CHAPTER I--EGYPT UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE

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

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Dam at Aswan

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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._

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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.