In Rome Apollonius continued his work of reforming the temples, and this with the full sanction of the Pontifex Maximus Telesinus, one of the consuls for the year 66 A.D., who was also a philosopher and a deep student of religion (iv. 40). But his stay in the imperial city was speedily cut short, for in October Nero crowned his persecution of the philosophers by publishing a decree of banishment against them from Rome, and both Telesinus (vii. 11) and Apollonius had to leave Italy. We next find him in Spain, making his headquarters in the temple of Hercules at Cadiz. On his return to Greece by way of Africa and Sicily (where he spent some time and visited Ætna), he passed the winter (? of 67 A.D.) at Eleusis, living in the temple, and in the spring of the following year sailed for Alexandria, spending some time on the way at Rhodes. The city of philosophy and eclecticism _par excellence_ received him with open arms as an old friend. But to reform the public cults of Egypt was a far more difficult task than any he had previously attempted. His presence in the temple (? the temple of Serapis) commanded universal respect, everything about him and every word he uttered seemed to breathe an atmosphere of wisdom and of “something divine.” The high priest of the temple looked on in proud disdain. “Who is wise enough,” he mockingly asked, “to reform the religion of the Egyptians?”--only to be met with the confident retort of Apollonius: “Any sage who comes from the Indians.” Here as elsewhere Apollonius set his face against blood-sacrifice, and tried to substitute instead, as he had attempted elsewhere, the offering of frankincense modelled in the form of the victim (v. 25). Many abuses he tried to reform in the manners of the Alexandrians, but upon none was he more severe than on their wild excitement over horse-racing, which frequently led to bloodshed (v. 26). Apollonius seems to have spent most of the remaining twenty years of his life in Egypt, but of what he did in the secret shrines of that land of mystery we can learn nothing from Philostratus, except that on the protracted journey to Ethiopia up the Nile no city or temple or community was unvisited, and everywhere there was an interchange of advice and instruction in sacred things (v. 43). SECTION X. THE GYMNOSOPHISTS OF UPPER EGYPT. We now come to Apollonius’ visit to the “Gymnosophists” in “Ethiopia,” which, though the artistic and literary goal of Apollonius’ journey in Egypt as elaborated by Philostratus, is only a single incident in the real history of the unrecorded life of our mysterious philosopher in that ancient land.