Though the old laws of Egypt must very much have fallen into disuse during the reigns of the latter Ptolemies, they had at least been left unchanged; and they teach us that the shadow of freedom may be seen, as in Rome under the Caesars, and in Florence under the Medici, long after the substance has been lost.  In quarrels between man and man, the thirty judges, from the cities of Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis, were still guided by the eight books of the law.  The king, the priests, and the soldiers were the only landholders in the country, while the herdsmen, husbandmen, and handicraftsmen were thought of lower caste.  Though the armies of Egypt were for the most part filled with Greek mercenaries, and the landholders of the order of soldiers could then have had as little to do with arms as knights and esquires have in our days, yet they still boasted of the wisdom of their laws, by which arms were only to be trusted to men who had a stake in the country worth fighting for.  The old manners had long since passed away.  The priests alone obeyed the old marriage law, that a man should have only one wife.  Other men, when rich enough, married several.  All children were held equally legitimate, whatever woman was the mother.

[Illustration:  295.jpg DEVELOPMENT OF EGYPTIAN CARICATURE]

It is to these latter reigns of the Ptolemies, when high feeling was sadly wanting in all classes of society, when literature and art were alike in a very low state, that we may place the rise of caricature in Egypt.  We find drawings made on papyrus to scoff at what the nation used to hold sacred.  The sculptures on the walls of the temples are copied in little; and cats, dogs, and monkeys are there placed in the attitudes of the gods and kings of old.  In one picture we have the mice attacking a castle defended by the cats, copied from a battle-scene of Ramses II. fighting against the Ethiopians.  In another the king on his throne as a dog, with a second dog behind him as a fan-bearer, is receiving the sacred offerings from a cat.  In a third the king and queen are seen playing at chess or checkers in the form of a lion playing with a unicorn or horned ass.

We may form some opinion of the wealth of Egypt in its more prosperous times when we learn from Cicero that in this reign, when the Romans had good means of knowing, the revenues of the country amounted to twelve thousand five hundred talents, or ten million dollars; just one-half of which wras paid by the port of Alexandria.  This was at a time when the foreign trade had, through the faults of the government, sunk down to its lowest ebb; when not more than twenty ships sailed each year from the Red Sea to India; when the free population of the kingdom had so far fallen off that it was not more than three millions, which was only half of what it had been in the reign of Ptolemy Soter, though Alexandria alone still held three hundred thousand persons.