tolerated in the city and temple of Serapis; and this singular indulgence was imprudently ascribed to the superstitious terrors of the Christians themselves; as if they had feared to abolish those ancient rites, which could alone secure the inundations of the Nile, the harvests of Egypt, and the subsistence of Constantinople. 42 35 (return) [ Sophronius composed a recent and separate history, (Jerom, in Script. Eccles. tom. i. p. 303,) which has furnished materials to Socrates, (l. v. c. 16.) Theodoret, (l. v. c. 22,) and Rufinus, (l. ii. c. 22.) Yet the last, who had been at Alexandria before and after the event, may deserve the credit of an original witness.] 36 (return) [ Gerard Vossius (Opera, tom. v. p. 80, and de Idoloaltria, l. i. c. 29) strives to support the strange notion of the Fathers; that the patriarch Joseph was adored in Egypt, as the bull Apis, and the god Serapis. * Note: Consult du Dieu Serapis et son Origine, par J D. Guigniaut, (the translator of Creuzer’s Symbolique,) Paris, 1828; and in the fifth volume of Bournouf’s translation of Tacitus.—M.] 37 (return) [ Origo dei nondum nostris celebrata. Aegyptiorum antistites sic memorant, &c., Tacit. Hist. iv. 83. The Greeks, who had travelled into Egypt, were alike ignorant of this new deity.] 38 (return) [ Macrobius, Saturnal, l. i. c. 7. Such a living fact decisively proves his foreign extraction.] 39 (return) [ At Rome, Isis and Serapis were united in the same temple. The precedency which the queen assumed, may seem to betray her unequal alliance with the stranger of Pontus. But the superiority of the female sex was established in Egypt as a civil and religious institution, (Diodor. Sicul. tom. i. l. i. p. 31, edit. Wesseling,) and the same order is observed in Plutarch’s Treatise of Isis and Osiris; whom he identifies with Serapis.] 40 (return) [ Ammianus, (xxii. 16.) The Expositio totius Mundi, (p. 8, in Hudson’s Geograph. Minor. tom. iii.,) and Rufinus, (l. ii. c. 22,) celebrate the Serapeum, as one of the wonders of the world.] 41 (return) [ See Mémoires de l’Acad. des Inscriptions, tom. ix. p. 397-416. The old library of the Ptolemies was totally consumed in Caesar’s Alexandrian war. Marc Antony gave the whole collection of Pergamus (200,000 volumes) to Cleopatra, as the foundation of the new library of Alexandria.] 42 (return) [ Libanius (pro Templis, p. 21) indiscreetly provokes his Christian masters by this insulting remark.]