"There will be three emperors at once," he announced. "But their
reign will be shorter than that of kings on the stage."

Within that year Galba, who was emperor for an instant, died at
the gates of Rome. Vitellius, after being emperor in little else
than dream, was butchered in the Forum; and Otho, in that fine
antique fashion, killed himself in Gaul. Apollonius meanwhile was
in Alexandria, predicting the purple to Vespasian, the rise of the
House of Flavia; invoking Jupiter in his protege's behalf; and
presently, the prediction accomplished, he was back in Rome,
threatening Domitian, warning him that the House of Flavia would
fall.

The atmosphere was then charged with the marvellous; the world was
filled with prodigies, with strange gods, beckoning chimeras and
credulous crowds. Belief in the supernatural was absolute; the
occult sciences, astrology, magic, divination, all had their
adepts. In Greece there were oracles at every turn, and with them
prophets who taught the art of adultery and how to construe the
past. On the banks of the Rhine there were girls who were regarded
as divinities, and in Gaul were men who were held wholly divine.

Jerusalem too had her follies. There was Simon the Magician,
founder of gnosticism, father of every heresy, Messiah to the
Jews, Jupiter to the Gentiles--an impudent self-made god, who
pretended to float in the air, and called his mistress Minerva--a
deification, parenthetically, which was accepted by Nicholas, his
successor, a deacon of the church, who raised her to the eighth
heaven as patron saint of lust. To him, as to Simon, she was
Ennoia, Prunikos, Helen of Troy. She had been Delilah, Lucretia.