From Judæa they moved to Arabia, and then to Egypt. Alexandria was then the second city of the world in importance, the first in interest. All the exhausted streams of the older civilizations had poured into it. Never before or since was there so cosmopolitan a population, such a gathering of old vices and new moralities, dead religions and fresh religions, cults six thousand years old and the latest gospels of Judæa and Persia. Its harbour still held the ships of every port in the Mediterranean, its Serapeum, Museum, and Cæsareum sheltered the art and culture of the world, and its deafening streets rang with the tongues of the world. But the soul of Egypt, too, was dead, and the Imperial party moved up the Nile to admire the surviving relics of its past. No doubt priests and learned men from Alexandria would attend as interpreters. They wandered in Memphis, which the sand of the desert was beginning to bury, passed through Heliopolis, and reached Besa, where they experienced the great sensation of the tour. The beautiful Bithynian youth was drowned in the Nile, and Sabina had to regard with disdain the womanly tears and the extravagant mourning of the Emperor. It is not clear to this day whether the death was accidental or voluntary. Hadrian, of course, said that it was accidental; but a rumour lingers in the chronicles that the Emperor, in his new zeal for Oriental superstition, had learned that his life was doomed unless some loved being was sacrificed for him, and Antinous offered himself. Hadrian has taken the secret with him, but the temples and statues he raised all over the Empire kept the memory of the pretty youth fresh for centuries.