Julia Domna, and that the book was completed a short time after her death.
The campaigns of Septimius Severus in the far East had extended the intellectual horizon. People began to see that the world was considerably larger than the Roman empire. The emperor had stayed some time in Tyana; he had been ill there, and his recovery may possibly have been attributed to the healing deity of the locality. His soldiers had brought home from their distant expeditions vague and wonderful accounts of the kingdoms of Persia and India, which their love of the marvellous had still further improved. In the Indian experiences of Philostratus there may be found an extraordinary mixture of reality and fanciful invention. Severus himself had begun to take a part in his wife's philosophic and literary amusements. It would seem that, having but little confidence in the future of all imperial institutions, and even in the combination of Greek and Roman civilisation, he looked with no unfavourable eye on the introduction of a foreign element into the moral life of his contemporaries. One circum-
