With a retinue of litter bearers to beat their path, Suetonius's gentlemen-of-quality joined the throng of mourners in the dusty streets of Hermopolis. Crowds swirled all round. Chanters and musicians lamented loudly in the lanes and temple forecourts. The air was alive with wailing voices, the scintillance of cymbals, and the shimmering rattle of systra. Dancers garbed in mourner's white beat their breasts and cried in grief to Mother Isis as they mimed their ritual search for her husband Osiris's dismembered body. Their hair was strewn with ashes, fabrics were rent, ritual objects were waved.

This year was an Isia of particularly serious supplication to the goddess because of the dismal rise of the Nile's flooding. Since July the river's waters had not swollen to the necessary levels to fully deluge the surrounding flatlands. This was a second year it had risen poorly. A bad harvest was assured for those farmers on higher ground. All were dependent on the flood's black silts to nourish the soil and its crops.

Naturally, the Imperial plantations close to the river were well nurtured. Yet the native Egyptians at the outlying fields wondered what offence had been committed to deserve the punishment of famine by the gods.

Egypt depends on the Nile for its agricultural survival. The two annual harvests would be affected. Deficiency induces famine. Social disturbances may erupt.

Even the city of Rome, far across the Middle Sea, depends on the Nile to nurture the crops. These provide the grain to feed the city's unemployed, impoverished, trouble-making plebs. The governing classes may afford to eat well, but Africa's grain is the underlying buttress of Imperial influence in the decrepit alleys and smelly lanes of the Subura at Rome's center teeming with its denizens. And Hadrian, the Senate, the Legions, and Prefect Turbo too know this well.

The charmless, dun-colored cluster of flat-roofed hovels of Hermopolis clustered around the weathered temples at the western bank of the Nile lies two hundred leagues upstream of the Middle Egypt capital of Memphis. This ancient city is the locale of the stupendous Pyramids and its implacable Sphinx.