contemporaneous Germany doubtless opens new suggestions for the genesis of Pharaoh." Influences In addition to the German elements, there were other influences on the composition of the short story. These included: the use of a device inspired by the ancient Greek chorus, in this case stating at the opening and at the end, and repeating once in the course of the text, a sentiment about the vanity of human hopes before the decrees of heaven; astrological echoes from Prus' own newspaper account of the solar eclipse that he had witnessed at Mława, north of Warsaw, four months earlier, on August 19, 1887; the history of Pharaoh Ramses II ("the Great"), who had lived nearly as long as the "Legend's" "hundred-year-old Ramses" (who is also referred to in Prus' story as "great Ramses") and had outlived dozens of his own potential successors; and the Roman poet Horace's sentiment, "Non omnis moriar" ("I shall not die altogether"), which Prus cites in Polish in the "Legend" and will cite in the original Latin at the end of The Doll, which he is also writing just then. Characters For Prus it was axiomatic that historical fiction must distort history. Characteristically, at times, in historical fiction, his choices of characters' names show considerable arbitrariness: nowhere more so than in "A Legend of Old Egypt." The protagonist is assigned the name of the hawk-headed Egyptian god Horus; Horus' mother, the Greek variant of the name of the Biblical Moses' wife, Sephora (Exodus 2:21); Horus' teacher, the name of Moses' father-in-law, Jethro (Exodus 3:1); and Horus' beloved, a Greek name that means "bearer of victory", Berenice (there were several Egyptian queens of that name in the Ptolemaic period). Pharaoh "A Legend of Old Egypt," published in 1888, shows unmistakable kinships in setting, theme and denouement with Prus' 1895 novel Pharaoh, for which the short story served as a preliminary sketch. Both works of fiction are set in ancient Egypt — the "Legend," at some indeterminate time, presumably during the 19th or 20th Dynasty, when all the Ramesside pharaohs reigned; Pharaoh, at the fall of the 20th Dynasty and New Kingdom in the 11th century BCE. In each, the protagonist (Horus, and Ramses XIII, respectively) aspires to introduce social reforms. (Ramses also plans preventive war against a rising Assyrian power.) In each, the protagonist perishes before he can implement his plans — though, in the novel, some of