war, when the news reached him that Otho was dead, and that Vitellius
had been raised to the purple by the German legions, and acknowledged
at Rome; and, without wasting more time in refusing the honour than was
necessary to prove that his soldiers were in earnest in offering it, he
allowed himself to be proclaimed emperor, as the successor of Otho.
He would not, however, then risk a march upon Rome, but he sent to
Alexandria to tell Tiberius Alexander, the governor of Egypt, what he
had done; he ordered him to claim in his name the allegiance of that
great province, and added that he should soon be there himself. The two
Roman legions in Egypt much preferred the choice of the Eastern to
that of the Western army, and the Alexandrians, who had only just
acknowledged Vitellius, readily took the oath to be faithful to
Vespasian. This made it less necessary for him to hasten thither, and he
only reached Alexandria in time to hear that Vitellius had been murdered
after a reign of eight months, and that he himself had been acknowledged
as emperor by Rome and the Western legions. His Egyptian coins in the
first year of his reign, by the word _peace_, point to the end of the
civil war.
When Vespasian entered Alexandria, he was met by the philosophers and
magistrates in great pomp. The philosophers, indeed, in a city where,
beside the officers of government, talent formed the only aristocracy,
were a very important body; and Dion, Euphrates, and Apollonius had been
useful in securing for Vespasian the allegiance of the Alexandrians.
Dion was an orator, who had been professor of rhetoric, but he had given
up that study for philosophy. His orations, or declamations, gained for
him the name of Chrysostom, or _golden-mouthed_. Euphrates, his friend,
was a platonist, who afterwards married the daughter of the prefect of
Syria, and removed to Rome. Apollonius of Tyana, the most celebrated of
these philosophers, was one of the first who gained his eminence from
the study of Eastern philosophy, which was then rising in the opinions
of the Greeks as highly worth their notice. He had been travelling in
the East; and, boasting that he was already master of all the fabled
wisdom of the Magi of Babylon and of the Gymnosophists of India, he was
come to Egypt to compare this mystic philosophy with that of the hermits
of Ethiopia and the Thebaid. Addressing himself as a pupil to the
priests, he willingly yielded his belief to their mystic claims; and,
whether from being deceived or as a deceiver, whether as an enthusiast
or as a cheat, he pretended to have learned all the supernatural
knowledge which they pretended to teach. By the Egyptians he was
looked upon as the favourite of Heaven; he claimed the power of working
miracles by his magical arts, and of foretelling events by his knowledge
of astrology. In the Thebaid he was so far honoured that at the bidding
of the priests one of the sacred trees spoke to him, as had been their
custom from of old with favourites, and in a clear and rather womanly
voice addressed him as a teacher from heaven.
It was to witness such practices as these, and to learn the art of
deceiving their followers, that the Egyptian priests were now consulted
by the Greeks. The oracle at Delphi was silent, but the oracle of Ammon
continued to return an answer. The mystic philosophy of the East had
come into fashion in Alexandria, and the priests were more celebrated as
magicians than as philosophers. They would tell a mans fortune and the
year that he was to die by examining the lines of his forehead. Some of
them even undertook, for a sum of money, to raise the dead to life, or,
rather, to recall for a time to earth the unwilling spirits, and make
them answer any questions that might be put to them. Ventriloquism was
an art often practised in Egypt, and perhaps invented there. By this the
priests gained a power over the minds of the listeners, and could make
them believe that a tree, a statue, or a dead body, was speaking to
them.
The Alexandrian men of letters seldom erred by wrapping themselves up in
pride to avoid the fault of meanness; they usually cringed to the great.
Apollonius was wholly at the service of Vespasian, and the emperor
repaid the philosopher by flattery as well as by more solid favours.
He kept him always by his side during his stay in Egypt; he acknowledged
his rank as a prophet, and tried to make further use of him in
persuading the Egyptians of his own divine right to the throne.
Vespasian begged him to make use of his prayers that he might obtain
from God the empire which he had as yet hardly grasped; but Apollonius,
claiming even a higher mission from Heaven than Vespasian was granting
to him, answered, with as much arrogance as flattery, I have myself
already made you emperor. With the intimacy between Vespasian and
Apollonius begins the use of gnostic emblems on the Alexandrian coins.
The imperial pupil was not slow in learning from such a master; and
the people were as ready to believe in the emperors miracles as in
the philosophers. As Vespasian was walking through the streets of
Alexandria, a man well known as having a disease in his eyes threw
himself at his feet and begged of him to heal his blindness. He had been
told by the god Serapis that he should regain his sight if the emperor
would but deign to spit upon his eyelids. Another man, who had lost the
use of a hand, had been told by the same god that he should be healed if
the emperor would but trample on him with his feet. Vespasian at first
laughed at them and thrust them off; but at last he so far yielded
to their prayers, and to the flattery of his friends, as to have the
physicians of Alexandria consulted whether it was in his power to heal
these unfortunate men. The physicians, like good courtiers, were not so
unwise as to think it impossible; besides, it seemed meant by the god as
a public proof of Vespasians right to the throne; if he were successful
the glory would be his, and if he failed the laugh would be against the
cripples. The two men were therefore brought before him, and in the face
of the assembled citizens he trampled on one and spit on the other; and
his flatterers declared that he had healed the maimed and given sight to
the blind.
Vespasian met with further wonders when he entered the temple of Serapis
to consult the god as to the state and fortunes of the empire. He went
into the inner sanctuary alone, and, to his surprise, there he beheld
the old Basilides, the freedman of Claudius, one of the chief men of
Alexandria, whom he knew was then lying dangerously ill, and several
days journey from the city. He inquired of the priests whether
Basilides had been in the temple, and was assured that he had not. He
then asked whether he had been in Alexandria; but nobody had seen him
there. Lastly, on sending messengers, he learned that he was on his
death-bed eighty miles off. With this miracle before his eyes, he could
not distrust the answers which the priests gave to his questions.
From Alexandria Vespasian sent back Titus to finish the siege of
Jerusalem. The Jewish writer Joseph, the son of Matthias, or Flavius
Josephus, as he called himself when he entered the service of the
emperor, was then in Alexandria. He had been taken prisoner by
Vespasian, but had gained his freedom by the betrayal of his countrys
cause. He joined the army of Titus and marched to the overthrow of
Jerusalem. Notwithstanding the obstinate and heroic struggles of the
Jews, Judæa was wholly conquered by the Romans, and Jerusalem and its
other fortresses either received Roman garrisons or were dismantled.
The Temple was overthrown in the month of September, A.D. 70. Titus made
slaves of ninety-seven thousand men, many of whom he led with him into
Egypt, and then sent them to work in the mines. These were soon followed
by a crowd of other brave Jews, who chose rather to quit their homes
and live as wanderers in Egypt than to own Vespasian as their king. They
knew no lord but Jahveh; to take the oaths or to pay tribute to Cæsar
was to renounce the faith of their fathers. But they found no safety in
Egypt. Their Greek brethren turned against them, and handed six hundred
of them up to Lupus, the governor of Egypt, to be punished; and their
countryman Josephus brands them all with the name of Sicarii. They tried
to hide themselves in Thebes and other cities less under the eyes of the
Roman governor. They were, however, followed and taken, and the courage
with which the boys and mere children bore their sufferings, sooner than
acknowledge Vespasian for their king, drew forth the praise of even the
time-serving Josephus.
The Greek Jews of Egypt gained nothing by this treachery towards
their Hebrew brethren; they were themselves looked down upon by the
Alexandrians, and distrusted by the Romans. The emperor ordered Lupus to
shut up the temple at Onion, near Heliopolis, in which, during the last
three hundred years, they had been allowed to have an altar, in rivalry
to the Temple of Jerusalem. Even Josephus, whose betrayal of his
countrymen might have saved him from their enemies, was sent with many
others in chains to Rome, and was only set free on his making himself
known to Titus. Indeed, when the Hebrew Jews lost their capital and
their rank as a nation, their brethren felt lowered in the eyes of their
fellow-citizens, in whatever city they dwelt, and in Alexandria they
lost all hope of keeping their privileges; although the emperor refused
to repeal the edict which granted them their citizenship, an edict to
which they always appealed for protection, but often with very little
success.
The Alexandrians were sadly disappointed in Vespasian. They had been
among the first to acknowledge him as emperor while his power was yet
doubtful, and they looked for a sum of money as a largess; but to their
sorrow he increased the taxes, and re-established some which had fallen
into disuse. They had a joke against him, about his claiming from one of
his friends the trifling debt of six oboli; and, upon hearing of their
witticisms, he was so angry that he ordered this sum of six oboli to be
levied as a poll-tax upon every man in the city, and he only remitted
the tax at the request of his son Titus. He went to Rome, carrying with
him the nickname of Cybiosactes, _the scullion_, which the Alexandrians
gave him for his stinginess and greediness, and which they had before
given to Seleucus, who robbed the tomb of Alexander the Great, at
Alexandria, of its famous golden sarcophagus.
Titus saw the importance of pleasing the people; and his wish to humour
their ancient prejudices, at the ceremony of consecrating a new bull
as Apis, brought some blame upon him. He there, as became the occasion,
wore the state crown, and dazzled the people of Memphis with his regal
pomp; but, while thus endeavouring to strengthen his fathers throne, he
was by some accused of grasping at it for himself.
The great temple of Kneph, at Latopolis, which had been the work of many
reigns and perhaps many centuries, was finished under Vespasian. It is
a building worthy of the best times of Egyptian architecture. It has a
grand portico, upheld by four rows of massive columns, with capitals in
the form of papyrus flowers. On the ceiling is a zodiac, like that at
Tentyra; and, though many other kings names are carved on the walls,
that of Vespasian is in the dedication over the entrance.
Of the reign of Titus in Egypt we find no trace beyond his coins struck
each year at Alexandria, and his name carved on one or two temples which
had been built in former reigns.
Of the reign of Domitian (81--96 A.D.) we learn something from the poet
Juvenal, who then held a military post in the province; and he gives
us a sad account of the state of lawlessness in which the troops lived
under his commands. All quarrels between soldiers and citizens were
tried by the officers according to martial law; and justice was very
far from being even-handed between the Roman and the poor Egyptian.
No witness was bold enough to come forward and say anything against a
soldier, while everybody was believed who spoke on his behalf. Juvenal
was at a great age when he was sent into Egypt; and he felt that the
command of a cohort on the very borders of the desert was a cruel
banishment from the literary society of Rome. His death in the camp was
hastened by his wish to return home. As what Juvenal chiefly aimed at
in his writings was to lash the follies of the age, he, of course, found
plenty of amusement in the superstitions and sacred animals of Egypt.
But he sometimes takes a poets liberty, and when he tells us that mans
was almost the only flesh that they ate without sinning, we need not
believe him to the letter. He gives a lively picture of a fight which he
saw between the citizens of two towns. The towns of Ombos and Tentyra,
though about a hundred miles apart, had a long-standing quarrel
about their gods. At Ombos they worshipped the crocodile and the
crocodile-headed god Savak, while at Tentyra they worshipped the goddess
Hâthor, and were celebrated for their skill in catching and killing
crocodiles. So, taking advantage of a feast or holiday, they marched out
for a fight. The men of Ombos Avere beaten and put to flight; but one of
them, stumbling as he ran away, was caught and torn to pieces, and,
as Juvenal adds, eaten by the men of Tentyra. Their worship of beasts,
birds, and fishes, and even growing their gods in the garden, are
pleasantly hit off by him; they left nothing, said he, without worship,
but the goddess of chastity. The mother goddess, Isis, the queen of
heaven, was the deity to whom they bowed with the most tender devotion,
and to swear by Isis was their favourite oath; and hence the leek, in
their own language named Isi, was no doubt the vegetable called a god by
the satiric Juvenal.
At the same time also the towns of Oxyrrhynchos and Cynopolis, in
the Heptanomos, had a little civil war about the animals which
they worshipped. Somebody at Cynopolis was said to have caught an
oxyrrhynchus fish in the Nile and eaten it; and so the people of
Oxyrrhynchos, in revenge, made an attack upon the dogs, the gods of
Cynopolis. They caught a number of them, killed them in sacrifice to
their offended fish-god, and ate them. The two parties then flew to arms
and fought several battles; they sacked one anothers cities in turns,
and the war was not stopped till the Roman troops marched to the spot
and punished them both.
But we gain a more agreeable and most likely a more true notion of the
mystical religion and philosophy of the Egyptians in these days from the
serious enquiries of Plutarch, who, instead of looking for what he could
laugh at, was only too ready to believe that he saw wisdom hidden
under an allegory in all their superstitions. Many of the habits of
the priests, such as shaving the whole body, wearing linen instead of
cotton, and refusing some meats as impure, seem to have arisen from a
love of cleanliness; their religion ordered what was useful. And it
also forbade what was hurtful; so to stir the fire with a sword was
displeasing to the gods, because it spoilt the temper of the metal.
None but the vulgar now looked upon the animals and statues as gods; the
priests believed that the unseen gods, who acted with one mind and with
one providence, were the authors of all good; and though these, like the
sun and moon, were called in each country by a different name, yet, like
those luminaries, they were the same over all the world.
[Illustration: 078b.jpg SCENE IN A SEPUUCHRAL CHAMBER]
Outward ceremonies in religion were no longer thought enough without a
good life; and, as the Greeks said, that beard and cloak did not make a
philosopher, so the Egyptians said that white linen and a tonsure
would not make a follower of Isis. All the sacrifices to the gods had a
secondary meaning, or, at least, they tried to join a moral aim to the
outward act; as on the twentieth day of the month, when they ate honey
and figs in honour of Thot, they sang Sweet is truth. The Egyptians,
like most other Eastern polytheists, held the doctrine which was
afterwards called Manicheism; they believed in a good and in a wicked
god, who governed the world between them. Of these the former made
himself threefold, because three is a perfect number, and they adopted
into their religion that curious metaphysical opinion that everything
divine is formed of three parts; and accordingly, on the Theban
monuments we often see the gods in groups of three. They worshipped
Osiris, Isis, and Horus under the form of a right-angled triangle, in
which Horus was the side opposite to the right angle. The favourite
part of their mythology was the lamentation of Isis for the death of
her husband Osiris. By another change the god Horus, who used to be a
crowned king of manly stature, was now a child holding a finger to his
mouth, and thereby marking that he had not yet learned to talk. The
Romans, who did not understand this Egyptian symbol for youthfulness,
thought that in this character he was commanding silence; and they gave
the name of Harpocrates, _Horus the powerful_, to a god of silence.
Horus was also often placed as a child in the arms of his mother Isis;
and thus by the loving nature of the group were awakened the more tender
feelings of the worshipper. The Egyptians, like the Greeks, had always
been loud in declaring that they were beloved by their gods; but they
received their favours with little gratitude, and hardly professed that
they felt any love towards the gods in return. But after the time of the
Christian era, we meet with more kindly feelings even among the pagans.
We find from the Greek names of persons that they at least had begun to
think their gods deserving of love, and in this group of the mother and
child, such a favourite also in Christian art, we see in what direction
these more kindly feelings found an entrance into the Egyptian religion.
As fast as opinion was raising the great god Serapis above his fellows
and making the wrathful judge into the ruler of the world, so fast was
the same opinion creating for itself a harbour of refuge in the child
Horus and its mother.
[Illustration: 080.jpg HARPOCRATES]
The deep earnestness of the Egyptians in the belief of their own
religion was the chief cause of its being adopted by others. The Greeks
had borrowed much from it. Though in Rome it had been forbidden by law,
it was much cultivated there in private; and the engraved rings on the
fingers of the wealthy Romans which bore the figures of Harpocrates and
other Egyptian gods easily escaped the notice of the magistrate. But the
superstitious Domitian, who was in the habit of consulting astrologers
and Chaldæan fortune-tellers, allowed the Egyptian worship. He built
at Rome a temple to Isis, and another to Serapis; and such was the
eagerness of the citizens for pictures of the mother goddess with her
child in her arms that, according to Juvenal, the Roman painters all
lived upon the goddess Isis. For her temple in the Campus Martius, holy
water was even brought from the Nile to purify the building and the
votaries; and a regular college of priests was maintained there by their
zeal and at their cost, with a splendour worthy of the Roman capital.
Domitian, also, was somewhat of a scholar, and he sent to Alexandria for
copies of their books, to restore the public library at Rome which had
been lately burnt; while his garden on the banks of the Tiber was
richer in the Egyptian winter rose than even the gardens of Memphis and
Alexandria.
During this century the coinage continues one of the subjects of chief
interest to the antiquary. In 92 A.D., in the eleventh year of his
reign, when Domitian took upon himself the tribunitian power at Rome
for a second period of ten years, the event was celebrated in Alexandria
with a triumphal procession and games in the hippodrome, of all which we
see clear traces on the Egyptian coins.
[Illustration: 081.jpg COINS OF DOMITIAN]
The coinage is almost the only trace of Nerva (96--98 A.D.) having
reigned in Egypt; but it is at the same time enough to prove the
mildness of his government. The Jews who by their own law were of old
required to pay half a shekel, or a didrachm, to the service of their
temple, had on their conquest been made to pay that sum as a yearly
tribute to the Ptolemies, and afterwards to the emperors. It was a
poll-tax levied on every Jew throughout the empire. But Nerva had the
humanity to relieve them from this insulting tribute, and well did he
deserve the honour of having it recorded on the coins struck in his
reign.
The coinage of the eleventh year of his successor, Trajan (98-117
A.D.), is very remarkable for its beauty, its technical skill, and
variety, even more so than that of the eleventh year of Domitian.
[Illustration: 082.jpg COIN OF NERVA]
The coins have hitherto proclaimed, in a manner unmistakably plain to
those who study numismatics, the games and conquests of the emperors,
the bountiful overflow of the Nile, and sometimes the worship of
Serapis; but we now enter upon the most brilliant and most important
period of the Egyptian coinage, and find a rich variety of fables taken
both from Egyptian and Greek mythology. The coins of Rome in this and
the following reigns show the wealth, good taste, and learning of the
nation, but they are surpassed by the coins of Egypt. While history
is nearly silent, and the buildings and other proofs of Roman good
government have perished, the coins alone are quite enough to prove
the well-being of the people. Among the Egyptian coins those of Trajan,
Hadrian, and the Antonines equal in number those of all the other
emperors together, while in beauty they far surpass them. They are
mostly of copper, of a small size, and thick, weighing about one hundred
and ten grains, and some larger of two hundred and twenty grains; the
silver coins are less common, and of mixed metal.
Though the Romans, while admiring and copying everything that was Greek,
affected to look upon the Egyptians as savages, who were only known to
be human beings by their power of speech, still the Egyptian physicians
were held by them in the highest repute. The more wealthy Romans often
sailed to Alexandria for the benefit of their advice. Pliny the Elder,
however, thought that of the invalids who went to Egypt for their
health more were cured by the sea voyage than by the physicians on their
arrival.
[Illustration: 083.jpg TRINITY OF ISIS, HORUS AND NEPHTHYS]
One of Ciceros physicians was an Egyptian. Pliny the Younger repaid his
Egyptian oculist, Harpocrates, by getting a rescript from the emperor
to make him a Roman citizen. But the statesman did not know under what
harsh laws his friend was born, for the grant was void in the case of an
Egyptian, the emperors rescript was bad as being against the law; and
Pliny had again to beg the greater favour that the Egyptian might first
be made a citizen of Alexandria, without which the former favour was
useless. Thus, even in Alexandria, a conquered province governed by
the despotic will of a military emperor, there were still some laws or
principles which the emperor found it not easy to break. The courts of
justice, those to whom the edicts were addressed and by whom they were
to be explained and carried into effect, claimed a power in some cases
above the emperor; and the first article in the Roman code was that an
imperial rescript, by whomsoever or howsoever obtained, was void if it
was against the law. As the lawyers and magistrates formed part of the
body of citizens, the Alexandrians had so far a share in the government
of their own affairs; but this was an advantage that the Egyptians lost
by being under the power of the Greek magistrates.
[Illustration: 084.jpg COINS OF TRAJAN]
Trajan always kept in the public granaries of Rome a supply of Egyptian
grain equal to seven times the _canon_, or yearly gift to the poor
citizens; and in this prudent course he was followed by all his
successors, until the store was squandered by the worthless Elagabalus.
One year, when the Nile did not rise to its usual height, and much of
the grain land of the Delta, instead of being moistened by its waters
and enriched by its mud, was left a dry, sandy plain, the granaries of
Rome were unlocked to feed the city of Alexandria. The Alexandrians then
saw the unusual sight of ships unloading their cargoes of wheat in their
harbour, and the Romans boasted that they took the Egyptian tribute
in grain, not because they could not feed themselves, but because the
Egyptians had nothing else to send them.
Alexandria under the Romans was still the centre of the trading world,
not only having its own great trade in grain, but being the port through
which the trade of India and Arabia passed to Europe, and at which the
Syrian vessels touched in their way to Italy. The harbour was crowded
with masts and strange prows and uncouth sails, and the quays always
busy with loading and unloading; while in the streets might be seen men
of all languages and all dresses, copper-coloured Egyptians, swarthy
Jews, lively, bustling Greeks, and haughty Italians, with Asiatics from
the neighbouring coasts of Syria and Cilicia, and even dark Ethiopians,
painted Arabs, Bactrians, Scythians, Persians, and Indians, all gay with
their national costumes. Alexandria was a spot in which Europe met Asia,
and each wondered at the strangeness of the other.
Of the Alexandrians themselves we receive a very unfavourable account
from their countryman, Dion Chrysostom. With their wealth, they
had those vices which usually follow or cause the loss of national
independence. They were eager for nothing but food and horse-races. They
were grave and quiet in their sacrifices and listless in business, but
in the theatre or in the stadium men, women, and children were alike
heated into passion, and overcome with eagerness and warmth of feeling.
A scurrilous song or a horse-race would so rouse them into a quarrel
that they could not hear for their own noise, nor see for the dust
raised by their own bustle in the hippodrome; while all those acts of
their rulers, which in a more wholesome state of society would have
called for notice, passed by unheeded.
[Illustration: 086.jpg EGYPTIAN WIG (BRITISH MUSEUM)]
They cared more for the tumble of a favourite charioteer than for the
sinking state of the nation. The ready employment of ridicule in the
place of argument, of wit instead of graver reason, of nicknames
as their most powerful weapon, was one of the worst points in the
Alexandrian character. Frankness and manliness are hardly to be looked
for under a despotic government where men are forbidden to speak their
minds openly; and the Alexandrians made use of such checks upon their
rulers as the law allowed them. They lived under an absolute monarchy
tempered only by ridicule. Though their city was four hundred years old,
they were still colonists and without a mother-country. They had very
little faith in anything great or good, whether human or divine. They
had few cherished prejudices, no honoured traditions, sadly little love
of fame, and they wrote no histories. But in luxury and delicacy they
set the fashion to their conquerors. The wealthy Alexandrian walked
about Rome in a scarlet robe, in summer fanning himself with gold, and
displaying on his fingers rings carefully suited to the season; as his
hands were too delicate to carry his heavier jewels in the warm weather.
At the supper tables of the rich, the Alexandrian singing boys were
much valued; the smart young Roman walked along the Via Sacra humming
an Alexandrian tune; the favourite comic actor, the delight of the
city, whose jokes set the theatre in a roar, was an Alexandrian; the
Retiarius, who, with no weapon but a net, fought against an armed
gladiator in the Roman forum, and came off conqueror in twenty-six such
battles, was an Alexandrian; and no breed of fighting-cocks was thought
equal to those reared in the suburbs of Alexandria.
In the reign of Augustus the Roman generals had been defeated in their
attacks on Arabia; but under Trajan, when the Romans were masters of all
the countries which surround Arabia Nabatæa, and when Egypt was so
far quiet that the legions could be withdrawn without danger to the
provinces, the Arabs could hold out no longer, and the rocky fastness
of Petra was forced to receive a Roman garrison. The event was as usual
commemorated on the coins of Rome; and for the next four hundred years
that remarkable Arab city formed part of the Roman empire; and Europeans
now travelling through the desert from Mount Sinai to Jerusalem are
agreeably surprised at coming upon temples, carved out of the solid
rock, ornamented with Corinthian columns of the age of the Antonines.
In the twelfth year of this reign, when Lucius Sulpicius Simius was
prefect, some additions which had been made to the temple at Panopolis
in the Thebaid were dedicated in the name of the emperor; and in the
nineteenth year, when Marcus Rutilius Lupus was prefect, a new portico
in the oasis of Thebes was in the same manner dedicated to Serapis and
Isis. A small temple, which had been before built at Denderah, near the
great temple of Venus, was in the first year of this reign dedicated to
the Empress Plotina, under the name of the great goddess, the Younger
Venus.
The canal from the Nile near Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes, which had
been first made by Necho, had been either finished or a second time
made by Philadelphus; and in this reign that great undertaking was again
renewed. But the stream of the Nile was deserting the Bubastite branch,
which was less navigable than formerly; and the engineers now changed
the greater part of the canals bed. They thought it wiser to bring
water from a higher part of the Nile, so that the current in the canal
might run into the Red Sea instead of out, and its waters might still
be fresh and useful to agriculture. It now began at Babylon opposite
Memphis and entered the Red Sea at a town which, taking its name from
the locks, was called Clysmon, about ten miles to the south of Arsinoë.
This latter town was no longer a port, having been separated from the
sea by the continual advance of the sands. We have no knowledge of how
long the care of the imperial prefects kept this new canal open and in
use. It was perhaps one of the first of the Roman works that went to
decay; and, when we find the Christian pilgrims sailing along it seven
centuries later, on their way from England to the holy sepulchre, it had
been again opened by the Muhammedan conquerors of Egypt.
[Illustration: 089.jpg ANTONINIAN TEMPLE NEAR SINAI]
Writings which some now regard as literary forgeries appeared in
Alexandria about this time. They prophesied the re-establishment of
the Jews at Jerusalem, and, as the wished-for time drew near, all the
eastern provinces of the Roman empire were disturbed by rebellious
risings of the Jews. Moved by the religious enthusiasm which gave birth
to the writings, the Jews of Egypt in the eighteenth year of this
reign (116 A.D.) were again roused into a quarrel with their Greek
fellow-citizens; and in the next year, the last of the reign, they rose
against their Roman governors in open rebellion, and they were not put
down till the prefect Lupus had brought his forces against them. After
this the Jews of Cyrene marched through the desert into Egypt, under the
command of Lucuas, to help their brethren; and the rebellion took the
regular form of a civil war, with all its usual horrors. The emperor
sent against the Jews an army followed by a fleet, which, after numerous
skirmishes and battles, routed them with great slaughter, and drove
numbers of them back into the desert, whence they harassed the village
as robbers. By these unsuccessful appeals to force, the Jews lost all
right to those privileges of citizenship which they always claimed, and
which had been granted by the emperors, though usually refused by the
Alexandrians. The despair and disappointment of the Jews seem in many
cases to have turned their minds to the Christian view of the Old
Testament prophecies; henceforth, says Eusebius, the Jews embraced the
Christian religion more readily and in greater numbers.
In A.D. 122, the sixth year of the reign of Hadrian, Egypt was honoured
by a visit from the emperor. He was led to Egypt at that time by some
riots of a character more serious than usual, which had arisen between
two cities, probably Memphis and Heliopolis, about a bull, as to whether
it was to be Apis or Mnevis. Egypt had been for some years without a
sacred bull; and when at length the priests found one, marked with the
mystic spots, the inhabitants of those two cities flew to arms, and
the peace of the province was disturbed by their religious zeal, each
claiming the bull as their own.
Hadrian also undertook a voyage up the Nile from Alexandria in order to
explore the wonders of Egypt. This was the fashion then, for the ancient
monuments and the banks of this mysterious river offered just as many
attractions at that time as they have done to all nations since
the expedition of Napoleon. That animal-worship, which had remained
unchanged for centuries, a riddle of human religion, was bound to excite
the curiosity of strangers. In this divinisation of animals lay the
greatest contempt for human understanding, and it was a bitter satire
on the apotheosis of kings and emperors. For what was the divinity
of Sesostris, of Alexander, of Augustus, or Hadrian compared with
the heavenly majesty of the ox Apis, or the holy cats, dogs, kites,
crocodiles, and god-apes? Egypt was at this epoch already a museum of
the Pharaoh-time and its enbalamed culture. Strange buildings, rare
sculptures, hieroglyphics, and pictures still filled the ancient towns,
even though these had lost their splendour. Memphis and Heliopolis,
Bubastis, Abydos, Saïs, Tanis, and the hundred-gated Thebes had long
fallen into ruin, although still inhabited.
The emperors escort must have been an extraordinary sight as it steered
up the stream on a fleet of dahabiehs. The emperor was accompanied by
students of the museum, interpreters, priests, and astrologers. Amongst
his followers were Verus and the beautiful Antinous.
The Empress Sabina also accompanied him; she had the poetess Julia
Balbilla amongst her court ladies. They landed wherever there was
anything of interest to be seen, and there was more in those days than
there is now. They admired the great pyramids, the colossal sphinx, and
the sacred town of Memphis. This city, the ancient royal seat of the
Pharaohs, and even in Strabos time the second town in Egypt, was not
yet buried under the sand of the desert; its disappearance had, however,
already begun. Under the Ptolemies it had given much of the material of
her temples and palaces for the building of Alexandria. The great palace
of the Pharaohs had long been destroyed, but there still remained
many notable monuments, such as the temple of Phtah, the pyramids, the
necropolis, and the Serapeum, and they retained their ancient cult.
The town was still the chief seat of the Egyptian hierarchy and the
residence of Apis; for this very reason the Roman government had
destined it to be one of her strong military stations, for here a legion
was quartered. The emperor could walk through the time-worn avenues of
sphinxes which led to the wonderful vaults where the long succession of
divine animals was buried, each like a Pharaoh, in a magnificent granite
sarcophagus. Hadrian could admire the beautifully sculptured tomb of Di,
an Egyptian officer of the fifth dynasty, with less trouble than we
must experience now; for now the palaces, the pictures of the gods,
and almost all the pyramids are swallowed up in sand. Miserable Arab
villages, such as Saqqâra, have fixed themselves in the ruins of
Memphis, and from a thick palm grove one can look with astonishment
upon the torso of the powerful Ramses II. lying solitary there, the last
witness to the glory of the temple of Phtah, before which this colossus
once had its stand. In the neighbourhood of Memphis lay Heliopolis, the
town of the sun-god, with its ancient temple, and a school of Egyptian
wisdom, in which Plato is supposed to have studied.
In Heliopolis the worship of the god Ra was preserved, the centre of
which was the holy animal Mnevis, a rival or comrade of Apis. Cambyses
had partly destroyed the temple and even the obelisks which the Pharaohs
had in the course of centuries erected to the sun-god; nowhere in Egypt
existed so many of these monuments as here and in Thebes. Hadrian saw
many of them lying half-burnt on the ground just as Strabo had done.
On the site of Heliopolis, now green with wheat-fields, only a single
obelisk has remained upright, which is considered as the oldest of all,
and was erected in the twelfth dynasty by Usirtasen I.
The royal assemblage had arrived in the course of their journey at Besa,
a place on the right bank of the river, opposite Hermopolis, when a
strange event occurred. This was the death of Hadrians favourite,
Antinous, a young Greek from Claudiopolis, who had been degraded to the
position of Ganymede to the emperor on account of his beauty. It is not
known where the emperor first came across the youth; possibly in his
native land, Bithynia. Not till he came to Egypt did he become his
inseparable companion, and this must have been a deep offence to
his wife. The unfortunate queen was delivered in Besa from his hated
presence, for Antinous was drowned there in the Nile.
His death was surrounded by mystery. Was it accident? Was he a victim?
Hadrians humanity protects him from the suspicion that he sacrificed
his victim in cold blood, as Tiberius had once sacrificed the beautiful
Hypatus in Capri. Had the fantastic youth sacrificed himself of his own
free will to the death divinities in order to save the emperors life?
Had the Egyptian priests foreseen in the stars some danger threatening
Hadrian, only to be averted by the death of his favourite? Such an idea
commended itself to the superstition of the time, especially in
this land and by the mysterious Nile. It corresponded, too, with the
emperors astrological arts. Was Antinous certain when he plunged into
the waves of the Nile that he would arise from them as a god? Hadrian
asserts in his memoirs that it was an accident, but no one believed him.
The divine honours which he paid to the dead youth lead us to suppose
that they formed the reward of a self-sacrifice, which, according to the
custom of those times, constituted a highly moral action, and was looked
upon as heroic devotion. At any rate, we will assume that this sacrifice
sank into the Nile without Hadrians will. Hadrian mourned for Antinous
with unspeakable pain and womanly tears. Now he was Achilles by the
corpse of Patroklus, or Alexander by the pyre of the dead Hephaistus.
He had the youth splendidly buried in Besa. This most extraordinary
intermezzo of all Nile journeys supplied dying heathendom with a new
god, and art with its last ideal form. Probably, also, during the
burial, far-sighted courtiers already saw the star of Antinous shining
in Egypts midnight sky, and then Hadrian saw it himself.
In the mystical land of Egypt, life might still be poetical even in the
clear daylight of Roman universal history in the reign of Hadrian. The
death of the young Bithynian seems to have occurred in October, 130.
The emperor continued his journey as soon as he had given orders for
a splendid town to be erected on the site of Besa, in honour of his
friend. In November, 130, the royal company is to be found amongst the
ruins of Thebes.
Thebes, the oldest town in Egypt, had been first put in the shade
by Memphis, and then destroyed by Cambyses. Since the time of the
Ptolemies, it had been called Diospolis, and Ptolemais had taken its
place as capital of the Thebaid. Already in Strabos time it was split
up. It formed on either side of the Nile groups of gigantic temples and
palaces, monuments, and royal graves similar to those scattered to-day
amongst Luxor, Karnak, Medinet-Habu, Deir-el-Bahari, and Kurna.
[Illustration: 095.jpg COMMEMORATIVE COIN OF ANTINOUS]
In Hadrians time the Rameseum, the so-called grave of Osymandias, on
the western bank of the Nile, the wonderful building of Ramses II.,
must still have been in good repair. These pylons, pillars, arcades, and
courts, these splendid halls with their sculpture-covered walls, appear
even to have influenced the Roman art in the time of the emperors. Their
reflex influence has been even seen in Trajans forum, in which the
chief thing was the emperors tomb.
In Alexandria the emperor mixed freely with the professors of the
museum, asking them questions and answering theirs in return; and he
dropped his tear of pity on the tomb of the great Pompey, in the form of
a Greek epigram, though with very little point. He laid out large sums
of money in building and ornamenting the city, and the Alexandrians were
much pleased with his behaviour. Among other honours that they paid
him, they changed the name of the month December, calling it the month
Hadrian; but as they were not followed by the rest of the empire the
name soon went out of use. The emperors patronage of philosophy was
rather at the cost of the Alexandrian museum, for he enrolled among its
paid professors men who were teaching from school to school in Italy and
Asia Minor. Thus Polemon of Laodicea, who taught oratory and philosophy
at Rome, Laodicea, and Smyrna, and had the right of a free passage for
himself and his servants in any of the public ships whenever he chose to
move from city to city for the purposes of study or teaching, had at
the same time a salary from the Alexandrian museum. Dionysius of Miletus
also received his salary as a professor in the museum while teaching
philosophy and mnemonicsat Miletus and Ephesus. Pancrates, the
Alexandrian poet, gained his salary in the museum by the easy task of a
little flattery. On Hadrians return to Alexandria from the Thebaid, the
poet presented to him a rose-coloured lotus, a flower well known in
India, though less common in Egypt than either the blue or white lotus,
and assured him that it had sprung out of the blood of the lion slain by
his royal javelin at a lion-hunt in Libya.
[Illustration: 097.jpg ROSE-COLOURED LOTUS]
The emperor was pleased with the compliment, and gave him a place in the
museum; and Pancrates in return named the plant the lotus of Antinous.
Pancrates was a warm admirer of the mystical opinions of the Egyptians
which were then coming into note in Alexandria. He was said to have
lived underground in holy solitude or converse with the gods for
twenty-three years, and during that time to have been taught magic by
the goddess Isis, and thus to have gained the power of working miracles.
He learned to call upon the queen of darkness by her Egyptian name
Hecate, and when driving out evil spirits to speak to them in the
Egyptian language. Whether these Greek students of the Eastern mysticism
were deceivers or deceived, whether they were led by a love of notoriety
or of knowledge, is in most cases doubtful, but they were surrounded by
a crowd of credulous admirers, who formed a strange contrast with the
sceptics and critics of the museum.
Among the Alexandrian grammarians of this reign was Apollonius Dyscolus,
so called perhaps from a moroseness of manner, who wrote largely on
rhetoric, on the Greek dialects, on accents, prosody, and on other
branches of grammar. In the few pages that remain of his numerous
writings, we trace the love of the marvellous which was then growing
among some of the philosophers. He tells us many remarkable stories,
which he collected rather as a judicious inquirer than as a credulous
believer; such as of second sight; an account of a lad who fell asleep
in the field while watching his sheep, and then slept for fifty-seven
years, and awoke to wonder at the strangeness of the changes that had
taken place in the meanwhile; and of a man who after death used from
time to time to leave his body, and wander over the earth as a spirit,
till his wife, tired of his coming back again so often, put a stop to it
by having his mummy burnt. He gives us for the first time Eastern tales
in a Greek dress, and we thus learn the source from which Europe gained
much of its literature in the Middle Ages. The Alexandrian author of
greatest note at this time was the historian Appian, who tells us that
he had spent some years in Rome practising as a lawyer, and returned to
Egypt on being appointed to a high post in the government of his native
city. There he wrote his Roman history.
In this reign the Jews, forgetful of what they had just suffered under
Trajan, again rose against the power of Rome; and, when Judæa rebelled
against its prefect, Tinnius Rufus, a little army of Jews marched out of
Egypt and Libya, to help their brethren and to free the holy land
(130 A.D.). But they were everywhere routed and put down with resolute
slaughter.
[Illustration: 099.jpg VOCAL STATUE OF AMENHOTHES]
Travellers, on reaching a distant point of a journey, or on viewing any
remarkable object of their curiosity, have at all times been fond of
carving or scribbling their names on the spot, to boast of their
prowess to after-comers; and never had any place been more favoured with
memorials of this kind than the great statue of Amenhôthes at Thebes.
This colossal statue, fifty-three feet high, was famed, as long as
the Egyptian priesthood lasted, for sending forth musical sounds
every morning at sunrise, when first touched by the suns rays; and no
traveller ever visited Thebes without listening for these remarkable
notes. The journey through Upper Egypt was at this time perfectly open
and safe, and the legs and feet of the statue are covered with names,
and inscriptions in prose and verse, of travellers who had visited it
at sunrise during the reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines. From these
curious memorials we learn that Hadrian visited Thebes a second time
with his queen, Sabina, in the fifteenth year of his reign. When the
empress first visited the statue she was disappointed at not hearing
the musical sounds; but, on her hinting threats of the emperors
displeasure, her curiosity was gratified on the following morning.
This gigantic statue of hard gritstone had formerly been broken in half
across the waist, and the upper part thrown to the ground, either by the
shock of an earthquake or the ruder shock of Persian zeal against the
Egyptian religion; and for some centuries past the musical notes had
issued from the broken fragments. Such was its fallen state when
the Empress Sabina saw it, and when Strabo and Juvenal and Pausanias
listened to its sounds; and it was not till after the reign of Hadrian
that it was again raised upright like its companion, as travellers now
see it.
[Illustration: 100b..jpg The Slumber Song]
From the painting by P. Grot. Johann
From this second visit, and a longer acquaintance, Hadrian seems to have
formed a very poor opinion of the Egyptians and Egyptian Jews; and the
following curious letter, written in 134 A.D. to his friend Servianus,
throws much light upon their religion as worshippers of Serapis, at
the same time that it proves how numerous the Christians had become in
Alexandria, even within seventy years of the period during which the
evangelist Mark is believed to have preached there:
Hadrian Augustus to Servianus, the consul, greeting:
As for Egypt, which you were praising to me, dearest Servianus, I have
found its people wholly light, wavering, and flying after every breath
of a report. Those who worship Serapis are Christians, and those who
call themselves bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis. There is
no ruler of a Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no presbyter of the
Christians, who is not a mathematician, an augur, and a soothsayer. The
very patriarch himself, when he came into Egypt, was by some said to
worship Serapis, and by others to worship Christ. As a race of men, they
are seditious, vain, and spiteful; as a body, wealthy and prosperous,
of whom nobody lives in idleness. Some blow glass, some make paper, and
others linen. There is work for the lame and work for the blind; even
those who have lost the use of their hands do not live in idleness.
Their one god is nothing; Christians, Jews, and all nations worship him.
I wish this body of men was better behaved, and worthy of their number;
for as for that they ought to hold the chief place in Egypt. I have
granted everything unto them; I have restored their old privileges, and
have made them grateful by adding new ones.
Among the crowd of gods that had formerly been worshipped in Egypt,
Serapis had latterly been rising above the rest. He was the god of
the dead, who in the next world was to reward the good and punish the
wicked; and in the growing worship of this one all-seeing judge we
cannot but trace the downfall of some of the evils of polytheism. A
plurality in unity was another method now used to explain away the
polytheism.
[Illustration: 102.jpg EGYPTIAN ORACLE]
The oracle when consulted about the divine nature had answered, I am
Ra, and Horus, and Osiris; or, as the Greeks translated it, Apollo,
and Lord, and Bacchus; I rule the hours and the seasons, the wind and
the storms, the day and the night; I am king of the stars and myself an
immortal fire. Hence arose the opinion which seems to have been given
to Hadrian, that the Egyptians had only one god, and his mistake in
thinking that the worshippers of Serapis were Christians. The emperor,
indeed, himself, though a polytheist, was very little of an idolater;
for, though he wished to add Christ to the number of the Roman gods,
he on the other hand ordered that the temples built in his reign should
have no images for worship; and in after ages it was common to call
all temples without statues Hadrians temples. But there were other and
stronger reasons for Hadrians classing the Christians with the Egyptian
astrologers. A Christian heresy was then rising into notice in Egypt in
that very form, taking its opinions from the philosophy on which it was
engrafted. Before Christianity was preached in Alexandria, there were
already three religions or forms of philosophy belonging to the three
races of men who peopled that busy city; first, the Greek philosophy;
which was chiefly platonism; secondly, the mysticism of the Egyptians;
and lastly, the religion of the Jews. These were often more or less
mixed, as we see them all united in the works of Philo-Judæ; and in
the writings of the early converts we usually find Christianity clothed
in one or other of these forms, according to the opinions held by the
writers before their conversion. The first Christian teachers, the
apostolic fathers as they are called, because they had been hearers of
the apostles themselves, were mostly Jews; but among the Egyptians and
Greeks of Alexandria their religion lost much of its purely moral caste,
and became, with the former, an astrological mysticism, and with the
latter an abstract speculative theology. It is of the Egyptian Jews that
Hadrian speaks in his letter just quoted; many of them had been already
converted to Christianity, and their religion had taken the form of
Gnosticism.
Gnosticism, or Science, for the name means no more, was not then new
in Alexandria, nor were its followers originally Christians. It was the
proud name claimed for their opinions by those who studied the Eastern
philosophy of the Magi; and Egypt seems to have been as much its native
soil as India. The name of Gnostic, says Weber, was generally given to
those who distinguished between belief on authority and gnosis, i.e.,
between the ordinary comprehension and a higher knowledge only granted
to a few gifted or chosen ones. They were split up into different sects,
according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the
platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its
symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant. The creed of those
who know never reached actual monotheism, the conception of one
personal god, who created everything according to his own free will and
rules over everything with unlimited wisdom and love. The god of
the Gnostics is a dark, mysterious being which can only arrive at a
consciousness of itself through a manifold descending scale of forces,
which flow from the god himself. The visible world was created out of
dead and evil matter by Demiurgos, the divine work-master, a production
and subordinate of the highest god. Man, too, is a production of this
subordinate creator, a production subject to a blind fate, and a prey to
those powers which rule between heaven and earth, without free-will,
the only thing which makes the ideas of sin and responsibility possible.
Matter is the seat of evil, and as long as man stands under the
influence of this matter, he is in the hands of evil and knows no
freedom. Redemption can only reach him through those higher beings of
light, which free man from the power of matter and translate him into
the kingdom of light. According to the Gnostic teaching, Christ is
one of these beings of light; he is one of the highest who appeared on
earth, and is transformed into a mythical, allegorical being, with
his human nature, his sufferings and death completely suppressed. The
redeemed soul is then as a kind of angel, or ideal being, brought in
triumph into the idealistic realm of light as soon as it has purified
itself to the nature of a spirit, by means of penitence, chastisements,
and finally the death of the physical body. Hence the Gnostics attached
little importance to the means of mercy in the Church, to the Bible, or
the sacraments; they allowed the Church teaching to exist as a necessary
conception for the people, but they placed their own teachings far above
it as mysterious or secret teachings. As regards their morals and
mode of life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes. It was due to
Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It
preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up
entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own
hollowness and eccentricity.
We still possess the traces of the Gnostic astrology in a number of
amulets and engraved gems, with the word _Abraxas_ or rather _Abrasax_
and other emblems of their superstition, which they kept as charms
against diseases and evil spirits. The word _Abrasax_ may be translated
_Hurt me not_. To their mystic rites we may trace many of the reproaches
thrown upon Christianity, such as that the Christians worshipped the
head of an ass, using the animals Koptic name _Eeo_, to represent the
name of IAn, or Jahveh. To the same source we may also trace some of
the peculiarities of the Christian fathers, such as St. Ambrose calling
Jesus the good scarabæus, who rolled up before him the hitherto
un-shapen mud of our bodies; a thought which seems to have been
borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insects habits; and
perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous
to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word _only begotten_. We
trace this thought on the Gnostic gems where Ave see a winged griffin
rolling before him a wheel, the emblem of eternity. He sits like a
conqueror on horseback, trampling under foot the serpent of old, the
spirit of sin and death. His horse is in the form of a ram, with an
eagles head and the crowned asp or basilisk for its tail. Before him
stands the figure of victory giving him a crown; above are written the
words Alpha and Omega, and below perhaps the word [IAH], Jahveh.
So far we have seen the form which Christianity at first took among the
Egyptians; but, as few writings by these Gnostics have come down to
our time, we chiefly know their opinions from the reproaches of their
enemies. It was not till the second generation of Gnostic teachers were
spreading their heresies that the Greek philosophers began to embrace
Christianity, or the Christians to study Greek literature; but as soon
as that was the case we have an unbroken chain of writings, in which
we find Christianity more or less mixed with the Alexandrian form of
platonism.
[Illustration: 106.jpg KOPTIC CHARM AND SCARABEUS]
The philosopher Justin, after those who had talked with the apostles,
is the earliest Christian writer whose works have reached us. He was a
Greek, born in Samaria; but he studied many years in Alexandria under
philosophers of all opinions. He did not, however, at once find in
the schools the wisdom he was in search for. The Stoic could teach him
nothing about God; the Peripatetic wished to be paid for his lessons
before he gave them; and the Pythagorean proposed to begin with music
and mathematics.
[Illustration: 107.jpg GNOSTIC GEM]
Not content with these, Justin turned to the platonist, whose purer
philosophy seemed to add wings to his thoughts, and taught him to mount
aloft towards true wisdom. While turning over in his mind what he had
thus learned in the several schools, dissatisfied with the philosophers
views, he chanced one day to meet with an old man walking on the
seashore near Alexandria, to whom he unbosomed his thoughts, and by whom
he was converted to Christianity. Justin tells us that there were no
people, whether Greeks or barbarians, or even dwellers in tent and
waggons, among whom prayers were not offered up to the heavenly father
in the name of the crucified Jesus. The Christians met every Sunday for
public worship, which began with a reading from the prophets, or from
the memoirs of the apostles called the gospels. This was followed by
a sermon, a prayer, the bread and wine, and a second prayer. Justins
quotations prove that he is speaking of the New Testament, which within
a hundred years of the crucifixion wras read in all the principal cities
in which Greek was spoken. Justin died as a martyr in 163 A.D.
The platonic professorship in Alexandria had usually been held by an
Athenian, and for a short time Athenagoras of Athens taught that branch
of philosophy in the museum; but he afterwards embraced the Christian
religion, and then taught Christianity openly in Alexandria. He enjoys
with Justin the honour of being one of the first men of learning who
were converted, and, like Justin, his chief work is an apology for the
Christians, addressed to the emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
[Illustration: 108.jpg GEMS SHOWING SYMBOL OF DEATH AND THE WORD [ÎAH]
JAVEH]
Athenagoras confines himself in his defence to the resurrection from
the dead and the unity of the Deity, the points chiefly attacked by the
pagans.
Hadrians Egyptian coins are remarkable both for number and variety. In
the sixth year of the reign we see a ship with spread sails, most likely
in gratitude for the emperors safe arrival in Egypt. In the eighth year
we see the head of the favourite Antinous, who had been placed among the
gods of the country. In the eleventh year, when the emperor took up the
tribunitial power at Rome for a second period of ten years, we find a
series of coins, each bearing the name of the nome or district in which
it was coined. This indeed is the most remarkable year of the most
remarkable reign in the whole history of coinage; we have numerous coins
for every year of this reign, and, in this year, for nearly every nome
in Egypt. Some coins are strongly marked with the favourite opinion of
the Gnostics as to the opposition between good and evil.
[Illustration: 109.jpg Hadrians Egyptian coins]
On one we have the war between the serpent of good and the serpent of
evil, distinguished by their different forms and by the emblems of Isis
and Serapis; on others the heads of Isis and Serapis, the principles of
love and fear; while on a third these two are united into a trinity by
Horus, who is standing on an eagle instead of having an eagles head, as
represented on previous coins.
The beginning of the reign of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 138) was remarkable
as being the end of the Sothic period of one thousand four hundred and
sixty years; the movable new years day of the calendar had come round
to the place in the natural year from which it first began to move in
the reign of Menophres or Thûtmosis III.; it had come round to the day
when the dog-star rose heliacally. If the years had been counted from
the beginning of this great year, there could have been no doubt when it
came to an end, as from the want of a leap year the new years day
must have been always moving one day in four years; but no satisfactory
reckoning of the years had been kept, and, as the end of the period was
only known by observation, there was some little doubt about the exact
year. Indeed, among the Greek astronomers, Dositheus said the dog-star
rises heliacally twenty-three days after midsummer, Meton twenty-eight
days, and Euctemon thirty-one days; they thus left a doubt of thirty-two
years as to when the period should end, but the statesmen placed it in
the first year of the reign of Antoninus. This end of the Sothic period
Avas called the return to the phoenix, and had been looked forward to by
the Egyptians for many years, and is well marked on the coins of this
reign. The coins for the first eight years teem with astronomy. There
are several with the goddess Isis in a boat, which we know, from the
zodiac in the Memnonium at Thebes, was meant for the heliacal rising of
the dog-star. In the second and in the sixth year we find on the coins
the remarkable word aion, _the age_ or _period_, and an ibis with a
glory of rays round its head, meant for the bird phoenix. In the seventh
year we see Orpheus playing on his lyre while all the animals of the
forest are listening, thus pointing out the return of the golden age.
In the eighth year we have the head of Serapis circled by the seven
planets, and the whole within the twelve signs of the zodiac; and on
another coin we have the sun and moon within the signs of the zodiac. A
series of twelve coins for the same year tells us that the house of the
sun, in the language of the astrologers, is in the lion, that of the
moon in the crab, the houses of Venus in the scales and the bull, those
of Mars in the scorpion and the ram, those of Jupiter in the archer
and the fishes, those of Saturn in the sea-goat and aquarius, those of
Mercury in the virgin and the twins. On the coins of the same year we
have the eagle and thunderbolt, the sphinx, the bull Apis, the Nile and
crocodile, Isis nursing the child Horus, the hawk-headed Aroëris, and
the winged sun. On coins of other years we have a camelopard, Horus
sitting on the lotus-flower, and a sacrifice to Isis, which was
celebrated on the last day of the year.
The coins also tell us of the bountiful overflow of the Nile, and of
the goodness of the harvests that followed; thus, in the ninth, tenth,
thirteenth, and seventeenth years, we see the river Nile in the form
of an old man leaning on a crocodile, pouring corn and fruit out of a
cornucopia, while a child by his side, with the figures 36, tells
us that in those years the waters of the Nile rose at Memphis to the
wished-for height of sixteen cubits. From these latter coins it would
seem that but little change had taken place in the soil of the Delta by
the yearly deposit of mud; Herodotus says that sixteen cubits was the
wished-for rise of the Nile at Memphis when he was there. And we should
almost think that the seasons were more favourable to the husbandman
during the reign of an Antonine than of a Caligula, did we not set it
down to the canals being better cleansed by the care of the prefect, and
to the mildness of the government leaving the people at liberty to enjoy
the bounties of nature, and at the same time making them more grateful
in acknowledging them.
[Illustration: 112.jpg COINS OF ANTONINUS PIUS.]
The mystic emblems on the coins are only what we might look for from the
spread of the Gnostic opinions, and the eagerness with which the Greeks
were copying the superstitions of the Egyptians; and, while astrology
was thus countenanced by the state, of course it was not less followed
by the people. The poor Jews took to it as a trade. In Alexandria the
Jewess, half beggar, half fortune-teller, would stop people in the
streets and interpret dreams by the help of the Bible, or sit under a
sacred tree like a sibyl, and promise wealth to those who consulted her,
duly proportioned to the size of the coin by which she was paid. We find
among the Theban ruins pieces of papyrus with inscriptions, describing
the positions of the heavens at particular hours in this reign, for the
astrologers therewith to calculate the nativities of the persons then
born. On one is a complete horoscope, containing the places of the sun,
moon, and every planet, noted down on the zodiac in degrees and minutes
of a degree; and with these particulars the mathematician undertook to
foretell the marriage, fortune, and death of the person who had been
born at the instant when the heavenly bodies were so situated; and, as
the horoscope was buried in the tomb with the mummy, we must suppose
that it was thought that the prognostication would hold good even in the
next world.
But astrology was not the only end to which mathematics were then
turned. Claudius Ptolemy, the astronomer and geographer, was at that
time the ornament of the mathematical school of Alexandria. In his
writings he treats of the earth as the centre of the heavens, and the
sun, moon, and planets as moving in circles and epicycles round it. This
had been the opinion of some of the early astronomers; but since this
theory of the heavens received the stamp of his authority, it is now
always called the Ptolemaic system.
In this reign was made a new survey of all the military roads in the
Roman empire, called the _Itinerary of Antoninus_. It included the
great roads of Egypt, which were only six in number. One was from
Contra-Pselcis in Nubia along the east bank of the Nile, to Babylon
opposite Memphis, and there turning eastward through Heliopolis and the
district of the Jews to Clysmon, where Trajans canal entered the Red
Sea. A second, from Memphis to Pelusium, made use of this for
about thirty miles, joining it at Babylon, and leaving it at Scense
Veteranorum. By these two roads a traveller could go from Pelusium to
the head of the Red Sea; but there was a shorter road through the desert
which joined the first at Serapion, about fifty miles from Clysmon,
instead of at Sceno Veteranorum, which was therefore about a hundred
miles shorter. A fourth was along the west bank of the Nile from Hiera
Sycaminon in Nubia to Alexandria, leaving the river at Andropolis,
about sixty miles from the latter city. A fifth was from Palestine to
Alexandria, running along the coast of the Mediterranean from Raphia to
Pelusium, and thence, leaving the coast to avoid the flat country, which
was under water during the inundation; it joined the last at Andropolis.
The sixth road was from Koptos on the Nile to Berenicê on the Red Sea.
These six were probably the only roads under the care of the prefect.
Though Syênê was the boundary of the province of Egypt, the Roman power
was felt for about one hundred miles into Nubia, and we find the names
of the emperors on several temples between Syênê and Hiera Sycaminon.
But beyond this, though we find inscriptions left by Roman travellers,
the emperors seem never to have aimed at making military roads, or
holding any cities against the inroads of the Blemmyes and other Arabs.
To this survey we must add the valuable geographical knowledge given
by Arrian in his voyage round the shores of the Red Sea, which has come
down to us in an interesting document, wherein he mentions the several
seaports and their distances, with the tribes and cities near the
coast. The trade of Egypt to India, Ethiopia, and Arabia was then most
valuable, and carried on with great activity; but, as the merchandise
was in each case carried only for short distances from city to city, the
traveller could gain but little knowledge of where it came from, or even
sometimes of where it was going.
[Illustration: 115.jpg STATUE OF THE NILE]
The Egyptians sent coarse linen, glass bottles, brazen vessels, brass
for money, and iron for weapons of war and hunting; and they received
back ivory, rhinoceros teeth, Indian steel, Indian ink, silks, slaves,
tortoise-shell, myrrh, and other scents, with many other Eastern
articles of high price and little weight. The presents which the
merchants made to the petty kings of Arabia were chiefly horses, mules,
and gold and silver vases. Beside this, the ports on the Red Sea carried
on a brisk trade among themselves in grain, expressed oil, wicker
boats, and sugar. Of sugar, or honey from the cane, this is perhaps
the earliest mention found in history; but Arrian does not speak of
the sugar-cane as then new, nor does he tell us where it was grown. Had
sugar been then seen for the first time he would certainly have said
so; it must have been an article well known in the Indian trade. While
passing through Egypt on his travels, or while living there and holding
some post under the prefect, the historian Arrian has left us his name
and a few lines of poetry carved on the foot of the great sphinx near
the pyramids.
At this time also the travellers continued to carve their names and
their feelings of wonder on the foot of the musical statue at Thebes and
in the deep empty tombs of the Theban kings. These inscriptions are full
of curious information. For example, it has been doubted whether the
Roman army was provided with medical officers. Their writers have not
mentioned them. But part of the Second Legion was at this time stationed
at Thebes; and one Asclepiades, while cutting his name in a tomb which
once held some old Theban, has cleared up the doubt for us, by saying
that he was physician to the Second Legion.
Antoninus made a hippodrome, or race-course, for the amusement of the
citizens of Alexandria, and built two gates to the city, called the gate
of the sun and the gate of the moon, the former fronting the harbour and
the latter fronting the lake Mareotis, and joined by the great street
which ran across the whole width of the city. But this reign was not
wholly without trouble; there was a rebellion in which the prefect
Dinarchus lost his life, and for which the Alexandrians were severely
punished by the emperor.
[Illustration: 117.jpg COINS OF MARCUS AURELIUS]
The coins of Marcus Aurelius, the successor of Antoninus Pius, have a
rich variety of subjects, falling not far short of those of the last
reign. On those of the fifth year, the bountiful overflow of the Nile is
gratefully acknowledged by the figure of the god holding a cornucopia,
and a troop of sixteen children playing round him. It had been not
unusual in hieroglyphical writing to express a thought by means of a
figure which in the Koptic language had nearly the same sound; and we
have seen this copied on the coins in the case of a Greek word, when the
bird phoenix was used for the palm-branch phoenix, or the hieroglyphical
word _year_; and a striking instance may be noticed in the case of a
Latin word, as the sixteen children or _cupids_ mean sixteen _cubits_,
the wished-for height of the Niles overflow. The statue of the Nile,
which had been carried by Vespasian to Rome and placed in the temple of
Peace, was surrounded by the same sixteen children. On the coins of his
twelfth year the sail held up by the goddess Isis is blown towards the
Pharos lighthouse, as if in that year the emperor had been expected in
Alexandria.
We find no coins in the eleventh or fourteenth years of this reign,
which makes it probable that it was in the eleventh year (A.D. 172) that
the rebellion of the native soldiers took place. These were very likely
Arabs who had been admitted into the ranks of the legions, but having
withdrawn to the desert they now harassed the towns with their marauding
inroads, and a considerable time elapsed before they were wholly put
down by Avidius Cassius at the head of the legions. But Cassius himself
was unable to resist the temptations which always beset a successful
general, and after this victory he allowed himself to be declared
emperor by the legions of Egypt; and this seems to have been the cause
of no coins being struck in Alexandria in the fourteenth year of the
reign. Cassius left his son Moecianus in Alexandria with the title of
Pretorian Prefect, while he himself marched into Syria to secure that
province. There the legions followed the example of their brethren in
Egypt, and the Syrians were glad to acknowledge a general of the Eastern
armies as their sovereign. But on Marcus leading an army into Syria he
was met with the news that the rebels had repented, and had put Cassius
to death, and he then moved his forces towards Egypt; but before his
arrival the Egyptian legions had in the same manner put Moecianus to
death, and all had returned to their allegiance.
When Marcus arrived in Alexandria the citizens were agreeably surprised
by the mildness of his conduct. He at once forgave his enemies; and
no offenders were put to death for having joined in the rebellion. The
severest punishment, even to the children of Cassius, was banishment
from the province, but without restraint, and with the forfeiture of
less than half their patrimony. In Alexandria the emperor laid aside the
severity of the soldier, and mingled with the people as a fellow-citizen
in the temples and public places; while with the professors in the
museum he was a philosopher, joining them in their studies in the
schools.
Borne and Athens at this time alike looked upon Alexandria as the centre
of the worlds learning. The library was then in its greatest glory;
the readers were numerous, and Christianity had as yet raised no doubts
about the value of its pagan treasures. All the wisdom of Greece,
written on rolls of brittle papyrus or tough parchment, was ranged in
boxes on the shelves. Of these writings the few that have been saved
from the wreck of time are no doubt some of the best, and they are
perhaps enough to guide our less simple taste towards the unornamented
grace of the Greek model. But we often fancy those treasures most
valuable that are beyond our reach, and hence when we run over the names
of the authors in this library we think perhaps too much of those which
are now missing. The student in the museum could have read the lyric
poems of Alcæus and Stersichorus, which in matter and style were
excellent enough to be judged not quite so good as Homer; the tender
lamentations of Simonides; the warm breathings of Sappho, the tenth
muse; the pithy iambics of Archilochus, full of noble flights and
brave irregularities; the comedies of Menander, containing every kind
of excellence; those of Eupolis and Cratinus, which were equal to
Aristophanes; the histories of Theopompus, which in the speeches were
as good as Thucydides; the lively, agreeable orations of Hyperides, the
accuser of Demosthenes; with the books of travels, chronologies, and
countless others of less merit for style and genius, but which, if they
had been saved, would not have left Egypt wholly without a history.
[Illustration: 120.jpg ALEXANDRIAN FORMS OF WRITING]
The trade of writing and making copies of the old authors employed
a great many hands in the neighbourhood of the museum. Two kinds of
handwriting were in use. One was a running hand, with the letters joined
together in rather a slovenly manner; and the other a neat, regular
hand, with the letters square and larger, written more slowly but read
more easily. Those that wrote the first were called _quick-writers_,
those that wrote the second were called _book-writers_. If an author was
not skilled in the use of the pen, he employed a _quickwriter_ to write
down his words as he delivered them. But in order that his work might be
published it was handed over to the _book-writers_ to be copied out more
neatly; and numbers of young women, skilled in penmanship, were employed
in the trade of copying books for sale. For this purpose parchment
was coming into use, though the old papyrus was still used, as an
inexpensive though less lasting writing material.
Athenæus, if we may judge from Iris writings, was then the brightest of
the Alexandrian wits and men of learning. We learn from his own pages
that he was born at Naucratis, and was the friend of Pancrates, who
lived under Hadrian, and also of Oppian, who died in the reign of
Caracalla. His _Deipnosophist_, or table-talk of the philosophers, is a
large work full of pleasing anecdotes and curious information, gathered
from comic writers and authors without number that have long since been
lost. But it is put together with very little skill. His industry and
memory are more remarkable than his judgment or good taste; and the
table-talk is too often turned towards eating and drinking. His amusing
work is a picture of society in Alexandria, where everything frivolous
was treated as grave, and everything serious was laughed at. The wit
sinks into scandal, the humour is at the cost of morality, and the
numerous quotations are chosen for their point, not for any lofty
thoughts or noble feeling. Alexandria was then as much the seat of
literary wit as it was of dry criticism; and Martial, the lively author
of the _Epigrams_, had fifty years before remarked that there were few
places in the world where he would more wish his verses to be repeated
than on the banks of the Nile.
Nothing could be lower than the poetic taste in Alexandria at this time.
The museum was giving birth to a race of poets who, instead of bringing
forth thoughts out of their own minds, found them in the storehouse of
the memory only. They wrote their patchwork poems by the help of Homers
lines, which they picked from all parts of the Iliad and Odyssey and
so put together as to make them tell a new tale. They called themselves
Homeric poets.
Lucian, the author of the _Dialogues_, was at that time secretary to the
prefect of Egypt, and this philosopher found a broad mark for his
humour in the religion of the Egyptians, their worship of animals and
water-jars, their love of magic, the general mourning through the land
on the death of the bull Apis, their funeral ceremonies, their placing
of their mummies round the dinner-table as so many guests, and pawning a
father or a brother when in want of money.
[Illustration: 122.jpg A SNAKE-CHARMER]
So little had the customs changed that the young Egyptians of high birth
still wore their long hair tied in one lock, and hanging over the right
ear, as we see on the Theban sculptures fifteen centuries earlier. It
was then a mark of royalty, but had since been adopted by many families
of high rank, and continues to be used even in the twentieth century.
[Illustration: 123.jpg THE SIGN OF NOBILITY]
Before the end of this reign we meet with a strong proof of the spread
of Christianity in Egypt. The number of believers made it necessary for
the Bishop of Alexandria to appoint three bishops under him, to look
after the churches in three other cities; and accordingly Demetrius, who
then held that office, took upon himself the rank, if not the name, of
Patriarch of Alexandria. A second proof of the spread of Christianity
is the pagan philosophers thinking it necessary to write against it.
Celsus, an Epicurean of Alexandria, was one of the first to attack it.
Origen answered the several arguments of Celsus with skill and candour.
He challenges his readers to a comparison between the Christians and
pagans in point of morals, in Alexandria or in any other city. He
argues in the most forcible way that Christianity had overcome all
difficulties, and had spread itself far and wide against the power of
kings and emperors, and he says that nobody but a Christian ever died
a martyr to the truth of his religion. He makes good use of the Jewish
prophecies; but he brings forward no proofs in support of the truth of
the gospel history; they were not wanted, as Celsus and the pagans had
not considered it necessary to call it into question.
Another proof of the number of Egyptian Christians is seen in the
literary frauds of which their writers were guilty, most likely to
satisfy the minds of those pagan converts that they had already made
rather than from a wish to make new believers. About this time was
written by an unknown Christian author a poem in eight books, named the
_Sibylline Verses_ which must not be mistaken for the pagan fragments
of the same name. It is written in the form of a prophecy, in the style
used by the Gnostics, and is full of dark sentences and half-expressed
hints.
Another spurious Christian work of about the same time is the
_Clementina_, or the _Recognitions of Clemens_, Bishop of Rome. It is
an account of the travels of the Apostle Peter and his conversation with
Simon Magus; but the authors knowledge of the Egyptian mythology, of
the opinions of the Greek philosophers, and of the astrological rules by
which fortunes are foretold from the planets places, amply prove that
he was an Egyptian or an Alexandrian. No name ranked higher among the
Christians than that of Clemens Romanus; and this is only one out of
several cases of Christian authors who wished to give weight to their
own opinions by passing them upon the world as his writings.
Marcus Aurelius, who died in 181 A.D., had pardoned the children of the
rebel general Avidius Cassius, but Commodus began his reign by putting
them to death; and, while thus disregarding the example and advice of
his father, he paid his memory the idle compliment of continuing his
series of dates on his own coins. But the Egyptian coinage of Commodus
clearly betrays the sad change that was gradually taking place in the
arts of the country; we no longer see the former beauty and variety of
subjects; and the silver, which had before been very much mixed with
copper, was under Commodus hardly to be known from brass.
[Illustration: 125.jpg CARTOUCHE OF COMMODUS]
Commodus was very partial to the Egyptian superstitions, and he adopted
the tonsure, and had his head shaven like a priest of Isis, that he
might more properly carry an Anubis staff in sacred processions, which
continued to be a feature of the religious activities of the age. Upper
Egypt had latterly been falling off in population. It had been drained
of all its hoarded wealth. Its carrying trade through Koptos to the Red
Sea was much lessened. Any tribute that its temples received from the
piety of the neighbourhood was small. Nubia was a desert; and a few
soldiers at Syênê were enough to guard the poverty of the Thebaid
from the inroads of the Blemmyes. It was no longer necessary to
send criminals to the Oasis; it was enough to banish them to the
neighbourhood of Thebes. Hence we learn but little of the state of
the country. Now and then a traveller, after measuring the pyramids of
Memphis and the underground tombs of Thebes, might venture as far as the
cataracts, and watch the sun at noon on the longest day shining to the
bottom of the sacred well at Syênê, like the orator Aristides and his
friend Dion. But such travellers were few; the majority of those who
made this journey have left the fact on record.
The celebrated museum, which had held the vast library of the Ptolemies,
had been burnt by the soldiers of Julius Cæsar in one of their battles
with the Egyptian army in the streets of Alexandria; but the loss had
been in part repaired by Mark Antonys gift of the library from Pergamus
to the temple of Serapis. The new library, however, would seem to have
been placed in a building somewhat separated from the temple, as when
the temple of Serapis was burnt in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and
again when it was in part destroyed by fire in the second year of this
reign we hear of no loss of books; and two hundred years later the
library of the Serapium, it is said, had risen to the number of seven
hundred thousand volumes. The temple-keeper to the great god Serapis, or
one of the temple-keepers, at this time was Asclepiades, a noted boxer
and wrestler, who had been made chief of the wrestling-ground and had
received the high rank of the emperors freedman. He set up a statue to
his father Demetrius, an equally noted boxer and wrestler, who had been
chief priest of the wrestling-ground and of the emperors baths in the
last reign.
[Illustration: 126.jpg THE ANUBIS STAFF]
Another favourite in the theatre was Apolaustus of Memphis, who removed
to Rome, where he was crowned as conqueror in the games, and as a reward
made priest to Apollo and emperors freedman.
The city of Canopus was still a large mart for merchandise, as the
shallow but safe entrance to its harbour made it a favourite with pilots
of the small trading vessels, who rather dreaded the rocks at the mouth
of the harbour of Alexandria. A temple of Serapis which had lately been
built at Canopus was dedicated to the god in the name of the Emperor
Commodus; and there some of the grosser superstitions of the polytheists
fled before the spread of Christianity and platonism in Alexandria. The
Canopic jars, which held those parts of the body that could not be made
solid in the mummy, and which had the heads of the four lesser gods
of the dead on their lids, received their name from this city. The
sculptures on the beautiful temples of Contra-Latopolis were also
finished in this reign, and the emperors names and titles were carved
on the walls in hieroglyphics, with those of the Ptolemies, under whom
the temple itself had been built. Commodus may perhaps not have been
the last emperor whose name and praises were carved in hieroglyphics;
but all the great buildings in the Thebaid, which add such value to the
early history of Egypt, had ceased before his reign. Other buildings of
a less lasting form were no doubt being built, such as the Greek temples
at Antinoopolis and Ptolemais, which have long since been swept away;
but the Egyptian priests, with their gigantic undertakings, their noble
plan of working for after ages rather than for themselves, were nearly
ruined, and we find no ancient building now standing in Egypt that was
raised after the time of the dynasty of the Antonines.
[Illustration: 128.jpg CANOPIC JARS]