n
had succeeded in beating the Blemmyes, in investing the island, and
in plundering and closing the temple. The priests of Isis escaped the
imperial raid and Horapollo had spent all his early years with his
father, his grandfather, and two younger sisters, in constant peril and
flight. His youthful spirit was unremittingly fed with hatred of the
persecutors, the cruel contemners and exterminators of the faith of his
forefathers; and this hatred rose to irreconcilable bitterness after
the massacre at Antioch where the imperial soldiery fell upon all his
family, and his grandfather and two innocent sisters were murdered.
These horrors were committed at the instigation of the Bishop, who
denounced the Egyptian strangers as idolaters, and to whom the Roman
prefect, a proud and haughty patrician, had readily lent the support of
an armed force. It was owing to the narrowest chance--or, as the old man
would have it, to the interposition of great Isis, that his father had
been so happy as to get away with him and the treasures he had brought
from the temple at Philae. Thus they had means to enable them to travel
farther under an assumed name, and they finally settled in Alexandria.
Here the persecuted youth changed his name, Horus, to its Greek
equivalent, and henceforth he was known at home and in the schools as
Apollo. He was highly gifted by nature, and availed himself with the
utmost zeal of the means of learning that abounded in Alexandria; he
labored indefatigably and dug deep into every field of Greek science,
gaining, under his father's guidance, all the knowledge of Egyptian
horoscopy, which was not wholly lost even at this late period.

In the midst of the contentious Christian sects of the capital, both
father and son remained heathen and worshippers of Isis; and when the
old priest died at an advanced age, Horapollo moved to Memphis where he
led the quiet and secluded life of a student, mingling only now and
then with the astronomers, astrologers, and calendar-makers at the
observatory, or visiting the alchemists' laboratories, where, even in
Christian Egypt, they still devoted themselves to attempts to transmute
the baser into the noble metals. Alchemists and star-readers alike soon
detected the old man's superior knowledge, and in spite of his acrid and
often offensively-repellent demeanor, took counsel of him on difficult
questions. His fame had even reached the Arabs, and, when it was
necessary to find the exact