It was adopted wherever the authority or the prestige of the Lagides was felt, and wherever the relations of Alexandria, the great commercial metropolis, extended. The Lagides induced the rulers and the nations with whom they concluded alliances to accept it. King Nicocreon introduced it into Cyprus after having consulted the oracle of the Serapeum,[12] and Agathocles introduced it into Sicily, at the time of his marriage with the daughter-in-law of Ptolemy I (298).[13] At Antioch, Seleucus Callinicus built a sanctuary for the statue of Isis sent to him from Memphis by Ptolemy Euergetes.[14] In token of his friendship Ptolemy Soter introduced his god Serapis into Athens, where the latter had a temple at the foot of the Acropolis[15] ever after, and Arsinoe, his mother or wife, founded another at Halicarnassus, about the year 307.[16] In this manner the political activity of the Egyptian dynasty was directed toward having the divinities, whose glory was in a certain measure connected with that of their house, recognized everywhere. Through Apuleius we know that under the empire the priests of Isis mentioned the ruling sovereign first of all in their prayers.[17] And this was simply an imitation of the grateful devotion which their predecessors had felt toward the Ptolemies. Protected by the Egyptian squadrons, sailors and merchants propagated the worship of Isis, the goddess of navigators, simultaneously on the coasts of Syria, {80} Asia Minor and Greece, in the islands of the Archipelago,[18] and as far as the Hellespont and Thrace.[19] At Delos, where the inscriptions enable us to study this worship somewhat in detail, it was not merely practised by strangers, but the very sacerdotal functions were performed by members of the Athenian aristocracy. A number of funereal bas-reliefs, in which the deified dead wears the _calathos_ of Serapis on his head, prove the popularity of the belief in future life propagated by these mysteries. According to the Egyptian faith he was identified with the god of the dead.[20] Even after the splendor of the court of Alexandria had faded and vanished; even after the wars against Mithridates and the growth of piracy had ruined the traffic of the AEgean Sea, the Alexandrian worship was too deeply rooted in the soil of Greece to perish, although it became endangered in certain seaports like Delos. Of all the gods of the Orient, Isis and Serapis were the only ones that retained a place among the great divinities of the Hellenic world until the end of paganism.[21] * * * * *