losophic
schools were popularly accused of encouraging it. Pythagoras (it
is the complaint of Plato) is said to have introduced to his
countrymen an art derived from his foreign travels; a charge
which recalls the names of Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Galileo,
and others, who had to pay the penalty of a premature knowledge
by the suspicion of their cotemporaries. Xenophanes is said
to be the only one of the philosophers who admitted the existence
or providence of the gods, and at the same time entirely
discredited divination. Of the Stoics, Panaetius was the only one
who ventured even to doubt. Some gave credit to one or two
particular modes only, as those of dreams and frenzy; but for the
most part every form of this sort of divine revelation was
implicitly received.[16]

[16] Cicero, in his second book _De Divinatione_, undertakes
to refute the arguments of the Stoics, 'the force of whose
mind, being all turned to the side of morals, unbent itself
in that of religion.' The divining faculty is divisible
generally into the artificial and the natural.

The science of magic proper is developed in the later schools of
philosophy, in which Oriental theology or demonology was largely
mixed. Apollonius of Tyana, a modern Pythagorean, is the most
famous magician of antiquity. This great miracle-worker of
paganism was born at the commencement of the Christian era; and
it has been observed that his miracles, though quite independent
of them, curiously coincide both in time and kind with the
Christian.[17] According to his biographer Philostratus, this
extraordinary man (whose travels and researches extended, we are
assured, over the whole East even into India, through Greece,
Italy, Spain, northern Africa, Ethiopia, &c.) must have been in
possession of a scientific knowledge which, compared with that of
his cotemporaries, might be deemed almost supernatural.
Extraordinary attainments suggested to him in later life to
excite the awe of the vulgar by investing himself with magical
powers. Apollonius is said to have assisted Vespasian in his
struggle for the throne of the Caesars; afterwards, when accused
of raising an insurrection against Domitian, and when he had
given himself up voluntarily to the imperial tribunal at Rome, he
escaped impending destruction by the exertion of his superhuman
art.

[17] The proclamation of the birth of Apollonius to his
mother by Proteus, and the incarnation of Proteus himself