Brugsch places the birth of Moses in the sixth year of the reign of Rameses II.[102] This may very well be. The fourscore years that elapsed between that time and the time of the exodus correspond with sufficient exactness to the chronological data furnished by the monuments. Moses would thus see out the sixty-one remaining years of the king’s long life, and release the Israelites from bondage toward the close of the reign of Menepthah,[103] who sat for about twenty years on the throne of his fathers. The correspondence of dates this time leaves nothing to be desired. The Sesostris of Diodorus Siculus went blind and died by his own hand; which act, says the historian, as it conformed to the glory of his life, was greatly admired by his people. We are here evidently in the region of pure fable. Suicide was by no means an Egyptian, but a classical, virtue. Just as the Greeks hated age, the Egyptians reverenced it; and it may be doubted whether a people who seem always to have passionately desired length of days would have seen anything to admire in a willful shortening of that most precious gift of the gods. With the one exception of Cleopatra--the death of Nitocris the rosy-cheeked being also of Greek,[104] and therefore questionable, origin--no Egyptian sovereign is known to have committed suicide; and even Cleopatra, who was half Greek by birth, must have been influenced to the act by Greek and Roman example. Dismissing, then, altogether this legend of his blindness and self-slaughter, it must be admitted that of the death of Rameses II we know nothing certain. Such are, very briefly, the leading facts of the history of this famous Pharaoh. Exhaustively treated, they would expand into a volume. Even then, however, one would ask, and ask in vain, what manner of man he was. Every attempt to evolve his personal character from these scanty data is in fact a mere exercise of fancy.[105] That he was personally valiant may be gathered with due reservation, from the poem of Pentaur; and that he was not unmerciful is shown in the extradition clause of the Khetan treaty. His pride was evidently boundless. Every temple which he erected was a monument to his own glory; every colossus was a trophy; every inscription a pæan of self-praise. At Abou Simbel, at Derr, at Gerf Hossayn, he seated his own image in the sanctuary among the images of the gods.[106] There are even instances in which he is depicted under the twofold aspect of royalty and divinity--Rameses the Pharaoh burning incense before Rameses the Deity.