none but {79} stirring or attractive elements. It was the most
civilized of all barbarian religions; it retained enough of the exotic
element to arouse the curiosity of the Greeks, but not enough to offend
their delicate sense of proportion, and its success was remarkable.

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 h