THE DRAGON, THE APOSTATE, THE GREAT MIND


The time is the middle of the fourth century A.D. The top of the
Crest-Wave is in India, now the greatest country in the world.
The young Samudragupta, about thirty years old now, has been
filling the whole peninsula with his renown as warrior, poet,
conqueror, patron of arts and letters, musician. The Hindus are
a busy and efficient people, masterly in this material world.
Their colonies are spread over Java, Sumatra, and the other
islands; Formosa (think where it lies) has a Sanskrit, but not
yet (so far as we know) a Chinese, name; all those seas are
filled with Indian shipping.--And with Arab shipping, too, by the
way; or are coming to be so; and spray of the Wave (in the
shape of Indian and Arab ships) is falling in the port of Canton.
But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea: an intriguing,
ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have
lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in
the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a
little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent
contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans
who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the
Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same
precious House of Tsin into the south.--Persia is on the back of
the Wave, something lower than the Crest: Sapor II, a dozen or
so years older than Samudragupta, has been on the throne since
some months before his (Sapor's) birth; and has now grown up
into a particularly vigorous monarch; conquering here and there;
persecuting the Christians with renewed energy since Constantine
took them into favor;--and of late years unmercifully banging
about Constantius son of Constantine in the open field, and
besieging and sometimes taking his fortresses. This, you may
say, with one hand: with the other he has been very busy with
his neighbors in the north-east, the nomads; he has been
punishing them a little; and incidentally founding, as a
protection against their in roads, the city of New Sapor in
Khorassan,--famed later as Nai-shapur, and the birthplace of a
certain Tent-maker of song-rich memory. In Armenia an Arsacid--
that is, Parthian--house has survived and holds sovereignty: and
Armenia is a sort of weak Belgium between Persia and Rome;
inclining to the latter, of course, because ruled by Arsacids,
who are the natural dynastic enemies of the Sassanids of Persia.
Rome has turned Christian; so, to cement his alliance with Rome
and insure Roman aid against powerful Persia, the Armenian king
has had himself coverted likewise, and his people follow suit
with great piety;--which sends Shah Sapor, King of the kings of
Iran and Turan, Brother of the Sun and Moon, to it with a
missionary as well as a dynastic zeal; and a war that is to be
of nearly thirty years' duration has been in process along the
frontier since 336. Persia, better called a kingdom, perhaps,
than an empire, commands about forty millions of subjects; as
against imperial Rome's--who can say? The population there must
have gone down by many millions since the days of the Antonines,
with all the civil wars, plagues, pestilences, and famines that
have harrowed the years between.

The sons of Constantine have succeeded to the throne of their
father; and the portions of Constantine II, the eldest of the
three, and Constans, the youngest, have at last fallen into
the hands, or the web, of Constantius,--a sort of cross between
a spider, an octopus, and an elderly maiden aunt,--and in
general about as unpleasant a creature as ever sat on a throne.
Constantine the Great, indeed, had willed the succession into the
hands of a much larger number of his relatives; but this
Constantius, his father once decently buried, had taken time by
the forelock, and insured things to his two brothers and himself
by killing out two of his uncles and seven of their sons; so
that now, Constantine II and Constans being dead, no male scions
of the house of Constantius Chlorus remain as possible rivals to
him, except two boys who had been at the time of the massacre,
the one too young, and the other too sickly, to count. We shall
come to them by and by.
 

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