Thus far testifieth Herodotus, the father of history, who, if not always entirely trustworthy, is certainly no greater liar than the rest of the tribe.
Battus became king of all Cyrenaica, and his descendants, by the name of Battidæ, did rule that land, and maintain the prosperity of Cyrene through eight generations, until the Ptolemies of Egypt conquered the country, and under their patronage Apollonia, the seaport, became the chief city.
It would be a great error to suppose that because Cyrene was on the northern coast of Africa, and near the vast and arid Barcan Desert, it was therefore an unpleasant seat. On the contrary, it may well be doubted whether a more delightful locality can be found on earth. All Pentapolis is remarkably healthful and pleasant, especially Cyrene and its vicinity. The lofty mountain-range slopes gently away to the very sands of earth's middle sea, the waters of which temper the heat of the climate, while the high mountains lying farther inland ward off the hot blasts of the desert. In Cyrene, and between the city and the sea, a luxuriant soil produces almost every fruit, flower, and grain known to both tropical and temperate latitudes. The grand fountain of Apollo, which the Arabs of our age call 'Ain Sahât, gushed up in the very midst of it. The mean temperature is 85° Fahr., and the variations thereof are gradual and insignificant.
In the year 26 B.C., Apion, the last lineal descendant of the Egyptian Ptolemies, bequeathed the city to the Romans.
Cyrene, so happily situated, became noted, not only for its prosperity and salubriousness, but for the intellectual life and activity of its inhabitants. It long possessed a famous medical school; it gave to fame Callimachus, the poet; Carneades, the founder of the new academy at Athens; Aristippus, the disciple of Socrates; Eratosthenes, the Polyhistor; and Synesius, one of the most elegant of ancient Christian writers.
Not far from beautiful and prosperous Cyrene, on one of those gentle declivities which were washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, there was, in A.D. 265, a comfortable stone farm-house, pleasantly located in the midst of a considerable tract of cultivated lands. The farm faced a small bay and the limitless sea northwardly; southwardly the high range of the Barcan mountains rolled grandly away, their nearer slopes inclosing the farm between the highlands and the bay, and imparting to the beautiful place a most attractive sense of quiet and seclusion from the busy world. The house was one story high, containing seven rooms, and the ground plan of it was exactly the outline of a cross, there being four rooms and a portico in the length thereof, and three in its greatest width.
At this house, in the last-named year, was born a man-child, whose fate it was to become one of the grandest, purest, least understood, and most systematically misrepresented characters in human history--Arius the Libyan, the Heretic--whose fortunes, good and evil, whose experiences, heterodox or orthodox, shall be followed in these pages with genuine love and admiration, with profoundest pity also, and yet with a sincere desire to deal justly with his grand and beautiful memory, seeking to "nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice."
CHAPTER II.
TO US A CHILD IS BORN: TO US A SON IS GIVEN.
The family resident at the Libyan farm-house consisted of only the swarthy Egyptian Ammonius; his young wife Arete, who, although an Egyptian, had somehow acquired a purely Greek name, a fact which indicated vast influence that the great Grecian city of Alexandria had long exerted over Egypt; and an old female domestic that had belonged to Arete's mother during even her girlhood, and was called Thopt, the abbreviation of some ancient Coptic name, the letters of which still served to point out the fact that in her infancy she had been dedicated to the service of some one of the gods of the Nile.