by gifts, the crocodile was thought to lose its fierceness, its teeth were harmless, and it never attempted to bite; and it was not till six o’clock on the eighth day that this animal again became an object of fear to those whose occupations brought them to the banks of the Nile.  Once a year also the statues of the gods were removed from their pedestals and placed in barges, and thus carried in solemn procession along the Nile, and only brought back to the temples after some days.  It was supposed that the gods were passing these days on a visit to the righteous Ethiopians.

The cat was at all times one of the animals held most sacred by the Egyptians.  In the earliest and latest times we find the statues of their goddesses with cats’ heads.  The cats of Alexandria were looked upon as so many images of Neith or the Minerva of Sais, a goddess worshipped both by Greeks and Egyptians; and it passed into a proverb with the Greeks, when they spoke of any two things being unlike, to say that they were as much like one another as a cat was to Minerva.  It is to Alexandria also that we trace the story of a cat turned into a lady to please a prince who had fallen in love with it.  The lady, however, when dressed in her bridal robes, could not help scampering about the room after a mouse seen upon the floor; and when Plutarch was in Egypt it had already become a proverb, that any one in too much finery was as awkward as a cat in a crocus-coloured robe.

So deeply rooted in the minds of the Egyptians was the worship of these animals that, when a Roman soldier had killed a cat unawares, though the Romans were masters of the country, the people rose against him in a fury.  In vain the king sent a message to quiet the mob, to let them know that the cat was killed by accident; and, though the fear of Rome would most likely have saved a Roman soldier unharmed whatever other crime he might have been guilty of, in this case nothing would quiet the people but his death, and he was killed before the eyes of Diodorus, the historian.  One nation rises above another not so much from its greater strength or skill in arms as from its higher aim and stronger wish for power.  The Egyptians, we see, had not lost their courage, and when the occasion called them out they showed a fearlessness not unworthy of their Theban forefathers; on seeing a dead cat in the streets they rose against the king’s orders and the power of Rome; had they thought their own freedom or their country’s greatness as much worth fighting for, they could perhaps have gained them.

[Illustration:  291.jpg EGYPTIAN FUNERAL CEREMONIES]

But the Egyptians had no civil laws or rights that they cared about; they had nothing left that they valued but their religion, and this the Romans took good care not to meddle with.  Had the Romans made war upon the priests and temples, as the Persians had done, they would perhaps in the same way have been driven out of Egypt:  but they never shocked the religious feelings of the people, and even after Egypt had become a Roman province, when the beautiful temples of Esne, Dendera, and other cities, were dedicated in the names of the Roman emperors, they seldom copied the example of Philometor, and put Greek, much less Roman, writing on the portico, but continued to let the walls be covered with hieroglyphical inscriptions.