ples. Olympiodorus also wrote
a history, but it has long since been lost, with other works of a
second-rate merit. He was a native of the Thebaid, and travelled over
his country. He described the Great Oasis as still a highly cultivated
spot, where the husbandman watered his fields every third day in summer,
and every fifth day in winter, from wells of two and three hundred feet
in depth, and thereby raised two crops of barley, and often three of
millet, in a year. Olympiodorus also travelled beyond Syene into Nubia,
with some danger from the Blemmyes, but he was not able to see the
emerald mines, which were worked on Mount Smaragdus in the Arabian
desert between Koptos and Berenice, and which seem to have been the
chief object of his journey.

Proclus came to Alexandria about the end of this reign, and studied
many years under Olympiodorus, but not to the neglect of the platonic
philosophy, of which he afterwards became such a distinguished ornament
and support. The other Alexandrians under whom Proclus studied were
Hero, the mathematician, a devout and religious pagan, Leonas, the
rhetorician, who introduced him to all the chief men of learning, and
Orion, the grammarian, who boasted of his descent from the race of
Theban priests. Thus the pagans still held up their heads in the
schools. Nor were the ceremonies of their religion, though unlawful,
wholly stopped. In the twenty-eighth year of this reign, when the people
were assembled in a theatre at Alexandria to celebrate the midnight
festival of the Nile, a sacrifice which had been forbidden by
Constantine and the council of Nicsea, the building fell beneath the
weight of the crowd, and upwards of five hundred persons were killed by
the fall.

[Illustration: 271.jpg ARABS RESTING IN THE DESERT]

It will be of some interest to review here the machinery of officers and
deputies, civil as well as military, by which Egypt was governed under
the successors of Constantine. The whole of the Eastern empire was
placed under two prefects, the pretorian prefect of the East and the
pretorian prefect of Illyricum, who, living at Constantinople, like
modern secretaries of state, made edicts for the government of the
provinces and heard the appeals. Under the prefect of the East were
fifteen consular provinces, together with Egypt, which was not any
longer under one prefect. There was no consular governor in Egypt
between the prefect at Constantinople and the six prefects of the