Page:Apollonius of Tyana - the pagan Christ of the third century.pdf/77

72 that if she had not been the first to inoculate her son with that fanatical infatuation for the god of his fathers, she at all events participated in it then. This opinion is strengthened when we find that she eventually became as unpopular as her son, and was put to death at the same time. We must not, however, dwell too much upon this caricature of a religious conception, which, after all, was not wholly without some redeeming features of greatness. By his fanaticism Elagabalus destroyed the idea which lies at the very foundation of the biography of Apollonius by Philostratus. That idea was, that Greco-Roman Paganism needed reform, and that, without throwing its principles entirely overboard, its legends might be modified, and its nature altered into a kind of monotheism in which the sun would occupy the first place and be worshipped as the source of physical as well as moral light, and so embrace in one and the same worship the most beautiful and the most popular divinities of ancient Paganism, such as Apollo, Æsculapius, Esmoun, Melkart, Mithras, and many other heroes