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

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

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

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

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

From Alexandria Vespasian sent back Titus to finish the siege of Jerusalem. The Jewish writer Joseph, the son of Matthias, or Flavius Josephus, as he called himself when he entered the service of the emperor, was then in Alexandria. He had been taken prisoner by Vespasian, but had gained his freedom by the betrayal of his country's cause. He joined the army of Titus and marched to the overthrow of Jerusalem. Notwithstanding the obstinate and heroic struggles of the Jews, Judaea 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 Caesar was to renounce the faith of their fathers. But they found no safety in Egypt. Their Greek brethren turned against them, and handed six hundred of them up to Lupus, the governor of Egypt, to be punished; and their countryman Josephus brands them all with the name of Sicarii. They tried to hide themselves in Thebes and other cities less under the eyes of the Roman governor. They were, however, followed and taken, and the courage with which the boys and mere children bore their sufferings, sooner than acknowledge Vespasian for their king, drew forth the praise of even the time-serving Josephus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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.



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 Chaldaean 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.



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.



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.



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



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.



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 Nabataea, and when Egypt was so far quiet that the legions could be withdrawn without danger to the provinces, the Arabs could hold out no longer, and the rocky fastness of Petra was forced to receive a Roman garrison. The event was as usual commemorated on the coins of Rome; and for the next four hundred years that remarkable Arab city formed part of the Roman empire; and Europeans now travelling through the desert from Mount Sinai to Jerusalem are agreeably surprised at coming upon temples, carved out of the solid rock, ornamented with Corinthian columns of the age of the Antonines.

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

The canal from the Nile near Bubastis to the Bitter Lakes, which had been first made by Necho, had been either finished or a second time made by Philadelphus; and in this reign that great undertaking was again renewed. But the stream of the Nile was deserting the Bubastite branch, which was less navigable than formerly; and the engineers now changed the greater part of the canal's bed. They thought it wiser to bring water from a higher part of the Nile, so that the current in the canal might run into the Red Sea instead of out, and its waters might still be fresh and useful to agriculture. It now began at Babylon opposite Memphis and entered the Red Sea at a town which, taking its name from the locks, was called Clysmon, about ten miles to the south of Arsinoe. 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.



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, Sais, Tanis, and the hundred-gated Thebes had long fallen into ruin, although still inhabited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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 Judaea 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.



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 Amenhothes at Thebes. This colossal statue, fifty-three feet high, was famed, as long as the Egyptian priesthood lasted, for sending forth musical sounds every morning at sunrise, when first touched by the sun's rays; and no traveller ever visited Thebes without listening for these remarkable notes. The journey through Upper Egypt was at this time perfectly open and safe, and the legs and feet of the statue are covered with names, and inscriptions in prose and verse, of travellers who had visited it at sunrise during the reigns of Hadrian and the Antonines. From these curious memorials we learn that Hadrian visited Thebes a second time with his queen, Sabina, in the fifteenth year of his reign. When the empress first visited the statue she was disappointed at not hearing the musical sounds; but, on her hinting threats of the emperor's displeasure, her curiosity was gratified on the following morning. This gigantic statue of hard gritstone had formerly been broken in half across the waist, and the upper part thrown to the ground, either by the shock of an earthquake or the ruder shock of Persian zeal against the Egyptian religion; and for some centuries past the musical notes had issued from the broken fragments. Such was its fallen state when the Empress Sabina saw it, and when Strabo and Juvenal and Pausanias listened to its sounds; and it was not till after the reign of Hadrian that it was again raised upright like its companion, as travellers now see it.



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.



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

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

We still possess the traces of the Gnostic astrology in a number of amulets and engraved gems, with the word Abraxas or rather Abrasax and other emblems of their superstition, which they kept as charms against diseases and evil spirits. The word Abrasax may be translated Hurt me not. To their mystic rites we may trace many of the reproaches thrown upon Christianity, such as that the Christians worshipped the head of an ass, using the animal's Koptic name Eeo, to represent the name of IAn, or Jahveh. To the same source we may also trace some of the peculiarities of the Christian fathers, such as St. Ambrose calling Jesus "the good scarabaeus, who rolled up before him the hitherto un-shapen mud of our bodies;" a thought which seems to have been borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insect's habits; and perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word only begotten. We trace this thought on the Gnostic gems where Ave see a winged griffin rolling before him a wheel, the emblem of eternity. He sits like a conqueror on horseback, trampling under foot the serpent of old, the spirit of sin and death. His horse is in the form of a ram, with an eagle's head and the crowned asp or basilisk for its tail. Before him stands the figure of victory giving him a crown; above are written the words Alpha and Omega, and below perhaps the word [IAH], Jahveh.

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



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.



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

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

JAVEH]

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

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



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

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



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

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

In this reign was made a new survey of all the military roads in the Roman empire, called the Itinerary of Antoninus. It included the great roads of Egypt, which were only six in number. One was from Contra-Pselcis in Nubia along the east bank of the Nile, to Babylon opposite Memphis, and there turning eastward through Heliopolis and the district of the Jews to Clysmon, where Trajan's canal entered the Red Sea. A second, from Memphis to Pelusium, made use of this for about thirty miles, joining it at Babylon, and leaving it at Scense Veteranorum. By these two roads a traveller could go from Pelusium to the head of the Red Sea; but there was a shorter road through the desert which joined the first at Serapion, about fifty miles from Clysmon, instead of at Sceno Veteranorum, which was therefore about a hundred miles shorter. A fourth was along the west bank of the Nile from Hiera Sycaminon in Nubia to Alexandria, leaving the river at Andropolis, about sixty miles from the latter city. A fifth was from Palestine to Alexandria, running along the coast of the Mediterranean from Raphia to Pelusium, and thence, leaving the coast to avoid the flat country, which was under water during the inundation; it joined the last at Andropolis. The sixth road was from Koptos on the Nile to Berenice on the Red Sea. These six were probably the only roads under the care of the prefect. Though Syene 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 Syene 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.



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.



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

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

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

Borne and Athens at this time alike looked upon Alexandria as the centre of the world's learning. The library was then in its greatest glory; the readers were numerous, and Christianity had as yet raised no doubts about the value of its pagan treasures. All the wisdom of Greece, written on rolls of brittle papyrus or tough parchment, was ranged in boxes on the shelves. Of these writings the few that have been saved from the wreck of time are no doubt some of the best, and they are perhaps enough to guide our less simple taste towards the unornamented grace of the Greek model. But we often fancy those treasures most valuable that are beyond our reach, and hence when we run over the names of the authors in this library we think perhaps too much of those which are now missing. The student in the museum could have read the lyric poems of Alcaeus 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.



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.

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

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

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



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.



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

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

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

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



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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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