REVIEWS THE TEMPLE OF SERAPIS. 337 



in Ms Serapeia at Memphis or Thebes, where his favoured "worship 

 was associated with the rising of the Nile, and the fertilising of its 

 submerged banks ; and at Eome or Pozzuoli, where the intruding 

 god had to contend for a time against the orthodoxy of old Pagan. 

 Italy. There, however, as elsewhere in all times, the persecuted 

 rites grew in popular estimation ; and in B. C. 43 the temple of 

 Serapis reared its marble columns, by decree of the Eoman Senate, 

 in the Circus Plaminius, and the worship of the strange Grod became 

 not only popular but fashionable ; if, indeed the ancient Egyptian, 

 and more modern Alexandrian, with the Grreek and Eoman Serapis, 

 were the same. 



But it is not this mythological question which now attracts atten- 

 tion, and beguiles a distinguished scholar to lay aside for a brief 

 period the cares of vice-regal responsibility, for pleasant dalliance 

 with the literary sphyax. It matters not, for his present purpose : 



" Whether Serapis was a deity originally Egyptian, or whether he was a strange 

 god from Sinope thrust into the place of Osiris by Ptolemy Soter. His worship 

 became the prevailing one at Alexandria, and spread from that commercial city 

 to all the countries with which it Avas connected. When Pausanias wrote, the 

 deity was established in almost every part of Greece. We find him at Rome in 

 the time of Catullus, and we should certainly look for a temple to him at Puteoli, 

 the regular port for which the fleets of Alexandria steered." 



At Pozzuoli, or Puteoli, accordingly, the ruins of a temple stUl 

 remain on the site, where, according to the celebrated inscription 

 now preserved in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, there existed a 

 temble of Serapis in the year of the city, 649, or sixty-two years 

 before the "canonization" of Serapis, and the building of the new 

 temple of Isis and Serapis in the Circus Plaminius at Eome : B. 0. 

 105. To the former temple a peculiar, popular, and scientific interest 

 now attaches. Its ruined columns are discovered to be the gnomon 

 of a scientific chronometer of singular value and utility, by means 

 of which the far-reaching chronometry of the geologist finds impor- 

 tant elucidation. The "Lex Parieti faciundo" of the Museo Bor- 

 bonico marble has been challenged by critical antiquaries ; aparently 

 without good reason. But no sceptical Maffei or Carelli assails the 

 genuineness of the lithodomous perforations by means of which the 

 columns of Pozzuoli are graven with an indisputable record of their 

 alternate submergence and upheaval, and with this, of the successive 

 changes in the relative level of land and sea, within an easily ascer- 

 tained period. 



