Now, when we find that the purpura of Tyre produced the scarlet colour which naturally represented fire, and that puniceus, which is equivalent to purpureus, is evidently used for scarlet, there is nothing that forbids us to understand purpureus in the same sense here, but rather requires it. But even though it were admitted that the tinge was deeper, and purpureus meant the true purple, as red, of which it is a shade, is the established colour of fire, and as the serpent was the universally acknowledged symbol of fire-worship, the probability is strong that the use of a red dragon as the Imperial standard of Rome was designed as an emblem of that system of fire-worship on which the safety of the empire was believed so vitally to hinge. Chapter VII
Section II
The Beast from the Sea
The next great enemy introduced to our notice is the Beast from the Sea (Rev 13:1): "I stood," says John, "upon the sand of the sea-shore, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea." The seven heads and ten horns on this beast, as on the great dragon, show that this power is essentially the same beast, but that it has undergone a circumstantial change. In the old Babylonian system, after the worship of the god of fire, there speedily followed the worship of the god of water or the sea. As the world formerly was in danger of being burnt up, so now it was in equal danger of being drowned. In the Mexican story it is said to have actually been so. First, say they, it was destroyed by fire, and then it was destroyed by water. The Druidic mythology gives the same account; for the Bards affirm that the dreadful tempest of fire that split the earth asunder, was rapidly succeeded by the bursting of the Lake Llion, when the waters of the abyss poured forth and "overwhelmed the whole world." In Greece we meet with the very same story. Diodorus Siculus tells us that, in former times, "a monster called Aegides, who vomited flames, appeared in Phrygia; hence spreading along Mount Taurus, the conflagration burnt down all the woods as far as India; then, with a retrograde course, swept the forests of Mount Lebanon, and extended as far as Egypt and Africa; at last a stop was put to it by Minerva. The Phrygians remembered well this CONFLAGRATION and the FLOOD which FOLLOWED it." Ovid, too, has a clear allusion to the same fact of the fire-worship being speedily followed by the worship of water, in his fable of the transformation of Cycnus. He represents King Cycnus, an attached friend of Phaethon, and consequently of fire-worship, as, after his friend's death, hating the fire, and taking to the contrary element that of water, through fear, and so being transformed into a swan.