t more properly carry an Anubis staff in sacred processions, which
continued to be a feature of the religious activities of the age. Upper
Egypt had latterly been falling off in population. It had been drained
of all its hoarded wealth. Its carrying trade through Koptos to the Red
Sea was much lessened. Any tribute that its temples received from the
piety of the neighbourhood was small. Nubia was a desert; and a few
soldiers at Syene were enough to guard the poverty of the Thebaid
from the inroads of the Blemmyes. It was no longer necessary to
send criminals to the Oasis; it was enough to banish them to the
neighbourhood of Thebes. Hence we learn but little of the state of
the country. Now and then a traveller, after measuring the pyramids of
Memphis and the underground tombs of Thebes, might venture as far as the
cataracts, and watch the sun at noon on the longest day shining to the
bottom of the sacred well at Syene, like the orator Aristides and his
friend Dion. But such travellers were few; the majority of those who
made this journey have left the fact on record.

The celebrated museum, which had held the vast library of the Ptolemies,
had been burnt by the soldiers of Julius Caesar in one of their battles
with the Egyptian army in the streets of Alexandria; but the loss had
been in part repaired by Mark Antony's gift of the library from Pergamus
to the temple of Serapis. The new library, however, would seem to have
been placed in a building somewhat separated from the temple, as when
the temple of Serapis was burnt in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and
again when it was in part destroyed by fire in the second year of this
reign we hear of no loss of books; and two hundred years later the
library of the Serapium, it is said, had risen to the number of seven
hundred thousand volumes. The temple-keeper to the great god Serapis, or
one of the temple-keepers, at this time was Asclepiades, a noted boxer
and wrestler, who had been made chief of the wrestling-ground and had
received the high rank of the emperor's freedman. He set up a statue to
his father Demetrius, an equally noted boxer and wrestler, who had been
chief priest of the wrestling-ground and of the emperor's baths in the
last reign.

[Illustration: 126.jpg THE ANUBIS STAFF]

Another favourite in the theatre was Apolaustus of Memphis, who removed
to Rome, where he was crowned as conqueror in the games, and as a reward
made priest to Apollo and emperor's freed