So that though Apollonius supported Vespasian as long as he worthily tried to follow out this ideal, he immediately rebuked him to his face when he deprived the Greek cities of their privileges. “You have enslaved Greece,” he wrote. “You have reduced a free people to slavery” (v. 41). Nevertheless, in spite of this rebuke, Vespasian in his last letter to his son Titus, confesses that they are what they are solely owing to the good advice of Apollonius (v. 30). Equally so he journeyed to Rome to meet Domitian face to face, and though he was put on trial and every effort made to prove him guilty of treasonable plotting with Nerva, he could not be convicted of anything of a political nature. Nerva was a good man, he told the emperor, and no traitor. Not that Domitian had really any suspicion that Apollonius was personally plotting against him; he cast him into prison solely in the hope that he might induce the philosopher to disclose the confidences of Nerva and other prominent men who were objects of suspicion to him, and who he imagined had consulted Apollonius on their chances of success. Apollonius’ business was not with politics, but with the “princes who asked him for his advice on the subject of virtue” (vi. 43). SECTION XII. APOLLONIUS THE PROPHET AND WONDER-WORKER. We will now turn our attention for a brief space to that side of Apollonius’ life which has made him the subject of invincible prejudice. Apollonius was not only a philosopher, in the sense of being a theoretical speculator or of being the follower of an ordered mode of life schooled in the discipline of resignation; he was also a philosopher in the original Pythagorean meaning of the term--a knower of Nature’s secrets, who thus could speak as one having authority. He knew the hidden things of Nature by sight and not by hearing; for him the path of philosophy was a life whereby the man himself became an instrument of knowing. Religion, for Apollonius, was not a faith only, it was a science. For him the shows of things were but ever-changing appearances; cults and rites, religions and faiths, were all one to him, provided the right spirit were behind them. The Tyanean knew no differences of race or creed; such narrow limitations were not for the philosopher. Beyond all others would he have laughed to hear the word “miracle” applied to his doings. “Miracle,” in its Christian theological sense, was an unknown term in antiquity, and is a vestige of superstition to-day. For though many believe that it is possible by means of the soul to effect a multitude of things beyond the possibilities of a science which is confined entirely to the investigation of physical forces, none but the unthinking believe that there can be any interference in the working of the laws which Deity has impressed upon Nature--the credo of Miraculists.