculcated the basic self-knowledge which enabled one to embark upon
a programme of Platonic philosophy, and followed by the Gorgias (civic
virtue), Phaedo (purificatory virtue), after which one passed to the properly
theoretic level, the study of true reality (ta onta). Here one first worked
through the Cratylus, to acquire a theory of language, then the Theaetetus,
for the study of concepts, then the Sophist and the Statesman for the study
of cosmic realities,
19
and the Phaedrus and Symposium for the study of
theology. As the culmination of this whole course he chose the Philebus.
This, however, is only the first cycle; the course concludes with the study

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of the two ‘summits’ of Platonic wisdom, the Timaeus, covering ‘physics,’
the study of every aspect of the physical world, and the Parmenides, for
‘theology’, the study of intelligible reality.
How long all this was designed to take, in terms of years, we have
no idea, but the general impression that one receives of the procedure
of ancient philosophical schools is that there was no hurry – a serious
student might spend upwards of ten years with his master (as Plotinus
did with Ammonius, and Amelius with Plotinus).
20
Iamblichus doubtless
commented on the text of the dialogues in considerable detail. We have
evidence of detailed commentaries by him on virtually all of those in his
cycle,
21
and for each of them he proposed the radical notion that they
had one single skopos, or subject-matter, to which all parts of the given
dialogue, including the apparently casual details of the introductory
portions, related.
22
The working out of this Procrustean system involved
a large degree of allegorizing, and forcing of the text, but it was actuated
by the belief that the divine Plato could have done nothing at random,
and that a dialogue must be a single, coherent living whole, on the lines
laid down by Socrates in the Phaedrus (264C).
Apart from normal school seminars, there will have been public dispu-
tations from time to time, as in the case of the visit to the school (related
by Eunapius, V 3: 406) of a rival philosopher, Alypius, who tries to put
Iamblichus on the spot by asking an awkward question – really a proposal
for discussion: ‘The rich man is either unjust, or the heir of one unjust, yes
or no?’ Iamblichus in the event deflects the question, but we can see here
in operation a procedure not unlike the mediaeval disputation, or indeed
the modern press conference, to which a philosopher might submit from
time to time, for purposes of self-advertisement or public relations. The
school also went on periodic outings, it would seem, as on one occasion to
the hot springs at Gadara – a considerable journey south, into present-day
Jordan (V.Phil. 2, 2: 459) – where the great man impressed his followers
by conjuring up a pair of spirits, Eros and Anteros, out of adjacent wells.
Another kind of external relations in which a philosopher of late
antiquity might indulge was the composition of ‘letters’, popular exposi-
tions of aspects of his doctrine in epistolary form, addressed to friends,
former pupils, patrons (male or female), or distinguished public figures.
Iamblichus is actually the only later Platonist of whom we have any
surviving letters (preserved in extracts by John of Stobi in his Anthology),
and they illustrate well the range of topics and recipients which might
be covered. We find letters to various pupils: to Sopater (also, perhaps,
a patron), On Fate, On Dialectic, On Bringing up Children,
23
On Ingratitude,
On Virtue, and On Truth; to Dexippus (whose short commentary on the

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Categories survives), On Dialectic; to Eustathius, On Music. There is one to
Anatolius, presumably his old teacher, On Justice; two to a certain Macedo-
nius, On Fate (perhaps the weightiest, from a philosophical point of view),
and On Concord; one to the lady Arete, On Self-Control; and a number of
others to persons of unidentifiable status. One figure, however, Dyscolius,
is identifiable with probability as the governor of Syria around 323 ad,
towards the end of Iamblichus’ life,
24
and this reminds us of a significant
aspect of the philosopher’s Sitz im Leben, his relations with those in
authority. Iamblichus’ position was secure so long as the anti-Christian
Licinius was in power in the East – we have most interesting testimony to
his relations with the court in the form of a series of letters addressed to him
by an anonymous correspondent who was plainly a prominent member of
Licinius’ staff, and very probably an ex-pupil
25
– but when Constantine
took over, it became increasingly difficult to maintain such a prominent
centre of Hellenic culture and religion, and the school, under Sopater’s
successor
26
Aedesius, had to go underground, re-emerging somewhat later
in Sardis.
But let us turn now, finally, to the so-called Athenian School, and to its
most prominent figure, Proclus. We have already caught a glimpse of
the circumstances of his arrival in Athens in 431.
27
He was met at the
port of Piraeus by his friend Nicolaus, who was a fellow-Lycian, and was
prepared to offer him a place to stay until he found his feet. Nicolaus was
himself studying rhetoric, and may indeed have made some attempt to
enrol Proclus in the school of his master,
28
but Proclus’ inclinations were
firmly directed towards philosophy, and specifically towards Platonism,
and this led him, more or less inevitably, to the feet of its chief, if not
only, exponent, Syrianus, son of Philoxenus, himself the designated
successor of the grand old man of Athenian Platonism, Plutarchus, son
of Nestorius. Marinus (loc. cit.) gives us a pleasant description of what
may have been an introductory interview, at which there was also present
a certain Lachares, who seems to have been a kind of assistant, or senior
student, of Syrianus’ (holding a status analogous, presumably, to that of
Amelius vis-à-vis Plotinus, or Sopater with Iamblichus). I will let Marinus
take up the story:
29
As they were still conversing, the sun came to set, and the moon, emerging
from her conjunction with the sun (ajpo; sunovdou), made her first appear-
ance.
30
So they moved to dismiss the young man, seeing as he was a stranger,
31

so that they could have leisure on their own to pay reverence to the Goddess.
But he, after proceeding just a short distance, and himself observing the moon
appearing from her (zodiacal) house, stopped in his tracks, took off his shoes,

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and, as they looked on, made his prayer to the goddess. At that, Lachares,
struck by the frank and fearless behaviour (parrhsiva) of the young man,
remarked to Syrianus, employing that admirable expression of Plato about
great natures (cf. Rep. 491E–492A): ‘This fellow will either come to be a great
good, or its opposite!’
And at that, the young Proclus was accepted into the inner circle.
Syrianus took him into his house,
32
and then introduced him to the aged
Plutarchus, who had officially retired, but who was prepared to take on this
promising young man for private lessons. With Plutarchus, Marinus tells
us (ch. 12), Proclus read Aristotle’s De Anima and Plato’s Phaedo,
33
and
Plutarchus was so pleased with him that he suggested that Proclus should
take notes of his expositions and write them up; and, to encourage him in
this, he put it to him (rather significantly, in view of what we know of the
provenance of other surviving commentaries, such as that, ostensibly, of
Hermeias on the Phaedrus)
34
that in future times they would be regarded
as Proclus’ commentaries on the works in question.
There is no evidence, in fact, that Proclus took him up on this generous
offer, but he plainly owed a good deal to his association with the old man,
which went on for his first two years in Athens, after which Plutarchus died.
It is not clear, in this time, whether Proclus also took lectures from Syrianus,
but it rather sounds from Marinus’ narrative (chs. 12–13) as if Syrianus
had farmed the young man out to his own former teacher, until he should
have covered all the preliminaries to the ‘advanced’ course in Platonism,
which in fact amounted to a thorough survey of Aristotle’s works – as
Marinus specifies, ‘in logic, ethics, politics, physics, and theology’. Apart
from the De Anima, then, we may conjecture that in these first two years
with Plutarchus, Proclus was taken through the Organon, Nicomachean
Ethics, Politics, Physics, and Metaphysics (at least Met. L – but possibly A, M
and N as well, on which Syrianus himself composed a commentary, which
survives). That would be quite a demanding schedule, but these works may
well not have been read in toto.
At any rate, when Proclus finally transferred full-time to Syrianus, he was
ready – after what Marinus describes (ch. 13) as ‘the preliminary initiations
and lesser mysteries’ (protevleia kai; mikra; musthvria) – for initiation into
the central mysteries of Platonism. This presumably means the Iamblichean
canon of dialogues, culminating in the two ‘summits’ of philosophy, the
Timaeus and the Parmenides.
Syrianus himself did not survive for many years after Plutarchus. He
was certainly dead by the time Proclus composed his own dialogue on
the Timaeus (in 440, when Proclus was twenty-eight, as Marinus tells us,
loc. cit.), and he is generally agreed to have died around 437. In his last

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year, Marinus tells us (ch. 26), having got through the Plato course, he
gave Proclus and one of his fellow senior pupils, Domninus, the choice
of a seminar on the Orphic poems or on the Chaldaean Oracles, but
Domninus and Proclus could not agree (Domninus favouring the Orphics,
Proclus the Chaldaeans), and while they were still bickering, Syrianus died;
but we can observe from this the general direction that instruction might
take – culminating, after a full course of Platonism, in more properly
theological and even theurgic revelations.
We get no very clear idea, unfortunately, from Marinus about the
communal life of Syrianus’ school. Plainly, there were other students than
Proclus, though not many may have lived ‘in’, as Proclus did. We know of
Lachares, for a start, but there was also Plutarchus’ grandson
35
Archiadas
(who may also have shared his sessions with Plutarchus – at any rate, the
old man bequeaths him to Syrianus along with Proclus; Marinus, ch. 12)
– and of course Hermeias. But how many more? I think it improbable
that there were many. We are dealing with tiny groups here – little more
than half a dozen serious students, probably, at any one time, though the
number of hangers-on and occasional attenders at lectures may have been
larger. I suppose, between one source and another (Marinus, Damascius,
Proclus’ own dedications), we have names of about a dozen students of
Proclus covering the whole period of over forty years during which he was
head of the Athenian Academy. A number of these, such as Archiadas,
Hierius, son of Plutarchus, Hegias, son of Theagenes, Damascius’ master
Isidorus, Marinus, Athenodorus,
36
Asclepiodotus,
37
or Pericles of Lydia,
38

will have stayed with him for a considerable time, but still the evidence
does not point to a group of more than half a dozen serious students at
any one time.
As for the day-to-day work of the School, Marinus tells us (V.Procl. 22)
that Proclus would deliver five lectures (praxeis) a day,
39
and sometimes
more, while also composing up to seven hundred lines. And this did not
prevent him from paying visits to other philosophers, and from giving
informal evening seminars (a[grafoi eJsperinai; sunousivai). The point of
describing the evening synousiai as agraphoi, ‘unwritten’ is presumably to
contrast them with the daytime lectures, which would be delivered from
a written text. If we may speculate about the daily timetable, I would
suggest an early start (8.00 a.m., or even 7.30?), culminating in lunch
around 2.00, followed by a siesta, and then perhaps an agraphos synousia
around 5.00 p.m., followed by dinner, attended by the whole School. After
that, or perhaps during the siesta period, the great man might find time to
compose his seven hundred lines (possibly dictated to a slave amanuensis).
Later in the night, at any rate, Marinus tells us, Proclus devoted himself to

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prayer and occasionally the composition of hymns (some of which we still
have),
40
since he was very sparing of sleep. No doubt this is an idealized
picture, but still anything resembling this routine would be pretty gruelling,
especially as one got older.
Proclus’ school was not, so far as we can see, entirely a one-man show,
though the status of assistants is something on which we have little
guidance. Plainly, in all the schools we have looked at, senior students
came to be entrusted with pedagogical tasks of one sort or another, whether
or not this conferred on them any official position. In Plotinus’ circle,
Amelius and then Porphyry were set various such tasks, such as refuting the
Gnostics (Porph. V.Plot. 16), but they are not explicitly said to be involved
in teaching. In the case of Iamblichus’ school, we have no evidence, but we
have observed him studying with, prior to Porphyry himself, Anatolius,
whom Eunapius describes as tw`n kata; Porfuvrion ta; deuvtera ferovmeno",
which seems to point to some kind of deputyship (the phrase is used
later by Photius – probably reproducing the terminology of Damascius
– at Bibl. cod. 181, introducing the Philosophos Historia, to describe the
position of Zenodotus: diavdoco" kai; ou|to" Provklou, ta; deuvtera Marivnou
fevrwn – which I take to mean ‘successor to Proclus, acting as assistant to
Marinus’). This is presumably also the solution to the mystery of the status
of Domninus as diadochos to Syrianus (Marinus V.Procl. 26): he was an
‘associate diadochos’ ! Apart from this, we also hear of such figures as Athe-
nodorus giving seminars (cf. above, n. 36).
Certainly not every day can have taken the course outlined by Marinus,
because, despite his unworldly attitudes, Proclus’ life had a practical,
political dimension. Engaging in civic politics in an increasingly Chris-
tianized empire had its dangers, but Marinus tells us (ch. 15) that Proclus
‘sometimes took part in political deliberations, attending public meetings
on city affairs (toi`" koinoi`" uJpe;r th`" povlew" sullovgoi" paragignovmeno"),
and proposing resolutions with sound judgement. He also consulted with
magistrates on matters of justice, not only exhorting these men, but in
a manner compelling them, with plain speaking befitting a philosopher
(th`/ filosovfw/ parrhsiva/), to do their proper duty.’ He also seems to have
had some supervisory role in public education.
All this reminds us that the late antique philosopher was, after all,
whether he liked it or not, a public figure, and if one was not of the now
prevailing faith, that role could be troublesome. There does appear to have
been at least one period where, Marinus tells us (loc. cit.), Proclus found
it prudent to withdraw for a year from the city, and undertake a cultural
and religious tour of Asia Minor. Marinus speaks darkly of a ‘hail-storm
and mighty wave of troubles’ (zavlh kai; trikumiva pragmavtwn), which could

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possibly refer to the fall-out from the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but
could have been something much more local; at any rate it was a period
where a Hellene had to keep his head down. The Academy in this period,
as we know from both Damascius (Phil. Hist. §102 Athanassiadi) and
Olympiodorus (In Alc. 141, p. 92 Westerink), was very well endowed
– Damascius talks of an income of 1000 gold nomismata (= solidi) and more
in Proclus’ day,
41
the product of generations of endowments and legacies
– and this, while giving the diadochos a certain clout in civic politics, and
providing a comfortable living (especially for a man of such sober habits
as Proclus), also gave hostages to fortune: there was the ultimate danger of
expropriation, if Christian enthusiasm got out of hand.
These reflections bring me, finally, to touch on the topic of the philoso-
pher in politics in this era. As we have had occasion to observe, none of
the holy and divine men with whom we have been dealing was quite as
untouched by the ‘real world’ of society and politics as they would, no
doubt, have wished to be. Plotinus was a society figure in Rome (leaving
aside speculation on what political connexions had been necessary to set
him up there in the first place), and was well connected at court; it is even
possible, as I have suggested, that the assassination of Gallienus, and the
accession of the rough Illyrian soldier Claudius Gothicus, proved a serious
blow to the school. The flourishing of Iamblichus’ school at Apamea was
plainly intimately bound up with the survival of the anti-Christian regime
of Licinius; when Constantine was victorious, the school simply dissolved.
The Academy at Athens survived, despite the vicissitudes hinted at by
Marinus, until whatever Justinian did to it in 529
42
– but whatever that
really was, it seems effectively to have closed the Academy down, and
caused a scattering of the faculty.
In all three cases, it is interesting to note that, while the great man
himself is not involved in politics, someone in his immediate circle always
is: in the case of Plotinus, the Arabian doctor Zethus; in that of Iambli-
chus, his senior pupil and probable patron, Sopater (for whom his foray
into imperial politics in Constantinople in the late 320s, after Iamblichus’
death, proved fatal, as Eunapius tells us)
43
– but there is also his anonymous
friend at the court of Licinius, plainly a former pupil, and possibly, as
I have suggested above, none other than Julius Julianus. In the entourage
of Proclus, we have above all the figure of his close friend Archiadas,
grandson
44
of Plutarchus, but also Archiadas’ son-in-law, Theagenes, who
was plainly a prominent member of society, and a useful patron of the
school. At V.Procl. 14, Marinus tells us that, while Proclus himself was too
high-minded to enter actively into political life, he ‘encouraged Archiadas

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to devote himself to it, instructing him, explaining to him the political
virtues and methods, acting like coaches who pace runners, exhorting him
to direct the affairs of his whole city, and at the same time to render services
to individuals, in every kind of virtue, but especially in the area of justice.’
So Archiadas was in effect appointed the legal and political adviser of the
Academy, and he seems to have performed this role effectively enough.
He appears to have bequeathed this role to Theagenes, to whom he gave
in marriage his daughter Asclepigeneia (the Younger). Theagenes must
indeed have been one of the most prominent men in Athens in the latter
part of the century. He was an eponymous archon at some unknown date,
which in this era is a sign of great distinction, a patricius, and a member
of the Senate in Constantinople, and Damascius tells us (Phil. Hist. §100)
that he used his great wealth for various civic purposes: besides supporting
the Academy, ‘he spent money on teachers, doctors, and other matters
relating to the welfare of his fatherland’ – that is to say, he paid the salaries
of public teachers and doctors. Marinus speaks of him, in V.Procl. 29, as
‘our benefactor (euergetes)’ – that is, benefactor of the Academy – though
Damascius, with his usual waspishness, speaks of Theagenes being hostile to
Marinus, when Marinus succeeded Proclus as diadochos, despite Marinus’
efforts to conciliate him (loc. cit.). So it would seem, on the whole, that,
while our philosophers were not by any means as unworldly as they make
out, they did prefer to appoint surrogates when it came to really getting
one’s hands dirty.
All in all, then, the philosopher in late antique society was a respected
and active member of the community, sometimes, it would seem, in the
direct pay of the community in which he taught – though this is not the
case with the figures I have been dealing with – but always supported
financially by a patron or patrons of some sort. Only in the case of the
late antique Athenian Academy do we find a more or less self-supporting
philosophical institution. With the onset of Christianity, things became
inevitably somewhat fraught – though not by any means as promptly as
one would expect
45
– and, unless one came to some arrangement such as
was entered into by Ammonius in Alexandria in the 390s (and such as the
Athenian philosophers disdained), the game was bound to be up sooner
or later. In Athens, the shutters came down, effectively, in 529 (though
philosophical activity, such as the writing of commentaries, did continue
in private after that, as we know), while in the capital of Constantinople
the end did not come until 726, with the closing of the university – and
by that time the professors, men such as Elias, David and Stephanus, had
long been Christian.

32. 12
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13
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Notes
1
Porphyry does not tell us what prompted his move from Athens to Rome. He
leaves us to assume that he came to sit at the feet of Plotinus, presumably having
heard some report of him at Athens. Eunapius, however, in his brief life of Porphyry
(V.Phil. IV 6: 456), seems to imply that he came to Rome initially to seek his fortune
as an independent philosopher (i{na katavsch/ dia; sofiva" th;n povlin), but then came
upon Plotinus, and was captivated by him. Eunapius, however, is a generally unreli-
able man, at least when out of range of his own personal experience.
2
This is rather curiously phrased – sunovnto" de; a[llw" ejn tai`" oJmilivai" – but
it seems to imply getting together for discussions in a different way, i.e. not in the
regular way. Armstrong renders this as ‘only engaging in general conversation with
his friends’, which is a paraphrase rather than a translation, but may indeed convey
the true sense. The French Vie de Plotin translation gives ‘néanmoins il enseignait
d’une autre façon, dans ses entretiens’, which is certainly nearer to the Greek, but
leaves the situation obscure. It is not made clear whether or not Plotinus is still in
Rome, but it is a reasonable assumption that he was holidaying in Campania, on
the estate of one of his friends, Zethus or Castricius, and talking informally with
his associates there. It is hardly conceivable that Plotinus would ever have stopped
philosophizing for very long.
3
The summer vacation in the schools lasted normally from the end of July to
the middle of October. Cf. H.-I. Marrou, Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité,
Paris, 1965, p. 393.
4
Dining together was, of course, a central, and most attractive, feature of the
communal life of a philosophical school. We learn most about this from Plutarch
one hundred and fifty years earlier, but we find both Longinus in Athens (Porph.
ap. Euseb. PE X 3, 1–15 = Fr. 408 Smith) and Plotinus in Rome (Porph. V.Plot.
15) celebrating Plato’s Birthday, the Platoneia, with a formal dinner party, to
which outsiders were invited, and at which formal discourses were presented.
This would only be the tip of the iceberg, though; there was probably an informal
dinner of the school on most evenings, at which philosophical questions might
be raised.
5
For the account of Plotinus’ school, I borrow from my earlier essay, ‘The
Academy in the Middle Platonic period’, Dionysius III (1979), 71–6, repr. in The
Golden Chain, Aldershot, 1990.
6
On Longinus and his school, see Luc Brisson, ‘Longinus Platonicus Philos-
ophus et Philologus’, in ANRW II 36.7, 5214–5299, esp. 5223–8; but Brisson can
cast no light on the relations between Longinus and Eubulus. From the evidence
of Porphyry, Fr. 408 Smith (cf. above, n. 4), Longinus would certainly seem to
have run a school of his own.
7
It is quite possible, as is suggested acutely by H.-D. Saffrey, in Porphyre, La
Vie de Plotin, II p. 32, that this Gemina was none other than Afinia Gemina
Baebiana, the widow of the emperor Trebonian, killed by his own troops in battle
in the spring of 253. It would then have been perhaps in 254 or so that Plotinus
might have commenced this happy arrangement, about ten years after his arrival
in Rome, as Gemina in her widowhood turned to the patronage of philosophy.

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Philosophy as a profession in late antiquity
She could also have introduced him into Roman senatorial society – if he did not
already enjoy that privilege from other sources.
8
Porph. V.Plot. 7. Castricius and Marcellus we do not know of outside the pages
of Porphyry, but Sabinillus was consul ordinarius, with the Emperor Gallienus, for
266, and may have been the intermediary through whom Plotinus was introduced
to the Emperor and to his wife Salonina, while Rogatianus is perhaps the C. Iulius
Volusenna Rogatianus who was proconsul of Asia in 254 (CIL III 6094).
9
This Zethus (presumably Zayd in Arabic) is an interesting figure, and may
even be a link in the obscure chain of influence which brought Plotinus to Rome
in the first place, and set him up there so comfortably. Zethus, Porphyry tells us
(ch. 7), had married the daughter of one Theodosius, a pupil of Ammonius – so
we have an Alexandrian connexion. Then Zethus ‘had an interest in politics’
(politiko;" w]n kai; rJopa;" e[cwn politikav"); whatever that precisely implies, it no
doubt involved the ability to make introductions with prominent figures. Do we
see here some trace of an ‘Alexandrian Mafia’ at Rome?
10
Cf. e.g., Aulus Gellius, NA XVIII 10. Herodes’ villa at Cephisia was plainly
something of a port of refuge for Taurus and members of his school.
11
This may have been all for the best, after all, but it would have been intriguing
to see how it worked out. Can we, in this opposition of a party at court, perhaps
see the influence of a sort of ‘Athens lobby’, worried about Platonopolis becoming
an intellectual counterweight to the schools of Athens, and thus bad for business
– as was also once suggested to me by Peter Brown? But Gallienus was in any case
not popular with the senatorial class; indeed, a too close dependence upon him
and his wife may have jeopardized the continuance of the school after Gallienus’
assassination in 268 (and possibly contributed to Porphyry’s bout of depression).
12
Notably by Olympiodorus, In Alc. 141, 1–3, – though Olympiodorus mistak-
enly assumes that the Academy had been accumulating endowments continuously
from the days of Plato himself. More probably, these endowments (diadocikav)
go back no further than the days of Marcus Aurelius, if that far, but that does not
make Olympiodorus’ evidence any the less valuable for the insight it gives into
the funding of the Academy in late antiquity.
13
Cf. Marinus V.Procl. 11–12. Of course, we do hear stories of touts for the
various schools waiting to nobble prospective students just off the boat in the
Piraeus, but that practice is more proper to the schools of rhetoric. Proclus is in
fact met off the boat by a friend and fellow-countryman Nicolaus, who seems to
have been studying as a sophist at the time, but there seems to be no question of
Nicolaus acting as a tout for anyone. Proclus finds his own way to Syrianus.
14
Marinus, loc. cit.
15
We are dependent for our information on Iamblichus virtually entirely on the
rather superficial and sensational account of Eunapius in his Lives of the Philoso-
phers (V: 457–61) – though Eunapius does claim (ibid. V 1,11: 458) to derive
his information in part from his teacher Chrysanthius of Sardis, who in turn was
a pupil of Iamblichus’ pupil Aedesius.
16
He was certainly dead by the time Porphyry composed his Life of Plotinus,
but we do not know when that was; and he was also dead by the time Porphyry

34. 14
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Philosophy as a profession in late antiquity
composed his Timaeus Commentary, since he tells a rather sad little anecdote about
him (Fr. LXXIV Sodano).
17
Porph. V.Plot. 3. 47.
18
Edited most recently, in the Budé series, by L.G. Westerink, J. Trouillard,
and A. Ségonds, Prolégomènes à la philosophie de Platon, Paris, 1990. I follow here
the corrected scheme set out by Westerink in the Introduction, pp. lxxi–lxxiv (the
received text is both corrupt and confused at various points).
19
This may come as something of a shock to many modern Platonists, but
in fact Iamblichus appears to have discerned the proper subject (skopos) of the
Sophist as the sublunary demiurge (performing as a sort of cosmic sophist), and
the Statesman as concerning the heavenly demiurge (on the basis of the myth). It
must be confessed also that these two dialogues have been left out of the list by
the dimwitted compiler, but Westerink (loc. cit.) has shown convincingly that
they must have been included, in this place.
20
And indeed as Porphyry doubtless would have, had their relationship not
been interrupted by Plotinus’ death (Porphyry’s withdrawal to Lilybaeum was
for health reasons only).
21
Only for the Theaetetus, Statesman and Symposium is evidence entirely lacking
– no doubt simply because there are no surviving later commentaries on those
dialogues.
22
Cf. on this Proclus, In Alc. p. 13, 17 Creuzer (= Iambl. In Alc. Fr. 2
Dillon).
23
Sopater was a family man, producing, among others, two sons, Sopater and
Himerius, the latter of whom had a son, Iamblichus (called after the philosopher),
on whom see Alan Cameron, ‘Iamblichus at Athens’, Athenaeum, n.s. XLV (1967),
143–53 (repr. in Literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World, Variorum:
London, 1985).
24
See Jones, Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, I, 275.
25
On this personage, whose letters to Iamblichus found their way, mysteri-
ously, into the correspondence of the Emperor Julian, see T.D. Barnes, ‘A Corre-
spondent of Iamblichus’, GRBS 19 (1978), 99–106 (repr. in Early Christianity
and the Roman Empire, Variorum: London, 1984). I am much tempted by the
possibility, not suggested by Barnes, that the personage concerned is none other
than Julian’s maternal grandfather, Julius Julianus, who had been Praetorian Prefect
and virtual head of government under Licinius, which would provide a plausible
reason for his being confused with Julian himself. This would put Iamblichus in
touch with the top echelons of Licinius’ administration.
26
Sopater himself, shortly after succeeding Iamblichus, had gone off, in 326,
rather rashly, to Constantinople to seek his fortune in the imperial administration,
and got himself executed through getting mixed up in the politics of the court.
27
Above, p. 4.
28
At any rate, Marinus remarks (V.Procl. ch. 11) that Proclus was ‘much sought
after by the teachers of rhetoric’ (perimavchto" toi`" rJhtorikoi`" genovmeno"), a sit-
uation which Nicolaus may have had something to do with.
29
Either Marinus heard this story from Lachares himself in his old age, or it

35. 16
John Dillon
17
Philosophy as a profession in late antiquity
had passed down in the folklore of the school.
30
This refers to that period of the month when the moon first comes out from
contiguity with the sun, and so becomes visible at nightfall.
31
This shows something of the caution with which practising followers of the
Old Faith tended to proceed under an aggressively Christian regime. They could
not be sure of Proclus’ allegiances.
32
Presumably the large house excavated in 1955 near the south base of the
Acropolis, in which many traces of philosophical activity were found. See on
this A. Franz, H. Thompson and J. Travlos, The Athenian Agora: Late Antiquity,
Princeton, 1988, pp. 42–4.
33
Psychology would seem to have been Plutarchus’ particular field of interest.
Cf. H.J. Blumenthal, ‘Plutarch’s exposition of the De Anima and the psychology
of Proclus’, in De Jamblique à Proclus. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 21,
Vandoeuvres-Genève, 1975, pp. 123–47 (repr. in Soul and Intellect: Studies in
Plotinus and Later Platonism, Variorum: Aldershot, 1993).
34
In fact, simply Hermeias’ written-up notes of Syrianus’ seminars on the
dialogues.
35
Marinus describes him as Plutarchus’ engonos, which would normally mean
‘grandson’, but we learn later (ch. 29) that Archiadas was married to one Plutarcha,
and had a daughter of the same name as Plutarchus’ daughter, Asclepigeneia. It
seems to me possible that Plutarcha was another daughter of Plutarchus (though
she may have been just a more remote relation), and that Archiadas was really his
son-in-law, and his offspring in a merely spiritual sense. Proclus, after all, liked to
refer to Syrianus as his ‘father’ (pater) and Plutarchus as his ‘grandfather’ (propator)
– and Syrianus, as we learn from Damascius (Phil. Hist. §56 Athanassiadi), had
wanted to marry Proclus to his relative (niece?), Aedesia. When Proclus tactfully
declined, Syrianus married her to his other pupil Hermeias.
36
Mentioned by Damascius at Phil. Hist. §66G. He is described there, though,
rather as an assistant of Proclus, giving exegeses of texts to students himself. The
role of such assistants we will discuss in a moment.
37
Dedicatee of the Parmenides Commentary, who figures quite extensively in
Damascius’ Philosophical History (§§83; 86, 103 Athanassiadi); he will have been
a pupil only in Proclus’ last years, however.
38
Dedicatee of the Platonic Theology, who is also accorded a mention in the
Parmenides Commentary (872, 18–32 Cousin), as having contributed an inter-
pretation of Parm. 131DE, thus giving evidence of discussion in a seminar within
the School. Pericles, indeed, sounds more like a senior assistant, to judge from the
mention of him in Marinus V.Plot. 29.
39
A praxis will have been about an hour long, to judge from the surviving
commentaries of Olympiodorus, which are divided into praxeis of 6–8 Teubner
pages (these may, of course, have been amplified in being edited); but this is
a pretty formidable load, one would think.
40
About to be published with Brill in an excellent edition by Robbert van den
Berg.
41
To put this figure in perspective, the salary of a rhetor or grammarian in

36. 16
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17
Philosophy as a profession in late antiquity
Carthage at about this time was 70 solidi a year (Cod. Just. I, 27, 1,42). Admittedly,
Proclus had an establishment to run, but with no more than one or two assistants
to support, he should have been pretty comfortable.
42
This is still controversial, even after Alan Cameron’s enlightening discussion
(‘The last days of the Academy at Athens’, Hermes XCVI (1968), pp. 7–30, repr.
in Literature and Society in the Early Byzantine World, Variorum: London, 1985),
but it does seem to have involved confiscation of Academy assets, as well as a ban
on teaching in public – not a total confiscation, however, as Olympiodorus in the
560s attests to there still being some assets, ‘despite the many confiscations that
have taken place’.
43
VS 462. It is remarkable, indeed, that Sopater should have had such confi-
dence of advancement at an aggressively Christian court, considering his back-
ground; but he did in fact have considerable success, until he fell foul of the Grand
Chamberlain Agapius.
44
Or possibly son-in-law. See n. 35 above.
45
One of the redeeming features of the absolutism of the later Roman Empire
was its inefficiency in the enforcement of its own decrees.

37. 19

38. 19
2
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Robin Lane Fox
1
In late antiquity, as in all other periods, philosophy had the power to
change a person’s choice of life and scale of values. The ‘shakers’ of my
title are people who passed on this sort of impact to others. Philosophy,
including Platonist philosophy, also addressed the intellectual’s relation
to contemporary society. If that society was incurably misguided, then
the philosopher might have no option except to leave it. In late antiquity,
some took this option, and they are my ‘movers’. Both the ‘shakers’ and the
‘movers’ need to be understood in terms of the philosophy they professed,
but a sufficient understanding of their actions does not require a deep
analysis of their deepest thoughts. They are within a historian’s grasp, and
so I will discuss individuals, their texts and contexts without a close reading
of particular arguments.
In Dublin, two particular thinkers presided over our conference: among
the ancients, Plotinus, and among the moderns, Peter Brown. As one of
his most expert interpreters has well reminded us, Plotinus would not
be altogether comfortable with the proceedings. In so far as they rest on
reasoned, discursive thought, they are a poor second to intuitive awareness,
which is beyond thought altogether. ‘Plotinus would have conscientiously
attended philosophical conferences and colloquia and have discussed
anything anyone wanted to discuss for as long as anyone wanted to discuss
it. But I am not sure that he would have enjoyed doing so … ’
1
Nor would
our general theme, the ‘late antique philosopher in society’, have been his
choice for aspiring wise men, like those in this volume. The key passage
here is at the end of his Ennead 1.2. Aspiring wise men, he tells us, may
begin their progress to the Good by exercising ‘civic values’, like justice,
and then the ‘purifying’ virtues, like self-control, but their aim, as Platonic
wise men, is to aspire to a likeness to God. As the wise man ascends, he may
have the lower virtues still, ‘potentially’, but ‘he will altogether separate
himself, as far as possible, from his lower nature and will not live the life
of the good man which civic virtue requires, but will leave that behind. He
will choose another, the life of the gods. It is to them, not to good men,

39. 20
Robin Lane Fox Movers and shakers
21
that we are to liken ourselves’. The gods do not need civic virtue, because
they have no need to exercise it.
2
Plotinus, therefore, would regard both a Conference and a Conference
on the ‘philosopher in society’ as beside the point for aspiring wise men.
Peter Brown, on the other hand, has memorably picked out our subject
in late antique societies which were composed of many more people than
such purified contemplators. His main discussion of it is in his book, Power
and Persuasion, and I would like to summarize aspects of this fertile study,
published in 1992. They frame, or underlie, much which our various
papers discuss in detail, even those which are most closely focused on the
intricacies of a particular text.
In the fourth century ad, Peter Brown suggests, the philosopher was
admired for his presumed truthfulness, his mastery of anger (a widespread
defect in his contemporaries) and his detachment from the distorting
claims of friends and helpers.
3
As he was ‘held to owe nothing to ties of
patronage and friendship’, he could exercise parrhsiva; he could speak out
with frankness and candour, even to rulers who were ravaged by the ‘wild
beasts’ of anger and passion. Whatever the reality, ‘philosophers who tamed
the heart of the Emperor remained important in the political imagina-
tion’; the philosopher could speak out and ‘persuade’ because he himself
had mastered the ‘beasts’ of passion within. At the same time, contacts
with the court, with governors and Imperial officials were potentially
extremely dangerous. ‘A tide of horror lapped close to the feet of educated
persons’, threatening torture and hideous punishments.
4
‘In situations
where courage, obstinacy and intelligence were needed, fourth-century
communities still turned at times to their local philosophers.’ Peter Brown
backs up this observation with apt instances from Ammianus’ histories,
showing this ‘firmitas animi’ of the philosopher in action.
5
I would only
add that this quality is still active, in modern versions of these awful ‘late
antique’ situations.
6
In the 1960s, the philosophy of Epictetus gave Admiral
Stockdale the ‘firmitas animi’ to survive solitary confinement in North
Vietnam. In the 1940s, the philosophy of Plato and Plotinus sustained their
great scholar, Heinrich Dörrie, in a crowded prison camp in the Russians’
war-zone, where he expounded their philosophy from memory to fellow-
prisoners and helped to sustain them too. We still have such ‘philosophers
in society’, albeit not as ambassadors.
In the fourth century the philosopher’s role as a candid, unshakeable
spokesman was exercised in settings with a new style. At court, a formalized
ceremonial had been imposed on the participants to a greater degree than
in the early Empire.
7
Personal deportment, therefore, had a greater public
significance. Here, the philosopher had the control and composure which

40. 20
Robin Lane Fox Movers and shakers
21
the situation required. For ‘despite the rise of intensely other-worldly
systems of thought associated with the Neoplatonist school, whose writings
bulk so large in our surviving evidence, this recurrent ethical concern,
with its insistence on self-mastery and its extreme scrupulosity on issues
of deportment, continued unchanged in late antiquity. When late Roman
persons spoke of ‘philosophy’, or turned for advice to philosophers, it was
these issues, not the mystical ascent of a Plotinus, that they wished to be
told about.’
8
After the 390s and the interventions of Theodosius, this role for the
philosopher dwindled.
9
Christian leaders, even the Christian monks and
holy men, now began to exercise parrhsiva effectively at the seats of power.
The long court-career of Themistius belonged to a past era.
10
‘A groundswell
of confidence that Christians enjoyed access to the powerful spelled the end
of polytheism far more effectively than did any Imperial law or the closing of
any Temple … ’ People who might have been philosophers in an earlier age
sometimes became bishops. As for the remaining philosophers, they lost the
art of ‘successful intervention’ and withdrew into the private circles of their
friends and family.
11
They cultivated ‘homonoetic filiva’ with like-minded
individuals and contemplated that recurrent Brownian marvel, the eternal
hierarchy of the ordered mundus, or universe. For Eunapius, looking back
on the fourth century’s big names in philosophy, the heroes were those
philosophers who had stayed free from the ‘taint of power’. Marinus’ life
of Proclus is evidence for this same change of role and emphasis, as are the
lives of philosophers compiled by Damascius in the early sixth century. In
a characteristically telling contrast, Peter Brown remarks that for Eunapius,
‘only a saint could be a good Emperor’, but for the Christians of his lifetime
and later, ‘a good Emperor listened to saints’.
12
Our papers in this volume range from Plotinus to Simplicius in the
530s, but even those with the most specialized focus attach to Power and
Persuasion’s presumption of this broad change. Before turning to specific
‘shakers’ and ‘movers’, I would like to propose a few preliminaries.
There is always a danger of beginning at a late point in an old story. The
public role for philosophers which we observe in the fourth century ad
had a long previous history. In the fourth century bc, the Athenians had
capitalized on the aura of their city’s theatre and sent famous actors as
envoys to powerful kings and foreign courts. The turning point comes with
Xenocrates, the head of the Academy, especially in 322 bc when Athenian
democracy was in danger. He was sent as an envoy to the Macedonian
Antipater, as if his philosophical fame and previous contacts might save the
Athenians. Xenocrates set a precedent. From the third century bc onwards,
however, Hellenistic cities began to use philosophers quite freely as ambas-

41. 22
Robin Lane Fox Movers and shakers
23
sadors.
13
There are far more instances here, even, than the notable case of
the Jew Philo, philosophically educated and articulate and the one person
who anticipates Brown’s themes by spanning both the ascetic ‘Dead Sea’
community at Qumran and a mission to the dreadful Emperor Caligula
in the early first century ad.
14
When philosophers continue to appear on public business in the fourth
century, they are not doing anything distinctively ‘late antique’; how many
of them had been chosen for this role because they were philosophers? The
question has well been asked about the sophists, a parallel profession, in
the second and early third centuries.
15
For philosophers, the answer is
‘some, but not all, and not only for that reason’. By now, most of them had
begun their studies with a full rhetorical training, the more vital public art.
Almost all of them were the sons of civic notables of very good family. If we
met Synesius simply in a little snapshot in Ammianus’ histories, we might
mistake him for nothing but a pursuer of philosophy and an admiring
student in Hypatia’s classes. Perhaps these high ideals helped him to be
chosen for public duties, but it was not solely for their sake that his fellows
in Cyrene sent him on his embassy to Constantinople. He spoke and wrote
remarkably elaborate Greek; he was extremely grand; his ancestors went
back a thousand years to the memorable foundation of Cyrene as described
in Herodotus Book 4.
16
Peter Brown emphasizes the philosopher’s ‘souci de
soi’ and the importance of his moral reputation, but he also observes that
in Greek civic life, there were things which had not changed since the days
of Demosthenes.
17
As an admirer of Demosthenes, I would agree, but with
a different emphasis. Intelligent men of the fourth century still knew their
Demosthenes even better than we do; Libanius, the ‘second Demosthenes’,
constantly read the speeches, and according to Damascius, Salustius at
Athens knew them by heart.
18
No student of Demosthenes could fail to
recognize how important it was that those who spoke up for their cities
should be above bribery, ‘catapolitical gift-receipt’, and above corrupt-
ibility.
19
A more mundane reason for continuing to send philosophers on
public business was the belief that in an acutely venal environment they
would be less likely to be bribed.
As its title requires, Power and Persuasion has much less to say about one
sub-group of philosophers, the Platonist theurgists. They are not so much
persuaders as real ‘shakers’ of the heavens, who were aiming to put the gods
to work, the ‘hedge fund’ operators in the late antique sector of Heavenly
Management.
20
The philosophers Maximus, Priscus and others certainly
did not have a prominent role with the Emperor Julian because they had
managed to overcome anger and passion.
21
Here, I would point to a very
different interpretation of their forerunner, Sopater, the pupil of Iamblichus.

42. 22
Robin Lane Fox Movers and shakers
23
For Peter Brown, he owed his prominence at Constantine’s court to his
personal mastery of the passions which licensed him and gave him authority
to work on what Eunapius describes as Constantine’s ‘provfasivn te kai;
forav’, a phrase which I translate as ‘purpose and impulse’.
22
From Constan-
tine’s point of view, perhaps, Sopater may have had some of the appeal of
a frank and candid adviser, the sort of person whom previous Emperors had
sometimes kept around them. However, like John Matthews, I have always
suspected that for Sopater himself, there was much more to the game-
plan.
23
Sopater was a pagan and the pseudo-Julianic Letter 138 presents
Sopater in contact with the pagan ruler Licinius, surely (as T.D. Barnes
suggested) in order to alert Licinius to Constantine’s Christian priorities.
24

Sopater had learned theurgy as a pupil of Iamblichus; his enemies at court
eventually had him condemned on a charge of attempting to ‘bind the
winds’ and impede the vital grain-fleet bound for Constantinople.
25
In
a brilliant paper in 1969, Peter Brown connected charges of sorcery in the
fourth century with the conflict between two types of power, the power
of new, socially mobile Imperial favourites and the established, persistent
power of older traditional families; modern anthropological studies had
suggested that friction between these two social groups might spark off
charges of sorcery, which are used by arrivistes against the persistent tradi-
tional classes.
26
Sopater’s origins were traditional and gentlemanly, but
might not the charge of magic laid against him simply be true? It certainly
had to be plausible, and now that Constantine’s ‘provfasiv" kai; forav’ was
increasingly Christian, was it not consistent for a man like Sopater to apply
the arts of theurgy, work on the old pagan gods and try to halt Constantine’s
progress in its tracks? The first action attested for a ‘philosopher in society’
in the fourth century is the attack on the Christians which incited the
‘Great Persecution’.
27
In the same tradition, might not Sopater have wished
to bring the Christian Emperor’s city into chaos by using the most powerful
weapon in his armoury, ‘theurgy’ which worked on the real gods?
‘Power and Persuasion’ is only one part of this story: the most prominent
philosophers practised ‘power and possession’, in the sense of oracular
and theurgic possession and practice. In the fifth and sixth centuries,
by contrast, philosophers are not to be found in Sopator’s sort of role at
Christian Emperors’ courts. We should emphasize their sound reasons for
withdrawing. The soundest reason was the continuing risk of Christian
harassment for any ‘tall poppy’ who raised his Platonist head too far above
the political ramparts. Sopater, Hypatia, the Alexandrians in the 480s, the
Athenians in 529 were on the receiving-end of extremely severe treatment
which was enough to make anyone wary of impinging on the Emperors’
court.
28
‘Now when they beheld the boldness [parrhsiva] of Peter and

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John and had perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, [the
Jewish authorities in Jerusalem] marvelled … ’: Acts 4.13 introduces the
long history of Christian ‘boldness’, and makes an apt epigraph for the
second half of Power and Persuasion, one which Proclus and his contem-
poraries certainly saw in action.
Withdrawal from a role at court, however, does not imply half-
heartedness or a withdrawal from public life altogether. The pagan ‘old
believers’ did not simply give up. We meet several of them in inscriptions
and anecdotes in the fifth century, even visiting caves, as a literal ‘pagan
underground’ in order to honour their gods.
29
We must also respect their
carefully-chosen proper names: names like Asclepiades, Asclepiodotus,
Asclepigeneia remind us that the ultimate uncertainties, conception and
childbirth, had continued to be credited by such people to the favours of
non-Christian gods.
30
The ‘birth miracle’ at the shrine of Isis at Menouthis
in the 460s was only one alleged instance in a much broader and longer
pagan tradition.
31
The gods, these people believed, still ‘gave children’ and
responded to prayers and ritual ‘workings’. In this tradition, Proclus’ actions
against earthquakes and droughts were not the actions of someone who
had given up public spiritedness.
32
They were serious attempts to control
natural hazards which affected whole communities.
Since 1992, it has become easier to trace a continuing emphasis on
political engagement among later Platonists. We now have the advantage
of good English translations and editions of Marinus’ Life of Proclus
and the fragments of Damascius’ ‘Philosophic History’.
33
In the Platonic
idiom, ‘political’ virtue involves Justice, exercised in a politeia, and ranks
second only to Contemplation. Philosophers who could still rank their
studies in this way were not altogether removed from public affairs.
Among supporting indications, it is worth quoting Damascius (F 124
Athanassiadi), which is addressing an unknown context either in his own
words or in words ascribed to a fellow Platonist. ‘Men naturally bestow the
name of ‘virtue’ on a life which abhors action, but it is not so, at least in my
judgement … For, virtue which is revealed in the middle of the constitu-
tion through political deeds and words exercises the soul to a more robust
state and firms it for more testing … What lurks in human lives as fake or
ejpiplavston (should we not translate this as ‘spin’?) is more clearly shown
up … ’ Political involvement stops us being ‘learned only in a corner’.
This last phrase is particularly significant because it echoes, and rebuts,
Themistius’ famous criticism of the Platonist philosophers.
34
From Plato’s
own career and writings, we might fear that ‘political involvement’ would
mean a dotty involvement with some theory of an ideal state. However,
the memoirs of Damascius and Proclus are not confined to this sort of

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fantasizing. In Marinus’ life we are presented with a Proclus who begins
by exemplifying the first stages of an aspiring wise man’s progress, the
exercise of political virtues. In chapters 15 to 17, we thus see someone
who is not simply pondering wistfully on the mundus. Marinus credits
him with parrhsiva, just like a philosopher in the fourth century. Proclus’
interventions are at the level of ‘local politics’, but are nonetheless active:
he attends debates, he intervenes with magistrates on matters of justice;
he harangues those in power, both in Athens and in a place as small (and
no doubt, startled) as Andros. If we could hear any of this involvement, it
might often be ‘moral’ and hortatory rather than practically constructive,
more like Philostratus’ Apollonius than a true Demosthenes. But it is not
the behaviour of someone who has simply withdrawn; we cannot lump all
those Platonist philosophers under one ‘Neoplatonist’ label and expect to
find only one ‘Neoplatonist’ attitude to public affairs.
In due course, I will return to the famous ‘perivstasi"’ or crisis, which
forced Proclus to be a ‘mover’ and leave Athens for a stay in Lydia. My point
here is that even if the court was no longer safe ground for non-Christian
philosophers, local involvement remained a significant avenue in the fifth
century ad.
2
‘When late Roman persons spoke of ‘philosophy’, or turned for advice to
philosophers … it was not the mystical ascent of a Plotinus that they wished
to be told about … ’ Yet, (as Peter Brown knows better than all of us) there
is one group of ‘late Roman persons’ who, wonderfully, wanted precisely
that. They are grouped in and near Milan, including young members of the
‘North African côterie’ who had gravitated to the city in the years 385/6.
In spring 386, an unnamed individual, a pagan (but not Praetextatus)
gave the public professor of rhetoric in Milan some libri Platonici in a Latin
translation.
35
With hindsight Augustine dismissed this individual as ‘puffed
up with pride (typhos)’, but the effect of his gift was transforming. It is our
best evidence of a philosopher as ‘shaker’.
Our fullest account was written eleven years later, in the Confessions,
and although it is manifestly stylized, nonetheless it is aiming, as always
in that work, to be scrupulously just. In 1950 Pierre Courcelle, and by
implication Peter Brown in 1967, considered the results of Augustine’s
first Platonist readings to be ‘une vaine tentative d’extase’, a failed attempt
at mystical contact with God.
36
The wording, however, suggests otherwise.
On the first occasion, as Augustine’s soul ascended beyond the visible
world, ‘nondum me esse qui viderem’. These words are picked up in the
description of the second, subsequent ‘tentative’: ‘nondum me esse qui

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cohaererem’.
37
Translations have been surprisingly varied, but in each
case we have a clear example of generic ‘qui’ and a subjunctive. On the
first occasion, Augustine is telling us, he was ‘not yet such a one as to see’
(God), but on the second occasion he was ‘not yet such a one as to cling
on’ (to God). On this second occasion, therefore, he had indeed made brief
contact with God, a true mystical union, but a fleeting one, as he tells us,
‘in the flash of a trembling glance’.
The libri Platonici which he read were several, but not many, of
Plotinus’ treatises.
38
Perhaps the first batch included nothing by Porphyry;
but Augustine’s Platonist readings continued in 386/7, more so than the
Confessions happen to tell us, and as H. Dörrie and J. Pépin have each
acutely recognized, Porphyry’s ‘Sentences’ and ‘Miscellaneous Inquiries’
were by then a part of them.
39
They were probably read in a second bout,
rather than in the first flurry. Augustine himself makes clear what his first
reading of Plotinus did for him. It did not curb his passions or teach him
ethics. The texts solved his continuing uncertainties about the ‘problem of
evil’ and they transformed his idea of God and His relation to the visible
world. As historians of philosophy we can see other sides to their aptness.
Plotinus had written in opposition to a dualist answer to the existence of
evil, the very answer which Augustine wished to replace since his break with
the dualist, Manichaeans.
40
As R.T. Wallis and others have brought out,
Plotinus’ arguments had also answered old and profound issues of scepti-
cism, another umbrella from which Augustine had just emerged.
41
Those
gains were all very important, but they were not supremely ‘shaking’. What
mattered here was that Plotinus’ writings (not more than fifteen treatises?)
turned Augustine inwards to an intense inner self-awareness and concentra-
tion.
42
They brought him to a realization of the latent heights and levels of
the ‘interiorité’ in each of us. God, he learned, is both ‘interior intimo meo
et superior summo meo’.
43
In the reception of this philosophy, both by Augustine and other
newcomers, we must allow for the recipients’ ‘history’ of philosophy.
Augustine had recently deserted Latin Scepticism, but he was unaware, he
tells us, that the Sceptics had also held positive beliefs, a ‘secret teaching’
which they reserved for their oldest and most experienced pupils.
44
By
November 386, Augustine was stating that Plato’s teaching had been
kept alive for a small minority (by what we know as ‘Sceptics’) and that it
had flowered again openly with Plotinus.
45
When the ‘inflated pagan’ in
Milan gave him texts by Plotinus, did he tell Augustine that here was the
‘secret doctrine’, which the Sceptics, Augustine’s recent masters, had been
keeping quietly to themselves? Augustine’s fascination with it is then even
more explicable.

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In the first excitement, as he recalls in November 386 (but not, later,
in the Confessions) he had ‘looked back’ on his ingrained Christianity as
if it was a vanishing point on the road, now behind him.
46
But then, he
stopped and read Paul (did a hint in Ambrose’s Sunday preaching, like the
one in our ‘On Isaac or The Soul’, send him back to Paul’s Epistles?).
47

He went on later to read the start of John’s Gospel (surely on the advice
of the priest Simplicianus?).
48
In both sources he believed that he had
found the ‘wisdom’ which his Platonist books had taught. He also found
much more besides. As a result, his ‘history’ of philosophy gained a further
depth: what Platonists had feared to teach openly (between, say, c. 160 bc
and c. 240 ad), Christ had preached to one and all (since the 30s ad) with
a new authority and openness.
At the time, Augustine was not baptized. He knew a bit of theology, but
not much, and he did not immediately fill the gap by equating Plotinus’
Triad with the Christian Trinity; he did not identify Plotinus’ World Soul
with the Holy Spirit.
49
It took some more months of reading for his views
to form here and as Nello Cipriani has admirably shown, further reading
of Marius Victorinus and some of Ambrose’s Sermons took place between
August 386 and summer 387.
50
Nonetheless, the impact of Plotinus on
him was spiritual from the start: Augustine never separates ‘theology’ from
‘spirituality’.
In our conference’s context, particular aspects of this discovery are most
striking. For a year or so, Augustine, his patron Romanianus and his friends
had been discussing questions of God and the soul and the related issue of
the ‘end’, or telos, of life while resenting the compromises of their lives near
the court in Milan.
51
Public parrhsiva and the exercise of self-control had
not particularly concerned them. When Augustine discovered ‘interiorité’,
he continued to pursue this discovery with his brilliant friend, Nebridius,
in a two-way series of letters, which extend over several years. Nebridius,
too, was not interested in ethics or ‘issues of deportment’.
52
Like Augustine,
he too was potentially ‘shaken’ by Plotinus’ mystical impact.
Nonetheless, neither of them, and especially not Augustine, had paid
any attention to Plotinus’ propaedeutic programme. Augustine had not
been practising the civic virtues. He was miles away from his tax-paying,
curial obligation in Thagaste, and was protected by immunity as a teacher
in Milan. His daily business was the courting of amici maiores and ‘telling
half-truths for a living’, as he brilliantly recalls it.
53
As for cathartic virtue,
he was so far from any such thing that he was indulging in active non-repro-
ductive sex with his latest concubine and was encouraging the battle-shy
Alypius to try the delights of sex with a woman once again; Plotinus would
not have approved.

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He had also plunged into Plotinus’ books without any systematic
programme of reading, let alone anything so structured as Simplicius’
course for his pupils. Years before, he had been inspired by Cicero’s Hort-
ensius and probably, by Cicero’s following text, the Catulus. He knew the
views of various other schools, probably in epitomes, but Platonist themes
are not recalled in the Confessions until his arrival in Milan, aged thirty.
When he read Plotinus he had never met or heard a trained philosopher. He
had never been taught by one. His abilities, rather, had been sharpened by
conversations with his friends. Yet, in one flash, he had seized the centre of
Plotinus’ difficult texts on ‘interiorité’ and united with God, the highest item
in the Christian hierarchy. In my view, Plotinus himself had had a similar
union with the One, although modern controversy on this point continues;
certainly, it did not occur only within weeks of beginning his studies.
54

Was Augustine’s lack of a ‘school’ partly compensated by a circle of
educated, like-minded laymen, who were meeting in Milan in a study-
group and assisting him to be ‘shaken’ by Plotinus? Such a group was first
brilliantly brought into our horizons by Pierre Courcelle, who included
in it people like Hermogenianus and Zenobius, the early recipients of
philosophic writings by Augustine, Simplicianus the priest who pointed
Augustine to the Plato-compatible opening of John’s Gospel, and bishop
Ambrose (in particular sermons). Courcelle’s later investigations added the
Platonist Calcidius too.
55
Manlius Theodorus was particularly important,
‘studiosissimus Plotini’, as Augustus called him, and a few months later,
he was politely addressed in Augustine’s Beata Vita and complimented, by
implication, in his Soliloquies.
56
Courcelle’s vision of a philosophic ‘circle’, led by Ambrose and Simpli-
cianus, is no longer convincing. Ambrose was the Sunday preacher at
a distance, who drew on Plotinus occasionally, but never named him;
Simplicianus was the former friend of Marius Victorinus, but Augustine
met him individually only after reading Plotinus, and does not recall any
detailed exposition of Neoplatonism in his company.
57
Beyond these two
priests, we should probably think of separate individuals, who were indeed
met separately by Augustine but whose knowledge of Plotinus’ texts varied.
Nonetheless, Courcelle’s researches have not lost their power and relevance
to our Conference’s themes. For they extend an interest in Platonism,
perhaps the renewed Platonism of Plotinus, to yet more individuals who
had not gravitated to any teacher or pursued the systematic course of
study which the late Platonists required. Augustine and Nebridius are
not the only people to have been drawn to difficult philosophy without
formal teachers: we should allow for similar educated persons in cities in
the Empire, even where we cannot name an established teacher or ‘school’

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of philosophy. Such people engaged with Platonizing questions, traces of
which have been detected in another near-contemporary, the historian
Ammianus.
58
He, too, was not mainly interested in a moral ‘souci de soi’
or ethical deportment.
What was the impact of this inner spirituality, which is both more and
less than a ‘philosophy of mind’, on individuals in the late fourth century
who encountered it? We can put the question to four contemporaries of
differing social class: Ambrose the bishop, Nebridius, Augustine, Manlius
Theodorus and, in the Greek ‘east’, Synesius of Cyrene. For Augustine,
the impact was intellectual, but not only that. It confirmed his desire to
convert to philosophy and give up rhetoric, to abandon ‘worldly ambition’
(spes saeculi) and take up the pursuit of ‘wisdom’. He actually did so, and in
November and December 386 we can read him in dialogue with himself.
In his Soliloquies, Reason asks Augustine: ‘if what Plato and Plotinus
said about God is true, is it not enough for you to know God as they
knew Him?’
59
Augustine’s answer reminds us that he was not, even now,
a ‘Christian Platonist’: strictly interpreted, ‘Christian Platonism’ is a con-
tradiction.
60
Augustine claims that Plotinus and the Platonists did not
know what, in fact, they had discovered: they were unaware, he appears
to mean, that what they said truly could be shown for certain by dialectic.
Like us, Plotinus would not accept this ‘reception’ of his careful exposi-
tions. He and the Platonists were also, according to Augustine, deficient
in basic values: they lacked the Christian triad of faith, hope and caritas.
Platonists would have enjoyed refuting this complaint too. In fact they
had all three, as Porphyry had explicitly stated in his Letter to Marcella, ch.
24.
61
Here, he spells out the stoicei'a which are necessary for worshipping
God: pivsti", ejlpiv" and ejrwv" are required, together with ajlhvqeia. This ejrwv"
is a passionate longing for the One, rather than any generalized love for
one’s fellow men. In the Soliloquies, indeed, this meaning is the one which
Augustine gives to caritas; it is the love of God so as to persist in a vision
of Him. The Augustine of this Dialogue is still concerned for his friends,
but they are only friends who share his quest for Wisdom: all Wisdom’s
lovers, he tells us, are loved by him too when they try to embrace her, as
he does. Not until some eighteen months later do we find him referring to
a different love, love of one’s neighbour as oneself. This love then remains
a principle of Augustine’s own actions in society, but its source is not philo-
sophic. It is Christian, of course, not Platonist. Like Augustine’s celibacy,
this basic principle of ‘moral deportment’ comes to him from outside the
philosophic tradition.
Spes saeculi was extremely relevant to Augustine, as he struggled to make
his way up the ladder; it was irrelevant to Nebridius, who was far too rich

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to need to work or win more honours, and totally irrelevant to a grand local
aristocrat, Synesius, or to Ambrose, of high senatorial family. Renunciation
of this spes was much less of an issue when they encountered philosophy;
their livelihoods were not in question. Nebridius, therefore, could continue
to be fascinated by questions on the ‘philosophy of mind’ and interiorité, by
dreams, memory and the puzzling ‘vehicle of the soul’, until even Augustine
had had enough of him. Of all Augustine’s contemporaries, he is the one
whom Plotinus could best have accommodated.
Ambrose, by contrast, did not explore the depths of his inner self. He
referred quite freely to the ‘inner man’, as Paul’s Letters called it, but his
flirtation with texts from Plotinus in his sermons was very brief.
62
It is most
pronounced when he discusses the wise man’s inviolability to the blows of
misfortune. He says nothing in detail about introversion, as Plotinus and
Augustine understood it, and so far as he talks of ascent, it is a version of
the migratory soul and the logos, as Philo and Origen had represented it.
63

In Ambrose’s texts from the 390s, there is no Plotinus at all. He had come
and gone, and the residents of late Roman Florence were not treated to
lectures on Plotinian mysticism when Ambrose eventually visited them. In
part, the difference is one of inclination. Unlike Augustine, Ambrose had
not continued to stretch himself with dialectic or logical retorts to scepti-
cism. His theological language was enlarged by bits of Plotinus, but they
were allusions, rather than items for continuing argument.
64
Basically, he
was hostile to philosophers, who had merely stolen (he thought) the prior
wisdom of the Bible. He was also extremely busy. A bishop in a major city
could not become too obsessed with his own ‘interiorité’, and then wait
for union with the One to ‘dawn’, as it had dawned on Plotinus, ‘like the
sunrise’. It was a lesson which Augustine the bishop would also discover,
despite his continuing practice of spiritual exercises and ‘ascents’ which he
carried over from the years before his ordination.
To the south-east, in Cyrenaica, Synesius was also extremely rich and
noble, but unlike Ambrose and Augustine he had been properly trained by
a great late Platonist teacher. He was a Christian of varying articulacy and
emphasis throughout his life, and he retained a passionate admiration for
wisdom and the aspiration to the One, as taught to him in Alexandria in
his earlier years by his revered Hypatia.
65
His elegant Hymns centre on the
possibility of piercing a ‘transparent universe’ and making contact with the
One. From these texts, Synesius, one feels, would have made an apt third
participant in the correspondence which Augustine and the like-minded
Nebridius conducted from 386 onwards: his book, On Dreams, even shared
their Neoplatonic sources.
66

Yet Synesius, author of these hymns, was also an ambassador, a political

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speaker, a dab hand at rounding up bandits and a continuing devotee of
blood sports, never happier than when hearing the hunting-songs of
Libyan foot-followers round a campfire in the desert.
67
As an aristocrat,
he had public roles and responsibilities: he could revere the philosophy
of his halcyon days with Hypatia, but he kept his Platonism in a separate
compartment, ‘this side of paradise’. What determined his role in society
was his range of obligations as a man of birth and education and his Chris-
tianity which involved him, eventually, in a bishopric.
Manlius Theodorus, by contrast, may seem like the textbook case for
the argument in Power and Persuasion.
68
We meet him in Milan in 386,
‘studiosissimus Plotini’ with views on the nature of the immortal soul, but
if we look carefully at Claudian’s panegyric of him we can see that he also
wrote on questions of ethics, the ‘norm’ of the good and the definition of
‘honourable’.
69
In 399, we then find him promoted back into a worldly
career and the consulship. However, his reputation for philosophy is
relevant to this advancement. Anticipating Peter Brown, Claudian praises
him for his precious mastery of the passions: ‘peacefully, you tame wrongs,
nor do you gnash your teeth horribly and rail against them, nor do you
demand the lash with a loud uproar … ’
70
Above all, the year of Theodorus’
consulship, 399, was exactly the year for the West to choose a philosopher
as consul: he could set a good example. In the East, the consulship had gone
to the unspeakable Eutropius, a eunuch. ‘O, shame of Earth and Heaven:
in consul’s robes an old woman is displayed through the cities and makes
the title of the year effeminate … ’
71
By promoting a philosopher, the West
could capture the moral high ground.
Theodorus, however, had also been a lawyer and his previous career as
a governor in Gaul had only been cut short by a disaster in his province,
the murder of the emperor Gratian. Wrecked in his worldly ambition,
as Augustine tells us, Theodorus then took up philosophy in retirement.
When the public stage called for him to return, he resumed his part with
gusto. His games as consul were suitably magnificent, ‘Let the sand grow
rich with copious blood, let the spectacle devour whole mountains … let
there be people who hurl themselves into the air like birds and build up
a shape with their bodies, growing in swift entanglement … ’
72
Theodorus
lived up to expectations and his study of philosophy did not dim his
‘worldly ambition’, or spes saeculi. The history of ‘philosophy in society’ is
also a history of the people whom it touched, but never fully permeated.
With hindsight, Augustine, the true convert, was disgusted by Theodorus’
relapse and regretted his excessive praise of him in his works of 386.
73

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3
When discussing those whom philosophy ‘shook’, I have emphasized those
who were not professional philosophers and who lived, as so many of us
do, with a range of commitments and competing claims on their attention.
I turn now to ‘movers’ who, by definition, are people who acted on their
principles. For as Plato had implied in the Republic, and as later commen-
tators observed, there may be no alternative for the wise man except to
move if his fellow-citizens behave like madmen. Here, too, philosophers
of our own time have shared a predicament with their forebears in late
antiquity. I will concentrate on two of the most famous ‘movers’, both of
them from Athens.
According to Marinus, Proclus in Athens faced some such crisis in
the mid-to-later fifth century and left the city to spend a period in Asia
Minor.
74
The ‘crisis’ is elliptically described and has been much discussed,
with emphasis on a Christian aspect to it. I wish to suggest what Marinus
studiously did not mention. The evidence lies in a most beguiling source,
the abbreviated final books of a long work On Correct Belief, compiled
by an unknown Christian in the 490s to early 500s and preserved in the
epitome which we know as the Tübingen Theosophy. This tantalizing quarry
of splintered old pagan oracles reports, under our number 53, how ‘in the
reign of Leo’ (457–74) a temple in Cyzicus became a Church of Mary.
This text has also now interested Cyril Mango who has observed that
Cyzicus’ temple must be the great Temple of Rhea, the mother of many
pagan gods; it is still unexcavated, and is one of the great possible gains for
our knowledge in the twenty-first century.
75
An oracle foretold the change
of use, and the same oracle, we are told, stood in ‘exactly these words’ on
the left wall of the ‘temple’ at Athens, predicting its takeover by Mary, the
Virgin mother.
Mango has reminded us of the oracle’s later appearance, in Malalas and
the Chroniclers, (to whom we can add a Syriac source, c. 600) but we also
know it earlier, in the Sixth Homily of Theodotus bishop of Ancyra (who
died by 451).
76
Theodotus alleges that the oracle had been sought by the
Athenians at a time of plague, in order to explain their puzzling altar to an
Unknown God. Plainly, Theodotus knew our oracle, but he had no idea
of its origin or true context. The emphasis on the Virgin Mary perhaps
implies its artful composition by an anonymous Christian in the earlier
fifth century.
Without a context, then, the text had been ‘in the air’ by 450, but the
important fact (as Mango has emphasized) is that the Christian author
of our Theosophy, writing before 508, probably in the 490s, accepts that
the text has been fulfilled twice over. It had come true once in Cyzicus,

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and once in Athens where it had now been inscribed. The ‘temple’ of this
inscription in Athens is certainly none other than the Parthenon, the pagan
Virgin’s temple. The Theosophy’s author thus contradicts the surveys by
Alison Frantz and the Agora Excavation Reports in Athens: the Parthenon
was already a Church of the Virgin Mary before 490, and arguably as early
as the reign of Leo.
This ‘tempestuous’ change, I suggest, is the one which buffeted Proclus.
Marinus does reveal that the great cult-statue of the Parthenon was moved
during Proclus’ lifetime, but he does not state openly that the shrine itself
was rededicated to Mary.
77
Here, Marinus is being studiously oblique, in
what Peter Brown has well described as an ‘ideology of silence’. Proclus does
not take this crisis passively. He protests, he intervenes with the authorities,
he has to leave the city. He goes eastwards for a bout of ‘spiritual tourism’,
touring the pagan cults and ‘mysteries’ of Lydia. We can understand his
destination even better since a recent study by Peter Herrmann. Without
considering Proclus, he has collected exceptional evidence for groups of
initiates and pagan mystery cults around Sardis, no less, in the heart of
Lydia, albeit in the earlier Imperial period.
78
Proclus, the Platonist wise man, did his utmost in a hopeless crisis. For,
the temples in his Athens were not lingering peacefully in a spiritual no
man’s land. There was a real thunderclap in what the late Homer Thompson
preferred to describe as their ‘twilight’.
79
Recently Garth Fowden has made
a good case for the construction of a Christian church in the ground-plan
of Hadrian’s Library, probably already in the 430s.
80
Marinus’ Life also
implies strongly that the Temple of Asclepius, a particular favourite, had
been curtailed in Proclus’ lifetime.
81
Our admiration for the sumptuous
houses A, B and C which archaeologists have uncovered on the Areopagus
must not be allowed to obscure the central, daily horror of the lives of the
‘old believers’ who frequented them.
82
On the Acropolis above them, the
Parthenon was now a Church, standing in a ‘faith zone’.
The words of the floating oracle, which had supposedly licensed the
Parthenon’s takeover, are worth a closer look. ”Osa pro;" ajrevthn kai; kovsmon
o[rwre, poiei'te, it was said to begin. Our Epitome quotes it in prose, but
it does not obscure its collection of learned words and metrical endings
to hexameters which befit a verse-oracle. ‘Whatever pertains to virtue and
kovsmo", you are doing’, Apollo was said to have told the Athenians; genuine
oracles often deployed an opening flattery of their recipients. But Marinus
tells us how Proclus was hailed by a god (in context, he means Asclepius) as
kovsmo" polevw", an acclamation for whose precise words I know no parallel.
Proclus would weep, Marinus tells us, as he recalled this favour from the
god. Was it not especially poignant to be the acknowledged kovsmo" of

53. 34
Robin Lane Fox Movers and shakers
35
Athens, when a fake Christian oracle had flattered the inhabitants for their
kovsmo" and ‘foretold’ to them (supposedly) that the Parthenon would
indeed become a shrine of Mary?
Some sixty years later, the pressures on Athenian philosophers intensi-
fied. I accept that Justinian’s ban on public salaries for pagan teachers,
among other measures against them, had the intended effect of halting the
Academy at Athens, in 529. I am less sure than Alan Cameron that Simpli-
cius turned to writing his commentary on Epictetus as a fortification in
this particular time of tyranny.
83
Epictetus was not such an unusual choice
of author, even in the 520s. However, I do prefer a chronology in which
Justinian’s ban was followed immediately by another famous emigration.
According to Agathias, Simplicius and six other wise Greek philoso-
phers migrated to Sassanian Persia, enticed by reports of the healthy state of
Persian society.
84
Not all of the seven ‘movers’ were necessarily members of
the Athens Academy, but once in Persia they found their hopes frustrated.
Contrary to their expectations, they found theft was much in evidence.
They also found an unacceptable oppression of the ‘lesser by the powerful’
and a prevalence of adultery, although the Persians were polygamous.
Whatever Agathias’ sources (one of the Seven is a possibility), we should
add these reactions to our views of Platonist philosophers in society. The
most explicit disgust at the ‘class struggle’ in the early sixth century is not
ascribed to a toiling peasant: it is ascribed to intellectuals, formed by Plato,
a point which the great work on the subject by G.E.M. de Sainte Croix did
not pick up. And yet ‘class struggle’ and the state of marriage are not objec-
tions which Platonists usually advance against a worldly society. It is, then,
worth pointing out that the year 528/9, the probable year of their arrival
in Persia, is the occasion of the final crushing of the Mazdakite uprising.
Mazdakites, too, were said to resent oppression by the nobles and the indis-
criminate ravaging of women.
85
Did the visiting Platonists hear of the recent
‘Mazdakite menace’ and sympathize with its reported programme?
In 532, the Seven Wise Men left Persia, and crossed back into the
Roman empire. According to Michel Tardieu, however, the source for
their stay at the Persian court is only a legend fostered by themselves.
86

At most, he thinks, one of them may have gone on an embassy to the
court, but the truth is that the Platonists really settled in the stoutly pagan
town of Harran where their successors kept a Platonist tradition alive for
three centuries, resurfacing as self-styled ‘Sabians’ in the Islamic world.
87

‘Throughout the centuries’, as Pierre Chuvin has expatiated, ‘Aramaicized
heirs of Plato, Plotinus and Proclus kept their rituals, prayers and fasts,
used the old Attic calendar, and perpetuated a ‘school of Harran’ through
which Greek philosophy reached Baghdad, whence it returned to the West,
via Andalusia’.
88

54. 34
Robin Lane Fox Movers and shakers
35
This seductive ‘golden chain’ rests on widely scattered bits of evidence,
none of which can support its conclusions: I have set out objections to
it, and its utter implausibility, in an Appendix to this paper. We cannot,
of course, know that all or some of the Seven did not visit Harran at
some point, because we know nothing of their movements, except for
Damascius’ presence at Emesa in 538.
89
For all we know, they could have
gone to Sicily. R. Thiel has recently reviewed the possible major cities,
but his arguments are necessarily inconclusive.
90
Most of them, including
Simplicius, may simply have returned to Athens and continued to work
‘in the shadow of the Parthenon’.
What we can say (against Tardieu) is that their stay in Persia was not
a legend: it has left us with a long, but seldom-studied, work on intellectual
questions. In a Latin translation, whose main manuscripts date from c.
850–70, we have a rendering of the Solutiones of ‘those things about which
King Chosroes doubted’.
91
It is ascribed to ‘Priscianus the philosopher’.
One of the Seven ‘movers’ was indeed Priscianus of Lydia, and the king
of Persia in 528/9 was Khusrau, or Chosroes. This text had an honoured
place in Renaissance Italian libraries: it exists in a fine Florentine copy and
in another, made for the Duke of Urbino. Modern scholars have been less
interested in it, but is this Latin translation evidence for Priscianus’ doings
in Persia?
We know this Priscianus for his ‘paraphrase’ of Theophrastus’ On Percep-
tion and also, after the fine arguments of Carlos Steel and F. Bossier, for the
work on Aristotle’s De Anima which survived mistakenly under Simplicius’
name.
92
Part of the case for the re-attribution of this text is stylistic and
Steel has usefully diagnosed characteristics in Priscianus’ style. In their Latin
translation, the Solutiones are not exactly fluent: however, they do not rest
on an original which is harsh and prone to recapitulation, the hallmark
of Priscianus in his two other writings. From style alone, we would never
credit them to him. The manner, too, is different. The Solutiones take
general questions, one by one, and answer them by citing passages, often
long passages, from Plato, Aristotle and other authors. The preface is
explicit about this practice. The author, it says, will recycle opinions from
old books, using a ‘brief and connected’ style. Some may ‘wish to correct
what has been written’, and to help them, the author specifies that he has
drawn on ‘Plato’s Timaeus, Phaedo, Phaedrus and Republic’, and ‘other
suitable disputationes’. He has also drawn on Aristotle’s Physics, De Caelo
and De Generatione et Corruptione. In fact, even this list does not exhaust
his very wide range of excerpted sources.
93
In Priscianus’ surviving paraphrase, or Metaphrasis, the method is
different. A passage is quoted from Theophrastus and then discussed

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56. He was clamorous with excitement. Curiosity beat masterfully on
the door of the future. He had to find out. Why had he been brought
here? What had Santa to do with it? Who was the woman in the
next compartment?
They had halted several times. Each time he had watched
carefully to see whether she was eluding him. Again their speed was
slackening. They were entering a little, sandy town, dotted with red-
brick villas, bleached by the wind and sun. He caught glimpses
between the houses of a battered esplanade, of concrete
breakwaters partly destroyed, of a pebbly beach alternately sucked
down and quarrelsomely hurled back by the waves. Over all hung
the haunting fragrance of salt, and gorse, and wild thyme.
They had come to a standstill. Passengers were climbing out and
greeting friends. A porter flung wide the door of his carriage,
shouting, “Seafold! Seafold!”
Having watched her alight, he followed. She was a few paces
ahead, picking her way daintily through the crowd. Again she was all
discretion and gave no hint that she had noticed him. Outside the
gate, cabmen offered themselves for hire. She shook her head
denyingly and passed on with her tripping step. Not until the station
had been left behind did he remember that he ought to have
inquired at what times the trains departed for London. Too late! His
immediate business was keeping her in sight.
With the unhesitating tread of one familiar with her surroundings,
she chose what seemed to be the most important street. It was
narrow and flanked by little, stooping cottages, most of which had
been converted into shops which cater to the needs of tourists. It
was the end of the season. A few remaining visitors were sauntering
aimlessly up and down. Natives, standing in groups, had the
appearance of being fishermen. Some of them nodded to her
respectfully; without halting, she passed them with a pleasant word.
At the bottom of the street she turned into a road, paralleling the
sea-front, which led through a waste of turf and sand into the wind-
swept uplands of the open country. Just where the country met the
town there stood a lath-and-plaster house, isolated, facing seaward,

57. J
creeper-covered, surrounded by high hedges. It was more
pretentious than any he had seen as yet. Giving no sign that she
was aware she was followed, she pushed open the rustic gate,
passed up the red-tiled path, produced a latch-key, and admitted
herself. There, in the bare stretch of road, having lured him all the
way from London, without a single backward glance or any sign that
would betray her recognition of his presence, she left him.
VII
ust what I might have expected,” he said aloud.
“Did you speak ter me, mister?”
He swung round to find a freckled, bare-legged urchin gazing
up at him.
“I didn't. Who are you?”
“A caddy from them links over there.” He pointed a grubby finger
along the road to where, half a mile away, the level of the seashore
swept up into a bold, green headland.
“Then I guess you're the sort of boy I'm looking for. Who lives in
this house?”
“A Madam Something or other. 'Er name sounds Russian.”
“What does she look like?”
“Dunno. She's a widder and covers 'erself up. Not but what she 'as
gentlemen friends as visits 'er.”
“You seem a sharp boy. Can you tell me how long she's lived
here?”
“Maybe a year; off and on that's ter say. I don't recolleck.”
“Is she by herself?”
“There's an old woman in the garden sometimes as looks a
'undred. She wears a white hanky tied round 'er 'ead.”
“I think that's all I want to ask you. Here's something for you. Oh
yes, do you happen to know about the trains to London?”

58. “The last one's gorn, mister, if that's what yer means. It's the one
that our gents at the golf-links aims ter catch.”
“Then I'm out of luck. Good evening, sonny, and thank you for
your information.”
The bare legs showed no signs of departing; the freckled face still
gazed up.
“What's interesting you. My way of speaking? I'm American.”
The boy shook his head. “We 'ad Canadian soldiers 'ere during the
war; they're pretty near Americans.”
“Then what is it?”
“It's that you're the second gent to-day to slip me a shilling for
telling 'im about this 'ouse. And it's something else.” He sank his
voice to a whisper. “Don't look round. There's been some one a-
peeking from be'ind a bedroom winder most of the time as we've
been talkin'. I'd best be goin'. Good evenin', mister.”
Not to attract attention by loitering, Hindwood set off at a
businesslike pace down the road toward the headland. As he drew
further away from the house, he walked more slowly; he was trying
to sort out his facts. The woman who lived there had a Russian
name. Santa Gorlof! She dressed like a widow. That would be to
disguise herself. The news about the gentlemen friends who visited
her was quite in keeping with the character which the Major had
bestowed on her, but not at all welcome. She had lived there for a
year, off and on. Her companion was an old woman, nearly a
hundred—the Little Grandmother! But who was this man who earlier
in the day had bribed the boy that he might obtain precisely the
same information? He reminded himself that the police were hunting
for her. The man might be a detective. If justice had already run her
to earth, Seafold was the last place in which he ought to be found. If
the boy had been accurate about the trains, there was no escape till
the morning. Even though he were to hire an automobile, he would
be placing his visit to Seafold on record. Self-preservation rose up
rampant. What a fool he'd been to involve himself in so perilous an
affair!

59. And yet, once more and for the last time, he longed to see Santa's
face. Why was it? Was it because her hearsay wickedness fascinated
him? It was not because he loved her. It was not to gratify morbid
curiosity—at least not entirely. Perhaps it was because he pitied her
and, against his will, discovered a certain grandeur in her defiance.
She had played a lone hand. Like a beast of prey in the jungle, she
was surrounded; at this moment she must be listening for the
stealthy tread of those who were encompassing her destruction, yet
she had not lost her cunning. She was fighting to the end. Probably
this time, as when the firing-squad waited for her in the woods of
Vincennes, she was planning to employ a man as her substitute—
himself. The fact remained that in her desperate need, she had
appealed to him for help. There was the barest chance that she was
innocent—a victim of false-appearing circumstances. He wanted to
judge her for himself by tearing aside the widow's veil and gazing on
her destroying beauty.
Turning off the road, he struck across the links, climbing toward
the towering headland. The wind, coming in gusts, rustled the
parched gorse and brittle fronds of bracken. Behind his back the sun
was setting, flinging a level bar of gold across the leaden sea. In
sudden lulls, when the wind ceased blowing, the air pulsated with
the rhythmic cannonading of waves assaulting the wall of cliffs.
When he listened intently, he could hear the ha-ha of their cheering
and their sullen moan as they were beaten back. It was strange to
think that two weeks ago he had been in New York, intent on
nothing but acquiring a fortune. Women had not troubled him. Why
should he now permit this woman, chance-met on ship-board, to
divert him—a woman who could never be closer to him?
He had reached the summit of the promontory. Etched against the
sky-line, his figure must be visible for miles. The sun sank lower and
vanished. Gazing through the clear atmosphere, far below him he
could discern every detail of the house to which he had been
tempted. It looked a fitting nest for an old poet. It held no hint of
terror. At the same time it was strategically well situated for
occupants who wished to keep an eye on all approaches.

60. He had been watching for any sign of movement, when a curious
thing happened. Though no figure appeared, from one of the upper
windows a white cloth fluttered. He shaded his eyes with his hand.
The signal was repeated. He tapped his breast and pointed, as much
as to say, “Shall I come?” The cloth was shaken vigorously. On
repeating the experiment, he obtained the same result. When he
nodded his head in assent, the fluttering ended.
So every step of his progress had been observed by some one
spying through a telescope from behind the curtained windows! The
first moment he had afforded an opportunity by looking back, the
signaling had commenced. That so much secrecy should be
employed seemed to betoken that Santa's case was desperate. That
she should have run the risk of tempting him down from London
must mean that he possessed some peculiar facility for rendering
her a much needed service.
The imminence of the danger, both to her and to himself, was
emphasized by this latest precaution. She had not dared to admit
him to the house or even to acknowledge his presence, until she had
made certain that he, in his turn, was not followed.
This thought, that he might be followed, filled him with an entirely
new sensation; it peopled every clump of gorse and bed of bracken
with possible unseen enemies. The rustling of the wind, the cry of a
sea-bird, made him turn alertly, scanning with suspicion every hollow
and mound of the wild, deserted landscape. It seemed unwise to
allow his actions to announce his intentions too plainly. What his
intentions were he was not very certain. His immediate inclination
was to shake himself free from the whole mysterious complication.
Continuing his ramble, he assumed a careless gait, descending the
further side of the promontory and bearing always slightly inland, so
that his course might lead back eventually to the road from which he
had departed. As dusk was gathering, he found himself entering an
abandoned military camp. The bare hutments, with their dusty
windows and padlocked doors, stretched away in seeming endless
avenues of ghostly silence. The Maple Leaf, painted on walls and
sign-boards, explained the village boy's reference to Canadian

61. H
soldiers. He had reached the heart of it, when he was possessed by
the overpowering sensation that human eyes were gazing at him.
Pulling himself up, he glanced back across his shoulder, crooking his
arm to ward off a blow. Realizing what he was doing, he relaxed and
stared deliberately about him. Nothing! No sign of life! Yet the
certainty remained that human eyes were watching.
“Nerves!” he muttered contemptuously.
It was dark when, leaving the camp, he struck the road. Stars
were coming out. Far away along the coast the distant lights of a
harbor blinked and twinkled. He hurried his steps. His mind was
made up. He would get something to eat in Seafold, discover a
garage, hire a car and be back in London by midnight. To confirm his
will in this decision, he began making plans for the morrow.
To enter the town he had to pass the house. As its bulk gathered
shape, his feet moved more slowly. Long before he came opposite it,
he had caught the fragrance of the myrtle in its hedges. The
windows which looked his way were shrouded. He paused for a
moment outside the rustic gate. He was saying good-by to
adventure. He was too old. His season for pardonable folly was
ended. The prose of life had claimed him.
Prolonging the pretense of temptation, he pushed open the gate.
A hand touched his—a woman's. The desire to play safe faded.
Weakly capitulating, he allowed himself to be led up the path and
across the shadowy threshold. The door of the darkened house
closed behind him. She was slipping the bolts into place.
VIII
e listened. He could not see her face—only the blurred outline
of her figure. Except for the sound of her movements, the
silence was unbroken. At the end of a passage, leading from
the hall, a streak of gold escaped along the carpet.
“Santa!”
No answer.

62. “Santa, why have you brought me?”
Gliding past him down the passage, she darted into the lighted
room, leaving the door ajar behind her. He followed gropingly. As he
entered, he was momentarily confused by the sudden change from
darkness.
She was addressing him in a small, strained voice. “There's no
need to be afraid.”
He looked about him, searching for the inspirer of fear. There was
no one save themselves. Then he noticed how she trembled. She
was making a brave effort to appear collected, but it was plain that
she was wild with terror. Her eyes were wide and dilated. She stood
on the defensive, backed against the fireplace, as though she were
expecting violence. Her right hand was in advance of her body. It
held something which caught the glow of the flames—a nickel-plated
revolver, cocked and ready for immediate action. His reception was
so different from anything he had anticipated that he stared with an
amused expression of inquiry.
At last he asked, “You knew from the start that I thought you
were Santa?”
Biting her lip to prevent herself from crying, she nodded. Far from
being Santa, she was fair as any Dane, with China-blue eyes and the
complexion of a wild rose. He noted the little wisps of curls which
made a haze of gold about her forehead. She wore turquoise
earrings. They were her only adornment. She herself was a
decoration. She was like a statue of the finest porcelain, so flawless
that she seemed unreal. Had it not been for her widow's mourning,
he would have said that she was untouched by passionate
experience. She had an appearance of provoking innocence, which
made the paleness of her beauty ardent as a flame.
Speaking quietly, “I'm not easily frightened,” he said; “and you,
while you keep me covered with that revolver, have no reason to be
afraid. Any moment you choose you can kill me—you've only to
press the trigger.”
Tears of horror sprang into her eyes. “But I don't want to kill you.”

63. “Then why don't you lay it aside?”
“Because—” She gazed at him appealingly.
“Because I'm alone. I may need it to protect myself.”
“From me? No. I should think you can see that.” Was the house
really empty? He listened. It was possible that some one might steal
up from behind. He did not dare to turn. His only chance of
preventing her from shooting him was to keep her engaged in
conversation.

64. “If you feel this way, why did you go to such elaborate pains to
force me to visit you to-night? You must have known that I didn't
want to come. It isn't I who have intruded.” He smiled cheerfully. “At
the risk of appearing rude, I'll be frank with you. When you crossed
my path at the Ritz, I was on the point of keeping a most important
engagement. When I followed you out of the hotel, it was because
of a message I'd found pinned to my pillow, 'Follow the widow.' So it
wasn't you in particular that I was following; I'd have followed any
widow. I expected that you'd speak to me as soon as we were in the
street. I'd no intention of giving up my appointment. You didn't; you
led me on, further and further, a step at a time. I don't mind telling
you that when I found myself in the train, I was extremely annoyed.
By the time I'd arrived at Lewes, I'd fully made up my mind to
abandon the chase. Then you spoke to me. I'd wasted so much of
my afternoon that I didn't like being beaten. You'd roused my
curiosity. Here in Seafold, you dodged me and left me standing in
the road like a dummy. That used up the fag-end of my patience; I
was mad clean through. I didn't care if I never saw you again. When
you signaled me on the headland, I signaled back that I was coming.
I wasn't. I was tired of being led on and eluded. When you caught
me at the gate, I was flirting with temptation, but I'd already laid my
plans to be back in London by midnight. So you see you can scarcely
blame me for being here. The shoe's on the other foot entirely.
You've put me to great inconvenience merely to tell me, it would
seem, that you don't want to shoot me.”
“I don't.”
“Then why not throw the thing away? You're far more scared of it
than I am.”
“Because I may have to use it.”
“On whom?”
“You.”
“Why?”
A sweet, slow smile turned up the edges of her mouth. “My orders
were to keep you here, if once I'd managed to persuade you inside.”

65. He laughed outright. “You hate having me here, and you'd hate to
see me go. Isn't that the way the land lies? I'm more or less in the
same fix: I didn't want to come, and I don't want to stay. The fact
remains that we're both here. Why not make the best of it? If you'll
stop brandishing that weapon, I'll feel much more comfortable. I'm
not trying to escape.”
“You might.”
For the first time he dared to shift his position. “Don't be alarmed,”
he warned her. “That's easier. I was stiff. Now, if you'll listen, I've a
proposal to make. You're treating me like a burglar, which isn't fair.
You may know, but I've not the least idea how long you intend to
hold me prisoner. I guess you're waiting for some one else to arrive,
but that's neither here nor there. Before the third person comes, you
may have shot me—of course, by accident. Revolvers go off if you
keep them too long pointed. You know nothing about firearms, and
I'm beginning to be rather fond of life. Here's what I propose: if
you'll put it away, I'll give you my parole not to come within two
yards of you or to attempt to escape. If I want my parole back, you
shall have a full five minutes' notice.”
“If I thought that I could trust you—”
“You can. Is it a bargain?”
Without answering, placing her weapon on the mantelpiece, she
turned her back on him. She seemed waiting to hear him advance
further into the room. He did not stir.
“What is it, Mr. Hindwood?”
“It's that I've just remembered one thing for which our armistice
has not provided. You'd better pick up your gun again. It's that I
haven't dined. I wonder whether you'd let me into the village—” He
left his sentence unended. He suddenly perceived that she was
shaken with sobbing. In his concern, he forgot his compact as to
distance and hurried over to her side. She swung round, her face
blinded with tears. As she stumbled past him, she muttered: “You've
beaten me. You're not afraid. I couldn't shoot you now if I wanted.”

66. T
IX
iptoeing to the threshold, he turned the handle and peeped
into the passage. As before, everything was in darkness.
He was free to go. There was nothing to stop him—nothing
except his honor. It was easy to argue that even his honor did not
prevent him. He had canceled his parole when he had reopened
negotiations by telling her to pick up her revolver. She had left it
behind her on the mantel-shelf. He took it in his hand and examined
it. It was a repeater. Every chamber was loaded. He whistled softly—
so she had meant business! Setting the hammer at half-cock, he
slipped the weapon in his pocket. He was master of the situation
now.
Why didn't he go? Two hours of steady driving, three at the most,
and he could be in London. He reminded himself that at this very
moment his private papers might be in the process of being
ransacked. What if they were? The possibility left him utterly
indifferent. He couldn't save them after the lapse of another three
hours.
No, the truth was that since his voyage on the Ryndam all the
emphases of his life were becoming altered. The importance of
money and power no longer seemed paramount. After nearly forty
years of living, he had awakened to the fact that it was women who
shed a radiance of glamour in an otherwise gloomy world. Of all
human adventures they were the most enthralling and the least
certain of rewarding.
It was curiosity that had enticed him into his present
entanglements; his curiosity had yet to be satisfied. With a revolver
in his pocket, he felt that he now possessed the means of extracting
the right answers to his questions. He had suffered mild
inconveniences, but so far he hadn't done so badly. He had
established mysterious relations with two beautiful women. One of
them was already under the same roof; the other, he believed, was

67. momentarily expected. He began to figure himself as a poet, a
dreamer, a potential storm-center of romance.
“And all because she has blue eyes!” he hinted.
Then he remembered that Santa's eyes were gray, and that up to
the last half-hour it had been Santa whom he had supposed that he
was following.
He gazed about him, making an inspection of the room, trying to
guess at the characters of its inhabitants. It was square and small.
Its walls were lined ceiling-high with shelves overloaded with books
of a learned appearance. A work-basket stood on a mahogany desk
with mending, scissors, and reels of cotton strewn near it. A piano
had been crushed into a corner, looking flippantly out of place amid
these scholarly surroundings. Below the mantelshelf was a rack
containing a row of pipes. Set about wherever a space allowed were
vases of freshly cut flowers.
The contradictions of the room suggested that it had once been a
man's den, but had now been taken over by a woman. This seemed
to indicate that the owner of the house was actually a widow.
Almost the whole of the wall confronting the door was occupied by
a tall French window, which opened directly on a lawn. Shrubs grew
waist-high about it. Instinct told him that this was the likeliest
approach for the other person, by whose order his kidnaping had
been plotted. He felt convinced that this person would prove to be a
woman, but he was taking no chances. With the night behind her,
she could spy on him for hours without being detected. She might
be spying on him now.
Assuming a listless manner, he seated himself to one side of the
fireplace. Out of the tail of his eye, without seeming to do so, he
watched the shadowy panes. His right hand was thrust into his
pocket, gripping the revolver.
After the lapse of some minutes, he heard in the passage the
widow's returning footsteps. Outside the door she halted, fumbling
at the handle. Giving up the attempt, she called to him to open. Just

68. as he was rising, a face, tense with eagerness, lifted itself out of the
bushes, peering in on him.

69. T
CHAPTER THE FOURTH—HE
BECOMES PART OF THE GAME
I
HE face hung there against the darkness for a second; then
the leaves closed over it as it was stealthily withdrawn. In the
utterness of his astonishment, Hindwood all but gave himself
away. It was not the face he had expected.
Masking his excitement with a yawn, he turned his back on the
window and stepped toward the door, opening it sufficiently to thrust
his head into the passage, but not wide enough to permit the
watcher in the bushes to learn anything of the person with whom he
talked. He found his captress standing just beyond the threshold,
carrying a tray, which accounted for her awkwardness.
“You won't have to dine in the village,” she explained. Then,
catching his strange expression, “What has happened?”
“Some one was to come to-night,” he whispered: “the person who
gave orders for my kidnaping. Isn't that so? She was to enter
through the window from the lawn, while you held me prisoner at
the revolver's point.”
“Is she here?”
“No, but a man who is her enemy—a Major Cleasby. He's hiding
directly in her path. He supposed you were she when you tried the
door. He showed his face. Is there any way in which we can warn
her?”
The widow set down her tray. Her eyes met his searchingly. “If the
man were there, you wouldn't want to save her.”
“Why not? You think I've invented the man in the bushes in order
that Santa may be scared away? I'm no more afraid of Santa than I

70. was of you. Besides, in your absence I've stolen your revolver. Ah,
that convinces you! The man's her husband and a secret service
agent. I can feel his eyes in my back. If you don't warn her, she'll be
caught. There must have been some prearranged signal. What was
it?”
Instead of answering, she pressed nearer, glancing fearfully across
her shoulder into the unlighted hall. Her voice came so faintly that
he could only just hear her.
“She wouldn't spare us. Why should you and I—? You don't know
what she intended.”
He smiled grimly. “I can guess. I was to have been her scapegoat
for the Rogovich murder. She was staging a new version of what
happened in the woods of Vincennes. Whether she escaped or was
brought to trial, I was to have been arrested. By that time she would
have clothed me with the appearance of her guilt. I was to have
figured as her lover and the Prince's rival. The motive for my crime
was to have been jealousy. The old story—an innocent man dying in
her stead!”
“If you think you know that, why should you, unless you are her
lover?”
“Because she's a woman.”
Her hands seized his, coaxing him from the doorway into the
darkened passage. “For the love of God, go!” she implored. “I give
you back your parole.”
Drawing her to him, he held her fast. “Don't struggle. He might
hear you. You decoyed me. You trapped me. Why this change? What
makes you so concerned for my safety?”
“I didn't know,” she panted, “the kind of man you are.”
“What kind?”
Her heart beat wildly. She lay against him unstirring, her face
averted. The moment he released her, she burst forth into new
pleading.
“For my sake. I beg of you.”

71. S
Into the grimness of his smiling there stole a gleam of tenderness.
“And leave you? I guess not. What's the signal?”
“The piano.”
“Come, then,” he said, “you shall play for me. While you play, if we
mask our expressions, we can talk of what we choose. Outwardly, to
deceive the man in the bushes, we must act a part. I'm an old
friend. I've dropped in unexpectedly. You've provided me with
supper. While I eat, we chatter and laugh. You sit at the piano and
sing for me occasionally. When the hour for Santa's arrival is past, I
take my leave. If you're brave, we can carry the farce through. Are
you game?”
For answer she picked up the tray and stepped into the room,
smiling back at him as he followed.
“I'm your humble servant, as always, Mr. Hind-wood, but I have
only two hands and they're occupied. If you'll bring up that table—
yes, set it before the fire. That's right. You must be comfortable, if
I'm to sing for you.”
II
he won't come now.”
The words reached him in a sigh. The pale hands fluttered
from the keyboard. The fair head dropped. Almost instantly
she straightened herself, banishing her appearance of weariness.
“Don't think that I'm showing the white feather. It's only that I'm
exhausted. She won't come now. I'm sure of it.” Then, bending
forward with a nervous tremor, “I daren't look round. Has he gone?”
Hindwood pushed back his chair from before the hearth. For the
moment he did not answer. He was striving to restore the spell
which the intrusion of her fear had broken. Glancing at her
sideways, he regarded her quietly where she sat at the piano in her
widow's garb. Through the window at her back he caught a glimpse
of the garden, shadowy and patched with moonlight. Above the
silence he heard the rumble of waves, sifting the pebbles on the

72. shore. Who was she, this woman who possessed the magic to
enchant him? Who had been her husband? What kind of man? Had
she loved him? How long since he had died? There were so many
questions.
She had persuaded him into following her, well knowing that he
believed her to be Santa. She had met his discovery of her
impersonation with a threat. When the luck was all in her favor, with
the panic of a stricken conscience she had thrown in her hand. For
the past two hours, in this cozy room, she had surrounded him with
shy intimacies of affection, to the end that the unseen spectator,
listening outside the panes, might be beguiled. Apparently the
deception had succeeded; the spectator had given no sign. It had
succeeded too well for Hindwood. It had roused in him the longing
that, behind her pretense of friendship, there might lurk a genuine
emotion of liking. He had tried to forget that the scene was stage-
set. He had wanted to believe that it was real.
“Has he gone?”
There was a break in her voice.
He pulled himself together. “Do you wish me to make certain?”
Rising, he lounged over to the piano as though to select a sheet
from the pile of music. In a flash he turned, wrenching wide the
doors of the French-window, and was across the step in a bound.
Nothing rose from the shadows to disturb the peace of the night.
Stooping by the bushes, he made a hurried examination.
“Come,” he called. Then, seeing how she pressed her hands
against her mouth, “There's no need to fear.”
When she was standing by his side, he explained: “To-morrow you
might think that I'd tricked you. I want you to see for yourself.
Here's where he was hiding when he peered in on me. The ground's
trampled. The bushes are bent back.”
“He may be still here,” she whispered, “in the garden—
somewhere.”
Hindwood smiled reassuringly into her upturned face. “He
wouldn't do you any harm if he were. Remember he's a secret

73. T
service agent. As a matter of fact, he ought to make you feel safe.”
“Safe!” She knotted her hands against her breast. “Shall I ever feel
safe? Oh, if I could confess—to you, to any one!”
“If it would help——”
Without giving him a chance to finish his sentence, she plucked at
his sleeve with the eagerness of a child. “Would you?”
“What?”
“Let me?”
III
hey had reentered the room, fastening the window securely
behind them. When that was done, they had drawn the
curtains across the panes. She had flung herself into a chair
beside the fire and was waiting impatiently for him to join her. But
he hovered in the center of the room, fingering his watch and
looking troubled.
“What's delaying you?” she asked without turning.
He slipped his watch into his pocket. “I had no idea it was so late.”
“Does that matter? Till morning there are no trains.”
“I was thinking of hotels.”
“They'll be shut.”
“Precisely. So what am I——?”
“Stay with me,” she said lazily.
The room became profoundly silent. The darkened house seemed
to listen. Had he plumbed a new depth in this drama of betrayal at
the moment when he hoped he had discovered loyalty? He had been
deceived by women before. Had he not allowed Santa to deceive
him, he would not have been here. He might tell himself that this
woman was different. If a man did not tell himself that each new
woman was different, the mischief of love would end.

74. He caught sight of her flaxen head and became ashamed of his
reflections. It wasn't possible, if the soul was foul, that the flesh
should be so fair. She had the wonder of the dawn in her eyes.
Nothing that she had said or done could belie the frankness of her
innocence. Standing behind her chair, he gazed down in puzzlement
at her graciousness.
“There are conventions. We may have met unconventionally, but
neither of us can afford to ignore them.”
Without looking up, she answered, “If you were as alone as I am,
you could afford to ignore anything.”
“Perhaps I am.”
“Then you understand.”
“I think I understand.” He spoke gently. “I suppose no man can
ever be so lonely as a woman, especially as a woman who has lost
her happiness, but I, too, have been lonely. Everybody has. The
cowardice which comes of loneliness is responsible for nearly every
wickedness. Most thefts, and cheatings, and even murders are
committed in an effort to gain companionship. But you can't elude
loneliness by short-cuts. Wherever you go, it's with you from birth to
death. Brave people make it their friend. Cowards let it become their
tempter. Loneliness is no excuse for wrong-doing, nor even for
surrendering to the appearance of it.”
“Preaching?”
“No. Trying to share with you my experience. Until this afternoon,
you didn't know that I existed. All your life up to the last five
minutes, you've been able to do without me. Don't be greedy and
spoil everything before it's started. There's tomorrow.”
“Why wait for to-morrow when I trust you now?”
He stooped lower. She had become irresistibly dear. In a rush he
had found the clue to her character—her childishness. She couldn't
bear to postpone the things she wanted.
“Trust me! I wonder! You're the first woman to have the daring to
tell me. I'm not sure that I feel complimented; at this hour of night

75. I
one has to be a little cold to be trusted like that. But I trust you—
which is strange after all that's happened. The person I distrust is
myself. You're beautiful. The most beautiful——”
“Am I more beautiful than Santa?”
He caught the vision of her blue eyes glinting up at him. There
was nothing roguish in their expression. They were pathetic in their
earnestness. Her throat was stretched back, white and firm. Her lips
were vivid and parted. Her question sounded like the ruse of a
coquette, yet she seemed wholly unaware of her attraction.
He drew himself erect, staring at the wall that he might forbid
himself the danger of looking at her. His voice came harsh and
abrupt. “Your confession can keep till morning. One can say and
unsay anything. It's deeds that can never be unsaid.”
He had reached the door. She spoke dully. “You despise me.” And
then, “All my life I've waited for to-morrows. Go quickly.”
Glancing across his shoulder he saw her, a mist of gold in a great
emptiness. Slowly he turned back.
“Can't you guess the reason for my going? I reverence you too
much.”
Clutching at his hands, she dragged herself to her feet. “It's
friendship that I'm asking. What's the use of reverence? Like me a
little. You'd do more for Santa. Only to like me wouldn't cost you
much.”
IV
should have died if you'd left me.” He was feeling both amused
and annoyed at his surrender; at the same time he was on the
alert for developments. She had extinguished the lamps. The
sole illumination was the firelight. For what reason she had done it,
whether as an aid to confession or as a discouragement to watchers,
she allowed him to guess. Whatever the reason, the precaution was
wise, but it increased the atmosphere of liaison. He had pushed back
his chair to the extreme corner of the hearth, so that he was

76. scarcely discernible. She sat where the glow from the coals beat up
into her face. He saw her profile against a background of darkness.
“Died!” He pursed his lips in masculine omniscience. “You'd have
gone to your bed and had a good night's rest.”
“I shouldn't. I was in terror. I used to be afraid only by night; now
it's both day and night. You're never afraid. You weren't afraid even
when I——. How do you manage it?”
“By doing things, instead of thinking about the things that can be
done to me. I've learned that what we fear never happens—fear's a
waste of time. Fear's imagination playing tricks by pouncing out of
cupboards. It's the idiot of the intellect, gibbering in the attic after
nightfall. IPs a coward, spreading cowardice with false alarms. It's a
liar and a libeller; life's a thousand times kinder than fear would
have us paint it.”
She sighed happily. “It was kind to me to-night.” He waited for her
confession to commence. She leaned back, her eyes half shut,
watching the red landscape in the dancing flames. Time moved
gently. Night seemed eternal. Her contentment proved contagious.
Neither of them spoke. Nothing mattered save the comfort of her
presence. In a hollow of the coals he invented a dream cottage to
which he would take her. It had a scarlet wood behind it and
mountains with ruby-tinted caves. As the fire settled, the mirage
faded.
“Does it strike you as comic,” he questioned, “that you and I
should sit here after midnight and that I shouldn't even know what
to call you?”
“Varensky. Anna Varensky.”
“Russian?”
She nodded.
“But are you Russian?”
“I'm Ivan Varensky's wife.”
“You say it proudly, as though I ought to know who Ivan Varensky
was.”

77. She turned her head slowly, wondering at him. “There's only one
Ivan Varensky: the man who wanted to be like Christ.”
Hindwood jerked himself into wakefulness. “I'm afraid I need
enlightenment. I don't——”
“You do,” she contradicted patiently, “or rather, you will when I've
helped you to recall him. How hurt he would be, poor Ivan, that a
man of your standing should so soon have forgotten him! He hoped
to make such a noise in the world. After Czardom had fallen, he
aimed to be a savior, healing men with words. But he wanted to be
crucified at once. He cared more for Calvary than for the road that
led up to it. He was an emotionalist, impatient of Gethsemane; it
was the crown of thorns that he coveted. Having only words with
which to save humanity, he dashed all over Russia in special trains,
speechifying at every halting-place, foretelling his approaching end.
He had no time to waste; he believed his days were numbered. His
message was always the same, whether he was addressing the
Duma, armies marching into action, or a handful of peasants: he
was about to die for Russia. Then suddenly Trotzky and Lenine
came. They were men who did things; they overthrew his
government. Worse, still, they refused to fulfill his prophecies;
instead of executing him, they bundled him into exile. To be forced
to live, when he had pledged himself to die, was a more cruel
crucifixion than any he had anticipated. He found himself nailed to
the cross of ridicule with no one to applaud his sacrifice. He was left
with nothing to talk about, for the thing he had talked about had not
happened. He was an idealist, an inspirer, a prophet, but because
death had avoided him, there was no gospel to write. Having
climbed the long road to Calvary, he had the tragedy to survive.
Don't think I'm belittling him. I loved him. It was a proud, but not an
easy task to be the wife of a man who wanted to be like Christ.”
She collapsed into silence, sitting lost in thought, her arms
hanging limply by her sides. He wondered what pictures she was
seeing in the fire—armed men marching, revolution, palaces going
up in dame.

78. Of course he remembered the Varensky she had described—the
Varensky who, in the darkest hour of the war, had hurled himself like
a knight-errant to the rescue of the Allies. It was he who was to
have consolidated Russia, leading its millions in an endless tide to
the defeat of the enemies of righteousness. It was freedom he had
promised; freedom to everybody. He had preached that every man
was good in himself, that the things that made men bad were laws.
Therefore he had swept all laws aside. He had done away with
compulsion, repealed death penalties, thrown prisons wide. For a
day and night he had held the stage, a shining figure, adored by
despairing eyes. Then the slaves whom he had released from
restraints had surged over him. He had vanished, trampled beneath
ungrateful feet, and Russia had become a mob.
So this was Varensky's wife! He felt awed. The romantic heroism
of her husband's failure clothed her with a wistful sacredness. Three
years ago he could not have approached her. He would scarcely
have dared to have regarded her as a woman. The hysteria of the
moment had canonized her. Streets through which she drove in
Petrograd had been lined with kneeling throngs. There had been
something medieval in the spontaneity of her worship. It had been
rumored that she was a bride immaculate; that her purity was the
secret of her husband's strength. Her face made the story credible.
It had the virgin innocence of a saint's. And here he was allowed to
sit beside her, with three years gone, sharing her hearth in this
obscure place of hiding!
“You were a Russian Joan of Arc,” he declared enthusiastically.
“How well I remember all the legends one read about you. And
Varensky—— It doesn't matter that he failed; his was the most
gallant figure of the entire war. When every nation was embittered,
he set us an example of how not to hate. He refused to kill, when all
of us were slaying. He had the courage of meekness; in that at least
he followed Christ. What became of him? There was a report——”
“There have been many reports,” she interrupted sadly. “Lest the
latest be true, I wear mourning. I wear mourning for him always.

79. Before his fall I was his perpetual bride; since his fall I am his
perpetual widow. He wishes to be dead, so to please him——-”
“Then he's still alive?” Immediately he was conscious of the
indecency of his disappointment.
She gazed into the darkness with a mild surprise. “I do not know.
I never know. That's the torture of it. He was always less a man
than a spirit. I begin to think he can not die.”
“You want him——?”
If she had heard his uncompleted question, she ignored it. With
folded hands she stared into the red heart of the fire. Behind her,
across the walls and ceiling as flames leaped and flickered, shadows
took fantastic shapes. When she spoke, as though she were talking
to herself, her words came softly.
“He was such a child—so dear, so vain, so intense, so sensitive.
Why did he marry me, if it was only to resign me? He treated me as
he treated Russia. We were both waiting for him to take us in his
arms. But it was always ideals—things one can't embrace—that drew
out his affections. Had he loved humanity less and individuals more,
he could have gone so far. There was something monstrous about
his self-abnegations. Perhaps he denied himself the things for which
he did not care. He wanted to seem nobler than any one else.
Through egotism he missed his chance. Had he planned to live, he
could have killed his enemies and prevented revolution. There was a
time when he could have crushed both Lenine and Trotzky. But he
had to be too noble. 'No,' he said, 'if their ideal is more right than
mine, it will conquer. Truth can not be silenced by slaughter.' It was
his inhuman magnanimity that defeated him. So Lenine and Trotzky
grew strong and crushed him. Because he had planned to die,
millions are starving, and Russia is in chaos.”
“But he doesn't own it?”
“In his heart—yes. Like a General who has blundered, the vision of
lost battlefields is forever in his eyes—the forests of white crosses!
His egotism is gone. He wants to make atonement; to perish seems
the only way. Any one who would delay him, even though she were

80. S
a woman who loved him, is his enemy. In his remorse he hounds
death as other men avoid it. He's head of the counterrevolution and
goes continually into Russia for the overthrow of Bolshevism. Not
that he hopes for success, but that he may be put against a wall and
shot.”
“And always he returns?”
“Always until this last time.”
Her voice sank away in a whisper. He eyed her with misgiving.
What was it she desired?
“I read something of this. He's been missing for a long time?”
“A long time.”
Coming out of the shadows, so that she could see his face, he
drew his chair close to hers.
“And what has this to do with your confession?”
V
he flinched, as though he had made a motion to strike her.
“My confession! Ah, yes! I forgot.” She tried to smile.
Stretching out her hand, she touched him in a timid appeal for
understanding. Taking it between his own he held it fast.
“Like that,” he said, “as though it were a bird that's tired. It isn't
its own nest, but it's safe and warm; let it rest till it grows stronger.”
“You're good,” she faltered. “Most good men are hard.”
“Maybe,” he laughed. “But I'm not good. On the other hand, I
don't suppose I'm bad. I'm simply a man who's always had to fight,
so I know what it's like to be up against it. You're up against it at
present. You can see nothing before you but a high stone wall with
no way round it. I've been there, and I've found that when you can't
get round a wall, there's usually a door. What do you say? Shall we
look for a door together?”
“I have.” She sank her head. “Every day and night in three
interminable years I've looked for it. I'm like a person lost in a fog,

81. standing still, listening, running, falling.”
“Scared to death?”
She nodded.
“Then don't be scared; stop running. Wait for your fear to catch
up with you. If you face it, it'll shrink to nothing. The feet of a
pursuer are like an army. What's causing your panic? Varensky? The
thought that he may not return?”
“No.”
“That he may?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“That he may go on wasting me forever.”
She waited for him to say something. When he remained silent,
she bent forward staring vacantly into the hearth. “Perhaps I'm a
coward and unfaithful. Perhaps if he'd been successful—— I know
what he thinks of me: that I'm a fair-weather wife. But I'm not. If it
would help him, I'd give my life for him. He doesn't want my life. He
doesn't want my body. He wants the one thing that I can't give him
—that I should believe in him. There are people who still believe in
him—the Little Grandmother. There are others, like Prince Rogovich,
who pretended to believe in him that he might use him as a cat's-
paw. He says good-by to me for the last time and vanishes. I wait in
retirement for news of his execution. At the end of two months,
three months, half a year, he comes back. Then the rehearsing for
his martyrdom commences all afresh. If there were anything I could
do! But to be wasted for no purpose!”
She turned her head wearily, glancing at him sideways. “You called
me the Joan of Russia. I was almost. There was a time when not to
be loved and not to be a mother seemed a small price to pay for
sainthood. It was my happiness against the happiness of millions.
But now——” Her eyes filmed over.
“But now———?” he prompted.

82. S
She brushed her tears away with pitiful defiance. “I want to be a
woman—to be everything in some man's life.”
“Perhaps you are in his, but he doesn't show it.”
She seemed to listen for laughter. Then, “No,” she said. “When I
try to be a woman, I play Satan to him.”
“And that's the wall?”
“Not all of it. There's Santa.”
In the swift march of his emotions he had almost forgotten Santa.
As though she had been drowning and he had turned back from
rescuing her, the mention of her name stung him with reproach.
“What of Santa?” he asked in a low voice.
VI
he's in love with my husband.”
He let go her hand. “Do you mind if I smoke? Perhaps you'll
join me? No?”
He took his time while he lit his cigarette. Then, speaking slowly,
“I can't believe all the evil that I've heard about this woman. And yet
I ought. Every fresh person has told me something increasingly vile.
To make a case against her, I have only to take all the trouble she's
caused me. I meet her on a liner and part with her on landing; from
that moment I have no peace. I'm pestered by strangers accusing
and defending her. My room is entered by spies. I find an
anonymous note pinned to my pillow. I'm lured out of London into
the heart of the country on the pretext that she's in danger and I
can help her. You know the rest. Until the happenings of tonight, the
most probable explanation seemed to be that she had taken a secret
fancy to me and had turned to me in her distress, when she found
herself suspected of a crime. That theory won't hold water any
longer.”
“It might.”
“It couldn't. You tell me she's in love with your husband.”

83. “Santa can be in love with as many men as serve her purpose.
The only loyalty to which she's constant is the memory of her dead
child.”
He shook himself irritably. “Nothing that you' or any one has told
me explains her. She left on me an impression of nobility which
absolutely contradicts all this later information. Until I met you, it
almost seemed there was a conspiracy on foot to poison my mind.
What she is said to have done may all be true, but I can't help
searching behind her actions for a higher motive. You'd clear matters
up if you'd tell me frankly how it is that you come into the picture.”
“The picture!” She shrank back from him like a timid child.
Controlling himself, he spoke patiently. “Do I need to be explicit?
You ought to hate her. She's in love with your husband. When, a few
hours ago, it was a case of warning her of the trap she was walking
into, you were reluctant to give the signal. 'She wouldn't spare us,'
you said; 'so why should you and I——?' And yet you're her
accomplice. It was you whom I followed. It was you who, when
you'd got me into this room, tried to hold me at the revolver's point.”
She buried her face in the hollow of her arm. Her voice came
muffled. “It was I.”
He waited for her to say more. She made no sound—not even of
sobbing.
“It was a dangerous game to play,” he reminded her. “You didn't
know your man or how he would take it. You must have had some
strong motive. You might have killed me without even intending.
What a risk you ran, doing a thing like that singlehanded! For a
moment, when I first entered, everything was touch and go.”
And still she made no reply.
The fire had burned low. He emptied coals on it. To bridge the
embarrassment of her silence, he went over to the window, pulling
aside the curtains, and stood gazing out at the glory of the night.
The moon rode high. Trees were clumped and motionless. The
crooning of waves made a continual lullaby.

84. She was married, and she was wasted. She was not wanted, and
she was not released. She had a husband who refused to live and
could not contrive to die. As a substitute for passion she had tried
sainthood; it had not satisfied.
He let the curtains fall. Turning, he gazed back at the black-garbed
figure bowed in the half-circle of firelight. Her golden hair had
broken loose. It poured across her shoulders and gathered at her
feet in a pool. At the moment she looked more a Magdalene than a
saint. And this was the woman who had made men brave by her
purity—to whom a nation had turned in its agony!
A flood of pity swept over him. Poor, narrow shoulders to have
borne such a burden! Poor, virgin feet to have come so long a
journey! Poor, mortal hands to have given such a blessing! She had
been robbed and cast aside.
The cruelty of idealists! She was their victim. What did they
attain? Idealists slew happiness on the altar of dreams that a future
happiness might result from it. Though their dreams were mistaken,
they lost nothing; they snatched their sensation of godlike
righteousness. But who could restore the happiness of others which
their frenzy had destroyed?
If this time Varensky had had the decency to die, she was free. He
himself could take her. But would she want him? He had no
attractions. All that he could offer would be to serve her. He couldn't
place her back on her pinnacle of fame. Instead of crowds, he would
be her only worshiper. Would that satisfy a woman who had been a
saint for a day? He could promise her rest and protection. He could
take her feet in his hands and guide them over rough places. And if
she wanted to be a woman——
Crossing the room on tiptoe, he stood over her. Sinking to his
knee, he placed a hand on her shoulder.
“Won't you look up? I'm not here to hurt you. I wouldn't even
judge you. Life's been hard.”
When she gave no sign, he spoke again.

85. H
“I'm a man and a stranger. You're a wife. But you've told me so
much. You're wounded. You can't go on by yourself.”
She moved. He knew now that she was listening.
“There's that door in the wall we were going to find. Perhaps
we've found it. Let me be your friend. It would be foolish and wrong
for me to tell you that I——”
She raised her head. Her hair fell back, and her eyes gazed out at
him with hungry intensity. “Don't say it,” she implored. “Varensky
——”
“But if he's dead? If I can bring you sure proof?”
For answer she pressed his hand against her bosom.
VII
e seated himself at her feet, his arms clasped about his knees
as if crouched before a camp-fire. How much meaning had
she read into his implied confession? He felt happy; happier
than ever before in his life, and yet, if she were the cause of his
happiness, the odds were all against him. She had promised him
nothing. She could promise him nothing. All he knew of her was
what she had told him. His elation might prove to be no more than
an emotion that would fade in the chill light of morning.
“It would be foolish and wrong for me to tell you——” The words
had risen to his lips unpremeditated. He had not realized that he
cared for her until they were uttered. He had merely felt an
immense compassion, an overwhelming desire to comfort her. That
he should care for her at all was preposterous. It was paying her no
compliment. Love that was worth the having required a more
permanent incentive than physical beauty. Her mind and her
character were a riddle to him. If his passion was no passing mood
and she were indeed a widow, it would be her mind and her
character that he might one day marry. He ought to have foreseen
that something of this sort would be sure to happen between a man
and woman left alone after midnight.

86. But the triumphant self whom she had roused in him grinned
impudently at this cautious moralizing. He gloried in the magnificent
unwisdom of his indiscretion. He was surprised and delighted at this
newly-discovered capacity for recklessness. When experience was
growing stale, he had broken through limitations and found himself
gazing on an unguessed landscape where adventure commenced
afresh. He could still feel the softness of her flesh against his hand.
That sudden act of tenderness had altered all their relations.
He glanced up at her shyly. She, too, was dreaming. Her lips were
smiling uncertainly; there was a far-away, brooding expression in her
eyes. The blackness of her mourning merged with the shadows,
making her seem disembodied; all he could see distinctly was the
golden torrent of her hair framing the pallor of her face.
“They knelt to you in Petrograd. I don't wonder.”
“Poor people! It did them no good. I never want any one else to
do it.”
“But I kneel to you. I crouch at your feet.”
“I would rather be loved than worshiped.” She restrained him
gently. “Not yet.”
“Then, until I may love, I kneel to you.”
“You ought to find me repellent. No, let me speak. I own to you
that I'm married, and here I sit with you alone, not knowing whether
my husband lives or is buried. I must be wicked—more wicked than
I guessed. Ivan was right; he used to tell me I played Satan to him.
These hands, which look so soft and white, are cruel. This face,
which seems so gentle, is a lie. This hair, which makes a pillow for
your head, is a snare. One good man has already cast me aside.
Rather than love me, he preferred death. And you are good. How
near I came to killing you!” She bent over him, taking his face
between her hands. “You! Do you understand?” She had drawn his
head back against her knees. Her lips all but touched him. He could
feel the fanning of her breath. Her voice came pantingly, as though
she dreaded her own question: “What can you see in me?”
“Blue eyes, like a glimpse of heaven.”

87. “Tell me truly.”
“What can I see?” He stared up adoringly. “A woman who's still a
child. A woman who's been cheated. A woman whose arms are
empty. A woman who sits outside a tomb, dreaming of life.”
“Not of life,” she corrected softly; “of being allowed to live for a
man.”
“For me, perhaps?”
She smiled vaguely.
“Without knowing what kind of a man I am?”
“Do you know me?” She sat upright, gazing straight before her.
“You don't even know why I brought you.”
“Why?”
“It seems strange to tell you now. It seems like a forgotten
sadness, so forgotten that it might belong to some one else. And yet
once it hurt. I brought you that I might win back my husband. Don't
stiffen. Look up and see how I'm smiling. I was never his in your
sense. I was an image in a niche, whose hands he kissed. I was a
mascot, bringing him good luck. The woman part of me he
postponed superstitiously till his cause should be won. It will never
be won now.”
“But he warned you before he married you?”
She shook her head. “He made sure of me. At first I was proud to
be included in his sacrifice. Then failure made it all absurd. I was
sorry for him. I knew only one way to comfort him. But because he
had failed, he became the more determined to deny himself. Instead
of comforting him, I became his tempter. Then Santa——”
Hindwood pulled himself together and bent forward, glowering
into the fire. “I can't understand all this talk of sacrifice. It sounds so
confoundedly unpractical. As far as I can make out, your husband's
idea of virtue was to abstain from everything that makes life worth
living. He didn't profit any one by abstaining. All he did was to
narrow himself. If he'd wanted to be an ascetic, why couldn't he

88. have done the thing thoroughly and played the game? There was no
need to drag you into it.”
“There was no need,” she assented quietly, “but to have me and
to withstand me made him appear more dedicated. He tantalized
himself with the thought of me and used me as a knife with which to
gash himself. I was a part of the road to Calvary he was treading in
order that Russia might be saved. It gratified his pride to make the
road spectacular. Then, when we were in exile and he was no longer
a power, Santa came, the ruthless idealist—his very opposite.”
“Ruthless, perhaps! But I shouldn't call her an idealist.”
“She is—an idealist who, to gain her ends, stoops to any
baseness. She's an avenging angel, beautiful and sinister. She's one
of the few revolutionaries who knows what she wants; because she
knows, she gets it. Varensky never knew. His head was in the
clouds. He lost sight of his purpose in a mist of words.”
“What does she want?” As he asked the question, he glanced back
at her where she gleamed like a phantom.
“She wants——” There was a pause during which the only sound
was the struggle of the distant surf. “She wants to make men pay for
what they do to children. All her crimes—— She's a mother, robbed
of her young; in her own fierce way, she's taken all the children of
the world to her breast.”
“But men don't do anything.”
She caught his tone of puzzlement. “Oh yes. Each generation
commits ferocious sins against the coming generation that can't
protect itself. It's children who pay for wars and every social
injustice. Men live like a marauding army, pillaging the land between
birth and death. They pass on and leave to children the settlement
of their reckless debts. Take this latest war; five million children in
Europe alone are dying of starvation at this moment. Santa's marked
down the men who are responsible for their suffering; silently, one
by one, she drugs them with her beauty and exacts the penalty.”
“Prince Rogovich?”
“Probably. He was raising funds for a new carnage.”

89. “But where do I come in? You said that you'd brought me here to
help you win your husband.”
“She's in love with Ivan. To be loved by Santa is like witnessing
the signature to one's death warrant. Perhaps she's a Bolshevik
agent—the only people to whom the Bolsheviks are merciful are
children. Perhaps she's really in love with him. She plays with him
like a cat with a mouse.”
“And he?”
“He's indifferent, as he is to every woman. Yet because she's
treacherous and he wants to die, he takes her with him on many of
his journeys. I hoped that if I could give you to her, she might spare
him. That was before I knew you. I was beside myself with
suspense. Ivan has been gone so long; to do her bidding seemed
like giving him his last chance of life. She's in danger and in hiding.
You're the one person who can prove her guilt. I thought that if I
put you in her power, I'd place her under an obligation, so that——”
“And now?”
She covered her face with her hands. “God forgive me, it's your
safety that counts—not Ivan's.” He knelt against her, plucking her
hands aside. “Look at me,” he commanded. “So long as your
husband lives, his safety comes first. In saving me, you might betray
him. If, in snatching our happiness, we connived at his death, his
shadow would always stand between us. I'm still your prisoner; I've
not taken back my parole. Here's your revolver.” He drew it from his
pocket and laid it on her knees. “Fulfill your bargain.”
“How?”
“Take me to Santa.”
“But Ivan—already he may be——”
“Until we know, we'll play the game by him.” When she hesitated,
he added, “I wouldn't be friends with any woman who couldn't be
loyal.”
Her hands groped after the revolver and found it. Forcing back her
tears, she answered, “Nor would I with any man.”

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