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My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a sorenessjust like that which I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend. So you see, Polemo, I believe in what is more than a mere ‘something.’ I believe in what is more real to me than sun, moon, stars, and the fair earth, and the voice of friends. You will say, Who is He?

Each has its advantages,” said Polemo; “there is a pleasure in imparting knowledge, in lighting flame from flame. It would be selfish did we not leave Greece to communicate what they have not here. But you,” he added, “lady, neither can learn in Greece nor teach in Africa, while you are in this vestibule of Orcus. I understand, however, it is your own choice; can that be possible?”

Polemo recollected having heard of her at the Capitol, and in the triclinium of one of the Decurions, as a lady of singular genius and attainments; and he lately had made an attempt to form a female class of hearers, and it would be a feather in his cap to make a convert of her.

But you don’t mean I must believe all this man says, because the decurions have put him here?” cried Arnobius. “Here is this Polemo saying that Proteus is matter, and that minerals and vegetables are his flock; that Proserpine is the vital influence, and Ceres the efficacy of the heavenly bodies; that there are mundane spirits, and supramundane; and then his doctrine about triads, monads, and progressions of the celestial gods?”

Let any one, with Polemo, take the world; or with the Stoics, the aether, or the sun; or with Anaximenes, the air, to be God; and what a divinity, religion, and worship must we needs have! Nothing can be so dangerous as PRINCIPLES thus TAKEN UP WITHOUT QUESTIONING OR EXAMINATION; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men's lives, and give a bias to all their actions.

“I see my brother wants you to ask how far it depends on me that I am here,” said Callista, wishing to hasten his movements; “it is because I will not burn incense upon the altar of Jupiter.” “A most insufficient reason, lady,” said Polemo. Callista was silent. “What does that action mean?” said Polemo; “it proposes to mean nothing else than that you are loyal to the Roman power.

I sacrifice to Him alone.” The two men looked at each other in amazement: one of them in anger. “It’s like the demon of Socrates,” said Aristo, timidly. “I will acknowledge Cæsar in every fitting way,” she repeated; “but I will not make him my God.” Presently she added, “Polemo, will not that invisible Monitor have something to say to all of us,—to you,—at some future day?”

The family of a Greek rhetorician was permitted to reign in Colchos and the adjacent kingdoms from the time of Mark Antony to that of Nero; and after the race of Polemo was extinct, the eastern Pontus, which preserved his name, extended no farther than the neighborhood of Trebizond.

Polemo was no fool, though steeped in affectation and self-conceit, and Aristo fancied that his sister might be more moved by a philosophical compatriot than any one else. Polemo’s astonishment, however, when the matter was proposed to him surpassed words, and it showed how utterly Aristo was absorbed in his own misery, that the possibility of such a reception should not have occurred to him.

From him it passed in succession to Polemo, Crates, Crantor, and others. Plato was thus the founder of a school or sect of teachers who busied themselves with commenting, expanding, modifying here and there the doctrines of the master. Little of their works beyond the names has been preserved, and indeed we can hardly regret the loss.