Page:Apollonius of Tyana - the pagan Christ of the third century.pdf/74

69 justly entitled. It was necessary that Apollonius should be like Christ, but it was also necessary that he should be different from, and superior to, Him. This circumstance alone can explain the various curious phenomena which require explanation, and its reasonableness assumes the form of absolute certainty when we fancy ourselves living in the same political and religious atmosphere as Philostratus when he wrote his book.

Julia Domna was, as everybody knows, the Egeria of that Pagan reform which was more or less skilfully, but at any rate perseveringly, conducted (as such mattersare when undertaken by women) by the empresses who were related to her, and wo succeeded her in the supreme management of affairs. It would appear, then, that this priestly family, who had come from the Temple of El-Gebal (the god of the mountain or high place), animated by a spirit of religious domination hardly known to the Paganism of the West, hoped to reform Paganism and to establish the supremacy of the Eastern deity, who was none other than the sun, the coarse image