"There is an axe hidden among the faggots," added an Egyptian letter-
writer in a warning voice.

"Bring it here," cried a butcher. "I can use it to slaughter my beasts."
The Romans as they heard these bandied words felt the blood mounting to
their faces, but the prefect, who knew his Alexandrians well, had
counselled them to be deaf; to see everything but to hear nothing. Now
there appeared a cohort of the Twelfth Legion, who were quartered in
garrison in Egypt, in their richest arms and holiday uniforms. Behind
them came two files of particularly tall lictors wearing wreaths, and
they were followed by several hundred wild beasts, leopards and panthers,
giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, and deer, all led by dark-colored
Egyptians. Then came a richly-dressed and much be-wreathed Dionysian
chorus with the sound of tambourines and lyres, double flutes and
triangles, and finally, drawn by ten elephants and twenty white horses,
a large ship, resting on wheels and gilt from stem to stern, representing
the vessel in which the Tyrrhenian pirates were said to have carried off
the young Dionysus when they had seen the black-haired hero on the shore
in his purple garments. But the miscreants--so the myth went on to say--
were not allowed long to rejoice in their violence, for hardly had the
ship reached the open sea when the fetters dropped from the god, vines
entwined the sails in sudden luxuriance, tendrils encumbered the oars and
rudder, heavy grapes clustered round the ropes, and ivy clung to the mast
and shrouded the seats and sides of the vessel. Dionysus is equally
powerful on sea and on land; in the pirates' ship he assumed the form of
a lion, and the pirates, filled with terror, flung themselves into the
sea, and in the form of dolphins followed their lost bark.

All this Titianus had caused to be represented just as the Homeric hymns