The author appears to take especial delight in accounts of costumes, processions, sacrifices, &c.; the details given of which are often valuable in an antiquarian point of view; and his information upon these subjects, as well as of the manners of the country in which the scene is laid, as far as our knowledge of the present day will enable us to decide, is extremely correct.  One of the most curious morceaux of this sort, is a minute description of the complete armour for horse and man, worn by the elite of the cavalry in the army of Oroondates; and which, though probably taken from that used by the troops of the Sassanian monarchs cotemporary with Heliodorus, is equally applicable to the period at which the scene is laid; since numerous passages in ancient authors show, that from the earliest time up to the Mohammedan conquest, the Persian nobles and heavy cavalry used panoply as impenetrable as the European chivalry of the middle ages.  Among the other scattered traits of manners, it will be remarked as singular, according to the ideas of the present day, that open piracy and robbery are neither spoken of as disreputable, nor as attaching any slur to those who exercised them; insomuch, that the notoriety of Thyamis, having been a chief of freebooters, is not regarded as any obstacle to his assumption of the high-priesthood.  But this, it will be found, was strictly in accordance with the manners of the ancient Greeks, among whom piracy was so far from being looked upon in any other light than that of an honourable profession, that Nestor himself, in the third book of the Odyssey, asks his guests, Telemachus and Mentor, as an ordinary question, whether business or piracy was the object of their voyage.  But the Bucoli (herdsmen or buccaniers,) over whom Thyamis held command, should probably, notwithstanding their practice of rapine, be regarded not so much as robbers as in the light of outlaws, who had taken refuge in these impenetrable marshes from the yoke of the Persians; and their constant conflicts with the Persian troops, as well as the march of Thyamis upon Memphis, confirm the opinion that this was the intention of the author.  That these vast marshes of the Delta were in fact, throughout the period of Persian rule in Egypt, the strongholds of Egyptian independence, admits of abundant demonstration from the Greek historians:—­it was here, in the mysterious island of Elbo, that Amyrtaeus, (called by Thucydides “the king of the marshes,”) held out after the reconquest of Egypt by Megabysus, B.C. 454, “for they could not take him on account of the great extent of the marsh; besides which, the marshmen are the most warlike of all the Egyptians."[66] This view of the subject has, at least, the advantage of placing Thyamis in a more respectable light than that of a mere marauder; though his mode of life under either supposition, would be considered, according to modern notions, as a strange training for the sacerdotal office.