GERMANICUS AT THEBES.
Tanquam tabula naufragii.—BACON.
While I was at Thebes the account often recurred to me which Tacitus
gives of the visit of Germanicus to the monuments of that city. He was,
being then about thirty years of age, the most accomplished and popular
prince the family of the Cæsars produced. His many civic and martial
virtues had attracted to him the eyes and the hearts of the world.
These high expectations, however, his foul murder speedily and cruelly
extinguished. The attention he bestowed on the historical monuments of
Egypt enhances the regard we feel for him.
How many ingredients of interest would a picture combine which presented
to us the young Cæsar standing, as the historian describes him, in the
temple-palace of Rameses, by the side of the great kings prostrate
granite colossus, attended by his Roman suite, and some of the elders
of the Egyptian priests, who are explaining to him the records on the
monuments. A pendant to it, which would possess sufficient connecting
points and contrasts of interest, would be a picture of his adoptive
ancestor, the great Dictator, in the Palace of the Ptolemies, dallying
with the Calypso of the Nile.
Here is the passage from Tacitus’s Annals I had in my mind. ‘It
was in the Consulate of M. Silanus and L. Norbanus that Germanicus
visited Egypt. He gave out that he wished to see to the affairs of the
province, but his real object was to make himself acquainted with its
antiquities.... Starting from Canopus, and ascending the Nile, he reached
the vast remains of Thebes. Enormous structures were still standing,
covered with hieroglyphics, which chronicled the bygone grandeur of
Egypt. One of the oldest and most distinguished of the priests was
ordered to interpret to him the record. He told him that it stated that
the population of the country had, at that old time to which it referred,
been able to supply an army of 700,000 men of the military age; and
that, with that army, King Rameses had conquered Libya, Ethiopia, Media,
Persia, Bactria, and Scythia; and the whole of Syria and Armenia, and
of the neighbouring Cappadocia. That he had then added to his empire
all between the coast of Bithynia on one side, and that of Lycia on the
other. They also read the amounts of tribute he had imposed on each
nation; the weights of silver and of gold; the number of horses, and
of different kinds of arms; the offerings to be made to the temples of
ivory and of incense, and the quantity of corn, and of various kinds of
vessels. The totals were not less magnificent than those now imposed by
Parthian violence, or Roman might.
‘There were also other wonders to which Germanicus directed his
attention. Among these were the stone figure of Memnon, which, when
struck by the rays of the rising sun, emits a sound resembling the human
voice; the Pyramids, which had, in a region of drifting and hardly
passable sands, been raised by the rivalry and wealth of kings to the
height of mountains; lakes that had been excavated for the storage of the
overflow of the Nile; perplexing intricacies and inexplorable recesses,
which in no direction could be penetrated by those who might wish to
enter them. After he had visited these sights he went to Elephantiné and
Syené, the gate formerly of the Roman Empire, which, however, has now
been extended to the Red Sea.’
One would much like to know how Tacitus got these particulars of the
Prince’s Egyptian tour. Romans were in the habit of keeping diaries, and
we cannot doubt but that the practice was followed by one so accomplished
and thoughtful as Germanicus. Was it then from the journal of the Prince
himself? The family might have allowed the historian to make use of it
for the purposes of his forthcoming work. Or was it from the journal of
some unconscious Russell of the Prince’s suite? Or had Tacitus himself
accompanied the Prince?
It may be worth noticing that the account the priests gave to Germanicus
of the conquests of Rameses the Great was substantially the same as that
which had been given to Herodotus four centuries and a half earlier. It
was the same record, read from the same lithotome. Of course, Herodotus
gives to him the name, by which he was known among the Greeks, of
Sesostris.
All these monuments of early Egyptian history—for the remains of even
the Labyrinth are still sufficient to enable one to make out the plan of
the structure—our English Prince had an opportunity, a few years back,
of seeing very much in the condition in which the Roman Prince saw them
1,850 years ago. The Empire which the world was expecting would have,
under him, its eternal foundations strengthened, is now, like the Egypt
he was studying, a thing of the past. We may be permitted to entertain
the double hope, that such precious records of mans history may, for
other thousands of years yet to come, escape the common fate of man’s
works, and still not outlive the empire of their later visitor.