Olympiodorus was at the same time undertaking the task of forming a Peripatetic school in Alexandria, in opposition to the new Platonism, and he has left some of the fruits of his labour in his Commentaries on Aristotle.  But the Peripatetic philosophy was no longer attractive to the pagans, though after the fall of the catechetical school it had a strong following of Christian disciples.  Olympiodorus also wrote a history, but it has long since been lost, with other works of a second-rate merit.  He was a native of the Thebaid, and travelled over his country.  He described the Great Oasis as still a highly cultivated spot, where the husbandman watered his fields every third day in summer, and every fifth day in winter, from wells of two and three hundred feet in depth, and thereby raised two crops of barley, and often three of millet, in a year.  Olympiodorus also travelled beyond Syene into Nubia, with some danger from the Blemmyes, but he was not able to see the emerald mines, which were worked on Mount Smaragdus in the Arabian desert between Koptos and Berenice, and which seem to have been the chief object of his journey.

Proclus came to Alexandria about the end of this reign, and studied many years under Olympiodorus, but not to the neglect of the platonic philosophy, of which he afterwards became such a distinguished ornament and support.  The other Alexandrians under whom Proclus studied were Hero, the mathematician, a devout and religious pagan, Leonas, the rhetorician, who introduced him to all the chief men of learning, and Orion, the grammarian, who boasted of his descent from the race of Theban priests.  Thus the pagans still held up their heads in the schools.  Nor were the ceremonies of their religion, though unlawful, wholly stopped.  In the twenty-eighth year of this reign, when the people were assembled in a theatre at Alexandria to celebrate the midnight festival of the Nile, a sacrifice which had been forbidden by Constantine and the council of Nicsea, the building fell beneath the weight of the crowd, and upwards of five hundred persons were killed by the fall.

[Illustration:  271.jpg ARABS RESTING IN THE DESERT]

It will be of some interest to review here the machinery of officers and deputies, civil as well as military, by which Egypt was governed under the successors of Constantine.  The whole of the Eastern empire was placed under two prefects, the pretorian prefect of the East and the pretorian prefect of Illyricum, who, living at Constantinople, like modern secretaries of state, made edicts for the government of the provinces and heard the appeals.  Under the prefect of the East were fifteen consular provinces, together with Egypt, which was not any longer under one prefect.  There was no consular governor in Egypt between the prefect at Constantinople and the six prefects of the smaller provinces.  These provinces were Upper Libya or Cyrene, Lower Libya or the Oasis, the Thebaid, AEgyptiaca or the western part of the Delta, Augustanica or the eastern part of the Delta, and the Heptanomis, now named Arcadia, after the late emperor.  Each of these was under an Augustal prefect, attended by a Princeps, a Cornicula-rius, an Adjutor, and others, and was assisted in civil matters by a Commentariensis, a corresponding secretary, a secretary ab actis, with a crowd of numerarii or clerks.