Chapter I: Egypt Under the Roman Empire (3)

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

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

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

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 Chaldæan fortune-tellers, allowed the Egyptian worship. He built at Rome a temple to Isis, and another to Serapis; and such was the eagerness of the citizens for pictures of the mother goddess with her child in her arms that, according to Juvenal, the Roman painters all lived upon the goddess Isis. For her temple in the Campus Martius, holy water was even brought from the Nile to purify the building and the votaries; and a regular college of priests was maintained there by their zeal and at their cost, with a splendour worthy of the Roman capital. Domitian, also, was somewhat of a scholar, and he sent to Alexandria for copies of their books, to restore the public library at Rome which had been lately burnt; while his garden on the banks of the Tiber was richer in the Egyptian winter rose than even the gardens of Memphis and Alexandria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Hadrians temples. But there were other and stronger reasons for Hadrians classing the Christians with the Egyptian astrologers. A Christian heresy was then rising into notice in Egypt in that very form, taking its opinions from the philosophy on which it was engrafted. Before Christianity was preached in Alexandria, there were already three religions or forms of philosophy belonging to the three races of men who peopled that busy city; first, the Greek philosophy; which was chiefly platonism; secondly, the mysticism of the Egyptians; and lastly, the religion of the Jews. These were often more or less mixed, as we see them all united in the works of Philo-Judæ; and in the writings of the early converts we usually find Christianity clothed in one or other of these forms, according to the opinions held by the writers before their conversion. The first Christian teachers, the apostolic fathers as they are called, because they had been hearers of the apostles themselves, were mostly Jews; but among the Egyptians and Greeks of Alexandria their religion lost much of its purely moral caste, and became, with the former, an astrological mysticism, and with the latter an abstract speculative theology. It is of the Egyptian Jews that Hadrian speaks in his letter just quoted; many of them had been already converted to Christianity, and their religion had taken the form of Gnosticism.

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

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

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

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 philosophers views, he chanced one day to meet with an old man walking on the seashore near Alexandria, to whom he unbosomed his thoughts, and by whom he was converted to Christianity. Justin tells us that there were no people, whether Greeks or barbarians, or even dwellers in tent and waggons, among whom prayers were not offered up to the heavenly father in the name of the crucified Jesus. The Christians met every Sunday for public worship, which began with a reading from the prophets, or from the memoirs of the apostles called the gospels. This was followed by a sermon, a prayer, the bread and wine, and a second prayer. Justins quotations prove that he is speaking of the New Testament, which within a hundred years of the crucifixion wras read in all the principal cities in which Greek was spoken. Justin died as a martyr in 163 A.D.

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

JAVEH]

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

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

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

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