We find no hieroglyphical inscriptions during this short reign of a few weeks, but there are many Alexandrian coins to prove the truth of the historian; and some of them, like those of Galba, bear the unlooked-for word freedom.  In the few weeks which then passed between the news of Otho’s death and of Vespasian being raised to the purple in Syria, Vitellius was acknowledged in Egypt; and the Alexandrian mint struck a few coins in his name with the figure of Victory.  But as soon as the legions of Egypt heard that the Syrian army had made choice of another emperor, they withdrew their allegiance from Vitellius, and promised it to his Syrian rival.

Vespasian was at Caesarea, in command of the army employed in the Jewish war, when the news reached him that Otho was dead, and that Vitellius had been raised to the purple by the German legions, and acknowledged at Rome; and, without wasting more time in refusing the honour than was necessary to prove that his soldiers were in earnest in offering it, he allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor, as the successor of Otho.  He would not, however, then risk a march upon Rome, but he sent to Alexandria to tell Tiberius Alexander, the governor of Egypt, what he had done; he ordered him to claim in his name the allegiance of that great province, and added that he should soon be there himself.  The two Roman legions in Egypt much preferred the choice of the Eastern to that of the Western army, and the Alexandrians, who had only just acknowledged Vitellius, readily took the oath to be faithful to Vespasian.  This made it less necessary for him to hasten thither, and he only reached Alexandria in time to hear that Vitellius had been murdered after a reign of eight months, and that he himself had been acknowledged as emperor by Rome and the Western legions.  His Egyptian coins in the first year of his reign, by the word peace, point to the end of the civil war.

When Vespasian entered Alexandria, he was met by the philosophers and magistrates in great pomp.  The philosophers, indeed, in a city where, beside the officers of government, talent formed the only aristocracy, were a very important body; and Dion, Euphrates, and Apollonius had been useful in securing for Vespasian the allegiance of the Alexandrians.  Dion was an orator, who had been professor of rhetoric, but he had given up that study for philosophy.  His orations, or declamations, gained for him the name of Chrysostom, or golden-mouthed.  Euphrates, his friend, was a platonist, who afterwards married the daughter of the prefect of Syria, and removed to Rome.  Apollonius of Tyana, the most celebrated of these philosophers, was one of the first who gained his eminence from the study of Eastern philosophy, which was then rising in the opinions of the Greeks as highly worth their notice.  He had been travelling in the East; and, boasting that he was already master of all the fabled wisdom of the Magi of Babylon and