Book 17
4.5
Again, long afterwards, when Octavian was ruling Rome, Cornelius Gallus, procuratorGallus was praefectus Aegypti (not procurator) from 30 to 26 B.C. of Egypt, drained the city by extensive embezzlements; and when on his return he was accused of peculation and the robbery of the province, in his fear of the bitterly exasperated nobility, to whom the emperor had committed the investigation of the case, he drew his sword and fell upon it. He was (if I am right in so thinking) the poet Gallus, whom Vergil laments in a way in the latter part of the BucolicsEclogue, x. and celebrates in gentle verse.
4.6
In this city, amid mighty shrines and colossal works of various kinds, which depict the likenesses of the Egyptian deities, we have seen many obelisks, and others prostrate and broken, which kings of long ago, when they had subdued foreign nations in war or were proud of the prosperous condition of their realms, hewed out of the veins of the mountains which they sought for even among the remotest dwellers on the globe, set up, and in their religious devotion dedicated to the gods of heaven.
4.7
Now an obelisk is a very hard stone, rising gradually somewhat in the form of a turning-postA meta was one of the three conical columns on the end of the spina of a circus. to a lofty height; little by little it grows slenderer, to imitate a sunbeam; it is four-sided, tapers to a narrow point, and is polished by the workman’s hand.
