PREFACE.

It is now fourteen years since I planned the story related in these volumes, the outcome of a series of lectures which I had occasion to deliver on the period of the Roman dominion in Egypt.  But the pleasures of inventive composition were forced to give way to scientific labors, and when I was once more at leisure to try my wings with increase of power I felt more strongly urged to other flights.  Thus it came to pass that I did I not take the time of Hadrian for the background of a tale till after I had dealt with the still later period of the early monastic move in “Homo Sum.”  Since finishing that romance my old wish to depict, in the form of a story, the most important epoch of the history of that venerable nation to which I have devoted nearly a quarter century of my life, has found its fulfilment.  I have endeavored to give a picture of the splendor of the Pharaonic times in “Uarda,” of the subjection of Egypt to the new Empire of the Persians in “An Egyptian Princess,” of the Hellenic period under the Lagides in “The Sisters,” of the Roman dominion and the early growth of Christianity in “The Emperor,” and of the anchorite spirit—­in the deserts and rocks of the Sinaitic Peninsula—­in “Homo Sum.”  Thus the present work is the last of which the scene will be laid in Egypt.  This series of romances will not only have introduced the reader to a knowledge of the history of manners and culture in Egypt, but will have facilitated his comprehension of certain dominant ideas which stirred the mind of the Ancients.  How far I may have succeeded in rendering the color of the times I have described and in producing pictures that realize the truth, I myself cannot venture to judge; for since even present facts are differently reflected in different minds, this must be still more emphatically the case with things long since past and half-forgotten.  Again and again, when historical investigation has refused to afford me the means of resuscitating some remotely ancient scene, I have been obliged to take counsel of imagination and remember the saying that ‘the Poet must be a retrospective Seer,’ and could allow my fancy to spread her wings, while I remained her lord and knew the limits up to which I might permit her to soar.  I considered it my lawful privilege to paint much that was pure invention, but nothing that was not possible at the period I was representing.  A due regard for such possibility has always set the bounds to fancy’s flight; wherever existing authorities have allowed me to be exact and faithful I have always been so, and the most distinguished of my fellow-professors in Germany, England, France and Holland, have more than once borne witness to this.  But, as I need hardly point out, poetical and historical truth are not the same thing; for historical truth must remain, as far as possible, unbiassed by the subjective feeling of the writer, while poetical truth can only find expression through the medium of the artist’s fancy.