eral members of the Council and wealthy merchants surrounded him,
while the grammateus Proclus first talked animatedly with other
government officials and representatives of the priesthood, and then with
Archias. The head of the Museum, who bore the title of "high priest," had
also appeared there with several members of this famous centre of the
intellectual life of the capital. They shared the shade of this part of
the temple with distinguished masters of sculpture and painting,
architecture and poetry, and conversed together with the graceful
animation of Greeks endowed with great intellectual gifts.

Among them mingled, distinguishable neither by costume nor language, a
number of prominent patrons of art in the great Jewish community. Their
principal, the alabarch, was talking eagerly with the philosopher
Hegesias and the Rhodian leech Chrysippus; Queen Arsinoe's favourite,
whom at Althea's instigation she had sent with Proclus to receive the
returning traveller.

Sometimes all gazed toward the mouth of the harbour, where the expected
ship must soon pass the recently completed masterpiece of Sostratus, the
towering lighthouse, still shining in its marble purity.

Soon many Alexandrians also crowded the large platform in front of the
Temple of Poseidon, and the very wide marble staircase leading from it to
the landing place.

Beneath the bronze statues of the Dioscuri, at the right and left of the
topmost step, had also gathered the magnificent figures of the Phebi and
the younger men from the wrestling school of Timagetes, with garlands on
their curling locks, as well as many younger artists and pupils of the
older masters.

The statues of the gods and goddesses of the sea and their lofty
pedestals, standing at the sides of the staircase, cast upon the marble
steps, gleaming in the radiance of the morning sun, narrow shadows, which
attracted the male and female chorus singers, who, also wearing beautiful
garlands, had come to greet the expected arrival with solemn chants.

Several actors were just coming from rehearsal in the theatre of
Dionysus, east of the Temple of Poseidon, of which, like all the stages
in the city, Proclus was chief manager.

A pretty dancing girl, who hung on the arm of the youngest, extended her
hand with a graceful gesture toward the staircase, and asked:

"Whom can they be expecting there? Probably some huge new animal for the
Museum which has been caught somewhere for the King, for