him, they changed the name of the month December, calling it the month Hadrian; but as they were not followed by the rest of the empire the name soon went out of use.  The emperor’s patronage of philosophy was rather at the cost of the Alexandrian museum, for he enrolled among its paid professors men who were teaching from school to school in Italy and Asia Minor.  Thus Polemon of Laodicea, who taught oratory and philosophy at Rome, Laodicea, and Smyrna, and had the right of a free passage for himself and his servants in any of the public ships whenever he chose to move from city to city for the purposes of study or teaching, had at the same time a salary from the Alexandrian museum.  Dionysius of Miletus also received his salary as a professor in the museum while teaching philosophy and mnemonicsat Miletus and Ephesus.  Pancrates, the Alexandrian poet, gained his salary in the museum by the easy task of a little flattery.  On Hadrian’s return to Alexandria from the Thebaid, the poet presented to him a rose-coloured lotus, a flower well known in India, though less common in Egypt than either the blue or white lotus, and assured him that it had sprung out of the blood of the lion slain by his royal javelin at a lion-hunt in Libya.

[Illustration:  097.jpg ROSE-COLOURED LOTUS]

The emperor was pleased with the compliment, and gave him a place in the museum; and Pancrates in return named the plant the lotus of Antinous.  Pancrates was a warm admirer of the mystical opinions of the Egyptians which were then coming into note in Alexandria.  He was said to have lived underground in holy solitude or converse with the gods for twenty-three years, and during that time to have been taught magic by the goddess Isis, and thus to have gained the power of working miracles.  He learned to call upon the queen of darkness by her Egyptian name Hecate, and when driving out evil spirits to speak to them in the Egyptian language.  Whether these Greek students of the Eastern mysticism were deceivers or deceived, whether they were led by a love of notoriety or of knowledge, is in most cases doubtful, but they were surrounded by a crowd of credulous admirers, who formed a strange contrast with the sceptics and critics of the museum.

Among the Alexandrian grammarians of this reign was Apollonius Dyscolus, so called perhaps from a moroseness of manner, who wrote largely on rhetoric, on the Greek dialects, on accents, prosody, and on other branches of grammar.  In the few pages that remain of his numerous writings, we trace the love of the marvellous which was then growing among some of the philosophers.  He tells us many remarkable stories, which he collected rather as a judicious inquirer than as a credulous believer; such as of second sight; an account of a lad who fell asleep in the field while watching his sheep, and then slept for fifty-seven years, and awoke to wonder at the strangeness of the changes that had taken place in the meanwhile; and of a man who after