, which induced him to conceal his
true name and rank. But neither by the name he had borrowed from the
Mede, nor by that which in the colleges of Egypt would have attested his
origin from kings, did the cultivators of magic acknowledge the potent
master. He received from their homage a more mystic appellation, and
was long remembered in Magna Graecia and the Eastern plain by the name
of 'Hermes, the Lord of the Flaming Belt'. His subtle speculations and
boasted attributes of wisdom, recorded in various volumes, were among
those tokens 'of the curious arts' which the Christian converts most
joyfully, yet most fearfully, burnt at Ephesus, depriving posterity of
the proofs of the cunning of the fiend.

The conscience of Arbaces was solely of the intellect--it was awed by no
moral laws. If man imposed these checks upon the herd, so he believed
that man, by superior wisdom, could raise himself above them. 'If (he
reasoned) I have the genius to impose laws, have I not the right to
command my own creations? Still more, have I not the right to
control--to evade--to scorn--the fabrications of yet meaner intellects
than my own?' Thus, if he were a villain, he justified his villainy by
what ought to have made him virtuous--namely, the elevation of his
capacities.

Most men have more or less the passion for power; in Arbaces that
passion corresponded exactly to his character. It was not the passion
for an external and brute authority. He desired not the purple and the
fasces, the insignia of vulgar command. His youthful ambition once
foiled and defeated, scorn had supplied its place--his pride, his
contempt for Rome--Rome, which had become the synonym of the world
(Rome, whose haughty name he regarded with the same disdain as that
which Rome herself lavished upon the barbarian), did not permit him to
aspire to sway over others, for that would render him at once the tool
or creature of the emperor. He, the Son of the Great Race of
Rameses--he execute the orders of, and receive his power from,
another!--the mere notion filled him with rage. But in rejecting an
ambition that coveted nominal distinctions, he but indulged the more in
the ambition to rule the heart. Honoring mental power as the greatest
of earthly gifts, he loved to feel that power palpably in himself, by
extending it over all whom he encountered. Thus had he ever sought the
young--thus had he ever fascinated and controlled them. He loved to
find subjects