the court. After the prizes for the athletes had been borne past,
Dionysus himself was charioted along, a gigantic figure clad in
purple, and pouring libations out of a golden goblet. Around him lay
huge drinking-cups, and smoking censers of gold, and a bower of vine
leaves grew up, and shaded the head of the god. Then hurried by a
crowd of priests and priestesses, Maenads, Bacchantes, Bassarids,
women crowned with the vine, or with garlands of snakes, and girls
bearing the mystic vannus Iacchi. And still the procession was not
ended. A mechanical figure of Nysa passed, in a chariot drawn by
eighty men, among clusters of grapes formed of precious stones, and
the figure arose, and poured milk out of a golden horn. The Satyrs
and Sileni followed close, and behind them six hundred men dragged on
a wain, a silver vessel that held six hundred measures of wine. This
was only the first of countless symbolic vessels that were carried
past, till last came a multitude of sixteen hundred boys clad in
white tunics, and garlanded with ivy, who bore and handed to the
guests golden and silver vessels full of sweet wine. All this was
only part of one procession, and the festival ended when Ptolemy and
Berenice and Ptolemy Philadelphus had been crowned with golden crowns
from many subject cities and lands.

This festival was obviously arranged to please the taste of a prince
with late Greek ideas of pictorial display, and with barbaric wealth
at his command. Theocritus himself enables us in the seventeenth
idyl to estimate the opulence and the dominion of Ptolemy. He was
not master of fertile Aegypt alone, where the Nile breaks the rich
dank soil, and where myriad cities pour their taxes into his
treasuries. Ptolemy held lands also in Phoenicia, and Arabia; he
claimed Syria and Libya and Aethiopia; he was lord of the distant
Pamphylians, of the Cilicians, the Lycians and the Carians, and the