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Yet each individual nature so repeats and is itself repeated in every other, that there is insured the possibility both of a world-revelation in the soul, and of a self-incarnation in the world; so that every man's life, like Agrippa's mirror, reflects the universe, and the universe is made the embodiment of his life, is made to beat with a human pulse.
The truth about the Pine-cone is perfectly well known; it was part of a fountain in Agrippa's artificial lake in the Campus Martius, of which Pigna was a part, and it was set up in the cloistered garden of Saint Peter's by Pope Symmachus about fourteen hundred years ago. The lake may have been near the Pantheon.
The world in those days was always willing enough to believe in tales of magic and sorcery; and when, as in Agrippa's case, the alleged magician gave himself out for such, and claimed credit for the wonders he worked, it is not surprising that the age should have allowed his pretensions.
One higher critic, indeed, has been found to suggest that the Biblical book really relates Agrippa's intercession at Rome disguised in the setting of a Persian story. Agrippa secured for a short time the rescission of the fateful decree, but the capricious madman soon returned to his old frame of mind, and ordered his image to be set up immediately.
"I know it!" she replied, adding: "It was because he coveted the crown of Caligula." While living upon the charity of Antipas and Herodias, Agrippa had intrigued to become king, a title for which the tetrarch was as eager as he. But if this news were true, no more was to be feared from Agrippa's scheming.
The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa's ingenious parable and the joyful humility of Dante's celestial friends, and renders both equally irrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies as she chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another's life. That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the whole.
"Look, look!" screamed a hundred voices, while dim arms pointed to some noiseless thing that floated high above them against the background of the sky, which grew grey with the coming dawn. It appeared and disappeared, appeared again, then seemed to pass downward in the direction of Agrippa's throne, and vanished. "It is that magician's angel," cried one, and the multitudes groaned.
Many of us do not like that. Translate Agrippa's scorn into words that fit ourselves: 'I am a well-to-do Manchester man. Am I to stand on the same level as my office-boy? Yes! the very same. 'I, a student, perhaps a teacher of science, or a cultivated man, a scholar, a lawyer, a professional man am I to stand on the same level as people that scarcely know how to read and write? Yes, exactly.
But now Antonia took Agrippa's misfortune to heart: however, to speak to Tiberius on his behalf, she took to be a very difficult thing, and indeed quite impracticable, as to any hope of success; yet did she procure of Macro, that the soldiers that kept him should be of a gentle nature, and that the centurion who was over them and was to diet with him, should be of the same disposition, and that he might have leave to bathe himself every day, and that his freed-men and friends might come to him, and that other things that tended to ease him might be indulged him.
In Imperial times, the street now called the Tritone, from the Triton on the fountain in Piazza Barberini, led up from the Portico of Vipsanius Agrippa's sister in the modern Corso to the temple of Flora at the beginning of the Quattro Fontane. It was met at right angles by a long street leading straight from the Forum of Trajan, and which struck it close to the Arch of Claudius.
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