To another religious war, between the Ombites and the Tentyrites, we owe the great Satire XV. of Juvenal, when banished to Egypt at the age of eighty.[844] The poem ranks high, not only for its mordant irony but also for its description of the origin of civil society, “a description infinitely superior to anything that Lucretius or Horace has delivered on the subject,” according to the not always laudatory Gifford. “Who knows not to what monstrous gods, my friend, The mad inhabitants of Egypt bend? The snake-devouring ibis, These enshrine, Those think the crocodile alone divine.” “Those” were the Ombites, “These” the Tentyrites, who hated the crocodile worshipped at Ombos: hence “Blind bigotry, at first, the evil wrought, For each despised the other’s gods, and thought Its own the true, the genuine—in a word The only deities to be adored.”[845] The _Phagrus_ had the distinction of being venerated in Egypt and Greece, whose writers, bothered by none of our scientific hesitation, regarded him not as one of the Mormyri, but as the Eel. They scoffed alike at his deification and his devotees.[846] The _Phagrus_, and the _Mœotes_, which is Wilkinson’s addition to the four other sacred fish, were probably the same under different names. Ælian, indeed, states that the former, worshipped at Syene, was called the _Mœotes_ by the people of Elephantine (quite close to Syene), and attributes its sanctity to its annual appearance always heralding the rise of the Nile,[847] a property of prescience transferred by Plutarch to the _Mœotes_.[848] We know so little about the _locus_ of the _Lepidotus_ (_Barbus bynni_) cult that Wilkinson’s assertion, “its worship extended over most parts of Egypt,” needs confirmatory data. The Crocodile, like the _Lates_, was worshipped here and there, but elsewhere keenly hunted. Of the first Thebes and Lake Mœris furnish types. Each place (according to Herodotus) harboured one crocodile in particular, very tame and tractable.[849] They adorned his ears, as Antonina her _Muræna_, “with earrings of molten stone or gold, and put bracelets on his forepaws, giving him daily a set portion of bread, with a certain number of victims: when he dies, they embalm and bury him in a sacred place.”[850] Of the various methods for catching the crocodile our author sets forth one which we all must agree as “worthy of mention.” “They bait a hook with a chine of pork, and let the meat be carried out into the middle of the stream, while the hunter on the bank holds a living pig which he belabours. The crocodile hears its cries and making for the sound encounters the pork, which he instantly swallows down. The men on the shore haul and, when they have got him to land, the first thing the hunter does is to plaster his eyes with mud. This once accomplished, the animal is despatched with ease, otherwise” (it may surprise you) “he gives great trouble.”[851]