The emperor moved through their ranks, and was loudly greeted with their cheers, while the army which encircled the whole plain was gradually closing round the crowd and lessening the circle.  When the ring was formed, Caracalla withdrew with his guards and gave the looked-for signal.  The soldiers then lowered their spears and charged on the unarmed crowd, of whom a part were butchered and part driven headlong into the ditches and canals; and such was the slaughter that the waters of the Nile, which at midsummer are always red with the mud from the upper country, were said to have flowed coloured to the sea with the blood of the sufferers.  Caracalla then returned to Antioch, congratulating himself on the revenge that he had taken on the Alexandrians for their jokes; not however till he had consecrated in the temple of Serapis the sword with which he boasted that he had slain his brother Geta.

Caracalla also punished the Alexandrians by stopping the public games and the allowance of grain to the citizens; and, to lessen the danger of their rebelling, he had the fortifications carried between the rest of the city and the great palace-quarter, the Bruchium, thus dividing Alexandria into two fortified cities, with towers on the walls between them.  Hitherto, under the Romans as under the Ptolemies, the Alexandrians had been the trusted favourites of their rulers, who made use of them to keep the Egyptians in bondage.  But under Caracalla that policy was changed; the Alexandrians were treated as enemies; and we see for the first time Egyptians taking their seat in the Roman senate, and the Egyptian religion openly cultivated by the emperor, who then built a temple in Rome to the goddess Isis.

On the murder of Caracalla in A.D. 217, Macrinus, who was thought to be the author of his death, was acknowledged as emperor; and though he only reigned for about two months, yet, as the Egyptian new year’s day fell within that time, we find Alexandrian coins for the first and second years of his reign.  The Egyptians pretended that the death of Caracalla had been foretold by signs from heaven; that a ball of fire had fallen on the temple of Serapis, which destroyed nothing but the sword with which Caracalla had slain his brother; and that an Egyptian named Serapion, who had been thrown into a lion’s den for naming Macrinus as the future emperor, had escaped unhurt by the wild beasts.

Macrinus recalled from Alexandria Julian, the prefect of Egypt, and appointed to that post his friend Basilianus, with Marius Secundus, a senator, as second in command, who was the first senator that had ever held command in Egypt.  He was himself at Antioch when Bassianus, a Syrian, pretending to be the son of Caracalla, offered himself to the legions as that emperor’s successor.  When the news reached Alexandria that the Syrian troops had joined the pretended Antoninus, the prefect Basilianus at once put to death the public couriers that brought