At home, the society of distinguished men afforded her the greatest pleasure.  Her husband allowed her complete freedom; although he, as the chief Greek priest of the city, would have preferred that she should not also have had among her most constant visitors so many learned Christians.  But the god whom he served united in his own person most of the others; and the mysteries which he superintended taught that even Serapis was only a symbolical embodiment of the universal soul, fulfilling its eternal existence by perpetually re-creating itself under constant and immutable laws.  A portion of that soul, which dwelt in all created things, had its abode in each human being, to return to the divine source after death.  Timotheus firmly clung to this pantheist creed; still, he held the honorable post of head of the Museum—­in the place of the Roman priest of Alexander, a man of less learning—­and was familiar not only with the tenets of his heathen predecessors, but with the sacred scriptures of the Jews and Christians; and in the ethics of these last he found much which met his views.

He, who, at the Museum, was counted among the skeptics, liked biblical sentences, such as “All is vanity,” and “We know but in part.”  The command to love your neighbor, to seek peace, to thirst after truth, the injunction to judge the tree by its fruit, and to fear more for the soul than the body, were quite to his mind.

He was so rich that the gifts of the visitors to the temple, which his predecessors had insisted on, were of no importance to him.  Thus he mingled a great deal that was Christian with the faith of which he was chief minister and guardian.  Only the conviction with which men like Clemens and Origen, who were friends of his wife, declared that the doctrine to which they adhered was the only right one—­was, in fact, the truth itself—­seemed to the skeptic “foolishness.”

His wife’s friends had converted his brother Zeno to Christianity; but he had no need to fear lest Euryale should follow them.  She loved him too much, and was too quiet and sensible, to be baptized, and thus expose him, the heathen high-priest, to the danger of being deprived of the power which she knew to be necessary to his happiness.

Every Alexandrian was free to belong to any other than the heathen creeds, and no one had taken offence at his skeptical writings.  When Euryale acted like the best of the Christian women, he could not take it amiss; and he would have scorned to blame her preference for the teaching of the crucified God.

As to Caesar’s character he had not yet made up his mind.