to prove what they could do, or to put forth their highest powers.
Actors, again, from the neglected theatres, starving histrions, to whom
the stage was prohibited by the Emperor and Bishop, singers and flute-
players; hungry priests and temple-servitors expelled from the closed
sanctuaries; lawyers, scribes, ships' captains, artisans, though but very
few merchants, for Christianity had ceased to be the creed of the poor,
and the wealthy attached themselves to the faith professed by those in
authority.

One of the students had contrived to bring a girl with him, and several
others, seeing this, went back into the streets by the secret way and
brought in damsels of no very fair repute, till the crowd of men was
diversified by a considerable sprinkling of wreathed and painted girls,
some of them the outcast maids of various temples, and others priestesses
of higher character, who had remained faithful to the old gods or who
practised magic arts.

Among these women one, a tall and dignified matron in mourning robes, was
a conspicuous figure. This was Berenice, the mother of the young heathen
who had been ridden down and wounded in the skirmish near the Prefect's
house, and whose eyes Eusebius had afterwards closed. She had come to
the Serapeum expressly to avenge her son's death and then to perish with
the fall of the gods for whom he had sacrificed his young life. But the
mad turmoil that surrounded her was more than she could bear; she stood,
hour after hour, closely veiled and absorbed in her own thoughts, neither
raising her eyes nor uttering a word, at the foot of a bronze statue of
justice dispensing rewards and punishments.

Olympius had entrusted the command of the little garrison of armed men to
Memnon, a veteran legate of great experience, who had lost his left arm