violent than the Antiochene, but just like these, not dangerous either for the stability of the empire or even for the individual government. Mischievous and ill-disposed lads are very inconvenient, but not more than inconvenient, in the household as in the commonwealth. [Sidenote: Alexandrian worship.] In religious matters also the two cities had an analogous position. To the worship of the land, as the native population retained it in Syria as in Egypt, the Alexandrians as well as the Antiochenes were disinclined in its original shape. But the Lagids, as well as the Seleucids, were careful of disturbing the foundations of the old religion of the country; and, merely amalgamating the older national views and sacred rites with the pliant forms of the Greek Olympus, they Hellenised these outwardly in some measure; they introduced, _e.g._ the Greek god of the lower world Pluto into the native worship, under the hitherto little mentioned name of the Egyptian god Sarapis, and then gradually transferred to this the old Osiris worship.[240] Thus the genuinely Egyptian Isis and the pseudo-Egyptian Sarapis played in Alexandria nearly the same part as Belus and Elagabalus in Syria, and made their way in a similar manner with these, although less strongly and with more vehement opposition, by degrees into the Occidental worship of the imperial period. As regards the immorality developed on occasion of these religious usages and festivals, and the unchastity approved and stimulated by priestly blessing, neither city was in a position to upbraid the other.