← catalogue

History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

by A. S. Rappoport · English · Gutenberg #17331 · 563,954 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

Author: A. S. Rappoport


        
Release date: December 17, 2005 [eBook #17331]
                Most recently updated: December 13, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17331

Credits: Produced by David Widger
        
        
        
        
        Character set: ISO-8859-1


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EGYPT FROM 330 B.C. TO THE PRESENT TIME, VOLUME 11 (OF 12) ***




Produced by David Widger





HISTORY OF EGYPT

From 330 B.C. to the Present Time


By S. RAPPOPORT, Doctor of Philosophy, Basel; Member of the Ecole
Langues Orientales, Paris; Russian, German, French Orientalist and
Philologist

VOL. XI.

Containing over Twelve Hundred Colored Plates and Illustrations

THE GROLIER SOCIETY

PUBLISHERS, LONDON


[Illustration: Spines]

[Illustration: Cover]

[Illustration: Frontispiece]

Dam at Aswan


[Illustration: 001.jpg PAGE IMAGE]


[Illustration: 002.jpg PAGE IMAGE]


THE ROMAN, CHRISTIAN, AND ARABIC PERIODS


_THE ROMAN ADMINISTRATION IN EGYPT--THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY--THE ARIAN
CONTROVERSY--THE GROWTH OF MONASTICISM--THE DECLINE OF ALEXANDRIA--THE
ARAB INVASION AND THE SPREAD OF MUHAMMEDANISM--THE ARAB DYNASTIES._

_Augustus remodels the government of Egypt--A new calendar
introduced--Egypt surveyed--Dissension between Jews and Greeks at
Alexandria--Strabo’s visit--The Egyptian religion at Rome--Wise
administration of Tiberius--The rise of the Therapeutæ--Lake
Mæris destroyed--The origin of Chemistry--The fable of the
Phoenix--Christianity introduced--Fiscal reforms under Galba--Vespasian
in Egypt--Fall of Jerusalem--The Nile Canal restored--Hadrian’s voyage
up the Nile--Death of Antinous--Christians and Gnostics--Astrology and
Astronomy--Roman roads in Egypt--Commerce and Sports--The Growth
of Christianity--Severus visits Egypt--The massacre of the
Alexandrians--Ammonius Saccas and the Alexandrian Platonists--The
School of Origen--Rise of Controversy--Decline of Commerce--Zenobia
in Syria--Growing importance of the Arabs--Revolt and recapture of
Alexandria--Persecution of the Christians under Diocletian--Introduction
of the Manichean heresy._

_Constantine the Great converted--Privileges of the clergy--Dogmatic
disputes--Council of Nicæa and the first Nicene Creed--Athanasian
and Arian controversies--Founding of Constantinople--Decline
of Alexandria--Imperial appointments in the Church--Religious
riots--Triumphs of Athanasius--Persecution by Bishop George of
Cappadocia--Early mission work--Development of the monastic
system--Text of the Bible--The monks and military service--Saracenic
encroachments--Theodosius overthrows Paganism--Destruction of the Great
Library--Pagan and Christian literature--Story of Hypatia--The Arabs
defeat the Romans--The Koptic New Testament--Egypt separated from
Rome--The Council of Chalcedon--Paganism restored in Upper Egypt--The
Henoticon--The writings of Hierocles--Relations with Persia--Inroads of
the Arabs--Justinian’s fiscal reforms--Coinage restored--The Persians
enter Egypt. The Life of Muhammed--Amr conquers Egypt--The legend of
Omar and the Great Library--The founding of Fostât--The Christians
taxed--Muhammedan oppression in Egypt--The Ommayad and Abbasid
dynasties--Caliph Harun er-Rashid--Turkish bodyguards--Rise of the
Tulunite Dynasty--Office of Prince of Princes--Reign of Muhammed
el-Ikshid--War with Byzantium--Fatimite Caliphs--The Ismailians and
Mahdism--Reign of Mustanssir--Turkish Rapacity--End of the Fatimite
Rule._


[Illustration: 003.jpg PAGE IMAGE]




CHAPTER I--EGYPT UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE


_The Roman dominion on the Nile: Settlement of the Egyptian frontiers:
Religious developments: Rebellions._


Augustus began his reign in Egypt in B.C. 30 by ordering all the statues
of Antony, of which there were more than fifty ornamenting the various
public buildings of the city, to be broken to pieces; and it is said
he had the meanness to receive a bribe of one thousand talents from
Archibus, a friend of Cleopatra, that the queen’s statues might be
left standing. It seems to have been part of his kingcraft to give the
offices of greatest trust to men of low birth, who were at the same time
well aware that they owed their employments to their seeming want of
ambition. Thus the government of Egypt, the greatest and richest of the
provinces, was given to Cornelius Gallus.

Before the fall of the republic the senate had given the command of the
provinces to members of their own body only; and therefore Augustus, not
wishing to alter the law, obtained from the senate for himself all those
governments which he meant to give to men of lower rank. By this legal
fiction, these equestrian prefects were answerable for their conduct to
nobody but the emperor on a petition, and they could not be sued at law
before the senate for their misdeeds. But he made an exception in the
case of Egypt. While on the one hand in that province he gave to the
prefect’s edicts the force of law, on the other he allowed him to be
cited before the senate, though appointed by himself. The power thus
given to the senate they never ventured to use, and the prefect of Egypt
was never punished or removed but by the emperor. Under the prefect was
the chief justice of the province, who heard himself, or by deputy, all
causes except those which were reserved for the decision of the emperor
in person. These last were decided by a second judge, or in modern
language a chancellor, as they were too numerous and too trifling to be
taken to Rome. Under these judges were numerous freedmen of the emperor,
and clerks entrusted with affairs of greater and less weight. Of the
native magistrates the chief were the keeper of the records, the police
judge, the prefect of the night, and the _Exegetes_, or interpreter of
the Egyptian law, who was allowed to wear a purple robe like a Roman
magistrate. But these Egyptian magistrates were never treated as
citizens; they were barbarians, little better than slaves, and only
raised to the rank of the emperor’s freedmen.

Augustus showed not a little jealousy in the rest of the laws by which
his new province was to be governed. While other conquered cities
usually had a senate or municipal form of government granted to them,
no city in Egypt was allowed that privilege, which, by teaching the
citizens the art of governing themselves and the advantages of union,
might have made them less at the mercy of their masters. He not only
gave the command of the kingdom to a man below the rank of a senator,
but ordered that no senator should even be allowed to set foot in Egypt
without leave from himself; and centuries later, when the weakness of
the country had led the emperors to soften some of the other stern laws
of Augustus, this was still strictly enforced.

Among other changes then brought in by the Romans was the use of a fixed
year in all civil reckonings. The Egyptians, for all the common purposes
of life, called the day of the heliacal rising of the dogstar, about our
18th of July, their new year’s day, and the husbandman marked it with
religious ceremonies as the time when the Nile began to overflow; while
for all civil purposes, and dates of kings’ reigns, they used a year of
three hundred and sixty-five days, which, of course, had a movable
new year’s day. But by the orders of Augustus all public deeds were
henceforth dated by the new year of three hundred and sixty-five days
and a quarter, which was named, after Julius Cæsar, the Julian year. The
years from B.C. 24 were made to begin on the 29th of August, the day
on which the movable new year’s day then happened to fall, and were
numbered from the year following the last of Cleopatra, as from the
first year of the reign of Augustus. But notwithstanding the many
advantages of the Julian year, which was used throughout Europe for
sixteen centuries, till its faultiness was pointed out by Pope Gregory
XIII., the Egyptian astronomers and mathematicians distrusted it from
the first, and chose to stick to their old year, in which there could
be no mistake about its length. Thus there were at the same time three
years and three new year’s days in use in Egypt: one about the 18th
of July, used by the common people; one on the 29th of August, used by
order of the emperor; and one movable, used by the astronomers.

By the conquest of Egypt, Augustus was also able to extend another of
the plans of his late uncle. Julius Cæsar, whose powerful mind found all
sciences within its grasp, had ordered a survey to be taken of the whole
of the Roman provinces, and the length of all the roads to be measured
for the use of the tax-gatherers and of the army; and Augustus was
now able to add Egypt to the survey. Polyclitus was employed on this
southern portion of the empire; and, after thirty-two years from its
beginning by Julius, the measurement of nearly the whole known world was
finished and reported to the senate.

At Alexandria Augustus was visited by Herod, who hastened to beg of
him those portions of his kingdom which Antony had given to Cleopatra.
Augustus received him as a friend; gave him back the territory which
Antony had taken from him, and added the province of Samaria and the
free cities on the coast. He also gave to him the body of four hundred
Gauls, who formed part of the Egyptian army and had been Cleopatra’s
bodyguard. He thus removed from Alexandria the last remains of the
Gallic mercenaries, of whom the Ptolemies had usually had a troop in
their service.

[Illustration: 007.jpg PLAN OF ALEXANDRIA]

Augustus visited the royal burial-place to see the body of Alexander,
and devoutly added a golden crown and a garland of flowers to the other
ornaments on the sarcophagus of the Macedonian. But he would take no
pains to please either the Alexandrians or Egyptians; he despised them
both. When asked if he would not like to see the Alexandrian monarchs
lying in their mummy-cases in the same tomb, he answered: “No, I came to
see the king, not dead men,” His contempt for Cleopatra and her father
made him forget the great qualities of Ptolemy Soter. So when he was
at Memphis he refused to humour the national prejudice of two thousand
years’ standing by visiting the bull Apis. Of the former conquerors,
Cambyses had stabbed the sacred bull, Alexander had sacrificed to it;
had Augustus had the violent temper of either, he would have copied
Cambyses. The Egyptians always found the treatment of the sacred bull a
foretaste of what they were themselves to receive from their sovereigns.

The Greeks of Alexandria, who had for some time past very unwillingly
yielded to the Jews the right of citizenship, now urged upon Augustus
that it should no longer be granted. Augustus, however, had received
great services from the Jews, and at once refused the prayer; and he set
up in Alexandria an inscription granting to the Jews the full privileges
of Macedonians, which they claimed and had hitherto enjoyed under
the Ptolemies. They were allowed their own magistrates and courts
of justice, with the free exercise of their own religion; and soon
afterwards, when their high priest died, they were allowed as usual
to choose his successor. The Greek Jews of Alexandria were indeed very
important, both from their numbers and their learning; they spread over
Syria and Asia Minor: they had a synagogue in Jerusalem in common with
the Jews of Cyrene and Libya; and we find that one of the chief teachers
of Christianity after the apostles was Apollos, the Alexandrian, who
preached the new religion in Ephesus, in Corinth, and in Crete.

On his return to Rome, Augustus carried with him the whole of the royal
treasure; and though perhaps there might have been less gold and silver
than usual in the palace of the Ptolemies, still it was so large a sum
that when, upon the establishment of peace over all the world, the rate
of interest upon loans fell in Rome, and the price of land rose, the
change was thought to have been caused by the money from Alexandria.
At the same time were carried away the valuable jewels, furniture, and
ornaments, which had been handed down from father to son, with the
crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. These were drawn in waggons through the
streets of Rome in triumph; and with them were shown in chains to the
wondering crowd Alexander Helius and Cleopatra Selene, the children of
Cleopatra and Antony.

Augustus threatened a severe punishment to the Alexandrians in the
building of a new capital. Only four miles from the Canopic or eastern
gate of Alexandria he laid out the plan of his new city of Meopolis, on
the spot where he had routed Mark Antony’s forces. Here he began
several large temples, and removed to them the public sacrifices and the
priesthood from the temples of Alexandria. But the work was carried
no farther, and soon abandoned; and the only change made by it in
Alexandria was that the temple of Serapis and the other temples were for
a time deserted.

The rest of the world had long been used to see their finest works of
art carried away by their conquerors; and the Egyptians soon learned
that, if any of the monuments of which they were so justly proud were
to be left to them, it would only be because they were too heavy to be
moved by the Roman engineers. Beside many other smaller Egyptian works,
two of the large obelisks, which even now ornament Rome, were carried
away by Augustus, that of Thutmosis IV., which stands in the Piazza del
Popolo, and that of Psammetichus, on Monte Citorio.

Cornelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt, seems either to have
misunderstood, or soon forgotten, the terms of his appointment. He set
up statues of himself in the cities of Egypt, and, copying the kings
of the country, he carved his name and deeds upon the pyramids. On this
Augustus recalled him, and he killed himself to avoid punishment. The
emperor’s wish to check the tyranny of the prefects and tax-gatherers
was strongly marked in the case of the champion fighting-cock. The
Alexandrians bred these birds with great care, and eagerly watched their
battles in the theatre. A powerful cock, that had hitherto slain all
its rivals and always strutted over the table unconquered, had gained a
great name in the city; and this bird, Eros, a tax-gatherer, roasted
and ate. Augustus, on hearing of this insult to the people, sent for the
man, and, on his owning what he had done, ordered him to be crucified.
Three legions and nine cohorts were found force enough to keep this
great kingdom in quiet obedience to their new masters; and when
Heroopolis revolted, and afterwards when a rebellion broke out in the
Thebaid against the Roman tax-gatherers, these risings were easily
crushed. The spirit of the nation, both of the Greeks and Egyptians,
seems to have been wholly broken; and Petronius, who succeeded
Cornelius Gallus, found no difficulty in putting down a rising of the
Alexandrians.

The canals, through which the overflowing waters of the Nile were
carried to the more distant fields, were, of course, each year more or
less blocked up by the same mud which made the fields fruitful; and the
clearing of these canals was one of the greatest boons that the monarch
could bestow upon the tillers of the soil. This had often been neglected
by the less powerful and less prudent kings of Egypt, in whose reigns
the husbandman believed that Heaven in its displeasure withheld part
of the wished-for overflow; but Petronius employed the leisure of his
soldiers on this wise and benevolent work. In order better to understand
the rise of the Nile, to fix the amount of the land-tax, and more fairly
to regulate the overflow through the canals, the Nilometer on the Island
of Elephantine was at this time made.

[Illustration: 011.jpg THE NILOMETER AT ELEPHANTINE]

It was under Ælius Gallus, the third prefect, that Egypt was visited by
Strabo, the most careful and judicious of all the ancient travellers. He
had come to study mathematics, astronomy, and geography in the museum,
under the successors of Euclid, Eratosthenes, and Hipparchus. He
accompanied the prefect in a march to Syênê (Aswan), the border town,
and he has left us a valuable account of the state of the country at
that time. Alexandria was the chief object that engaged his attention.
Its two harbours held more ships than were to be seen in any other port
in the world, and its export trade was thought greater than that of all
Italy. The docks on each side of the causeway, and the ship canal, from
the harbour of Eunostus to the Mareotic Lake, were full of bustle and
activity. The palace or citadel on the promontory of Lochias on one side
of the great harbour was as striking an object as the lighthouse on the
other. The temples and palaces covered a space of ground equal to more
than one-fourth part of the city, and the suburbs reached even beyond
the Mareotic Lake. Among the chief buildings were the Soma, which held
the bodies of Alexander and of the Ptolemies; the court of justice;
the museum of philosophy, which had been rebuilt since the burning by
Cæsar’s soldiers; the exchange, crowded with merchants, the temple of
Neptune, and Mark Antony’s fortress, called the Timonium, on a point of
land which jutted into the harbour; the Cæsarium, or new palace; and the
great temple of Serapis, which was on the western side of the city, and
was the largest and most ornamented of all these buildings. Farther off
was the beautiful gymnasium for wrestlers and boxers, with its porticoes
of a stadium in length, where the citizens used to meet in public
assembly. From the top of the temple of Pan, which rose like a
sugar-loaf in the middle of the city, and was mounted by a winding
staircase, the whole of this remarkable capital might be seen spread
out before the eye. On the east of the city was the circus, for
chariot races, and on the west lay the public gardens and pale green
palm-groves, and the Necropolis ornamenting the roadside with tombs for
miles along the seashore. Other tombs were in the catacombs underground
on the same side of the city. The banks of the Mareotic Lake were
fringed with vineyards, which bore the famed wine of the same name,
and which formed a pleasant contrast with the burning whiteness of the
desert beyond. The canal from the lake to the Nile marked its course
through the plain by the greater freshness of the green along its banks.
In the distance were the new buildings of Augustus’ city of Nicopolis.
The arts of Greece and the wealth of Egypt had united to adorn the
capital of the Ptolemies. Heliopolis, the ancient seat of Egyptian
learning, had never been wholly repaired since its siege by Cambyses,
and was then almost a deserted city. Its schools were empty, its
teachers silent; but the houses in which Plato and his friend Eudoxus
were said to have dwelt and studied were pointed out to the traveller,
to warm his love of knowledge and encourage him in the pursuit of
virtue. Memphis was the second city in Egypt, while Thebes and Abydos,
the former capitals, had fallen to the size and rank of villages. At
Memphis Strabo saw the bull-fights in the circus, and was allowed to
look at the bull Apis through a window of his stable. At Crocodilopolis
he saw the sacred crocodile caught on the banks of the lake and fed
with cakes and wine. Ptolemais, which was at first only an encampment of
Greek soldiers, had risen under the sovereigns to whom it owed its name
to be the largest city in the Thebaid, and scarcely less than Memphis.
It was built wholly by the Greeks, and, like Alexandria, it was under
Greek laws, while the other cities in Egypt were under Egyptian laws and
magistrates. It was situated between Panopolis and Abydos; but, while
the temples of Thebes, which were built so many centuries earlier, are
still standing in awful grandeur, scarcely a trace of this Greek city
can be found in the villages of El Menshieh and Girgeh (Cerkasoros),
which now stand on the spot. Strabo and the Roman generals did not
forget to visit the broken colossal statue of Amenhôthes, near Thebes,
which sent forth its musical sounds every morning, as the sun, rising
over the Arabian hills, first shone upon its face; but this inquiring
traveller could not make up his mind whether the music came from the
statue, or the base, or the people around it. He ended his tour with
watching the sunshine at the bottom of the astronomical well at Syênê,
which, on the longest day, is exactly under the sun’s northern edge, and
with admiring the skill of the boatmen who shot down the cataracts in
their wicker boats, for the amusement of the Roman generals.

In the earlier periods of Egyptian history Ethiopia was peopled, or, at
least, governed, by a race of men, whom, as they spoke the same language
and worshipped the same gods as their neighbours of Upper Egypt, we must
call the Kopts. But the Arabs, under the name of Troglodyte, and other
tribes, had made an early settlement on the African side of the Red Sea.
So numerous were they in Upper Egypt that in the time of Strabo half the
population of the city of Koptos were Arabs; they were the camel-drivers
and carriers for the Theban merchants in the trade across the desert.
Some of the conquests of Ramses had been over that nation in southern
Ethiopia, and the Arab power must have further risen after the defeat of
the Ethiopians by Euergetes I. Ethiopia in the time of Augustus was held
by Arabs; a race who thought peace a state of disgraceful idleness,
and war the only employment worthy of men; and who made frequent hasty
inroads into Nubia, and sometimes into Egypt. They fought for plunder,
not for conquest, and usually retreated as quickly as they came,
with such booty as they laid their hands on. To use words which were
proverbial while the Nile swarmed with crocodiles, “They did as the dogs
do, they drank and ran away;” and the Romans found it necessary to place
a body of troops near the cataracts of Syênê to stop their marching
northward and laying waste the Thebaid. While the larger part of the
Roman legions was withdrawn into Arabia on an unsuccessful quest for
treasure, a body of thirty thousand of these men, whom we may call
either Arabs, from their blood and language, or Ethiopians, from their
country, marched northward into Egypt, and overpowered the three
Roman cohorts at Elephantine, Syênê, and Philas. Badly armed and badly
trained, they were led on by the generals of Candace, Queen of Napata,
to the fourth cataract. They were, however, easily driven back when
Gallus led against them an army of ten thousand men, and drove them to
Ethiopian Pselchis, now remaining as the modern village of Dakkeh. There
he defeated them again, and took the city by storm. From Pselchis he
marched across the Nubian desert two hundred and fifty miles to Premnis,
on the northerly bend of the river, and then made himself master of
Napata, the capital. A guard was at the moment left in the country to
check any future inroads; but the Romans made no attempts to hold it.

[Illustration: 016.jpg ON THE EDGE OF THE DESERT]

Of the state of the Ethiopie Arabs under Queen Candace we learn but
little from this hasty inroad; but some of the tribes must have been
very far from the barbarians that, from their ignorance of the arts
of war, the Romans judged them to be. Those nearest to the Egyptian
frontiers, the Troglodyte and Blemmyes, were unsettled, wandering, and
plundering; but the inhabitants of Meroë were of a more civilised race.
The Jews had settled in southern Ethiopia in large numbers, and for
a long time; Solomon’s trade had made them acquainted with Adule and
Auxum; some of them were employed in the highest offices, and must have
brought with them the arts of civilised life. A few years later (Acts
VIII. 27) we meet with a Jewish eunuch, the treasurer of Queen Candace,
travelling with some pomp from Ethiopia to the religious festivals at
Jerusalem. The Egyptian coins of Augustus and his successors are all
Greek; the conquest of the country by the Romans made no change in its
language. Though the chief part of the population spoke Koptic, it was
still a Greek province of the Roman empire; the decrees of the prefects
of Alexandria and of the upper provinces were written in Greek; and
every Roman traveller, who, like a schoolboy, has scratched his name
upon the foot of the musical statue of Amenhôthes, to let the world know
the extent of his travels, has helped to prove that the Roman government
of the country was carried on in the Greek language. The coins often
bear the eagle and thunderbolt on one side, while on the other is the
emperor’s head, with his name and titles; and, after a few years, they
are all dated with the year of the emperor’s reign. In the earliest he
is styled a Son of God, in imitation of the Egyptian title of Son of the
Sun. After Egypt lost its liberty, we no longer find any gold coinage in
the country; that metal, with everything else that was most costly, was
carried away to pay the Roman tribute. This was chiefly taken in money,
except, indeed, the tax on grain, which the Egyptian kings had always
received in kind, and which was still gathered in the same way, and
each year shipped to Rome, to be distributed among the idle poor of
that great city. At this time it amounted to twenty millions of bushels,
which was four times what was levied in the reign of Philadelphus.
The trade to the east was increasing, but as yet not large. About
one hundred and twenty small vessels sailed every year to India from
MyosHormos, which was now the chief port on the Red Sea.

No change was made in the Egyptian religion by this change of masters;
and, though the means of the priests were lessened, they still carried
forward the buildings which were in progress, and even began new ones.
The small temple of Isis, at Tentyra, behind the great temple of Hâthor,
was either built or finished in this reign, and it was dedicated to the
goddess, and to the honour of the emperor as Jupiter Liberator, in a
Greek inscription on the cornice, in the thirty-first year of the reign,
when Publius Octavius was prefect of the province.

[Illustration: 018.jpg A KOPTIC MAIDEN]

The large temple at Talmis, in Nubia, was also then built, though not
wholly finished; and we find the name of Augustus at Philæ, on some of
the additions to the temple of Isis, which had been built in the reign
of Philadelphus. In the hieroglyphical inscriptions on these temples,
Augustus is called Autocrator Cæsar, and is styled Son of the Sun, King
of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the other titles which had always been
given by the priests to the Ptolemies and their own native sovereigns
for so many centuries. These claims were evidently unknown in Rome,
where the modesty of Augustus was almost proverbial.

The Greeks had at all times been forward in owning the Egyptians as
their teachers in religion; and in the dog Cerberus, the judge Minos,
the boat of Charon, and the river Styx of their mythology, we see a
clear proof that it was in Egypt that the Greeks gained their faint
glimpse of the immortality of the soul, a day of judgment, and a future
state of rewards and punishments; and, now that Rome was in close
intercourse with Egypt, the Romans were equally ready to borrow thence
their religious ceremonies. They brought to Rome the Egyptian opinions
with the statues of the gods. They ran into the new superstition to
avoid the painful uneasiness of believing nothing, and, though the
Romans ridiculed their own gods, they believed in those of Egypt. So
fashionable was the worship of Isis and Serapis becoming in Italy, that
Augustus made a law that no Egyptian ceremonies should enter the city
or even the suburbs of Rome. His subjects might copy the luxuries, the
follies, and the vices of the Alexandrians, but not the gloomy devotion
of the Egyptians. But the spread of opinions was not so checked;
even Virgil taught the doctrine of the Egyptian millennium, or the
resurrection from the dead when the thousand years were ended; and the
cripple asking for alms in the streets of Rome would beg in the name of
the holy Osiris.

Egypt felt no change on the death of Augustus. The province was well
governed during the whole of the reign of Tiberius, and the Alexandrians
completed the beautiful temple to his honour, named the Sebaste, or
Cæsar’s Temple. It stood by the side of the harbour, and was surrounded
with a sacred grove. It was ornamented with porticoes, and fitted up
with libraries, paintings, and statues, and was the most lofty building
in the city. In front of this temple they set up two ancient obelisks,
which had been made by Thutmosis III. and carved by Ramses II., and
which, like the other monuments of the Theban kings, have outlived
all the temples and palaces of their Greek and Roman successors. These
obelisks are now generally known as “Cleopatra’s Needles.” One of them,
in 1878, was taken to London and set up on the Thames Embankment; the
other was soon afterward brought to New York, and is now in Central Park
in that city. It is sixty-seven feet high to its sharpened apex, and
seven feet, seven inches in diameter at its base. On its face are
deeply incised inscriptions in hieroglyphic character, giving the names
Thutmosis III., Ramses II., and Seti II.

[Illustration: 022b.jpg FRAGMENTS IN WOOD PAINTED]

The harsh justice with which Tiberius began his reign was at Rome soon
changed into a cruel tyranny; but in the provinces it was only felt as
a check to the injustice of the prefects. On one occasion, when Æmilius
Rectus sent home from Egypt a larger amount of taxes than was usual,
he hoped that his zeal would be praised by Tiberius. But the emperor’s
message to the prefect was as stern as it was humane: “I should wish my
sheep to be sheared, but not to be flayed.” On the death of one of
the prefects, there was found among his property at Rome a statue of
Menelaus, carved in Ethiopian obsidian, which had been used in the
religious ceremonies in the temple of Heliopolis, and Tiberius returned
it to the priests of that city as its rightful owners. Another proof of
the equal justice with which this province was governed was to be seen
in the buildings then carried on by the priests in Upper Egypt. We find
the name of Tiberius carved in hieroglyphics on additions or repairs
made to the temples at Thebes, at Aphroditopolis, at Berenicê, on the
Red Sea, at Philæ, and at the Greek city of Parembole, in Nubia. The
great portico was at this time added to the temple at Tentyra, with an
inscription dedicating it to the goddess in Greek and in hieroglyphics.
As a building is often the work of years, while sculpture is only the
work of weeks, so the fashion of the former is always far less changing
than that of the latter. The sculptures on the walls of this beautiful
portico are crowded and graceless; while, on the other hand, the
building itself has the same grand simplicity and massive strength that
we find in the older temples of Upper Egypt.

We cannot but admire the zeal of the Egyptians by whom this work
was then finished. They were treated as slaves by their Greek
fellow-countrymen; their houses were ransacked every third year by
military authority in search of arms; they could have had no help from
their Roman masters, who only drained the province of its wealth; and
the temple had perhaps never been heard of by the emperor, who could
have been little aware that the most lasting monument of his reign was
being raised in the distant province of Egypt.

[Illustration: 024.jpg TEMPLE AT TENTYRA, ENLARGED BY ROMAN ARCHITECTS]

The priests of the other parts of the country sent gifts out of their
poverty in aid of this pious work; and among the figures on the walls
we see those of forty cities, from Semneh, at the second cataract, to
Memphis and Saïs, in the Delta, each presenting an offering to the god
of the temple.

In the third year of this reign Germanicus Cæsar, who, much against his
will, had been sent into the East as governor, found time to leave his
own province, and to snatch a hasty view of the time-honoured buildings
of Egypt. Descending the river to Thebes, and, while gazing on the
huge remains of the temples, he asked the priests to read to him the
hieroglyphical writing on the walls. He was told that it recounted the
greatness of the country in the time of King Ramses, when there were
seven hundred thousand Egyptians of an age to bear arms; and that
with these troops Ramses had conquered the Libyans, Ethiopians, Medes,
Persians, Bactrians, Scythians, Syrians, Armenians, Cappadocians,
Bithynians, and Lycians. He was also told the tributes laid upon each
of those nations; the weight of gold and silver, the number of chariots
and horses, the gifts of ivory and scents for the temples, and the
quantity of grain which the conquered provinces sent to feed the
population of Thebes. After listening to the musical statue of
Amenhothes, Germanicus went on to Elephantine and Syênê; and, on his
return, he turned aside to the pyramids and the Lake of Mceris, which
regulated the overflow of the Nile on the neighbouring fields. At
Memphis, Germanicus consulted the sacred bull Apis as to his future
fortune, and met with an unfavourable answer. The manner of consulting
Apis was for the visitor to hold out some food in his hand, and the
answer was understood to be favourable if the bull turned his head
to eat, but unfavourable if he looked another way. When Germanicus
accordingly held out a handful of grain, the well-fed animal turned his
head sullenly towards the other side of his stall; and on the death of
this young prince, which shortly followed, the Egyptians did not
forget to praise the bull’s foresight. This blameless and seemingly
praiseworthy visit of Germanicus did not, however, escape the notice
of the jealous Tiberius. He had been guilty of gaining the love of the
people by walking about without guards, in a plain Greek dress, and of
lowering the price of grain in a famine by opening the public granaries;
and Tiberius sternly reproached him with breaking the known law of
Augustus, by which no Roman citizen of consular or even of equestrian
rank might enter Alexandria without leave from the emperor.

There were at this time about a million of Jews in Egypt. In Alexandria
they seem to have been about one-third of the population, as they
formed the majority in two wards out of the five into which the city was
divided. They lived under their own elders and Sanhedrim, going up at
their solemn feasts to worship in their own temple at Onion; but, from
their mixing with the Greeks, they had become less strict than their
Hebrew brethren in their observance of the traditions. Some few of them,
however, held themselves in obedience to the Sanhedrim in Jerusalem, and
looked upon the temple of Jerusalem as the only Jewish temple; and these
men were in the habit of sending an embassy on the stated solemn feasts
of the nation to offer the appointed sacrifices and prayers to Jahveh
in the holy city on their behalf. But though the decree by Cæsar, which
declared that the Jews were Alexandrian citizens, was engraved on a
pillar in the city, yet they were by no means treated as such, either by
the government, or by the Greeks, or by the Egyptians.

[Illustration: 027.jpg ON THE BANKS OF THE NILE.]

When, during the famine, the public granaries seemed unable to supply
the whole city with food, even the humane Germanicus ordered that the
Jews, like the Egyptians, should have no share of the gift. They were
despised even by the Egyptians themselves, who, to insult them, said
that the wicked god Typhon had two sons, Hierosolymus and Judæus, and
that from these the Jews were descended.

In the neighbourhood of Alexandria, on a hill near the shores of the
Lake Mareotis, was a little colony of Jews, who, joining their own
religion with the mystical opinions and gloomy habits of the Egyptians,
have left us one of the earliest known examples of the monastic life.
They bore the name of Therapeutæ. They had left, says Philo, their
worldly wealth to their families or friends; they had forsaken wives,
children, brethren, parents, and the society of men, to bury themselves
in solitude and pass their lives in the contemplation of the divine
essence. Seized by this heavenly love, they were eager to enter upon the
next world, as though they were already dead to this. Every one, whether
man or woman, lived alone in his cell or monastery, caring for neither
food nor raiment, but having his thoughts wholly turned to the Law and
the Prophets, or to sacred hymns of their own composing. They had their
God always in their thoughts, and even the broken sentences which they
uttered in their dreams were treasures of religious wisdom. They prayed
every morning at sunrise, and then spent the day in turning over the
sacred volumes, and the commentaries, which explained the allegories,
or pointed out a secondary meaning as hidden beneath the surface of even
the historical books of the Old Testament. At sunset they again prayed,
and then tasted their first and only meal. Selfdenial indeed was the
foundation of all their virtues. Some made only three meals in the week,
that their meditations might be more free; while others even attempted
to prolong their fast to the sixth day. During six days of the week they
saw nobody, not even one another. On the seventh day they met together
in the synagogue. Here they sat, each according to his age; the women
separated from the men. Each wore a plain, modest robe, which covered
the arms and hands, and they sat in silence while one of the elders
preached. As they studied the mystic powers of numbers, they thought the
number seven was a holy number, and that seven times seven made a great
week, and hence they kept the fiftieth day as a solemn festival. On that
day they dined together, the men on one side and the women on the other.
The rushy papyrus formed the couches; bread was their only meat, water
their drink, salt the seasoning, and cresses the delicacy. They would
keep no slaves, saying that all men were born equal. Nobody spoke,
unless it was to propose a question out of the Old Testament, or to
answer the question of another. The feast ended with a hymn of praise.

[Illustration: 029.jpg BEDOUIN TENT IN THE DESERT]

The ascetic Jews of Palestine, the Essenes on the banks of the Dead Sea,
by no means, according to Philo, thus quitted the active duties of life;
and it would seem that the Therapeutas rather borrowed their customs
from the country in which they had settled, than from any sects of the
Jewish nation. Some classes of the Egyptian priesthood had always held
the same views of their religious duties. These Egyptian monks slept on
a hard bed of palm branches, with a still harder wooden pillow for the
head; they were plain in their dress, slow in walking, spare in diet,
and scarcely allowed themselves to smile. They washed thrice a day, and
prayed as often; at sunrise, at noon, and at sunset. They often fasted
from animal food, and at all times refused many meats as unclean.
They passed their lives alone, either in study or wrapped in religious
thought. They never met one another but at set times, and were seldom
seen by strangers. Thus, leaving to others the pleasures, wealth, and
lesser prizes of this life, they received from them in return what most
men value higher, namely, honour, fame, and power.

The Romans, like the Greeks, feeling but little partiality in favour
of their own gods, were rarely guilty of intolerance against those of
others; and would hardly have checked the introduction of a new religion
unless it made its followers worse citizens. But in Rome, where
every act of its civil or military authorities was accompanied with a
religious rite, any slight towards the gods was a slight towards the
magistrate; many devout Romans had begun to keep holy the seventh day;
and Egypt was now so closely joined to Italy that the Roman senate made
a new law against the Egyptian and Jewish superstitions, and, in A.D.
19, banished to Sardinia four thousand men who were found guilty of
being Jews.

Egypt had lost with its liberties its gold coinage, and it was now
made to feel a further proof of being a conquered country in having its
silver much alloyed with copper. But Tiberius, in the tenth year of his
reign, altogether stopped the Alexandrian mint, as well as those of the
other cities which occasionally coined; and after this year we find no
more coins, but the few with the head and name of Augustus Cæsar, which
seem hardly to have been meant for money, but to commemorate on some
peculiar occasions the emperor’s adoption by his stepfather. The Nubian
gold mines were probably by this time wholly deserted; they had been so
far worked out as to be no longer profitable. For fifteen hundred years,
ever since Ethiopia was conquered by Thebes, wages and prices had been
higher in Egypt than in the neighbouring countries. But this was now no
longer the case. Egypt had been getting poorer during the reigns of the
latter Ptolemies; and by this time it is probable that both wages and
prices were higher in Rome.

It seems to have been usual to change the prefect of Egypt every few
years, and the prefect-elect was often sent to Alexandria to wait
till his predecessor’s term of years had ended. Thus in this reign of
twenty-three years Æmilius Rectus was succeeded by Vetrasius Pollio;
and on his death Tiberius gave the government to his freedman Iberus.
During the last five years Egypt was under the able but stern government
of Flaccus Avillius, whose name is carved on the temple of Tentyra with
that of the emperor. He was a man who united all those qualities of
prudent forethought, with prompt execution and attention to business,
which was so necessary in controlling the irritable Alexandrians, who
were liable to be fired into rebellion by the smallest spark. Justice
was administered fairly; the great were not allowed to tyrannise over
the poor, nor the people to meet in tumultuous mobs; and the legions
were regularly paid, so that they had no excuse for plundering the
Egyptians.

On the death of Tiberius, in A.D. 37, the old quarrel again broke out
between Jews and Greeks. The Alexandrians were not slow in learning the
feelings of his successor, Caius, or Caligula, towards the Jews, nor
in turning against them the new law that the emperor’s statue should
be honoured in every temple of the empire. They had very unwillingly
yielded a half-obedience to the law of Augustus that the Jews should
still be allowed the privileges of citizenship; and, as soon as they
heard that Caligula was to be worshipped in every temple of the empire,
they denounced the Jews as traitors and rebels, who refused so to honour
the emperor in their synagogues. It happened, unfortunately, that their
countryman, King Agrippa, at this time came to Alexandria. He had full
leave from the emperor to touch there, as being the quickest and most
certain way of making the voyage from Rome to the seat of his own
government. Indeed, the Alexandrian voyage had another merit in the eyes
of a Jew; for, whereas wooden water-vessels were declared by the Law to
be unclean, an exception was made by their tradition in favour of the
larger size of the water-wells in the Alexandrian ships. Agrippa had
seen Egypt before, on his way to Rome, and he meant to make no stay
there; but, though he landed purposely after dark, and with no pomp or
show, he seems to have raised the anger of the prefect Flaccus, who felt
jealous at any man of higher rank than himself coming into his province.
The Greeks fell into the prefect’s humour, and during the stay of
Agrippa in Alexandria they lampooned him in songs and ballads, of which
the raillery was not of the most delicate kind. They mocked him by
leading about the streets a poor idiot dressed up with a paper crown and
a reed for a sceptre, in ridicule of his rather doubtful right to the
style of royalty.

As these insults towards the emperor’s friend passed wholly unchecked
by the prefect, the Greeks next assaulted the Jews in the streets and
market-place, attacked their houses, rooted up the groves of trees
around their synagogues, and tore down the decree by which the
privileges of citizenship had been confirmed to them. The Greeks then
proceeded to set up by force a statue of the emperor in each Jewish
synagogue, as if the new decree had included those places of worship
among the temples, and, not finding statues enough, they made use of the
statues of the Ptolemies, which they carried away from the gymnasium
for that purpose. During the last reign, under the stern government
of Tiberius, Flaccus had governed with justice and prudence, but under
Caligula he seemed to have lost all judgment in his zeal against the
Jews. When the riots in the streets could no longer be overlooked,
instead of defending the injured party, he issued a decree in which
he styled the Jews foreigners; thus at one word robbing them of their
privileges and condemning them unheard. By this the Greeks were hurried
forward into further acts of injustice, and the Jews of resistance. But
the Jews were the weaker party: they were overpowered, and all driven
into one ward, and four hundred of their houses in the other wards were
plundered, and the spoil divided as if taken in war. They were stoned,
and even burnt in the streets, if they ventured forth to buy food for
their families. Flaccus seized and scourged in the theatre thirty-eight
of their venerable councillors, and, to show them that they were no
longer citizens, the punishment was inflicted by the hands of Egyptian
executioners. While the city was in this state of riot, the Greeks gave
out that the Jews were concealing arms; and Flaccus, to give them a
fresh proof that they had lost the rights of citizenship, ordered that
their houses should be forcibly entered and searched by a centurion and
a band of soldiers.

During their troubles the Jews had not been allowed to complain to the
emperor, or to send an embassy to Rome to make known their grievances.
But the Jewish King Agrippa, who was on his way from Rome to his
kingdom, forwarded to Caligula the complaints of his countrymen, the
Jews, with an account of the rebellious state of Alexandria. The riots,
it is true, had been wholly raised by the prefect’s zeal in setting up
the emperor’s statue in the synagogues to be worshipped by the Jews, and
in carrying into effect the emperor’s decree; but, as he had not been
able to keep his province quiet, it was necessary that he should
be recalled, and punished for his want of success. To have found it
necessary to call out the troops was of course a fault in a governor;
but doubly so at a time and in a province where a successful general
might so easily become a formidable rebel. Accordingly, a centurion,
with a trusty cohort of soldiers, was sent from Rome for the recall
of the prefect. On approaching the flat coast of Egypt, they kept
the vessel in deep water till sunset, and then entered the harbour of
Alexandria in the dark. The centurion, on landing, met with a freedman
of the emperor, from whom he learned that the prefect was then at
supper, entertaining a large company of friends. The freedman led the
cohort quietly into the palace, into the very room where Flaccus was
sitting at table; and the first tidings that he heard of his government
being disapproved of in Rome was his finding himself a prisoner in his
own palace. The friends stood motionless with surprise, the centurion
produced the emperor’s order for what he was doing, and as no resistance
was attempted all passed off quietly; Flaccus was hurried on board the
vessel then at anchor in the harbour on the same evening and immediately
taken to Rome.

It so happened that on the night that Flaccus was seized, the Jews
had met together to celebrate their autumnal feast, the feast of the
Tabernacles: not as in former years with joy and pomp, but in fear,
in grief, and in prayer. Their chief men were in prison, their nation
smarting under its wrongs and in daily fear of fresh cruelties; and it
was not without alarm that they heard the noise of soldiers moving to
and fro through the city, and the heavy tread of the guards marching by
torchlight from the camp to the palace. But their fear was soon turned
into joy when they heard that Flaccus, the author of all their wrongs,
was already a prisoner on board the vessel in the harbour; and they
gave glory to God, not, says Philo, that their enemy was going to be
punished, but because their own sufferings were at an end.

The Jews then, having had leave given them by the prefect, sent
an embassy to Rome, at the head of which was Philo, the platonic
philosopher, who was to lay their grievances before the emperor, and to
beg for redress. The Greeks also at the same time sent their embassy,
at the head of which was the learned grammarian Apion, who was to accuse
the Jews of not worshipping the statue of the emperor, and to argue that
they had no right to the same privileges of citizenship with those who
boasted of their Macedonian blood. But, as the Jews did not deny the
charge that was brought against them, Caligula would hear nothing that
they had to say; and Philo withdrew with the remark, “Though the emperor
is against us, God will be our friend.”

We learn the sad tale of the Jews’ suffering under Caligula from the
pages of their own historian only. But though Philo may have felt and
written as one of the sufferers, his truth is undoubted. He was a man
of unblemished character, and the writer of greatest learning and of the
greatest note at that time in Alexandria; being also of a great age, he
well deserved the honour of being sent on the embassy to Caligula. He
was in religion a Jew, in his philosophy a platonist, and by birth an
Egyptian: and in his numerous writings we may trace the three sources
from which he drew his opinions. He is always devotional and in earnest,
full of pure and lofty thoughts, and often eloquent. His fondness for
the mystical properties of numbers, and for finding an allegory or
secondary meaning in the plainest narrative, seems borrowed from the
Egyptians. According to the Eastern proverb every word in a wise book
has seventy-two meanings; and this mode of interpretation was called
into use by the necessity which the Jews felt of making the Old
Testament speak a meaning more agreeable to their modern views of
religion. In Philo’s speculative theology he seems to have borrowed less
from Moses than from the abstractions of Plato, whose shadowy hints he
has embodied in a more solid form. He was the first Jewish writer
that applied to the Deity the mystical notion of the Egyptians, that
everything perfect was of three parts. Philo’s writings are valuable as
showing the steps by which the philosophy of Greece may be traced
from the writings of Plato to those of Justin Martyr and Clemens
Alexandrinus. They give us the earliest example of how the mystical
interpretation of the Scriptures was formed into a system, by which
every text was made to unfold some important philosophic or religious
truth to the learned student, at the same time that to the unlearned
reader it conveyed only the simple historic fact.

The Hellenistic Jews, while suffering under severe political
disabilities, had taken up a high literary position in Alexandria, and
had forced their opinions into the notice of the Greeks. The glowing
earnestness of their philosophy, now put forward in a platonic dress,
and heir improved style, approaching even classic elegance, laced their
writings on a lofty eminence far above anything which the cold, lifeless
grammarians of the museum were then producing. Apion, who went to Rome
to plead against Philo, was a native of the Great Oasis, but as he was
born of Greek parents, he claimed and received the title and privileges
of an Alexandrian, which he denied to the Jews who were born in the
city. He had studied under Didymus and Apollonius and Euphranor, and was
one of the most laborious of the grammarians and editors of Homer. All
his writings are now lost. Some of them were attacks upon the Jews and
their religion, calling in question the truth of the Jewish history
and the justice of that nation’s claim to high antiquity; and to these
attacks we owe Josephus’ _Answer_, in which several valuable fragments
of history are saved by being quoted against the pagans in support of
the Old Testament. One of his works was his _Ægyptiaca_, an account of
what he thought most curious in Egypt. But his learned trifling is now
lost, and nothing remains of it but his account of the meeting between
Androclus and the lion, which took place in the amphitheatre at Rome
when Apion was there on his embassy. Androclus was a runaway slave, who,
when retaken, was brought to Rome to be thrown before an African lion
for the amusement of the citizens, and as a punishment for his flight.
But the fierce and hungry beast, instead of tearing him to pieces,
wagged his tail at him, and licked his feet. It seems that the slave,
when he fled from his master, had gained the friendship of the lion in
the Libyan desert, first by pulling a thorn out of his foot, and then
by living three years with him in a cave; and, when both were brought
in chains to Rome, Androclus found a grateful friend in the amphitheatre
where he thought to have met with a cruel death.

We may for a moment leave our history, to bid a last farewell to the
family of the Ptolemies. Augustus, after leading Selene, the daughter
of Cleopatra and Antony, through the streets of Rome in his triumph, had
given her in marriage to the younger Juba, the historian of Africa; and
about the same time he gave to the husband the kingdom of Mauritania,
the inheritance of his father. His son Ptolemy succeeded him on the
throne, but was soon turned out of his kingdom. We trace the last of
the Ptolemies in his travels through Greece and Asia Minor by the
inscriptions remaining to his honour. The citizens of Xanthus in Lycia
set up a monument to him; and at Athens his statue was placed beside
that of Philadelphus in the gymnasium of Ptolemy, near the temple of
Theseus, where he was honoured as of founder’s kin. He was put to death
by Caligula. Drusilla, another grandchild of Cleopatra and Antony,
married Antonius Felix, the procurator of Judæa, after the death of his
first wife, who was also named Drusilla. These are the last notices that
we meet with of the royal family of Egypt.

As soon as the news of Caligula’s death (A.D. 41) reached Egypt, the
joy of the Jews knew no bounds. They at once flew to arms to revenge
themselves on the Alexandrians, whose streets were again the seat of
civil war. The governor did what he could to quiet both parties, but
was not wholly successful till the decree of the new emperor reached
Alexandria. In this Claudius granted to the Jews the full rights of
citizenship, which they had enjoyed under the Ptolemies, and which had
been allowed by Augustus; he left them to choose their own high priest,
to enjoy their own religion without hindrance, and he repealed the laws
of Caligula under which they had been groaning. At this time the Jewish
alabarch in Egypt was Demetrius, a man of wealth and high birth, who had
married Mariamne, the daughter of the elder Agrippa.

[Illustration: 041.jpg EGYPTIAN THRESHING-MACHINE]

The government under Claudius was mild and just, at least as far as
a government could be in which every tax-gatherer, every military
governor, and every sub-prefect was supposed to enrich himself by his
appointment. Every Roman officer, from the general down to the lowest
tribune, claimed the right of travelling through the country free of
expense, and seizing the carts and cattle of the villagers to carry him
forward to the next town, under the pretence of being a courier on the
public service. But we have a decree of the ninth year of this reign,
carved on the temple in the Great Oasis, in which Cneius Capito, the
prefect of Egypt, endeavours to put a stop to this injustice. He orders
that no traveller shall have the privilege of a courier unless he has a
proper warrant, and that then he shall only claim a free lodging; that
clerks in the villages shall keep a register of all that is taken on
account of the public service; and that if anybody make an unjust claim
he shall pay four times the amount to the informer and six times the
amount to the emperor. But royal decrees could do little or nothing
where there were no judges to enforce them; and the people of Upper
Egypt must have felt this law as a cruel insult when they were told that
they might take up their complaints to Basilides, at Alexandria. The
employment of the informer is a full acknowledgment of the weakness
of this absolute government, and that the prefect had not the power
to enforce his own decrees; and, when we compare this law with that
of Alexander on his conquest of the country, we have no difficulty in
seeing why Egypt rose under the Ptolemies and sunk under the selfish
policy of Augustus.

Claudius was somewhat of a scholar and an author; he wrote several
volumes both in Greek and in Latin. The former he might perhaps think
would be chiefly valued in Alexandria; and when he founded a new college
in that city, called after himself the Claudian Museum, he ordered that
on given days every year his history of Carthage should be publicly
read in one museum, and his history of Italy in the other; thus securing
during his reign an attention to his writings which their merits alone
would not have gained.

Under the government of Claudius the Egyptians were again allowed to
coin money; and in his first year begins that historically important
series in which every coin is dated with the year of the emperor’s
reign. The coins of the Ptolemies were strictly Greek in their
workmanship, and the few Egyptian characters that we see upon them are
so much altered by the classic taste of the die-engraver that we hardly
know them again. But it is far otherwise with the coins of the emperors,
which are covered with the ornaments, characters, and religious
ceremonies of the native Egyptians; and, though the style of art is
often bad, they are scarcely equalled by any series of coins whatever in
the service they render to the historian.

It was in this reign that the route through Egypt to India first became
really known to the Greeks and Romans. The historian Pliny, who died in
79 A.D., has left us a contemporary account of these early voyages. “It
will not be amiss,” he says in his _Natural History_, “to set forth the
whole of the route from Egypt, which has been stated to us of late, upon
information on which reliance may be placed and is here published for
the first time. The subject is one well worthy of our notice, seeing
that in no year does India drain our empire of less than five hundred
and fifty millions of sesterces [or two million dollars], giving back
her own wares in exchange, which are sold among us at fully one hundred
times their cost price.

“Two miles distant from Alexandria is the town of Heliopolis. The
distance thence to Koptos, up the Nile, is three hundred and eight
miles; the voyage is performed, when the Etesian winds are blowing, in
twelve days. From Koptos the journey is made with the aid of camels,
stations being arranged at intervals for the supply of fresh water. The
first of these stations is called Hydreuma, and is distant twenty-two
miles; the second is situate on a mountain at a distance of one day’s
journey from the last; the third is at a second Hydreuma, distant from
Koptos ninety-five miles; the fourth is on a mountain; the next to that
is another Hydreuma, that of Apollo, and is distant from Koptos one
hundred and eighty-four miles; after which there is another on a
mountain; there is then another station at a place called the New
Hydreuma, distant from Koptos two hundred and thirty miles; and next
to it there is another called the Old Hydreuma, where a detachment
is always on guard, with a caravansary that affords lodging for two
thousand persons. The last is distant from the New Hydreuma seven
miles. After leaving it, we come to the city of Berenicê, situate upon
a harbour of the Red Sea, and distant from Koptos two hundred and
fifty-seven miles. The greater part of this distance is generally
travelled by night, on account of the extreme heat, the day being spent
at the stations; in consequence of which it takes twelve days to perform
the whole journey from Koptos to Berenicê.

“Passengers generally set sail at midsummer before the rising of the
Dog-star, or else immediately after, and in about thirty days arrive
at Ocelis in Arabia, or else at Cane, in the region which bears
frankincense. To those who are bound for India, Ocelis is the best place
for embarkation. If the wind called Hippolus happens to be blowing,
it is possible to arrive in forty days at the nearest mart of India,
Muziris by name [the modern Mangalore]. This, however, is not a very
desirable place for disembarkation, on account of the pirates which
frequent its vicinity, where they occupy a place, Mtrias; nor, in fact,
is it very rich in articles of merchandise. Besides, the roadstead for
shipping is a considerable distance from the shore, and the cargoes
have to be conveyed in boats, either for loading or discharging. At the
moment that I am writing these pages,” continues Pliny, “the name of
the king of the place is Cælobotras. Another part, and a much more
convenient one, is that which lies in the territory of the people called
Neacyndi, Barace by name. Here King Pandian used to reign, dwelling at a
considerable distance from the mart in the interior, at a city known
as Modiera. The district from which pepper is carried down to Barace
in boats hollowed out of a single tree, is known as Cottonara. None of
these names of nations, ports, and cities are to be found in any of
the former writers, from which circumstance it would appear that the
localities have since changed their names. Travellers set sail from
India on their return to Europe, at the beginning of the Egyptian month
Tybus, which is our December, or, at all events, before the sixth day of
the Egyptian month Mechir, the same as our ides of January: if they do
this, they can go and return in the same year. They set sail from
India with a south-east wind, and, upon entering the Red Sea, catch the
south-west or south.”

The places on the Indian coast which the Egyptian merchant vessels then
reached are verified from the coins found there; and as we know the
course of the trade-wind by which they arrived, we also know the part of
Africa where they left the shore and braved the dangers of the ocean.
A hoard of Roman gold coins of these reigns has been dug up in our own
days near Calicut, under the roots of a banyan-tree. It had been there
buried by an Alexandrian merchant on his arrival from this voyage, and
left safe under the cover of the sacred tree to await his return from a
second journey. But he died before his return, and his secret died with
him. The products of the Indian trade were chiefly silk, diamonds, and
other precious stones, ginger, spices, and some scents. The state of
Ethiopia was then such that no trade came down the Nile to Syênê;
and the produce of southern Africa was brought by coasting vessels to
Berenicê. These products were ivory, rhinoceros teeth, hippopotamus
skins, tortoise shell, apes, monkeys, and slaves, a list which throws
a sidelight both on the pursuits of the natives and the tastes of the
ultimate purchasers.

[Illustration: 047.jpg AN ARAB GIRL]

The Romans in most cases collected the revenues of a province by means
of a publican or farmer, to whom the taxes were let by auction; but such
was the importance of Egypt that the same jealousy which made them think
its government too great to be trusted to a man of high rank, made them
think its revenues too large to be trusted to one farmer. The smaller
branches of the Egyptian revenue were, however, let out as usual, and
even the collection of the customs of the whole of the Red Sea was not
thought too much to trust to one citizen. Annius Plocamus, who farmed
them in this reign, had a little fleet under his command to collect them
with; and, tempted either by trade or plunder, his ships were sometimes
as far out as the south coast of Arabia. On one occasion one of his
freedmen in the command of a vessel was carried by a north wind into
the open ocean, and after being fifteen days at sea found himself on the
coast of Ceylon. This island was not then wholly new to the geographers
of Egypt and Europe. It had been heard of by the pilots in the voyage of
Alexander the Great; Eratosthenes had given it a place in his map; and
it had often been reached from Africa by the sailors of the Red Sea in
wickerwork boats made of papyrus; but this was the first time it had
been visited by a European.

In the neighbourhood of the above-mentioned road from Koptos to Berenicê
were the porphyritic quarries and the emerald mines, which were briskly
worked under the Emperor Claudius. The mountain was now named the
Claudian Mountain.

As this route for trade became known, the geographers began to
understand the wide space that separates India from Africa. Hitherto,
notwithstanding a few voyages of discovery, it had been the common
opinion that Persia was in the neighbourhood of Ethiopia. The Greeks had
thought that the Nile rose in India, in opposition to the Jews, who said
that it was the river Gibon of the garden of Eden, which made a circuit
round the whole of the land of Cush, or Ethiopia. The names of these
countries got misused accordingly; and even after the mistake was
cleared up we sometimes find Ethiopia called India.

The Egyptian chemists were able to produce very bright dyes by methods
then unknown to Greece or Rome. They dipped the cloth first into a
liquid of one colour, called a mordant, to prepare it, and then into
a liquid of a second colour; and it came out dyed of a third colour,
unlike either of the former. The ink with which they wrote the name of
a deceased person on the mummy-cloth, like our own marking-ink, was made
with nitrate of silver. Their knowledge of chemistry was far greater
than that of their neighbours, and the science is even now named from
the country of its birth. The later Arabs called it Alchemia, _the
Egyptian art_, and hence our words alchemy and chemistry. So also
Naphtha, or _rock oil_, from the coast of the Red Sea; and Anthracite,
or _rock fuel_, from the coast of Syria, both bear Egyptian names.
To some Egyptian stones the Romans gave their own names; as the black
glassy obsidian from Nubia they called after Obsidius, who found it;
the black Tiberian marble with white spots, and the Augustan marble with
regular wavy veins, were both named after the emperors. Porphyry was
now used for statues for the first time, and sometimes to make a kind of
patchwork figure, in which the clothed parts were of the coloured stone,
while the head, hands, and feet were of white marble. And it was thought
that diamonds were nowhere to be found but in the Ethiopian gold mines.

Several kinds of wine were made in Egypt; some in the Arsinoïte nome on
the banks of the lake Mceris; and a poor Libyan wine at Antiplme on the
coast, a hundred miles from Alexandria. Wine had also been made in
Upper Egypt in small quantities a very long time, as we learn from the
monuments; but it was produced with difficulty and cost and was not
good; it was not valued by the Greeks. It was poor and thin, and drunk
only by those who were feverish and afraid of anything stronger. That
of Anthylla, to the east of Alexandria, was very much better. But better
still were the thick luscious Tæniotic and the mild delicate Mareotic
wines. This last was first grown at Plinthine, but afterwards on all the
banks of the lake Mareotis. The Mareotic wine was white and sweet and
thin, and very little heating or intoxicating. Horace had carelessly
said of Cleopatra that she was drunk with Mareotic wine; but Lucan, who
better knew its quality, says that the headstrong lady drank wine far
stronger than the Mareotic. Near Sebennytus three kinds of wine were
made; one bitter named Peuce, a second sparkling named Æthalon, and
the third Thasian, from a vine imported from Thasus. But none of these
Egyptian wines was thought equal to those of Greece and Italy. Nor were
they made in quantities large enough or cheap enough for the poor; and
here, as in other countries, the common people for their intoxicating
drink used beer or spirits made from barley.

[Illustration: 051.jpg FARMING IN EGYPT]

The Egyptian sour wine, however, made very good vinegar, and it was then
exported for sale in Rome. During this half-century that great national
work, the lake of Moeris, by which thousands of acres had been flooded
and made fertile, and the watering of the lower country regulated, was,
through the neglect of the embankments, at once destroyed. The latest
traveller who mentions it is Strabo, and the latest geographer Pomponius
Mela. By its means the province of Arsinoë was made one of the most
fruitful and beautiful spots in Egypt. Here only does the olive grow
wild. Here the vine will grow. And by the help of this embanked lake the
province was made yet more fruitful. But before Pliny wrote, the bank
had given way, the pentup waters had made for themselves a channel into
the lake now called Birket el Kurun, and the two small pyramids, which
had hitherto been surrounded by water, then stood on dry ground. Thus
was the country slowly going to ruin by the faults of the government,
and ignorance in the foreign rulers. But, on the other hand, the
beautiful temple of Latopolis, which had been begun under the Ptolemies,
was finished in this reign; and bears the name of Claudius with those of
some later emperors on its portico and walls.

In the Egyptian language the word for a year is _Bait_, which is also
the name of a bird. In hieroglyphics this word is spelt by a palm-branch
_Bai_ and the letter T, followed sometimes by a circle as a picture of
the year. Hence arose among a people fond of mystery and allegory a mode
of speaking of the year under the name of a palm-branch or of a bird;
and they formed a fable out of a mere confusion of words. The Greeks,
who were not slow to copy Egyptian mysticism, called this fabulous bird
the _Phoenix_ from their own name for the palm-tree. The end of any long
period of time they called the return of the phonix to earth. The Romans
borrowed the fable, though perhaps without understanding the allegory;
and in the seventh year of this reign, when the emperor celebrated the
secular games at Rome, at the end of the eighth century since the city
was built, it was said that the phoenix had come to Egypt and was thence
brought to Rome. This was in the consulship of Plautius and Vitellius;
and it would seem to be only from mistakes in the name that Pliny
places the event eleven years earlier, in the consulship of Plautius
and Papinius, and that Tacitus places it thirteen years earlier in the
consulship of Fabius and Vitellius. This fable is connected with some
of the remarkable epochs in Egyptian history. The story lost nothing by
travelling to a distance. In Rome it was said that this wonderful bird
was a native of Arabia, where it lived for five hundred years, that on
its death a grub came out of its body which in due time became a perfect
bird; and that the new phonix brought to Egypt the bones of its parent
in the nest of spices in which it had died, and laid them on the altar
in the temple of the sun in Heliopolis. It then returned to Arabia to
live in its turn for five hundred years, and die and give life again
to another as before. The Christians saw in this story a type of the
resurrection; and Clement, Bishop of Rome, quotes it as such in his
Epistle to the Corinthians.

We find the name of Claudius on several of the temples of Upper Egypt,
particularly on that of Apollinopolis Magna, and on the portico of the
great temples of Latopolis, which were being built in this reign.

In the beginning of the reign of Nero, 55 A.D., an Egyptian Jew,
who claimed to be listened to as a prophet, raised the minds of his
countrymen into a ferment of religious zeal by preaching about the
sufferings of their brethren in Judæa; and he was able to get together
a body of men, called in reproach the Sicarii, or _ruffians_, whose
numbers are variously stated at four thousand and thirty thousand,
whom he led out of Egypt to free the holy city from the bondage of the
heathen. But Felix, the Roman governor, led against them the garrison of
Jerusalem, and easily scattered the half-armed rabble. By such acts of
religious zeal on the part of the Jews they were again brought to blows
with the Greeks of Alexandria. The Macedonians, as the latter still
called themselves, had met in public assembly to send an embassy to
Rome, and some Jews who entered the meeting, which as citizens they had
a full right to do, were seized and ill-treated by them as spies. They
would perhaps have even been put to death if a large body of their
countrymen had not run to their rescue. The Jews attacked the assembled
Greeks with stones and lighted torches, and would have burned the
amphitheatre and all that were in it, if the prefect, Tiberius
Alexander, had not sent some of the elders of their own nation to calm
their angry feelings. But, though the mischief was stopped for a time,
it soon broke out again; and the prefect was forced to call out the
garrison of two Roman legions and five thousand Libyans before he
could re-establish peace in the city. The Jews were always the greatest
sufferers in these civil broils; and Josephus says that fifty thousand
of his countrymen were left dead in the streets of Alexandria. But this
number is very improbable, as the prefect was a friend to the Jewish
nation, and as the Roman legions were not withdrawn to the camp till
they had guarded the Jews in carrying away and burying the bodies of
their friends.

It was a natural policy on the part of the emperors to change a prefect
whenever his province was disturbed by rebellion, as we have seen in the
case of Flaccus, who was recalled by Caligula. It was easier to send a
new governor than to inquire into a wrong or to redress a grievance; and
accordingly in the next year C. Balbillus was sent from Rome as prefect
of Egypt. He reached Alexandria on the sixth day after leaving the
Straits of Sicily, which was spoken of as the quickest voyage known. The
Alexandrian ships were better built and better manned than any others,
and, as a greater number of vessels sailed every year between that port
and Puteoli on the coast of Italy than between any other two places, no
voyage was better understood or more quickly performed. They were out of
sight of land for five hundred miles between Syracuse and Cyrene. Hence
we see that the quickest rate of sailing, with a fair wind, was at that
time about one hundred and fifty miles in the twenty-four hours. But
these ships had very little power of bearing up against the wind; and
if it were contrary the voyage became tedious. If the captain on sailing
out of the port of Alexandria found the wind westerly, and was unable to
creep along the African coast to Cyrene, he stood over to the coast of
Asia Minor, in hopes of there finding a more favourable wind. If a storm
arose, he ran into the nearest port, perhaps in Crete, perhaps in Malta,
there to wait the return of fair weather. If winter then came on, he had
to lie by till spring. Thus a vessel laden with Egyptian wheat, leaving
Alexandria in September, after the harvest had been brought down to the
coast, would sometimes spend five months on its voyage from that port to
Puteoli. Such was the case with the ship bearing the children of Jove
as its figurehead, which picked up the Apostle Paul and the historian
Josephus when they had been wrecked together on the island of Malta; and
such perhaps would have been the case with the ship which they before
found on the coast of Lycia, had it been able to reach a safe harbour,
and not been wrecked at Malta.

[Illustration: 056.jpg EGYPTIAN THRESHING MACHINE]

The rocky island of Malta, with the largest and safest harbour in
the Mediterranean, was a natural place for ships to touch at between
Alexandria and Italy. Its population was made up of those races which
had sailed upon its waters first from Carthage and then from Alexandria;
it was a mixture of Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Græco-Egyptians. To
judge from the skulls turned up in the burial-places, the Egyptians
were the most numerous, and here as elsewhere the Egyptian superstitions
conquered and put down all the other superstitions. While the island was
under the Phoenicians, the coins had the head of the Sicilian goddess
on one side, and on the other the Egyptian trinity of Isis, Osiris, and
Nepthys. When it was under the Greek rule the head on the coins received
an Egyptian head-dress, and became that of the goddess Isis, and on the
other side of the coin was a winged figure of Osiris. It was at
this time governed by a Roman governor. The large temple, built with
barbarian rudeness, and ornamented with the Phoenician palm-branch, was
on somewhat of a Roman plan, with a circular end to every room. But it
was dedicated to the chief god of Egypt, and is even yet called by its
Greek name Hagia Chem, _the temple of Chem_. The little neighbouring
island of Cossyra, between Sicily and Carthage, also shows upon its
coins clear traces of its taste for Egyptian customs.

[Illustration: 057.jpg MALTESE COIN]

The first five years of this reign, the _quinquennium Neronis_, while
the emperor was under the tutorship of the philosopher Seneca, became in
Rome proverbial for good government, and on the coinage we see marks of
Egypt being equally well treated. In the third year we see on a coin the
queen sitting on a throne with the word _agreement_, as if to praise
the young emperor’s good feeling in following the advice of his mother
Agrippina. On another the emperor is styled the young good genius, and
he is represented by the sacred basilisk crowned with the double crown
of Egypt. The new prefect, Balbillus, was an Asiatic Greek, and no doubt
received his Roman names of Tiberius Claudius on being made a freedman
of the late emperor. He governed the country mildly and justly; and
the grateful inhabitants declared that under him the Nile was more than
usually bountiful, and that its waters always rose to their just height.
But in the latter part of the reign the Egyptians smarted severely under
that cruel principle of a despotic monarchy that every prefect, every
sub-prefect, and even every deputy tax-gatherer, might be equally
despotic in his own department.

[Illustration: 058.jpg COIN OF COSSYRA]

On a coin of the thirteenth year of the reign of this ruler, we see a
ship with the word _emperor-bearer_, being that in which he then sailed
into Greece, or in which the Alexandrians thought that he would visit
their city. But if they had really hoped for his visit as a pleasure,
they must have thought it a danger escaped when they learned his
character; they must have been undeceived when the prefect Cæcinna
Tuscus was punished with banishment for venturing to bathe in the bath
which was meant for the emperor’s use if he had come on his projected
visit.

During the first century and a half of Roman sway in Egypt the school
of Alexandria was nearly silent. We have a few poems by Leonides of
Alexandria, one of which is addressed to the Empress Poppæa, as the wife
of Jupiter, on his presenting a celestial globe to her on her birthday.
Pamphila wrote a miscellaneous history of entertaining stories, and her
lively, simple style makes us very much regret its loss. Chæremon, a
Stoic philosopher, had been, during the last reign, at the head of the
Alexandrian library, but he was removed to Rome as one of the tutors to
the young Nero.

[Illustration: 059.jpg COIN OF NERO]

He is ridiculed by Martial for writing in praise of death, when, from
age and poverty, he was less able to enjoy life. We still possess a
most curious though short account by him of the monastic habits of the
ancient Egyptians. He also wrote on hieroglyphics, and a small fragment
containing his opinion of the meanings of nineteen characters still
remains to us. But he is not always right; he thinks the characters were
used allegorically for thoughts, not for sounds; and fancies that the
priests used them to keep secret the real nature of the gods.

He was succeeded at the museum by his pupil Dionysius, who had the
charge of the library till the reign of Trajan. Dionysius was also
employed by the prefect as a secretary of state, or, in the language of
the day, secretary to the embassies, epistles, and answers. He was the
author of the _Periegesis_, and aimed at the rank of a poet by writing
a treatise on geography in heroic verse. From this work he is named
Dionysius Periegetes. While careful to remind us that his birthplace
Alexandria was a Macedonian city, he gives due honour to Egypt and the
Egyptians. There is no river, says he, equal to the Nile for carrying
fertility and adding to the happiness of the land. It divides Asia from
Libya, falling between rocks at Syênê, and then passing by the old and
famous city of Thebes, where Memnon every morning salutes his beloved
Aurora as she rises. On its banks dwells a rich and glorious race of
men, who were the first to cultivate the arts of life; the first to make
trial of the plough and sow their seed in a straight furrow; and the
first to map the heavens and trace the sloping path of the sun.

According to the traditions of the church, it was in this reign that
Christianity was first brought into Egypt by the Evangelist Mark, the
disciple of the Apostle Peter. Many were already craving for religious
food more real than the old superstitions. The Egyptian had been shaken
in his attachment to the sacred animals by Greek ridicule. The Greek had
been weakened in his belief of old Homer’s gods by living with men
who had never heard of them. Both were dissatisfied with the scheme of
explaining the actions of their gods by means of allegory. The crumbling
away of the old opinions left men more fitted to receive the new
religion from Galilee. Mark’s preaching converted crowds in Alexandria;
but, after a short stay, he returned to Rome, in about the eleventh
year of this reign, leaving Annianus to watch over the growing church.
Annianus is usually called the first bishop of Alexandria; and Eusebius,
who lived two hundred years later, has given us the names of his
successors in an unbroken chain. If we would inquire whether the early
converts to Christianity in Alexandria were Jews, Greeks, or Egyptians,
we have nothing to guide us but the names of these bishops. Annianus,
or Annaniah, as his name was written by the Arabic historians, was very
likely a Jew; indeed, the Evangelist Mark would begin by addressing
himself to the Jews, and would leave the care of the infant church to
one of his own nation. In the platonic Jews, Christianity found soil
so exactly suited to its reception that it is only by he dates that the
Thérapeute of Alexandria and their historian Philo are proved not to be
Christian; and, again, it was in the close union between the platonic
Jews and the platonists that Christianity found its easiest path to the
ears and hearts of the pagans. The bishops that followed seem to have
been Greek converts. Before the death of Annaniah, Jerusalem had been
destroyed by the Roman armies, and the Jews sunk in their own eyes
and in those of their fellow-citizens throughout the empire; hence the
second bishop of Alexandria was less likely to be of Hebrew blood; and
it was long before any Egyptians aimed at rank in the church. But though
the spread of Christianity was rapid, both among the Greeks and the
Egyptians, we must not hope to find any early traces of it in the
historians. It was at first embraced by the unlearned and the poor,
whose deeds and opinions are seldom mentioned in history; and we may
readily believe the scornful reproach of the unbelievers, that it was
chiefly received by the unfortunate, the unhappy, the despised, and the
sinful. When the white-robed priestesses of Ceres carried the sacred
basket through the streets of Alexandria, they cried out, “Sinners away,
or keep your eyes to the ground; keep your eyes to the ground!” When
the crier, standing on the steps of the portico in front of the great
temple, called upon the pagans to come near and join in the celebration
of their mysteries, he cried out, “All ye who are clean of hands and
pure of heart, come to the sacrifice; all ye who are guiltless in
thought and deed, come to the sacrifice.”

But many a repentant sinner and humble spirit must have drawn back in
distrust from a summons which to him was so forbidding, and been glad
to hear the good tidings of mercy offered by Christianity to those who
labour and are heavy laden, and to the broken-hearted who would turn
away from their wickedness. While such were the chief followers of the
gospel, it was not likely to be much noticed by the historians; and we
must wait till it forced its way into the schools and the palace before
we shall find many traces of the rapidity with which it was spreading.

[Illustration: 063.jpg ETHIOPIAN ARABS]

During these reigns the Ethiopian Arabs kept up their irregular warfare
against the southern frontier. The tribe most dreaded were the Blemmyes,
an uncivilised people, described by the affrighted neighbours as having
no heads, but with eyes and mouth on the breast; and it was under that
name that the Arabs spread during each century farther and farther into
Egypt, separating the province from the more cultivated tribes of Upper
Ethiopia or Meroë. The cities along the banks of the Nile in Lower
Ethiopia, between Nubia and Meroë, were ruined by being in the debatable
land between the two nations. The early Greek travellers had counted
about twenty cities on each side of the Nile between Syênê and Meroë;
but when, in a moment of leisure, the Roman government proposed to
punish and stop the inroads of these troublesome neighbours, and sent
forward a tribune with a guard of soldiers, he reported on his return
that the whole country was a desert, and that there was scarcely a
city inhabited on either side of the Nile beyond Nubia. But he had not
marched very far. The interior of Africa was little known; and to seek
for the fountain of the Nile was another name for an impossible or
chimerical undertaking.

But Egypt itself was so quiet as not to need the presence of so large
a Roman force as usual to keep it in obedience; and when Vespasian, who
commanded Nero’s armies in Syria, found the Jews more obstinate in their
rebellion and less easily crushed than he expected, the emperor sent the
young Titus to Alexandria, to lead to his father’s assistance all the
troops that could be spared. Titus led into Palestine through Arabia two
legions, the Fifth and the Tenth, which were then in Egypt.

We find a temple of this reign in the oasis of Dakleh, or the Western
Oasis, which seems to have been a more flourishing spot in the time
of the Romans than when Egypt itself was better governed. It is so far
removed from the cities in the valley of the Nile that its position, and
even existence, was long unknown to Europeans, and to such hiding-places
as this many of the Egyptians fled, to be farther from the tyranny of
the Roman tax-gatherers.

Hitherto the Roman empire had descended for just one hundred years
through five emperors like a family inheritance; but, on the death of
Nero, the Julian and Claudian families were at an end, and Galba, who
was raised to the purple by the choice of the soldiers, endeavoured to
persuade the Romans and their dependent provinces that they had regained
their liberties. The Egyptians may have been puzzled by the word
_freedom_, then struck upon the coins by their foreign masters, but must
have been pleased to find it accompanied with a redress of grievances.

Galba began his reign with the praiseworthy endeavour of repairing the
injustice done by his cruel predecessor. He at once recalled the prefect
of Egypt, and appointed in his place Tiberius Julius Alexander, an
Alexandrian, a son of the former prefect of that name; and thus Egypt
was under the government of a native prefect. The peaceable situation of
the Great Oasis has saved a long Greek inscription of the decree which
was now issued in redress of the grievances suffered under Nero. It is
a proclamation by Julius Demetrius, the commander of the Oasis, quoting
the decree of Tiberius Julius Alexander, the new prefect of Egypt.

The prefect acknowledges that the loud complaints with which he was met
on entering upon his government were well founded, and he promises that
the unjust taxes shall cease; that nobody shall be forced to act as a
provincial tax-gatherer; that no debts shall be cancelled or sales made
void under the plea of money owing to the revenue; that no freeman shall
be thrown into prison for debt, unless it be a debt due to the
royal revenue, and that no private debt shall be made over to the
tax-gatherer, to be by him collected as a public debt; that no property
settled on the wife at marriage shall be seized for taxes due from the
husband; and that all new charges and claims which had grown up within
the last five years shall be repealed. In order to discourage informers,
whom the prefects had much employed, and by whom the families in
Alexandria were much harassed, and to whom he laid the great falling off
in the population of that city, he orders, that if anybody should
make three charges and fail in proving them, he shall forfeit half his
property and lose the right of bringing an action at law. The land had
always paid a tax in proportion to the number of acres overflowed and
manured by the waters of the Nile; and the husbandmen had latterly been
frightened by the double threat of a new measurement of the land, and of
making it at the same time pay according to the ancient registers of the
overflow when the canals had been more open and more acres flooded; but
the prefect promises that there shall be no new measurements, and that
they shall only be taxed according to the actual overflow. In 69 A.D.
Galba was murdered, after a reign of seven months. Some of his coins,
however, are dated in the second year of his reign, according to the
Alexandrian custom of counting the years. They called the 29th of
August, the first new year’s day after the sovereign came to the throne,
the first day of his second year.

Otho was then acknowledged as emperor by Rome and the East, while the
hardy legions of Germany thought themselves entitled to choose for
themselves. They set up their own general, Vitellius. The two legions in
Egypt sided with the four legions in Syria under Mucianus, and the
three legions which, under Vespasian, were carrying on the memorable
war against the Jews; and all took the oaths to Otho. We find no
hieroglyphical inscriptions during this short reign of a few weeks, but
there are many Alexandrian coins to prove the truth of the historian;
and some of them, like those of Galba, bear the unlooked-for word
_freedom_. In the few weeks which then passed between the news of Otho’s
death and of Vespasian being raised to the purple in Syria, Vitellius
was acknowledged in Egypt; and the Alexandrian mint struck a few coins
in his name with the figure of Victory. But as soon as the legions of
Egypt heard that the Syrian army had made choice of another emperor,
they withdrew their allegiance from Vitellius, and promised it to his
Syrian rival.

Vespasian was at Cæsarea, in command of the army employed in the Jewish
war, when the news reached him that Otho was dead, and that Vitellius
had been raised to the purple by the German legions, and acknowledged
at Rome; and, without wasting more time in refusing the honour than was
necessary to prove that his soldiers were in earnest in offering it, he
allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor, as the successor of Otho.
He would not, however, then risk a march upon Rome, but he sent to
Alexandria to tell Tiberius Alexander, the governor of Egypt, what he
had done; he ordered him to claim in his name the allegiance of that
great province, and added that he should soon be there himself. The two
Roman legions in Egypt much preferred the choice of the Eastern to
that of the Western army, and the Alexandrians, who had only just
acknowledged Vitellius, readily took the oath to be faithful to
Vespasian. This made it less necessary for him to hasten thither, and he
only reached Alexandria in time to hear that Vitellius had been murdered
after a reign of eight months, and that he himself had been acknowledged
as emperor by Rome and the Western legions. His Egyptian coins in the
first year of his reign, by the word _peace_, point to the end of the
civil war.

When Vespasian entered Alexandria, he was met by the philosophers and
magistrates in great pomp. The philosophers, indeed, in a city where,
beside the officers of government, talent formed the only aristocracy,
were a very important body; and Dion, Euphrates, and Apollonius had been
useful in securing for Vespasian the allegiance of the Alexandrians.
Dion was an orator, who had been professor of rhetoric, but he had given
up that study for philosophy. His orations, or declamations, gained for
him the name of Chrysostom, or _golden-mouthed_. Euphrates, his friend,
was a platonist, who afterwards married the daughter of the prefect of
Syria, and removed to Rome. Apollonius of Tyana, the most celebrated of
these philosophers, was one of the first who gained his eminence from
the study of Eastern philosophy, which was then rising in the opinions
of the Greeks as highly worth their notice. He had been travelling in
the East; and, boasting that he was already master of all the fabled
wisdom of the Magi of Babylon and of the Gymnosophists of India, he was
come to Egypt to compare this mystic philosophy with that of the hermits
of Ethiopia and the Thebaid. Addressing himself as a pupil to the
priests, he willingly yielded his belief to their mystic claims; and,
whether from being deceived or as a deceiver, whether as an enthusiast
or as a cheat, he pretended to have learned all the supernatural
knowledge which they pretended to teach. By the Egyptians he was
looked upon as the favourite of Heaven; he claimed the power of working
miracles by his magical arts, and of foretelling events by his knowledge
of astrology. In the Thebaid he was so far honoured that at the bidding
of the priests one of the sacred trees spoke to him, as had been their
custom from of old with favourites, and in a clear and rather womanly
voice addressed him as a teacher from heaven.

It was to witness such practices as these, and to learn the art of
deceiving their followers, that the Egyptian priests were now consulted
by the Greeks. The oracle at Delphi was silent, but the oracle of Ammon
continued to return an answer. The mystic philosophy of the East had
come into fashion in Alexandria, and the priests were more celebrated as
magicians than as philosophers. They would tell a man’s fortune and the
year that he was to die by examining the lines of his forehead. Some of
them even undertook, for a sum of money, to raise the dead to life, or,
rather, to recall for a time to earth the unwilling spirits, and make
them answer any questions that might be put to them. Ventriloquism was
an art often practised in Egypt, and perhaps invented there. By this the
priests gained a power over the minds of the listeners, and could make
them believe that a tree, a statue, or a dead body, was speaking to
them.

The Alexandrian men of letters seldom erred by wrapping themselves up in
pride to avoid the fault of meanness; they usually cringed to the great.
Apollonius was wholly at the service of Vespasian, and the emperor
repaid the philosopher by flattery as well as by more solid favours.
He kept him always by his side during his stay in Egypt; he acknowledged
his rank as a prophet, and tried to make further use of him in
persuading the Egyptians of his own divine right to the throne.
Vespasian begged him to make use of his prayers that he might obtain
from God the empire which he had as yet hardly grasped; but Apollonius,
claiming even a higher mission from Heaven than Vespasian was granting
to him, answered, with as much arrogance as flattery, “I have myself
already made you emperor.” With the intimacy between Vespasian and
Apollonius begins the use of gnostic emblems on the Alexandrian coins.
The imperial pupil was not slow in learning from such a master; and
the people were as ready to believe in the emperor’s miracles as in
the philosopher’s. As Vespasian was walking through the streets of
Alexandria, a man well known as having a disease in his eyes threw
himself at his feet and begged of him to heal his blindness. He had been
told by the god Serapis that he should regain his sight if the emperor
would but deign to spit upon his eyelids. Another man, who had lost the
use of a hand, had been told by the same god that he should be healed if
the emperor would but trample on him with his feet. Vespasian at first
laughed at them and thrust them off; but at last he so far yielded
to their prayers, and to the flattery of his friends, as to have the
physicians of Alexandria consulted whether it was in his power to heal
these unfortunate men. The physicians, like good courtiers, were not so
unwise as to think it impossible; besides, it seemed meant by the god as
a public proof of Vespasian’s right to the throne; if he were successful
the glory would be his, and if he failed the laugh would be against the
cripples. The two men were therefore brought before him, and in the face
of the assembled citizens he trampled on one and spit on the other; and
his flatterers declared that he had healed the maimed and given sight to
the blind.

Vespasian met with further wonders when he entered the temple of Serapis
to consult the god as to the state and fortunes of the empire. He went
into the inner sanctuary alone, and, to his surprise, there he beheld
the old Basilides, the freedman of Claudius, one of the chief men of
Alexandria, whom he knew was then lying dangerously ill, and several
days’ journey from the city. He inquired of the priests whether
Basilides had been in the temple, and was assured that he had not. He
then asked whether he had been in Alexandria; but nobody had seen him
there. Lastly, on sending messengers, he learned that he was on his
death-bed eighty miles off. With this miracle before his eyes, he could
not distrust the answers which the priests gave to his questions.

From Alexandria Vespasian sent back Titus to finish the siege of
Jerusalem. The Jewish writer Joseph, the son of Matthias, or Flavius
Josephus, as he called himself when he entered the service of the
emperor, was then in Alexandria. He had been taken prisoner by
Vespasian, but had gained his freedom by the betrayal of his country’s
cause. He joined the army of Titus and marched to the overthrow of
Jerusalem. Notwithstanding the obstinate and heroic struggles of the
Jews, Judæa was wholly conquered by the Romans, and Jerusalem and its
other fortresses either received Roman garrisons or were dismantled.
The Temple was overthrown in the month of September, A.D. 70. Titus made
slaves of ninety-seven thousand men, many of whom he led with him into
Egypt, and then sent them to work in the mines. These were soon followed
by a crowd of other brave Jews, who chose rather to quit their homes
and live as wanderers in Egypt than to own Vespasian as their king. They
knew no lord but Jahveh; to take the oaths or to pay tribute to Cæsar
was to renounce the faith of their fathers. But they found no safety in
Egypt. Their Greek brethren turned against them, and handed six hundred
of them up to Lupus, the governor of Egypt, to be punished; and their
countryman Josephus brands them all with the name of Sicarii. They tried
to hide themselves in Thebes and other cities less under the eyes of the
Roman governor. They were, however, followed and taken, and the courage
with which the boys and mere children bore their sufferings, sooner than
acknowledge Vespasian for their king, drew forth the praise of even the
time-serving Josephus.

The Greek Jews of Egypt gained nothing by this treachery towards
their Hebrew brethren; they were themselves looked down upon by the
Alexandrians, and distrusted by the Romans. The emperor ordered Lupus to
shut up the temple at Onion, near Heliopolis, in which, during the last
three hundred years, they had been allowed to have an altar, in rivalry
to the Temple of Jerusalem. Even Josephus, whose betrayal of his
countrymen might have saved him from their enemies, was sent with many
others in chains to Rome, and was only set free on his making himself
known to Titus. Indeed, when the Hebrew Jews lost their capital and
their rank as a nation, their brethren felt lowered in the eyes of their
fellow-citizens, in whatever city they dwelt, and in Alexandria they
lost all hope of keeping their privileges; although the emperor refused
to repeal the edict which granted them their citizenship, an edict to
which they always appealed for protection, but often with very little
success.

The Alexandrians were sadly disappointed in Vespasian. They had been
among the first to acknowledge him as emperor while his power was yet
doubtful, and they looked for a sum of money as a largess; but to their
sorrow he increased the taxes, and re-established some which had fallen
into disuse. They had a joke against him, about his claiming from one of
his friends the trifling debt of six oboli; and, upon hearing of their
witticisms, he was so angry that he ordered this sum of six oboli to be
levied as a poll-tax upon every man in the city, and he only remitted
the tax at the request of his son Titus. He went to Rome, carrying with
him the nickname of Cybiosactes, _the scullion_, which the Alexandrians
gave him for his stinginess and greediness, and which they had before
given to Seleucus, who robbed the tomb of Alexander the Great, at
Alexandria, of its famous golden sarcophagus.

Titus saw the importance of pleasing the people; and his wish to humour
their ancient prejudices, at the ceremony of consecrating a new bull
as Apis, brought some blame upon him. He there, as became the occasion,
wore the state crown, and dazzled the people of Memphis with his regal
pomp; but, while thus endeavouring to strengthen his father’s throne, he
was by some accused of grasping at it for himself.

The great temple of Kneph, at Latopolis, which had been the work of many
reigns and perhaps many centuries, was finished under Vespasian. It is
a building worthy of the best times of Egyptian architecture. It has a
grand portico, upheld by four rows of massive columns, with capitals in
the form of papyrus flowers. On the ceiling is a zodiac, like that at
Tentyra; and, though many other kings’ names are carved on the walls,
that of Vespasian is in the dedication over the entrance.

Of the reign of Titus in Egypt we find no trace beyond his coins struck
each year at Alexandria, and his name carved on one or two temples which
had been built in former reigns.

Of the reign of Domitian (81--96 A.D.) we learn something from the poet
Juvenal, who then held a military post in the province; and he gives
us a sad account of the state of lawlessness in which the troops lived
under his commands. All quarrels between soldiers and citizens were
tried by the officers according to martial law; and justice was very
far from being even-handed between the Roman and the poor Egyptian.
No witness was bold enough to come forward and say anything against a
soldier, while everybody was believed who spoke on his behalf. Juvenal
was at a great age when he was sent into Egypt; and he felt that the
command of a cohort on the very borders of the desert was a cruel
banishment from the literary society of Rome. His death in the camp was
hastened by his wish to return home. As what Juvenal chiefly aimed at
in his writings was to lash the follies of the age, he, of course, found
plenty of amusement in the superstitions and sacred animals of Egypt.
But he sometimes takes a poet’s liberty, and when he tells us that man’s
was almost the only flesh that they ate without sinning, we need not
believe him to the letter. He gives a lively picture of a fight which he
saw between the citizens of two towns. The towns of Ombos and Tentyra,
though about a hundred miles apart, had a long-standing quarrel
about their gods. At Ombos they worshipped the crocodile and the
crocodile-headed god Savak, while at Tentyra they worshipped the goddess
Hâthor, and were celebrated for their skill in catching and killing
crocodiles. So, taking advantage of a feast or holiday, they marched out
for a fight. The men of Ombos Avere beaten and put to flight; but one of
them, stumbling as he ran away, was caught and torn to pieces, and,
as Juvenal adds, eaten by the men of Tentyra. Their worship of beasts,
birds, and fishes, and even growing their gods in the garden, are
pleasantly hit off by him; they left nothing, said he, without worship,
but the goddess of chastity. The mother goddess, Isis, the queen of
heaven, was the deity to whom they bowed with the most tender devotion,
and to swear by Isis was their favourite oath; and hence the leek, in
their own language named Isi, was no doubt the vegetable called a god by
the satiric Juvenal.

At the same time also the towns of Oxyrrhynchos and Cynopolis, in
the Heptanomos, had a little civil war about the animals which
they worshipped. Somebody at Cynopolis was said to have caught an
oxyrrhynchus fish in the Nile and eaten it; and so the people of
Oxyrrhynchos, in revenge, made an attack upon the dogs, the gods of
Cynopolis. They caught a number of them, killed them in sacrifice to
their offended fish-god, and ate them. The two parties then flew to arms
and fought several battles; they sacked one another’s cities in turns,
and the war was not stopped till the Roman troops marched to the spot
and punished them both.

But we gain a more agreeable and most likely a more true notion of the
mystical religion and philosophy of the Egyptians in these days from the
serious enquiries of Plutarch, who, instead of looking for what he could
laugh at, was only too ready to believe that he saw wisdom hidden
under an allegory in all their superstitions. Many of the habits of
the priests, such as shaving the whole body, wearing linen instead of
cotton, and refusing some meats as impure, seem to have arisen from a
love of cleanliness; their religion ordered what was useful. And it
also forbade what was hurtful; so to stir the fire with a sword was
displeasing to the gods, because it spoilt the temper of the metal.
None but the vulgar now looked upon the animals and statues as gods; the
priests believed that the unseen gods, who acted with one mind and with
one providence, were the authors of all good; and though these, like the
sun and moon, were called in each country by a different name, yet, like
those luminaries, they were the same over all the world.

[Illustration: 078b.jpg SCENE IN A SEPUUCHRAL CHAMBER]

Outward ceremonies in religion were no longer thought enough without a
good life; and, as the Greeks said, that beard and cloak did not make a
philosopher, so the Egyptians said that white linen and a tonsure
would not make a follower of Isis. All the sacrifices to the gods had a
secondary meaning, or, at least, they tried to join a moral aim to the
outward act; as on the twentieth day of the month, when they ate honey
and figs in honour of Thot, they sang “Sweet is truth.” The Egyptians,
like most other Eastern polytheists, held the doctrine which was
afterwards called Manicheism; they believed in a good and in a wicked
god, who governed the world between them. Of these the former made
himself threefold, because three is a perfect number, and they adopted
into their religion that curious metaphysical opinion that everything
divine is formed of three parts; and accordingly, on the Theban
monuments we often see the gods in groups of three. They worshipped
Osiris, Isis, and Horus under the form of a right-angled triangle, in
which Horus was the side opposite to the right angle. The favourite
part of their mythology was the lamentation of Isis for the death of
her husband Osiris. By another change the god Horus, who used to be a
crowned king of manly stature, was now a child holding a finger to his
mouth, and thereby marking that he had not yet learned to talk. The
Romans, who did not understand this Egyptian symbol for youthfulness,
thought that in this character he was commanding silence; and they gave
the name of Harpocrates, _Horus the powerful_, to a god of silence.
Horus was also often placed as a child in the arms of his mother Isis;
and thus by the loving nature of the group were awakened the more tender
feelings of the worshipper. The Egyptians, like the Greeks, had always
been loud in declaring that they were beloved by their gods; but they
received their favours with little gratitude, and hardly professed that
they felt any love towards the gods in return. But after the time of the
Christian era, we meet with more kindly feelings even among the pagans.
We find from the Greek names of persons that they at least had begun to
think their gods deserving of love, and in this group of the mother and
child, such a favourite also in Christian art, we see in what direction
these more kindly feelings found an entrance into the Egyptian religion.
As fast as opinion was raising the great god Serapis above his fellows
and making the wrathful judge into the ruler of the world, so fast was
the same opinion creating for itself a harbour of refuge in the child
Horus and its mother.

[Illustration: 080.jpg HARPOCRATES]

The deep earnestness of the Egyptians in the belief of their own
religion was the chief cause of its being adopted by others. The Greeks
had borrowed much from it. Though in Rome it had been forbidden by law,
it was much cultivated there in private; and the engraved rings on the
fingers of the wealthy Romans which bore the figures of Harpocrates and
other Egyptian gods easily escaped the notice of the magistrate. But the
superstitious Domitian, who was in the habit of consulting astrologers
and Chaldæan fortune-tellers, allowed the Egyptian worship. He built
at Rome a temple to Isis, and another to Serapis; and such was the
eagerness of the citizens for pictures of the mother goddess with her
child in her arms that, according to Juvenal, the Roman painters all
lived upon the goddess Isis. For her temple in the Campus Martius, holy
water was even brought from the Nile to purify the building and the
votaries; and a regular college of priests was maintained there by their
zeal and at their cost, with a splendour worthy of the Roman capital.
Domitian, also, was somewhat of a scholar, and he sent to Alexandria for
copies of their books, to restore the public library at Rome which had
been lately burnt; while his garden on the banks of the Tiber was
richer in the Egyptian winter rose than even the gardens of Memphis and
Alexandria.

During this century the coinage continues one of the subjects of chief
interest to the antiquary. In 92 A.D., in the eleventh year of his
reign, when Domitian took upon himself the tribunitian power at Rome
for a second period of ten years, the event was celebrated in Alexandria
with a triumphal procession and games in the hippodrome, of all which we
see clear traces on the Egyptian coins.

[Illustration: 081.jpg COINS OF DOMITIAN]

The coinage is almost the only trace of Nerva (96--98 A.D.) having
reigned in Egypt; but it is at the same time enough to prove the
mildness of his government. The Jews who by their own law were of old
required to pay half a shekel, or a didrachm, to the service of their
temple, had on their conquest been made to pay that sum as a yearly
tribute to the Ptolemies, and afterwards to the emperors. It was a
poll-tax levied on every Jew throughout the empire. But Nerva had the
humanity to relieve them from this insulting tribute, and well did he
deserve the honour of having it recorded on the coins struck in his
reign.

The coinage of the eleventh year of his successor, Trajan (98-117
A.D.), is very remarkable for its beauty, its technical skill, and
variety, even more so than that of the eleventh year of Domitian.

[Illustration: 082.jpg COIN OF NERVA]

The coins have hitherto proclaimed, in a manner unmistakably plain to
those who study numismatics, the games and conquests of the emperors,
the bountiful overflow of the Nile, and sometimes the worship of
Serapis; but we now enter upon the most brilliant and most important
period of the Egyptian coinage, and find a rich variety of fables taken
both from Egyptian and Greek mythology. The coins of Rome in this and
the following reigns show the wealth, good taste, and learning of the
nation, but they are surpassed by the coins of Egypt. While history
is nearly silent, and the buildings and other proofs of Roman good
government have perished, the coins alone are quite enough to prove
the well-being of the people. Among the Egyptian coins those of Trajan,
Hadrian, and the Antonines equal in number those of all the other
emperors together, while in beauty they far surpass them. They are
mostly of copper, of a small size, and thick, weighing about one hundred
and ten grains, and some larger of two hundred and twenty grains; the
silver coins are less common, and of mixed metal.

Though the Romans, while admiring and copying everything that was Greek,
affected to look upon the Egyptians as savages, who were only known to
be human beings by their power of speech, still the Egyptian physicians
were held by them in the highest repute. The more wealthy Romans often
sailed to Alexandria for the benefit of their advice. Pliny the Elder,
however, thought that of the invalids who went to Egypt for their
health more were cured by the sea voyage than by the physicians on their
arrival.

[Illustration: 083.jpg TRINITY OF ISIS, HORUS AND NEPHTHYS]

One of Cicero’s physicians was an Egyptian. Pliny the Younger repaid his
Egyptian oculist, Harpocrates, by getting a rescript from the emperor
to make him a Roman citizen. But the statesman did not know under what
harsh laws his friend was born, for the grant was void in the case of an
Egyptian, the emperor’s rescript was bad as being against the law; and
Pliny had again to beg the greater favour that the Egyptian might first
be made a citizen of Alexandria, without which the former favour was
useless. Thus, even in Alexandria, a conquered province governed by
the despotic will of a military emperor, there were still some laws or
principles which the emperor found it not easy to break. The courts of
justice, those to whom the edicts were addressed and by whom they were
to be explained and carried into effect, claimed a power in some cases
above the emperor; and the first article in the Roman code was that an
imperial rescript, by whomsoever or howsoever obtained, was void if it
was against the law. As the lawyers and magistrates formed part of the
body of citizens, the Alexandrians had so far a share in the government
of their own affairs; but this was an advantage that the Egyptians lost
by being under the power of the Greek magistrates.

[Illustration: 084.jpg COINS OF TRAJAN]

Trajan always kept in the public granaries of Rome a supply of Egyptian
grain equal to seven times the _canon_, or yearly gift to the poor
citizens; and in this prudent course he was followed by all his
successors, until the store was squandered by the worthless Elagabalus.
One year, when the Nile did not rise to its usual height, and much of
the grain land of the Delta, instead of being moistened by its waters
and enriched by its mud, was left a dry, sandy plain, the granaries of
Rome were unlocked to feed the city of Alexandria. The Alexandrians then
saw the unusual sight of ships unloading their cargoes of wheat in their
harbour, and the Romans boasted that they took the Egyptian tribute
in grain, not because they could not feed themselves, but because the
Egyptians had nothing else to send them.

Alexandria under the Romans was still the centre of the trading world,
not only having its own great trade in grain, but being the port through
which the trade of India and Arabia passed to Europe, and at which the
Syrian vessels touched in their way to Italy. The harbour was crowded
with masts and strange prows and uncouth sails, and the quays always
busy with loading and unloading; while in the streets might be seen men
of all languages and all dresses, copper-coloured Egyptians, swarthy
Jews, lively, bustling Greeks, and haughty Italians, with Asiatics from
the neighbouring coasts of Syria and Cilicia, and even dark Ethiopians,
painted Arabs, Bactrians, Scythians, Persians, and Indians, all gay with
their national costumes. Alexandria was a spot in which Europe met Asia,
and each wondered at the strangeness of the other.

Of the Alexandrians themselves we receive a very unfavourable account
from their countryman, Dion Chrysostom. With their wealth, they
had those vices which usually follow or cause the loss of national
independence. They were eager for nothing but food and horse-races. They
were grave and quiet in their sacrifices and listless in business, but
in the theatre or in the stadium men, women, and children were alike
heated into passion, and overcome with eagerness and warmth of feeling.
A scurrilous song or a horse-race would so rouse them into a quarrel
that they could not hear for their own noise, nor see for the dust
raised by their own bustle in the hippodrome; while all those acts of
their rulers, which in a more wholesome state of society would have
called for notice, passed by unheeded.

[Illustration: 086.jpg EGYPTIAN WIG (BRITISH MUSEUM)]

They cared more for the tumble of a favourite charioteer than for the
sinking state of the nation. The ready employment of ridicule in the
place of argument, of wit instead of graver reason, of nicknames
as their most powerful weapon, was one of the worst points in the
Alexandrian character. Frankness and manliness are hardly to be looked
for under a despotic government where men are forbidden to speak their
minds openly; and the Alexandrians made use of such checks upon their
rulers as the law allowed them. They lived under an absolute monarchy
tempered only by ridicule. Though their city was four hundred years old,
they were still colonists and without a mother-country. They had very
little faith in anything great or good, whether human or divine. They
had few cherished prejudices, no honoured traditions, sadly little love
of fame, and they wrote no histories. But in luxury and delicacy they
set the fashion to their conquerors. The wealthy Alexandrian walked
about Rome in a scarlet robe, in summer fanning himself with gold, and
displaying on his fingers rings carefully suited to the season; as his
hands were too delicate to carry his heavier jewels in the warm weather.
At the supper tables of the rich, the Alexandrian singing boys were
much valued; the smart young Roman walked along the Via Sacra humming
an Alexandrian tune; the favourite comic actor, the delight of the
city, whose jokes set the theatre in a roar, was an Alexandrian; the
Retiarius, who, with no weapon but a net, fought against an armed
gladiator in the Roman forum, and came off conqueror in twenty-six such
battles, was an Alexandrian; and no breed of fighting-cocks was thought
equal to those reared in the suburbs of Alexandria.

In the reign of Augustus the Roman generals had been defeated in their
attacks on Arabia; but under Trajan, when the Romans were masters of all
the countries which surround Arabia Nabatæa, and when Egypt was so
far quiet that the legions could be withdrawn without danger to the
provinces, the Arabs could hold out no longer, and the rocky fastness
of Petra was forced to receive a Roman garrison. The event was as usual
commemorated on the coins of Rome; and for the next four hundred years
that remarkable Arab city formed part of the Roman empire; and Europeans
now travelling through the desert from Mount Sinai to Jerusalem are
agreeably surprised at coming upon temples, carved out of the solid
rock, ornamented with Corinthian columns of the age of the Antonines.

In the twelfth year of this reign, when Lucius Sulpicius Simius was
prefect, some additions which had been made to the temple at Panopolis
in the Thebaid were dedicated in the name of the emperor; and in the
nineteenth year, when Marcus Rutilius Lupus was prefect, a new portico
in the oasis of Thebes was in the same manner dedicated to Serapis and
Isis. A small temple, which had been before built at Denderah, near the
great temple of Venus, was in the first year of this reign dedicated to
the Empress Plotina, under the name of the great goddess, the Younger
Venus.

The canal from the Nile near Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes, which had
been first made by Necho, had been either finished or a second time
made by Philadelphus; and in this reign that great undertaking was again
renewed. But the stream of the Nile was deserting the Bubastite branch,
which was less navigable than formerly; and the engineers now changed
the greater part of the canal’s bed. They thought it wiser to bring
water from a higher part of the Nile, so that the current in the canal
might run into the Red Sea instead of out, and its waters might still
be fresh and useful to agriculture. It now began at Babylon opposite
Memphis and entered the Red Sea at a town which, taking its name from
the locks, was called Clysmon, about ten miles to the south of Arsinoë.
This latter town was no longer a port, having been separated from the
sea by the continual advance of the sands. We have no knowledge of how
long the care of the imperial prefects kept this new canal open and in
use. It was perhaps one of the first of the Roman works that went to
decay; and, when we find the Christian pilgrims sailing along it seven
centuries later, on their way from England to the holy sepulchre, it had
been again opened by the Muhammedan conquerors of Egypt.

[Illustration: 089.jpg ANTONINIAN TEMPLE NEAR SINAI]

Writings which some now regard as literary forgeries appeared in
Alexandria about this time. They prophesied the re-establishment of
the Jews at Jerusalem, and, as the wished-for time drew near, all the
eastern provinces of the Roman empire were disturbed by rebellious
risings of the Jews. Moved by the religious enthusiasm which gave birth
to the writings, the Jews of Egypt in the eighteenth year of this
reign (116 A.D.) were again roused into a quarrel with their Greek
fellow-citizens; and in the next year, the last of the reign, they rose
against their Roman governors in open rebellion, and they were not put
down till the prefect Lupus had brought his forces against them. After
this the Jews of Cyrene marched through the desert into Egypt, under the
command of Lucuas, to help their brethren; and the rebellion took the
regular form of a civil war, with all its usual horrors. The emperor
sent against the Jews an army followed by a fleet, which, after numerous
skirmishes and battles, routed them with great slaughter, and drove
numbers of them back into the desert, whence they harassed the village
as robbers. By these unsuccessful appeals to force, the Jews lost all
right to those privileges of citizenship which they always claimed, and
which had been granted by the emperors, though usually refused by the
Alexandrians. The despair and disappointment of the Jews seem in many
cases to have turned their minds to the Christian view of the Old
Testament prophecies; henceforth, says Eusebius, the Jews embraced the
Christian religion more readily and in greater numbers.

In A.D. 122, the sixth year of the reign of Hadrian, Egypt was honoured
by a visit from the emperor. He was led to Egypt at that time by some
riots of a character more serious than usual, which had arisen between
two cities, probably Memphis and Heliopolis, about a bull, as to whether
it was to be Apis or Mnevis. Egypt had been for some years without a
sacred bull; and when at length the priests found one, marked with the
mystic spots, the inhabitants of those two cities flew to arms, and
the peace of the province was disturbed by their religious zeal, each
claiming the bull as their own.

Hadrian also undertook a voyage up the Nile from Alexandria in order to
explore the wonders of Egypt. This was the fashion then, for the ancient
monuments and the banks of this mysterious river offered just as many
attractions at that time as they have done to all nations since
the expedition of Napoleon. That animal-worship, which had remained
unchanged for centuries, a riddle of human religion, was bound to excite
the curiosity of strangers. In this divinisation of animals lay the
greatest contempt for human understanding, and it was a bitter satire
on the apotheosis of kings and emperors. For what was the divinity
of Sesostris, of Alexander, of Augustus, or Hadrian compared with
the heavenly majesty of the ox Apis, or the holy cats, dogs, kites,
crocodiles, and god-apes? Egypt was at this epoch already a museum of
the Pharaoh-time and its enbalamed culture. Strange buildings, rare
sculptures, hieroglyphics, and pictures still filled the ancient towns,
even though these had lost their splendour. Memphis and Heliopolis,
Bubastis, Abydos, Saïs, Tanis, and the hundred-gated Thebes had long
fallen into ruin, although still inhabited.

The emperor’s escort must have been an extraordinary sight as it steered
up the stream on a fleet of dahabiehs. The emperor was accompanied by
students of the museum, interpreters, priests, and astrologers. Amongst
his followers were Verus and the beautiful Antinous.

The Empress Sabina also accompanied him; she had the poetess Julia
Balbilla amongst her court ladies. They landed wherever there was
anything of interest to be seen, and there was more in those days than
there is now. They admired the great pyramids, the colossal sphinx, and
the sacred town of Memphis. This city, the ancient royal seat of the
Pharaohs, and even in Strabo’s time the second town in Egypt, was not
yet buried under the sand of the desert; its disappearance had, however,
already begun. Under the Ptolemies it had given much of the material of
her temples and palaces for the building of Alexandria. The great palace
of the Pharaohs had long been destroyed, but there still remained
many notable monuments, such as the temple of Phtah, the pyramids, the
necropolis, and the Serapeum, and they retained their ancient cult.
The town was still the chief seat of the Egyptian hierarchy and the
residence of Apis; for this very reason the Roman government had
destined it to be one of her strong military stations, for here a legion
was quartered. The emperor could walk through the time-worn avenues of
sphinxes which led to the wonderful vaults where the long succession of
divine animals was buried, each like a Pharaoh, in a magnificent granite
sarcophagus. Hadrian could admire the beautifully sculptured tomb of Di,
an Egyptian officer of the fifth dynasty, with less trouble than we
must experience now; for now the palaces, the pictures of the gods,
and almost all the pyramids are swallowed up in sand. Miserable Arab
villages, such as Saqqâra, have fixed themselves in the ruins of
Memphis, and from a thick palm grove one can look with astonishment
upon the torso of the powerful Ramses II. lying solitary there, the last
witness to the glory of the temple of Phtah, before which this colossus
once had its stand. In the neighbourhood of Memphis lay Heliopolis, the
town of the sun-god, with its ancient temple, and a school of Egyptian
wisdom, in which Plato is supposed to have studied.

In Heliopolis the worship of the god Ra was preserved, the centre of
which was the holy animal Mnevis, a rival or comrade of Apis. Cambyses
had partly destroyed the temple and even the obelisks which the Pharaohs
had in the course of centuries erected to the sun-god; nowhere in Egypt
existed so many of these monuments as here and in Thebes. Hadrian saw
many of them lying half-burnt on the ground just as Strabo had done.
On the site of Heliopolis, now green with wheat-fields, only a single
obelisk has remained upright, which is considered as the oldest of all,
and was erected in the twelfth dynasty by Usirtasen I.

The royal assemblage had arrived in the course of their journey at Besa,
a place on the right bank of the river, opposite Hermopolis, when a
strange event occurred. This was the death of Hadrian’s favourite,
Antinous, a young Greek from Claudiopolis, who had been degraded to the
position of Ganymede to the emperor on account of his beauty. It is not
known where the emperor first came across the youth; possibly in his
native land, Bithynia. Not till he came to Egypt did he become his
inseparable companion, and this must have been a deep offence to
his wife. The unfortunate queen was delivered in Besa from his hated
presence, for Antinous was drowned there in the Nile.

His death was surrounded by mystery. Was it accident? Was he a victim?
Hadrian’s humanity protects him from the suspicion that he sacrificed
his victim in cold blood, as Tiberius had once sacrificed the beautiful
Hypatus in Capri. Had the fantastic youth sacrificed himself of his own
free will to the death divinities in order to save the emperor’s life?
Had the Egyptian priests foreseen in the stars some danger threatening
Hadrian, only to be averted by the death of his favourite? Such an idea
commended itself to the superstition of the time, especially in
this land and by the mysterious Nile. It corresponded, too, with the
emperor’s astrological arts. Was Antinous certain when he plunged into
the waves of the Nile that he would arise from them as a god? Hadrian
asserts in his memoirs that it was an accident, but no one believed him.
The divine honours which he paid to the dead youth lead us to suppose
that they formed the reward of a self-sacrifice, which, according to the
custom of those times, constituted a highly moral action, and was looked
upon as heroic devotion. At any rate, we will assume that this sacrifice
sank into the Nile without Hadrian’s will. Hadrian mourned for Antinous
with unspeakable pain and “womanly tears.” Now he was Achilles by the
corpse of Patroklus, or Alexander by the pyre of the dead Hephaistus.
He had the youth splendidly buried in Besa. This most extraordinary
intermezzo of all Nile journeys supplied dying heathendom with a new
god, and art with its last ideal form. Probably, also, during the
burial, far-sighted courtiers already saw the star of Antinous shining
in Egypt’s midnight sky, and then Hadrian saw it himself.

In the mystical land of Egypt, life might still be poetical even in the
clear daylight of Roman universal history in the reign of Hadrian. The
death of the young Bithynian seems to have occurred in October, 130.
The emperor continued his journey as soon as he had given orders for
a splendid town to be erected on the site of Besa, in honour of his
friend. In November, 130, the royal company is to be found amongst the
ruins of Thebes.

Thebes, the oldest town in Egypt, had been first put in the shade
by Memphis, and then destroyed by Cambyses. Since the time of the
Ptolemies, it had been called Diospolis, and Ptolemais had taken its
place as capital of the Thebaid. Already in Strabo’s time it was split
up. It formed on either side of the Nile groups of gigantic temples and
palaces, monuments, and royal graves similar to those scattered to-day
amongst Luxor, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, Deir-el-Bahari, and Kurna.

[Illustration: 095.jpg COMMEMORATIVE COIN OF ANTINOUS]

In Hadrian’s time the Rameseum, the so-called grave of Osymandias, on
the western bank of the Nile, the wonderful building of Ramses II.,
must still have been in good repair. These pylons, pillars, arcades, and
courts, these splendid halls with their sculpture-covered walls, appear
even to have influenced the Roman art in the time of the emperors. Their
reflex influence has been even seen in Trajan’s forum, in which the
chief thing was the emperor’s tomb.

In Alexandria the emperor mixed freely with the professors of the
museum, asking them questions and answering theirs in return; and he
dropped his tear of pity on the tomb of the great Pompey, in the form of
a Greek epigram, though with very little point. He laid out large sums
of money in building and ornamenting the city, and the Alexandrians were
much pleased with his behaviour. Among other honours that they paid
him, they changed the name of the month December, calling it the month
Hadrian; but as they were not followed by the rest of the empire the
name soon went out of use. The emperor’s patronage of philosophy was
rather at the cost of the Alexandrian museum, for he enrolled among its
paid professors men who were teaching from school to school in Italy and
Asia Minor. Thus Polemon of Laodicea, who taught oratory and philosophy
at Rome, Laodicea, and Smyrna, and had the right of a free passage for
himself and his servants in any of the public ships whenever he chose to
move from city to city for the purposes of study or teaching, had at
the same time a salary from the Alexandrian museum. Dionysius of Miletus
also received his salary as a professor in the museum while teaching
philosophy and mnemonicsat Miletus and Ephesus. Pancrates, the
Alexandrian poet, gained his salary in the museum by the easy task of a
little flattery. On Hadrian’s return to Alexandria from the Thebaid, the
poet presented to him a rose-coloured lotus, a flower well known in
India, though less common in Egypt than either the blue or white lotus,
and assured him that it had sprung out of the blood of the lion slain by
his royal javelin at a lion-hunt in Libya.

[Illustration: 097.jpg ROSE-COLOURED LOTUS]

The emperor was pleased with the compliment, and gave him a place in the
museum; and Pancrates in return named the plant the lotus of Antinous.
Pancrates was a warm admirer of the mystical opinions of the Egyptians
which were then coming into note in Alexandria. He was said to have
lived underground in holy solitude or converse with the gods for
twenty-three years, and during that time to have been taught magic by
the goddess Isis, and thus to have gained the power of working miracles.
He learned to call upon the queen of darkness by her Egyptian name
Hecate, and when driving out evil spirits to speak to them in the
Egyptian language. Whether these Greek students of the Eastern mysticism
were deceivers or deceived, whether they were led by a love of notoriety
or of knowledge, is in most cases doubtful, but they were surrounded by
a crowd of credulous admirers, who formed a strange contrast with the
sceptics and critics of the museum.

Among the Alexandrian grammarians of this reign was Apollonius Dyscolus,
so called perhaps from a moroseness of manner, who wrote largely on
rhetoric, on the Greek dialects, on accents, prosody, and on other
branches of grammar. In the few pages that remain of his numerous
writings, we trace the love of the marvellous which was then growing
among some of the philosophers. He tells us many remarkable stories,
which he collected rather as a judicious inquirer than as a credulous
believer; such as of second sight; an account of a lad who fell asleep
in the field while watching his sheep, and then slept for fifty-seven
years, and awoke to wonder at the strangeness of the changes that had
taken place in the meanwhile; and of a man who after death used from
time to time to leave his body, and wander over the earth as a spirit,
till his wife, tired of his coming back again so often, put a stop to it
by having his mummy burnt. He gives us for the first time Eastern tales
in a Greek dress, and we thus learn the source from which Europe gained
much of its literature in the Middle Ages. The Alexandrian author of
greatest note at this time was the historian Appian, who tells us that
he had spent some years in Rome practising as a lawyer, and returned to
Egypt on being appointed to a high post in the government of his native
city. There he wrote his Roman history.

In this reign the Jews, forgetful of what they had just suffered under
Trajan, again rose against the power of Rome; and, when Judæa rebelled
against its prefect, Tinnius Rufus, a little army of Jews marched out of
Egypt and Libya, to help their brethren and to free the holy land
(130 A.D.). But they were everywhere routed and put down with resolute
slaughter.

[Illustration: 099.jpg VOCAL STATUE OF AMENHOTHES]

Travellers, on reaching a distant point of a journey, or on viewing any
remarkable object of their curiosity, have at all times been fond of
carving or scribbling their names on the spot, to boast of their
prowess to after-comers; and never had any place been more favoured with
memorials of this kind than the great statue of Amenhôthes at Thebes.
This colossal statue, fifty-three feet high, was famed, as long as
the Egyptian priesthood lasted, for sending forth musical sounds
every morning at sunrise, when first touched by the sun’s rays; and no
traveller ever visited Thebes without listening for these remarkable
notes. The journey through Upper Egypt was at this time perfectly open
and safe, and the legs and feet of the statue are covered with names,
and inscriptions in prose and verse, of travellers who had visited it
at sunrise during the reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines. From these
curious memorials we learn that Hadrian visited Thebes a second time
with his queen, Sabina, in the fifteenth year of his reign. When the
empress first visited the statue she was disappointed at not hearing
the musical sounds; but, on her hinting threats of the emperor’s
displeasure, her curiosity was gratified on the following morning.
This gigantic statue of hard gritstone had formerly been broken in half
across the waist, and the upper part thrown to the ground, either by the
shock of an earthquake or the ruder shock of Persian zeal against the
Egyptian religion; and for some centuries past the musical notes had
issued from the broken fragments. Such was its fallen state when
the Empress Sabina saw it, and when Strabo and Juvenal and Pausanias
listened to its sounds; and it was not till after the reign of Hadrian
that it was again raised upright like its companion, as travellers now
see it.

[Illustration: 100b..jpg The Slumber Song]

     From the painting by P. Grot. Johann

From this second visit, and a longer acquaintance, Hadrian seems to have
formed a very poor opinion of the Egyptians and Egyptian Jews; and the
following curious letter, written in 134 A.D. to his friend Servianus,
throws much light upon their religion as worshippers of Serapis, at
the same time that it proves how numerous the Christians had become in
Alexandria, even within seventy years of the period during which the
evangelist Mark is believed to have preached there:

“Hadrian Augustus to Servianus, the consul, greeting:

“As for Egypt, which you were praising to me, dearest Servianus, I have
found its people wholly light, wavering, and flying after every breath
of a report. Those who worship Serapis are Christians, and those who
call themselves bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis. There is
no ruler of a Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no presbyter of the
Christians, who is not a mathematician, an augur, and a soothsayer. The
very patriarch himself, when he came into Egypt, was by some said to
worship Serapis, and by others to worship Christ. As a race of men, they
are seditious, vain, and spiteful; as a body, wealthy and prosperous,
of whom nobody lives in idleness. Some blow glass, some make paper, and
others linen. There is work for the lame and work for the blind; even
those who have lost the use of their hands do not live in idleness.
Their one god is nothing; Christians, Jews, and all nations worship him.
I wish this body of men was better behaved, and worthy of their number;
for as for that they ought to hold the chief place in Egypt. I have
granted everything unto them; I have restored their old privileges, and
have made them grateful by adding new ones.”


Among the crowd of gods that had formerly been worshipped in Egypt,
Serapis had latterly been rising above the rest. He was the god of
the dead, who in the next world was to reward the good and punish the
wicked; and in the growing worship of this one all-seeing judge we
cannot but trace the downfall of some of the evils of polytheism. A
plurality in unity was another method now used to explain away the
polytheism.

[Illustration: 102.jpg EGYPTIAN ORACLE]

The oracle when consulted about the divine nature had answered, “I am
Ra, and Horus, and Osiris;” or, as the Greeks translated it, Apollo,
and Lord, and Bacchus; “I rule the hours and the seasons, the wind and
the storms, the day and the night; I am king of the stars and myself an
immortal fire.” Hence arose the opinion which seems to have been given
to Hadrian, that the Egyptians had only one god, and his mistake in
thinking that the worshippers of Serapis were Christians. The emperor,
indeed, himself, though a polytheist, was very little of an idolater;
for, though he wished to add Christ to the number of the Roman gods,
he on the other hand ordered that the temples built in his reign should
have no images for worship; and in after ages it was common to call
all temples without statues Hadrian’s temples. But there were other and
stronger reasons for Hadrian’s classing the Christians with the Egyptian
astrologers. A Christian heresy was then rising into notice in Egypt in
that very form, taking its opinions from the philosophy on which it was
engrafted. Before Christianity was preached in Alexandria, there were
already three religions or forms of philosophy belonging to the three
races of men who peopled that busy city; first, the Greek philosophy;
which was chiefly platonism; secondly, the mysticism of the Egyptians;
and lastly, the religion of the Jews. These were often more or less
mixed, as we see them all united in the works of Philo-Judæ; and in
the writings of the early converts we usually find Christianity clothed
in one or other of these forms, according to the opinions held by the
writers before their conversion. The first Christian teachers, the
apostolic fathers as they are called, because they had been hearers of
the apostles themselves, were mostly Jews; but among the Egyptians and
Greeks of Alexandria their religion lost much of its purely moral caste,
and became, with the former, an astrological mysticism, and with the
latter an abstract speculative theology. It is of the Egyptian Jews that
Hadrian speaks in his letter just quoted; many of them had been already
converted to Christianity, and their religion had taken the form of
Gnosticism.

Gnosticism, or Science, for the name means no more, was not then new
in Alexandria, nor were its followers originally Christians. It was the
proud name claimed for their opinions by those who studied the Eastern
philosophy of the Magi; and Egypt seems to have been as much its native
soil as India. The name of Gnostic, says Weber, was generally given to
those who distinguished between belief on authority and gnosis, i.e.,
between the ordinary comprehension and a higher knowledge only granted
to a few gifted or chosen ones. They were split up into different sects,
according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the
platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its
symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant. The “creed of those
who know” never reached actual monotheism, the conception of one
personal god, who created everything according to his own free will and
rules over everything with unlimited wisdom and love. The god of
the Gnostics is a dark, mysterious being which can only arrive at a
consciousness of itself through a manifold descending scale of forces,
which flow from the god himself. The visible world was created out of
dead and evil matter by Demiurgos, the divine work-master, a production
and subordinate of the highest god. Man, too, is a production of this
subordinate creator, a production subject to a blind fate, and a prey to
those powers which rule between heaven and earth, without free-will,
the only thing which makes the ideas of sin and responsibility possible.
Matter is the seat of evil, and as long as man stands under the
influence of this matter, he is in the hands of evil and knows no
freedom. Redemption can only reach him through those higher beings of
light, which free man from the power of matter and translate him into
the kingdom of light. According to the Gnostic teaching, Christ is
one of these beings of light; he is one of the highest who appeared on
earth, and is transformed into a mythical, allegorical being, with
his human nature, his sufferings and death completely suppressed. The
redeemed soul is then as a kind of angel, or ideal being, brought in
triumph into the idealistic realm of light as soon as it has purified
itself to the nature of a spirit, by means of penitence, chastisements,
and finally the death of the physical body. Hence the Gnostics attached
little importance to the means of mercy in the Church, to the Bible, or
the sacraments; they allowed the Church teaching to exist as a necessary
conception for the people, but they placed their own teachings far above
it as mysterious or secret teachings. As regards their morals and
mode of life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes. It was due to
Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It
preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up
entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own
hollowness and eccentricity.

We still possess the traces of the Gnostic astrology in a number of
amulets and engraved gems, with the word _Abraxas_ or rather _Abrasax_
and other emblems of their superstition, which they kept as charms
against diseases and evil spirits. The word _Abrasax_ may be translated
_Hurt me not_. To their mystic rites we may trace many of the reproaches
thrown upon Christianity, such as that the Christians worshipped the
head of an ass, using the animal’s Koptic name _Eeo_, to represent the
name of IAn, or Jahveh. To the same source we may also trace some of
the peculiarities of the Christian fathers, such as St. Ambrose calling
Jesus “the good scarabæus, who rolled up before him the hitherto
un-shapen mud of our bodies;” a thought which seems to have been
borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insect’s habits; and
perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous
to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word _only begotten_. We
trace this thought on the Gnostic gems where Ave see a winged griffin
rolling before him a wheel, the emblem of eternity. He sits like a
conqueror on horseback, trampling under foot the serpent of old, the
spirit of sin and death. His horse is in the form of a ram, with an
eagle’s head and the crowned asp or basilisk for its tail. Before him
stands the figure of victory giving him a crown; above are written the
words Alpha and Omega, and below perhaps the word [IAH], Jahveh.

So far we have seen the form which Christianity at first took among the
Egyptians; but, as few writings by these Gnostics have come down to
our time, we chiefly know their opinions from the reproaches of their
enemies. It was not till the second generation of Gnostic teachers were
spreading their heresies that the Greek philosophers began to embrace
Christianity, or the Christians to study Greek literature; but as soon
as that was the case we have an unbroken chain of writings, in which
we find Christianity more or less mixed with the Alexandrian form of
platonism.

[Illustration: 106.jpg KOPTIC CHARM AND SCARABEUS]

The philosopher Justin, after those who had talked with the apostles,
is the earliest Christian writer whose works have reached us. He was a
Greek, born in Samaria; but he studied many years in Alexandria under
philosophers of all opinions. He did not, however, at once find in
the schools the wisdom he was in search for. The Stoic could teach him
nothing about God; the Peripatetic wished to be paid for his lessons
before he gave them; and the Pythagorean proposed to begin with music
and mathematics.

[Illustration: 107.jpg GNOSTIC GEM]

Not content with these, Justin turned to the platonist, whose purer
philosophy seemed to add wings to his thoughts, and taught him to mount
aloft towards true wisdom. While turning over in his mind what he had
thus learned in the several schools, dissatisfied with the philosopher’s
views, he chanced one day to meet with an old man walking on the
seashore near Alexandria, to whom he unbosomed his thoughts, and by whom
he was converted to Christianity. Justin tells us that there were no
people, whether Greeks or barbarians, or even dwellers in tent and
waggons, among whom prayers were not offered up to the heavenly father
in the name of the crucified Jesus. The Christians met every Sunday for
public worship, which began with a reading from the prophets, or from
the memoirs of the apostles called the gospels. This was followed by
a sermon, a prayer, the bread and wine, and a second prayer. Justin’s
quotations prove that he is speaking of the New Testament, which within
a hundred years of the crucifixion wras read in all the principal cities
in which Greek was spoken. Justin died as a martyr in 163 A.D.

The platonic professorship in Alexandria had usually been held by an
Athenian, and for a short time Athenagoras of Athens taught that branch
of philosophy in the museum; but he afterwards embraced the Christian
religion, and then taught Christianity openly in Alexandria. He enjoys
with Justin the honour of being one of the first men of learning who
were converted, and, like Justin, his chief work is an apology for the
Christians, addressed to the emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

[Illustration: 108.jpg GEMS SHOWING SYMBOL OF DEATH AND THE WORD [ÎAH]
JAVEH]

Athenagoras confines himself in his defence to the resurrection from
the dead and the unity of the Deity, the points chiefly attacked by the
pagans.

Hadrian’s Egyptian coins are remarkable both for number and variety. In
the sixth year of the reign we see a ship with spread sails, most likely
in gratitude for the emperor’s safe arrival in Egypt. In the eighth year
we see the head of the favourite Antinous, who had been placed among the
gods of the country. In the eleventh year, when the emperor took up the
tribunitial power at Rome for a second period of ten years, we find a
series of coins, each bearing the name of the nome or district in which
it was coined. This indeed is the most remarkable year of the most
remarkable reign in the whole history of coinage; we have numerous coins
for every year of this reign, and, in this year, for nearly every nome
in Egypt. Some coins are strongly marked with the favourite opinion of
the Gnostics as to the opposition between good and evil.

[Illustration: 109.jpg Hadrian’s Egyptian coins]

On one we have the war between the serpent of good and the serpent of
evil, distinguished by their different forms and by the emblems of Isis
and Serapis; on others the heads of Isis and Serapis, the principles of
love and fear; while on a third these two are united into a trinity by
Horus, who is standing on an eagle instead of having an eagle’s head, as
represented on previous coins.

The beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138) was remarkable
as being the end of the Sothic period of one thousand four hundred and
sixty years; the movable new year’s day of the calendar had come round
to the place in the natural year from which it first began to move in
the reign of Menophres or Thûtmosis III.; it had come round to the day
when the dog-star rose heliacally. If the years had been counted from
the beginning of this great year, there could have been no doubt when it
came to an end, as from the want of a leap year the new year’s day
must have been always moving one day in four years; but no satisfactory
reckoning of the years had been kept, and, as the end of the period was
only known by observation, there was some little doubt about the exact
year. Indeed, among the Greek astronomers, Dositheus said the dog-star
rises heliacally twenty-three days after midsummer, Meton twenty-eight
days, and Euctemon thirty-one days; they thus left a doubt of thirty-two
years as to when the period should end, but the statesmen placed it in
the first year of the reign of Antoninus. This end of the Sothic period
Avas called the return to the phoenix, and had been looked forward to by
the Egyptians for many years, and is well marked on the coins of this
reign. The coins for the first eight years teem with astronomy. There
are several with the goddess Isis in a boat, which we know, from the
zodiac in the Memnonium at Thebes, was meant for the heliacal rising of
the dog-star. In the second and in the sixth year we find on the coins
the remarkable word aion, _the age_ or _period_, and an ibis with a
glory of rays round its head, meant for the bird phoenix. In the seventh
year we see Orpheus playing on his lyre while all the animals of the
forest are listening, thus pointing out the return of the golden age.
In the eighth year we have the head of Serapis circled by the seven
planets, and the whole within the twelve signs of the zodiac; and on
another coin we have the sun and moon within the signs of the zodiac. A
series of twelve coins for the same year tells us that the house of the
sun, in the language of the astrologers, is in the lion, that of the
moon in the crab, the houses of Venus in the scales and the bull, those
of Mars in the scorpion and the ram, those of Jupiter in the archer
and the fishes, those of Saturn in the sea-goat and aquarius, those of
Mercury in the virgin and the twins. On the coins of the same year we
have the eagle and thunderbolt, the sphinx, the bull Apis, the Nile and
crocodile, Isis nursing the child Horus, the hawk-headed Aroëris, and
the winged sun. On coins of other years we have a camelopard, Horus
sitting on the lotus-flower, and a sacrifice to Isis, which was
celebrated on the last day of the year.

The coins also tell us of the bountiful overflow of the Nile, and of
the goodness of the harvests that followed; thus, in the ninth, tenth,
thirteenth, and seventeenth years, we see the river Nile in the form
of an old man leaning on a crocodile, pouring corn and fruit out of a
cornucopia, while a child by his side, with the figures 36, tells
us that in those years the waters of the Nile rose at Memphis to the
wished-for height of sixteen cubits. From these latter coins it would
seem that but little change had taken place in the soil of the Delta by
the yearly deposit of mud; Herodotus says that sixteen cubits was the
wished-for rise of the Nile at Memphis when he was there. And we should
almost think that the seasons were more favourable to the husbandman
during the reign of an Antonine than of a Caligula, did we not set it
down to the canals being better cleansed by the care of the prefect, and
to the mildness of the government leaving the people at liberty to enjoy
the bounties of nature, and at the same time making them more grateful
in acknowledging them.

[Illustration: 112.jpg COINS OF ANTONINUS PIUS.]

The mystic emblems on the coins are only what we might look for from the
spread of the Gnostic opinions, and the eagerness with which the Greeks
were copying the superstitions of the Egyptians; and, while astrology
was thus countenanced by the state, of course it was not less followed
by the people. The poor Jews took to it as a trade. In Alexandria the
Jewess, half beggar, half fortune-teller, would stop people in the
streets and interpret dreams by the help of the Bible, or sit under a
sacred tree like a sibyl, and promise wealth to those who consulted her,
duly proportioned to the size of the coin by which she was paid. We find
among the Theban ruins pieces of papyrus with inscriptions, describing
the positions of the heavens at particular hours in this reign, for the
astrologers therewith to calculate the nativities of the persons then
born. On one is a complete horoscope, containing the places of the sun,
moon, and every planet, noted down on the zodiac in degrees and minutes
of a degree; and with these particulars the mathematician undertook to
foretell the marriage, fortune, and death of the person who had been
born at the instant when the heavenly bodies were so situated; and, as
the horoscope was buried in the tomb with the mummy, we must suppose
that it was thought that the prognostication would hold good even in the
next world.

But astrology was not the only end to which mathematics were then
turned. Claudius Ptolemy, the astronomer and geographer, was at that
time the ornament of the mathematical school of Alexandria. In his
writings he treats of the earth as the centre of the heavens, and the
sun, moon, and planets as moving in circles and epicycles round it. This
had been the opinion of some of the early astronomers; but since this
theory of the heavens received the stamp of his authority, it is now
always called the Ptolemaic system.

In this reign was made a new survey of all the military roads in the
Roman empire, called the _Itinerary of Antoninus_. It included the
great roads of Egypt, which were only six in number. One was from
Contra-Pselcis in Nubia along the east bank of the Nile, to Babylon
opposite Memphis, and there turning eastward through Heliopolis and the
district of the Jews to Clysmon, where Trajan’s canal entered the Red
Sea. A second, from Memphis to Pelusium, made use of this for
about thirty miles, joining it at Babylon, and leaving it at Scense
Veteranorum. By these two roads a traveller could go from Pelusium to
the head of the Red Sea; but there was a shorter road through the desert
which joined the first at Serapion, about fifty miles from Clysmon,
instead of at Sceno Veteranorum, which was therefore about a hundred
miles shorter. A fourth was along the west bank of the Nile from Hiera
Sycaminon in Nubia to Alexandria, leaving the river at Andropolis,
about sixty miles from the latter city. A fifth was from Palestine to
Alexandria, running along the coast of the Mediterranean from Raphia to
Pelusium, and thence, leaving the coast to avoid the flat country, which
was under water during the inundation; it joined the last at Andropolis.
The sixth road was from Koptos on the Nile to Berenicê on the Red Sea.
These six were probably the only roads under the care of the prefect.
Though Syênê was the boundary of the province of Egypt, the Roman power
was felt for about one hundred miles into Nubia, and we find the names
of the emperors on several temples between Syênê and Hiera Sycaminon.
But beyond this, though we find inscriptions left by Roman travellers,
the emperors seem never to have aimed at making military roads, or
holding any cities against the inroads of the Blemmyes and other Arabs.

To this survey we must add the valuable geographical knowledge given
by Arrian in his voyage round the shores of the Red Sea, which has come
down to us in an interesting document, wherein he mentions the several
seaports and their distances, with the tribes and cities near the
coast. The trade of Egypt to India, Ethiopia, and Arabia was then most
valuable, and carried on with great activity; but, as the merchandise
was in each case carried only for short distances from city to city, the
traveller could gain but little knowledge of where it came from, or even
sometimes of where it was going.

[Illustration: 115.jpg STATUE OF THE NILE]

The Egyptians sent coarse linen, glass bottles, brazen vessels, brass
for money, and iron for weapons of war and hunting; and they received
back ivory, rhinoceros’ teeth, Indian steel, Indian ink, silks, slaves,
tortoise-shell, myrrh, and other scents, with many other Eastern
articles of high price and little weight. The presents which the
merchants made to the petty kings of Arabia were chiefly horses, mules,
and gold and silver vases. Beside this, the ports on the Red Sea carried
on a brisk trade among themselves in grain, expressed oil, wicker
boats, and sugar. Of sugar, or honey from the cane, this is perhaps
the earliest mention found in history; but Arrian does not speak of
the sugar-cane as then new, nor does he tell us where it was grown. Had
sugar been then seen for the first time he would certainly have said
so; it must have been an article well known in the Indian trade. While
passing through Egypt on his travels, or while living there and holding
some post under the prefect, the historian Arrian has left us his name
and a few lines of poetry carved on the foot of the great sphinx near
the pyramids.

At this time also the travellers continued to carve their names and
their feelings of wonder on the foot of the musical statue at Thebes and
in the deep empty tombs of the Theban kings. These inscriptions are full
of curious information. For example, it has been doubted whether the
Roman army was provided with medical officers. Their writers have not
mentioned them. But part of the Second Legion was at this time stationed
at Thebes; and one Asclepiades, while cutting his name in a tomb which
once held some old Theban, has cleared up the doubt for us, by saying
that he was physician to the Second Legion.

Antoninus made a hippodrome, or race-course, for the amusement of the
citizens of Alexandria, and built two gates to the city, called the gate
of the sun and the gate of the moon, the former fronting the harbour and
the latter fronting the lake Mareotis, and joined by the great street
which ran across the whole width of the city. But this reign was not
wholly without trouble; there was a rebellion in which the prefect
Dinarchus lost his life, and for which the Alexandrians were severely
punished by the emperor.

[Illustration: 117.jpg COINS OF MARCUS AURELIUS]

The coins of Marcus Aurelius, the successor of Antoninus Pius, have a
rich variety of subjects, falling not far short of those of the last
reign. On those of the fifth year, the bountiful overflow of the Nile is
gratefully acknowledged by the figure of the god holding a cornucopia,
and a troop of sixteen children playing round him. It had been not
unusual in hieroglyphical writing to express a thought by means of a
figure which in the Koptic language had nearly the same sound; and we
have seen this copied on the coins in the case of a Greek word, when the
bird phoenix was used for the palm-branch phoenix, or the hieroglyphical
word _year_; and a striking instance may be noticed in the case of a
Latin word, as the sixteen children or _cupids_ mean sixteen _cubits_,
the wished-for height of the Nile’s overflow. The statue of the Nile,
which had been carried by Vespasian to Rome and placed in the temple of
Peace, was surrounded by the same sixteen children. On the coins of his
twelfth year the sail held up by the goddess Isis is blown towards the
Pharos lighthouse, as if in that year the emperor had been expected in
Alexandria.

We find no coins in the eleventh or fourteenth years of this reign,
which makes it probable that it was in the eleventh year (A.D. 172) that
the rebellion of the native soldiers took place. These were very likely
Arabs who had been admitted into the ranks of the legions, but having
withdrawn to the desert they now harassed the towns with their marauding
inroads, and a considerable time elapsed before they were wholly put
down by Avidius Cassius at the head of the legions. But Cassius himself
was unable to resist the temptations which always beset a successful
general, and after this victory he allowed himself to be declared
emperor by the legions of Egypt; and this seems to have been the cause
of no coins being struck in Alexandria in the fourteenth year of the
reign. Cassius left his son Moecianus in Alexandria with the title of
Pretorian Prefect, while he himself marched into Syria to secure that
province. There the legions followed the example of their brethren in
Egypt, and the Syrians were glad to acknowledge a general of the Eastern
armies as their sovereign. But on Marcus leading an army into Syria he
was met with the news that the rebels had repented, and had put Cassius
to death, and he then moved his forces towards Egypt; but before his
arrival the Egyptian legions had in the same manner put Moecianus to
death, and all had returned to their allegiance.

When Marcus arrived in Alexandria the citizens were agreeably surprised
by the mildness of his conduct. He at once forgave his enemies; and
no offenders were put to death for having joined in the rebellion. The
severest punishment, even to the children of Cassius, was banishment
from the province, but without restraint, and with the forfeiture of
less than half their patrimony. In Alexandria the emperor laid aside the
severity of the soldier, and mingled with the people as a fellow-citizen
in the temples and public places; while with the professors in the
museum he was a philosopher, joining them in their studies in the
schools.

Borne and Athens at this time alike looked upon Alexandria as the centre
of the world’s learning. The library was then in its greatest glory;
the readers were numerous, and Christianity had as yet raised no doubts
about the value of its pagan treasures. All the wisdom of Greece,
written on rolls of brittle papyrus or tough parchment, was ranged in
boxes on the shelves. Of these writings the few that have been saved
from the wreck of time are no doubt some of the best, and they are
perhaps enough to guide our less simple taste towards the unornamented
grace of the Greek model. But we often fancy those treasures most
valuable that are beyond our reach, and hence when we run over the names
of the authors in this library we think perhaps too much of those which
are now missing. The student in the museum could have read the lyric
poems of Alcæus and Stersichorus, which in matter and style were
excellent enough to be judged not quite so good as Homer; the tender
lamentations of Simonides; the warm breathings of Sappho, the tenth
muse; the pithy iambics of Archilochus, full of noble flights and
brave irregularities; the comedies of Menander, containing every kind
of excellence; those of Eupolis and Cratinus, which were equal to
Aristophanes; the histories of Theopompus, which in the speeches were
as good as Thucydides; the lively, agreeable orations of Hyperides, the
accuser of Demosthenes; with the books of travels, chronologies, and
countless others of less merit for style and genius, but which, if they
had been saved, would not have left Egypt wholly without a history.

[Illustration: 120.jpg ALEXANDRIAN FORMS OF WRITING]

The trade of writing and making copies of the old authors employed
a great many hands in the neighbourhood of the museum. Two kinds of
handwriting were in use. One was a running hand, with the letters joined
together in rather a slovenly manner; and the other a neat, regular
hand, with the letters square and larger, written more slowly but read
more easily. Those that wrote the first were called _quick-writers_,
those that wrote the second were called _book-writers_. If an author was
not skilled in the use of the pen, he employed a _quickwriter_ to write
down his words as he delivered them. But in order that his work might be
published it was handed over to the _book-writers_ to be copied out more
neatly; and numbers of young women, skilled in penmanship, were employed
in the trade of copying books for sale. For this purpose parchment
was coming into use, though the old papyrus was still used, as an
inexpensive though less lasting writing material.

Athenæus, if we may judge from Iris writings, was then the brightest of
the Alexandrian wits and men of learning. We learn from his own pages
that he was born at Naucratis, and was the friend of Pancrates, who
lived under Hadrian, and also of Oppian, who died in the reign of
Caracalla. His _Deipnosophist_, or table-talk of the philosophers, is a
large work full of pleasing anecdotes and curious information, gathered
from comic writers and authors without number that have long since been
lost. But it is put together with very little skill. His industry and
memory are more remarkable than his judgment or good taste; and the
table-talk is too often turned towards eating and drinking. His amusing
work is a picture of society in Alexandria, where everything frivolous
was treated as grave, and everything serious was laughed at. The wit
sinks into scandal, the humour is at the cost of morality, and the
numerous quotations are chosen for their point, not for any lofty
thoughts or noble feeling. Alexandria was then as much the seat of
literary wit as it was of dry criticism; and Martial, the lively author
of the _Epigrams_, had fifty years before remarked that there were few
places in the world where he would more wish his verses to be repeated
than on the banks of the Nile.

Nothing could be lower than the poetic taste in Alexandria at this time.
The museum was giving birth to a race of poets who, instead of bringing
forth thoughts out of their own minds, found them in the storehouse of
the memory only. They wrote their patchwork poems by the help of Homer’s
lines, which they picked from all parts of the Iliad and Odyssey and
so put together as to make them tell a new tale. They called themselves
Homeric poets.

Lucian, the author of the _Dialogues_, was at that time secretary to the
prefect of Egypt, and this philosopher found a broad mark for his
humour in the religion of the Egyptians, their worship of animals and
water-jars, their love of magic, the general mourning through the land
on the death of the bull Apis, their funeral ceremonies, their placing
of their mummies round the dinner-table as so many guests, and pawning a
father or a brother when in want of money.

[Illustration: 122.jpg A SNAKE-CHARMER]

So little had the customs changed that the young Egyptians of high birth
still wore their long hair tied in one lock, and hanging over the right
ear, as we see on the Theban sculptures fifteen centuries earlier. It
was then a mark of royalty, but had since been adopted by many families
of high rank, and continues to be used even in the twentieth century.

[Illustration: 123.jpg THE SIGN OF NOBILITY]

Before the end of this reign we meet with a strong proof of the spread
of Christianity in Egypt. The number of believers made it necessary for
the Bishop of Alexandria to appoint three bishops under him, to look
after the churches in three other cities; and accordingly Demetrius, who
then held that office, took upon himself the rank, if not the name, of
Patriarch of Alexandria. A second proof of the spread of Christianity
is the pagan philosophers thinking it necessary to write against it.
Celsus, an Epicurean of Alexandria, was one of the first to attack it.
Origen answered the several arguments of Celsus with skill and candour.
He challenges his readers to a comparison between the Christians and
pagans in point of morals, in Alexandria or in any other city. He
argues in the most forcible way that Christianity had overcome all
difficulties, and had spread itself far and wide against the power of
kings and emperors, and he says that nobody but a Christian ever died
a martyr to the truth of his religion. He makes good use of the Jewish
prophecies; but he brings forward no proofs in support of the truth of
the gospel history; they were not wanted, as Celsus and the pagans had
not considered it necessary to call it into question.

Another proof of the number of Egyptian Christians is seen in the
literary frauds of which their writers were guilty, most likely to
satisfy the minds of those pagan converts that they had already made
rather than from a wish to make new believers. About this time was
written by an unknown Christian author a poem in eight books, named the
_Sibylline Verses_ which must not be mistaken for the pagan fragments
of the same name. It is written in the form of a prophecy, in the style
used by the Gnostics, and is full of dark sentences and half-expressed
hints.

Another spurious Christian work of about the same time is the
_Clementina_, or the _Recognitions of Clemens_, Bishop of Rome. It is
an account of the travels of the Apostle Peter and his conversation with
Simon Magus; but the author’s knowledge of the Egyptian mythology, of
the opinions of the Greek philosophers, and of the astrological rules by
which fortunes are foretold from the planets’ places, amply prove that
he was an Egyptian or an Alexandrian. No name ranked higher among the
Christians than that of Clemens Romanus; and this is only one out of
several cases of Christian authors who wished to give weight to their
own opinions by passing them upon the world as his writings.

Marcus Aurelius, who died in 181 A.D., had pardoned the children of the
rebel general Avidius Cassius, but Commodus began his reign by putting
them to death; and, while thus disregarding the example and advice of
his father, he paid his memory the idle compliment of continuing his
series of dates on his own coins. But the Egyptian coinage of Commodus
clearly betrays the sad change that was gradually taking place in the
arts of the country; we no longer see the former beauty and variety of
subjects; and the silver, which had before been very much mixed with
copper, was under Commodus hardly to be known from brass.

[Illustration: 125.jpg CARTOUCHE OF COMMODUS]

Commodus was very partial to the Egyptian superstitions, and he adopted
the tonsure, and had his head shaven like a priest of Isis, that he
might more properly carry an Anubis staff in sacred processions, which
continued to be a feature of the religious activities of the age. Upper
Egypt had latterly been falling off in population. It had been drained
of all its hoarded wealth. Its carrying trade through Koptos to the Red
Sea was much lessened. Any tribute that its temples received from the
piety of the neighbourhood was small. Nubia was a desert; and a few
soldiers at Syênê were enough to guard the poverty of the Thebaid
from the inroads of the Blemmyes. It was no longer necessary to
send criminals to the Oasis; it was enough to banish them to the
neighbourhood of Thebes. Hence we learn but little of the state of
the country. Now and then a traveller, after measuring the pyramids of
Memphis and the underground tombs of Thebes, might venture as far as the
cataracts, and watch the sun at noon on the longest day shining to the
bottom of the sacred well at Syênê, like the orator Aristides and his
friend Dion. But such travellers were few; the majority of those who
made this journey have left the fact on record.

The celebrated museum, which had held the vast library of the Ptolemies,
had been burnt by the soldiers of Julius Cæsar in one of their battles
with the Egyptian army in the streets of Alexandria; but the loss had
been in part repaired by Mark Antony’s gift of the library from Pergamus
to the temple of Serapis. The new library, however, would seem to have
been placed in a building somewhat separated from the temple, as when
the temple of Serapis was burnt in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and
again when it was in part destroyed by fire in the second year of this
reign we hear of no loss of books; and two hundred years later the
library of the Serapium, it is said, had risen to the number of seven
hundred thousand volumes. The temple-keeper to the great god Serapis, or
one of the temple-keepers, at this time was Asclepiades, a noted boxer
and wrestler, who had been made chief of the wrestling-ground and had
received the high rank of the emperor’s freedman. He set up a statue to
his father Demetrius, an equally noted boxer and wrestler, who had been
chief priest of the wrestling-ground and of the emperor’s baths in the
last reign.

[Illustration: 126.jpg THE ANUBIS STAFF]

Another favourite in the theatre was Apolaustus of Memphis, who removed
to Rome, where he was crowned as conqueror in the games, and as a reward
made priest to Apollo and emperor’s freedman.

The city of Canopus was still a large mart for merchandise, as the
shallow but safe entrance to its harbour made it a favourite with pilots
of the small trading vessels, who rather dreaded the rocks at the mouth
of the harbour of Alexandria. A temple of Serapis which had lately been
built at Canopus was dedicated to the god in the name of the Emperor
Commodus; and there some of the grosser superstitions of the polytheists
fled before the spread of Christianity and platonism in Alexandria. The
Canopic jars, which held those parts of the body that could not be made
solid in the mummy, and which had the heads of the four lesser gods
of the dead on their lids, received their name from this city. The
sculptures on the beautiful temples of Contra-Latopolis were also
finished in this reign, and the emperor’s names and titles were carved
on the walls in hieroglyphics, with those of the Ptolemies, under whom
the temple itself had been built. Commodus may perhaps not have been
the last emperor whose name and praises were carved in hieroglyphics;
but all the great buildings in the Thebaid, which add such value to the
early history of Egypt, had ceased before his reign. Other buildings of
a less lasting form were no doubt being built, such as the Greek temples
at Antinoopolis and Ptolemais, which have long since been swept away;
but the Egyptian priests, with their gigantic undertakings, their noble
plan of working for after ages rather than for themselves, were nearly
ruined, and we find no ancient building now standing in Egypt that was
raised after the time of the dynasty of the Antonines.

[Illustration: 128.jpg CANOPIC JARS]

But the poverty of the Egyptians was not the only cause why they built
no more temples. Though the colossal statue of Amenhôthes uttered
its musical notes every morning at sunrise, still tuneful amid the
desolation with which it was surrounded, and the Nile was still
worshipped at midsummer by the husbandman to secure its fertilising
overflow; nevertheless, the religion itself for which the temples had
been built was fast giving way before the silent spread of Christianity.
The religion of the Egyptians, unlike that of the Greeks, was no
longer upheld by the magistrate; it rested solely on the belief of its
followers, and it may have merged into Christianity the faster for the
greater number of truths which were contained in it than in the paganism
of other nations. The scanty hieroglyphical records tell us little
of thoughts, feelings, and opinions. Indeed that cumbersome mode of
writing, which alone was used in religious matters, was little fitted
for anything beyond the most material parts of their mythology. Hence
we must not believe that the Egyptian polytheism was quite so gross as
would appear from the sculptures; and indeed we there learn that they
believed, even at the earliest times, in a resurrection from the tomb, a
day of judgment, and a future state of rewards and punishments.

The priests made a great boast of their learning and philosophy, and
could each repeat by heart those books of Thot which belonged to his own
order. The singer, who walked first in the sacred processions, bearing
the symbols of music, could repeat the books of hymns and the rules for
the king’s life. The soothsayer, who followed, carrying a clock and a
palm-branch, the emblem of the year, could repeat the four astrological
books; one on the moon’s phases, one on the fixed stars, and two on
their heliacal risings. The scribe, who walked next, carrying a book
and the flat rule which held the ink and pen, was acquainted with the
geography of the world and of the Nile, and with those books which
describe the motions of the sun, moon, and planets, and the furniture
of the temple and consecrated places. The master of the robes understood
the ten books relating to education, to the marks on the sacred
heifers, and to the worship of the gods, embracing the sacrifices, the
first-fruits, the hymns, the prayers, the processions, and festivals.
The prophet or preacher, who walked last, carrying in his arms the
great water-pot, was the president of the temple, and learned in the ten
books, called hieratic, relating to the laws, the gods, the management
of the temples, and the revenue. Thus, of the forty-two chief books of
Thot, thirty-six were learned by these priests, while the remaining
six on the body, its diseases, and medicines, were learned by the
Pastophori, priests who carried the image of the god in a small shrine.
These books had been written at various times: some may have been very
old, but some were undoubtedly new; they together formed the Egyptian
bible. Apollonius, or Apollonides Horapis, an Egyptian priest, had
lately published a work on these matters in his own language, named
Shomenuthi, _the book of the gods_.

[Illustration: 130.jpg RELIGIOUS PROCESSION]

But the priests were no longer the earnest, sincere teachers as of
old; they had invented a system of secondary meanings, by which they
explained away the coarse religion of their statues and sacred animals.

They had two religions, one for the many and one for the few; one,
material and visible, for the crowds in the outer courtyards, in which
the hero was made a god and every attribute of deity was made a person;
and another, spiritual and intellectual, for the learned in the schools
and sacred colleges. Even if we were not told, we could have no doubt
but the main point of secret knowledge among the learned was a disbelief
in those very doctrines which they were teaching to the vulgar, and
which they now explained among themselves by saying that they had a
second meaning. This, perhaps, was part of the great secret of the
goddess Isis, the secret of Abydos, the betrayer of which was more
guilty than he who should try to stop the _baris_ or sacred barge in the
procession on the Nile. The worship of gods, before whose statues the
nation had bowed with unchanging devotion for at least two thousand
years was now drawing to a close. Hitherto the priests had been able to
resist all new opinions.

[Illustration: 131.jpg SHRINE]

The name of Amon-Ra had at one time been cut out from the Theban
monuments to make way for a god from Lower Egypt; but it had been cut in
again when the storm passed by. The Jewish monotheism had left the
crowd of gods unlessened. The Persian efforts had overthrown statues and
broken open temples, but had not been able to introduce their worship of
the sun. The Greek conquerors had yielded to the Egyptian mind without
a struggle; and Alexander had humbly begged at the door of the temple
to be acknowledged as a son of Amon. But in the fulness of time
these opinions, which seemed as firmly based as the monuments which
represented them, sunk before a religion which set up no new statues,
and could command no force to break open temples.

The Egyptian priests, who had been proud of the superiority of their own
doctrines over the paganism of their neighbours, mourned the overthrow
of their national religion. “Our land,” says the author of Hermes
Trismegistus, “is the temple of the world; but, as wise men should
foresee all things, you should know that a time is coming when it will
seem that the Egyptians have by an unfailing piety served God in
vain. For when strangers shall possess this kingdom religion will
be neglected, and laws made against piety and divine worship, with
punishment on those who favour it. Then this holy seat will be full of
idolatry, idols’ temples, and dead men’s tombs. O Egypt, Egypt, there
shall remain of thy religion but vague stories which posterity will
refuse to believe, and words graven in stone recounting thy piety. The
Scythian, the Indian, or some other barbarous neighbour shall dwell in
Egypt. The Divinity shall reascend into the heaven; and Egypt shall be a
desert, widowed of men and gods.”

The spread of Christianity among the Egyptians was such that their
teachers found it necessary to supply them with a life of Jesus, written
in their own language, that they might the more readily explain to
them his claim to be obeyed, and the nature of his commands. The Gospel
according to the Egyptians, for such was the name this work bore, has
long since been lost, and was little quoted by the Alexandrians. It was
most likely a translation from one of the four gospels, though it had
some different readings suited to its own church, and contained some
praise of celibacy not found in the New Testament; but it was not valued
by the Greeks, and was lost on the spread of the Koptic translation of
the whole New Testament.

The grave, serious Christians of Upper Egypt were very unlike the lively
Alexandrians. But though the difference arose from peculiarities of
national character, it was only spoken of as a difference of opinion.
The Egyptians formed an ascetic sect in the church, who were called
heretics by the Alexandrians, and named Docetas, because they taught
that the Saviour was a god, and did not really suffer on the cross, but
was crucified only _in appearance_. They of necessity used the Gospel
according to the Egyptians, which is quoted by Cassianus, one of their
writers; many of them renounced marriage with, the other pleasures
and duties of social life, and placed their chief virtue in painful
self-denial; and out of them sprang that remarkable class of hermits,
monks, and fathers of the desert who in a few centuries covered Europe
with monasteries.

It is remarkable that the translation of a gospel into Koptic introduced
a Greek alphabet into the Koptic language. Though for all religious
purposes the scribes continued to use the ancient hieroglyphics, in
which we trace the first steps by which pictures are made to represent
words and syllables rather than letters, yet for the common purposes of
writing they had long since made use of the _enchorial_ or common hand,
in which the earlier system of writing is improved by the characters
representing only letters, though sadly too numerous for each to have a
fixed and well-known force. But, as the hieroglyphics were also always
used for carved writing on all subjects, and the common hand only used
on papyrus with a reed pen, the latter became wholly an indistinct
running hand; it lost that beauty and regularity which the
hieroglyphics, like the Greek and Roman characters, kept by being carved
on stone, and hence it would seem arose the want of a new alphabet for
the New Testament. This was made by merely adding to the Greek alphabet
six new letters borrowed from the hieroglyphics for those sounds which
the Greeks did not use; and the writing was then written from left to
right like a European language instead of in either direction according
to the skill or fancy of the scribe.

It was only upon the ancient hieroglyphics thus falling into disuse that
the Greeks of Alexandria, almost for the first time, had the
curiosity to study the principles on which they were written. Clemens
Alexandrinus, who thought no branch of knowledge unworthy of his
attention, gives a slight account of them, nearly agreeing with the
results of our modern discoveries. He mentions the three kinds of
writing; first, the _hieroglyphic_; secondly, the _hieratic_, which is
nearly the same, but written with a pen, and less ornamental than
the carved figures; and thirdly, the _demotic_, or common alphabetic
writing. He then divides the hieroglyphic into the alphabetic and
the symbolic; and lastly, he divides the symbolic characters into the
imitative, the figurative, and those formed like riddles. As instances
of these last we may quote, for the first, the three zigzag lines which
by simple imitation mean “water;” for the second, the oval which mean
“a name,” because kings’ names were written within ovals; and for the
third, a cup with three anvils, which mean “Lord of Battles,” because
“cup” and “lord” have nearly the same sound _neb_, and “anvils” and
“battles” have nearly the same sound _meshe_.

In this reign Pantonus of Athens, a Stoic philosopher, held the first
place among the Christians of Alexandria. He is celebrated for uniting
the study of heathen learning with a religious zeal which led him to
preach Christianity in Abyssinia.

[Illustration: 135.jpg HIEROGLYPHIC, HIERATIC, AND DEMOTIC WRITING]

He introduced a taste for philosophy among the Christians; and, though
Athenagoras rather deserves that honour, he was called the founder
of the catechetical school which gave birth to the series of learned
Christian writers that flourished in Alexandria for the next century. To
have been a learned man and a Christian, and to have encouraged learning
among the catechists in his schools may seem deserving of no great
praise. Was the religion of Jesus to spread ignorance and darkness over
the world? But we must remember that a new religion cannot be introduced
without some danger that learning and science may get forbidden,
together with the ancient superstitions which had been taught in the
same schools; we shall hereafter see that in the quarrels between pagans
and Christians, and again between the several sects of Christians,
learning was often reproached with being unfavourable to true religion;
and then it will be granted that it was no small merit to have founded
a school in which learning and Christianity went hand in hand for nearly
two centuries. Pantænus has left no writings of his own, and is best
known through his pupil or fellow-student, Clemens. He is said to have
brought with him to Alexandria, from the Jewish Christians that he met
with on his travels, a copy of St. Matthew’s Gospel in the original
Hebrew, a work now unfortunately lost, which, if we possessed it, would
settle for us the disputed point, whether or no it contained all that
now bears that Apostle’s name in the Greek translation.

The learned, industrious, and pious Clemens, who, to distinguish him
from Clemens of Rome, is usually called Clemens Alexandrinus, succeeded
Pantænus in the catechetical school, and was at the same time a
voluminous writer. He was in his philosophy a platonist, though
sometimes called of the Eclectic school. He has left an Address to the
Gentiles, a treatise on Christian behaviour called Pedagogus, and eight
books of Stromata, or _collections_, which he wrote to describe the
perfect Christian or Gnostic, to furnish the believer with a model for
his imitation, and to save him from being led astray by the sects of
Gnostics “falsely so called.” By his advice, and by the imitation of
Christ, the Christian is to step forward from faith, through love, to
knowledge; from being a slave, he is to become a faithful servant and
then a son; he is to become at last a god walking in the flesh.

Clemens was not wholly free from the mysticism which was the chief mark
of the Gnostic sect. He thought much of the sacred power of numbers.
Abraham had three hundred and eighteen servants when he rescued Lot,
which, when written in Greek numerals thus, IHT formed the sacred sign
for the name of Jesus. Ten was a perfect number, and is that of the
commandments given to Moses. Seven was a glorious number, and there
are seven Pleiades, seven planets, seven days in the week; and the
two fishes and five barley loaves, with which the multitude were
miraculously fed, together make the number of years of plenty in Egypt
under Joseph. Clemens also quotes several lines in praise of the seventh
day, which he says were from Homer, Hesiod, and Callimachus; but here
there is reason to believe that he was deceived by the pious fraud of
some zealous Jew or Christian, as no such lines are now to be found in
the pagan poets.

During the reign of Pertinax, which lasted only three months (194 A.D.),
we find no trace of his power in Egypt, except the money which the
Alexandrians coined in his name. It seems to have been the duty of the
prefect of the mint, as soon as he heard of an emperor’s death, to lose
no time in issuing coins in the name of his successor. It was one of the
means to proclaim and secure the allegiance of the province for the new
emperor.

During the reign of Commodus, Pescennius Niger had been at the head of
the legion that was employed in Upper Egypt in stopping the inroads of
their troublesome neighbours, who already sometimes bore the name of
Saracens. He was a hardy soldier, and strict in his discipline, while he
shared the labours of the field and of the camp with the men under him.
He would not allow them the use of wine; and once, when the troops that
guarded the frontier at Syênê (Aswan) sent to ask for it, he bluntly
answered, “You have got the Nile to drink, and cannot possibly want
more.” Once, when a cohort had been routed by the Saracens, the men
complained that they could not fight without wine; but he would not
relax in his discipline. “Those who have just now beaten you,” said
Niger, “drink nothing but water.” He gained the love and thanks of the
people of Upper Egypt by thus bridling the lawlessness of the troops;
and they gave him his statue cut in black basalt, in allusion to his
name Niger. This statue was placed in his Roman villa.

[Illustration: 138b.jpg A NATIVE OF ASWAN]

But on the death of Pertinax, when Septimus Severus declared himself
emperor in Pannonia, Niger, who was then in the province of Syria, did
the same. Egypt and the Egyptian legions readily and heartily joined
his party, which made it unnecessary for him to stay in that part of
the empire; so he marched upon Greece, Thrace, and Macedonia. But there,
after a few months, he was met by the army of his rival, who also sent
a second army into Egypt; and he was defeated and slain at Cyzicus in
Mysia, after having been acknowledged as emperor in Egypt and Syria for
perhaps a year and a few months.

[Illustration: 139b.jpg PAINTING AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE FIFTH TOMB]

We find no Alexandrian coins of Niger, although we cannot allow a
shorter space of time to his reign than one whole year, together with
a few months of the preceding and following years. Within that time
Severus had to march upon Rome against his first rival, Julian, to
punish the praetorian guards, and afterwards to conquer Niger.

After the death of his rival, when Severus was the undisputed master of
the empire, and was no longer wanted in the other provinces, he found
leisure, in A.D. 196, to visit Egypt; and, like other active-minded
travellers, he examined the pyramids of Memphis and the temples at
Thebes, and laughed at the worship of Serapis and the Egyptian animals.
His visit to Alexandria wras marked by many new laws. Now that the
Greeks of that city, crushed beneath two centuries of foreign rule, had
lost any remains of courage or of pride that could make them feared by
their Roman master, he relaxed part of the strict policy of Augustus. He
gave them a senate and a municipal form of government, a privilege that
had hitherto been refused in distrust to that great city, though freely
granted in other provinces where rebellion was less dreaded. He also
ornamented the city with a temple to Rhea, and with a public bath, which
was named after himself the Bath of Severus.

Severus made a law, says the pagan historian, forbidding anybody, under
a severe punishment, from becoming Jew or Christian. But he who gives
the blow is likely to speak of it more lightly than he who smarts under
it; and we learn from the historian of the Church that, in the tenth
year of this reign, the Christians suffered persecution from their
governors and their fellow-citizens. Among others who then lost their
lives for their religion was Leonides, the father of Origen. He left
seven orphan children, of whom the eldest, that justly celebrated
writer, was only sixteen years old, but was already deeply read in
the Scriptures, and in the great writers of Greece. As the property of
Leonides was forfeited, his children were left in poverty; but the young
Origen was adopted by a wealthy lady, zealous for the new religion,
by whose help he was enabled to continue his studies under Clemens. In
order to read the Old Testament in the original, he made himself master
of Hebrew, which was a study then very unusual among the Greeks, whether
Jews or Christians.

In this persecution of the Church all public worship was forbidden to
the Christians; and Tertullian of Carthage eloquently complains that,
while the emperor allowed the Egyptians to worship cows, goats, or
crocodiles, or indeed any animal they chose, he only punished those that
bowed down before the Creator and Governor of the world. Of course,
at this time of trouble the catechetical school was broken up and
scattered, so that there was no public teaching of Christianity in
Alexandria. But Origen ventured to do that privately which was forbidden
to be done openly; and, when the storm had blown over, Demetrius, the
bishop, appointed him to that office at the head of the school which he
had already so bravely taken upon himself in the hour of danger. Origen
could boast of several pupils who added their names to the noble list of
martyrs who lost their lives for Christianity, among whom the best known
was Plutarch, the brother of Heraclas. Origen afterwards removed for a
time to Palestine, and fell under the displeasure of his own bishop for
being there ordained a presbyter.

In Egypt Severus seems to have dated the years of his reign from the
death of Niger, though he had reigned in Rome since the deaths of
Pertinax and Julian. His Egyptian coins are either copper, or brass
plated with a little silver; and after a few reigns even those last
traces of a silver coinage are lost in this falling country. In tracing
the history of a word’s meaning we often throw a light upon the customs
of a nation. Thus, in Rome, gold was so far common that avarice was
called the love of gold; while in Greece, where silver was the metal
most in use, money was called _argurion_. In the same way it is
curiously shown that silver was no longer used in Egypt by our finding
that the brass coin of one hundred and ten grains weight, as being the
only piece of money seen in circulation, was named an _argurion_.

The latter years of the reign of Caracalla were spent in visiting the
provinces of his wide empire; and, after he had passed through Thrace
and Asia Minor, Egypt had the misfortune to be honoured by a visit from
its emperor. The satirical Alexandrians, who in the midst of their own
follies and vices were always clever in lashing those of their rulers,
had latterly been turning 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/17331