At that period of the Hellenic dominion which I have described, the kings of Egypt were free to command in all that concerned the internal affairs of their kingdom, but the rapidly-growing power of the Roman Empire enabled her to check the extension of their dominion, just as she chose.

Philometor himself had heartily promoted the immigration of Israelites from Palestine, and under him the important Jewish community in Alexandria acquired an influence almost greater than the Greek; and this not only in the city but in the kingdom and over their royal protector, who allowed them to build a temple to Jehovah on the shores of the Nile, and in his own person assisted at the dogmatic discussions of the Israelites educated in the Greek schools of the city.  Euergetes II., a highly gifted but vicious and violent man, was, on the contrary, just as inimical to them; he persecuted them cruelly as soon as his brother’s death left him sole ruler over Egypt.  His hand fell heavily even on the members of the Great Academy—­the Museum, as it was called—­of Alexandria, though he himself had been devoted to the grave labors of science, and he compelled them to seek a new home.  The exiled sons of learning settled in various cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, and thus contributed not a little to the diffusion of the intellectual results of the labors in the Museum.

Aristarchus, the greatest of Philometor’s learned contemporaries, has reported for us a conversation in the king’s palace at Memphis.  The verses about “the puny child of man,” recited by Cleopatra in chapter X., are not genuinely antique; but Friedrich Ritschl—­the Aristarchus of our own days, now dead—­thought very highly of them and gave them to me, some years ago, with several variations which had been added by an anonymous hand, then still in the land of the living.  I have added to the first verse two of these, which, as I learned at the eleventh hour, were composed by Herr H. L. von Held, who is now dead, and of whom further particulars may be learned from Varnhagen’s ‘Biographisclaen Denkmalen’.  Vol.  VII.  I think the reader will thank me for directing his attention to these charming lines and to the genius displayed in the moral application of the main idea.  Verses such as these might very well have been written by Callimachus or some other poet of the circle of the early members of the Museum of Alexandria.

I was also obliged in this narrative to concentrate, in one limited canvas as it were, all the features which were at once the conditions and the characteristics of a great epoch of civilization, and to give them form and movement by setting the history of some of the men then living before the reader, with its complications and its denouement.  All the personages of my story grew up in my imagination from a study of the times in which they lived, but when once I saw them clearly in outline they soon stood before my mind in a more distinct form, like people in a dream; I