t were butchered and part driven headlong
into the ditches and canals; and such was the slaughter that the waters
of the Nile, which at midsummer are always red with the mud from the
upper country, were said to have flowed coloured to the sea with
the blood of the sufferers. Caracalla then returned to Antioch,
congratulating himself on the revenge that he had taken on the
Alexandrians for their jokes; not however till he had consecrated in the
temple of Serapis the sword with which he boasted that he had slain his
brother Geta.

Caracalla also punished the Alexandrians by stopping the public games
and the allowance of grain to the citizens; and, to lessen the danger of
their rebelling, he had the fortifications carried between the rest
of the city and the great palace-quarter, the Bruchium, thus dividing
Alexandria into two fortified cities, with towers on the walls
between them. Hitherto, under the Romans as under the Ptolemies, the
Alexandrians had been the trusted favourites of their rulers, who made
use of them to keep the Egyptians in bondage. But under Caracalla that
policy was changed; the Alexandrians were treated as enemies; and we see
for the first time Egyptians taking their seat in the Roman senate, and
the Egyptian religion openly cultivated by the emperor, who then built a
temple in Rome to the goddess Isis.

On the murder of Caracalla in A.D. 217, Macrinus, who was thought to be
the author of his death, was acknowledged as emperor; and though he only
reigned for about two months, yet, as the Egyptian new year's day fell
within that time, we find Alexandrian coins for the first and second
years of his reign. The Egyptians pretended that the death of Caracalla
had been foretold by signs from heaven; that a ball of fire had fallen
on the temple of Serapis, which destroyed nothing but the sword with
which Caracalla had slain his brother; and that an Egyptian named
Serapion, who had been thrown into a lion's den for naming Macrinus as
the future emperor, had escaped unhurt by the wild beasts.

Macrinus recalled from Alexandria Julian, the prefect of Egypt, and
appointed to that post his friend Basilianus, with Marius Secundus, a
senator, as second in command, who was the first senator that had ever
held command in Egypt. He was himself at Antioch when Bassianus, a
Syrian, pretending to be the son of Caracalla, offered himself to the
legions as that emperor's successor. When the news reached Alexandria
that