Athenaeus, if we may judge from Iris writings, was then the brightest of the Alexandrian wits and men of learning.  We learn from his own pages that he was born at Naucratis, and was the friend of Pancrates, who lived under Hadrian, and also of Oppian, who died in the reign of Caracalla.  His Deipnosophist, or table-talk of the philosophers, is a large work full of pleasing anecdotes and curious information, gathered from comic writers and authors without number that have long since been lost.  But it is put together with very little skill.  His industry and memory are more remarkable than his judgment or good taste; and the table-talk is too often turned towards eating and drinking.  His amusing work is a picture of society in Alexandria, where everything frivolous was treated as grave, and everything serious was laughed at.  The wit sinks into scandal, the humour is at the cost of morality, and the numerous quotations are chosen for their point, not for any lofty thoughts or noble feeling.  Alexandria was then as much the seat of literary wit as it was of dry criticism; and Martial, the lively author of the Epigrams, had fifty years before remarked that there were few places in the world where he would more wish his verses to be repeated than on the banks of the Nile.

Nothing could be lower than the poetic taste in Alexandria at this time.  The museum was giving birth to a race of poets who, instead of bringing forth thoughts out of their own minds, found them in the storehouse of the memory only.  They wrote their patchwork poems by the help of Homer’s lines, which they picked from all parts of the Iliad and Odyssey and so put together as to make them tell a new tale.  They called themselves Homeric poets.

Lucian, the author of the Dialogues, was at that time secretary to the prefect of Egypt, and this philosopher found a broad mark for his humour in the religion of the Egyptians, their worship of animals and water-jars, their love of magic, the general mourning through the land on the death of the bull Apis, their funeral ceremonies, their placing of their mummies round the dinner-table as so many guests, and pawning a father or a brother when in want of money.

[Illustration:  122.jpg A SNAKE-CHARMER]

So little had the customs changed that the young Egyptians of high birth still wore their long hair tied in one lock, and hanging over the right ear, as we see on the Theban sculptures fifteen centuries earlier.  It was then a mark of royalty, but had since been adopted by many families of high rank, and continues to be used even in the twentieth century.

[Illustration:  123.jpg THE SIGN OF NOBILITY]