[Illustration:  125.jpg CARTOUCHE OF COMMODUS]

Commodus was very partial to the Egyptian superstitions, and he adopted the tonsure, and had his head shaven like a priest of Isis, that he might more properly carry an Anubis staff in sacred processions, which continued to be a feature of the religious activities of the age.  Upper Egypt had latterly been falling off in population.  It had been drained of all its hoarded wealth.  Its carrying trade through Koptos to the Red Sea was much lessened.  Any tribute that its temples received from the piety of the neighbourhood was small.  Nubia was a desert; and a few soldiers at Syene were enough to guard the poverty of the Thebaid from the inroads of the Blemmyes.  It was no longer necessary to send criminals to the Oasis; it was enough to banish them to the neighbourhood of Thebes.  Hence we learn but little of the state of the country.  Now and then a traveller, after measuring the pyramids of Memphis and the underground tombs of Thebes, might venture as far as the cataracts, and watch the sun at noon on the longest day shining to the bottom of the sacred well at Syene, like the orator Aristides and his friend Dion.  But such travellers were few; the majority of those who made this journey have left the fact on record.

The celebrated museum, which had held the vast library of the Ptolemies, had been burnt by the soldiers of Julius Caesar in one of their battles with the Egyptian army in the streets of Alexandria; but the loss had been in part repaired by Mark Antony’s gift of the library from Pergamus to the temple of Serapis.  The new library, however, would seem to have been placed in a building somewhat separated from the temple, as when the temple of Serapis was burnt in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and again when it was in part destroyed by fire in the second year of this reign we hear of no loss of books; and two hundred years later the library of the Serapium, it is said, had risen to the number of seven hundred thousand volumes.  The temple-keeper to the great god Serapis, or one of the temple-keepers, at this time was Asclepiades, a noted boxer and wrestler, who had been made chief of the wrestling-ground and had received the high rank of the emperor’s freedman.  He set up a statue to his father Demetrius, an equally noted boxer and wrestler, who had been chief priest of the wrestling-ground and of the emperor’s baths in the last reign.

[Illustration:  126.jpg THE ANUBIS STAFF]

Another favourite in the theatre was Apolaustus of Memphis, who removed to Rome, where he was crowned as conqueror in the games, and as a reward made priest to Apollo and emperor’s freedman.