The epistrategus proceeded with great caution, but his efforts also remained futile.  He ordered a report to be made of all the vessels which had entered the harbours and bays of the northeastern Delta, but those commanded by Satabus and his sons gave no cause for investigation; they had come into the Tanite arm of the Nile as lumber ships from Pontus, and had discharged beams and planks for the account of a well-known commercial house in Sinope.

Yet the official ordered the Owl’s Nest to be searched.  In doing this he made himself guilty of an act of violence, as the island’s right of asylum still existed, and this incensed the irritable and refractory Biamites the more violently, the deeper was the reverent awe with which the nation regarded Tabus, who, according to their belief, was over a hundred years old.  The Biamites honoured her not only as an enchantress and a leech, but as the ancestress of a race of mighty men.  By molesting this aged woman, and interfering with an ancient privilege, the epistrategus lost the aid of the hostile fishermen, sailors, and weavers.  Any information from their ranks to him was regarded as treachery; and, besides, his stay in Tennis could be but brief, as the King, on account of the impending war, had summoned him back to the capital.

On the third day after his arrival he left Tennis and sailed from Tanis for Alexandria.  He had had little time to attend to Thyone and her guests.

Proclus, too, could not devote himself to them until after the departure of the epistrategus, since he had gone immediately to Tanis, where, as head of the Dionysian artists of all Egypt, he had been occupied in attending to the affairs of the newly established theatre.

On his return to Tennis he had instantly requested to be conducted to the Temple of Demeter, to inspect the blinded Hermon’s rescued work.

He had entered the cella of the sanctuary with the expectation of finding a peculiar, probably a powerful work, but one repugnant to his taste, and left it fairly overpowered by the beauty of this noble work of art.

What he had formerly seen of Hermon’s productions had prejudiced him against the artist, whose talent was great, but who, instead of dedicating it to the service of the beautiful and the sublime, chose subjects which, to Proclus, did not seem worthy of artistic treatment, or, when they were, sedulously deprived them of that by which, in his eyes, they gained genuine value.  In Hermon’s Olympian Banquet he—­who also held the office of a high priest of Apollo in Alexandria—­had even seen an insult to the dignity of the deity.  In the Street Boy Eating Figs, the connoisseur’s eye had recognised a peculiar masterpiece, but he had been repelled by this also; for, instead of a handsome boy, it represented a starving, emaciated vagabond.

True to life as this figure might be, it seemed to him reprehensible, for it had already induced others to choose similar vulgar subjects.