V., and Gallienus devolved the burden of his Eastern
provinces on a Syrian Emir. Their tastes and pursuits were as similar as
their histories. Charles excelled as a wit and a critic; Gallienus as a
poet and a gastronomer. Charles was curious about chemistry, and founded
the Royal Society. In the third century the conception of the systematic
investigation of nature did not exist. Gallienus, therefore, could not
patronise exact science; and the great literary light of the age, Longinus,
irradiated the court of Palmyra. But the Emperor bestowed his favour in
ample measure on the chief contemporary philosopher, Plotinus, who strove
to unite the characters of Plato and Pythagoras, of sage and seer. Like
Schelling in time to come, he maintained the necessity of a special organ
for the apprehension of philosophy, without perceiving that he thereby
proclaimed philosophy bankrupt, and placed himself on the level of the
Oriental hierophants, with whose sublime quackeries the modest sage could
not hope to contend. So extreme was his humility, that he would not claim
to have been consciously united to the Divinity more than four times in his
life; without condemning magic and thaumaturgy, he left their practice to
more adventurous spirits, and contented himself with the occasional visits
of a familiar demon in the shape of a serpent. He experienced, however,
frequent visitations of trance or ecstasy, sometimes lasting for a long
period; and it may have been in one of these that he was inspired by the
idea of asking the Emperor for a decayed city in Campania, there to
establish a philosophic commonwealth as nearly upon the model of Plato's
Republic as the degeneracy of the times would allow.

"I cannot," said Gallienus, when the project had been explained to him,
"object in principle to aught so festive and jocose. The age is turned
upside down; its comedians are lamentable, and its sages ludicrous. It must
moreover, I apprehend, be sated with the earthquakes, famines, pestilences,
and barbarian invasions with which it hath been exclusively regaled for so
long, and must crave something enlivening, of the nature of thy
proposition. But whether, when we arrive at the consideration of ways and
means, I shall find my interview with my treasurer enlivening, is gravely
to be questioned. I have heard homilies enough on my prodigality, which
merely means that I prefer spending my treasures on myself to saving them
for my successor, whose ti