Addressed to all varieties of age
and character, these harangues woke an echo in every breast they
reached. To the young they were clothed in all the poetry of the
worship for which they pleaded. They dwelt on the altars of Venus that
the Christians would lay waste; on the woodlands that the Christians
would disenchant of their Dryads; on the hallowed Arts that the
Christians would arise and destroy. To the aged they called up
remembrances of the glories of the past achieved through the favour of
the gods; of ancestors who had died in their service; of old forgotten
loves, and joys, and successes that had grown and prospered under the
gentle guardianship of the deities of old--while the unvarying burden of
their conclusion to all was the reiterated assertion that the
illustrious Macrinus had died a victim to the toleration of the
Christian sect.
But the efforts of Ulpius were not confined to the delivery of orations.
Every moment of his leisure time was dedicated to secret pilgrimages
into Alexandria.
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