In the desire to look after the future life, the Egyptians were exceptional, as their embalming showed. They lived in a salubrious country, they boasted that they were “the healthiest of mortals,”[160] and so great was their horror that any one should mutilate the human form, that the _paraschistes_ παρασχιστἡς who made the necessary incisions in the dead when a body was to be embalmed, became an object of execration as soon as his job was over. According to Diodorus Siculus, he was always assaulted by his own assistants, stones being thrown at him with such violence that he had to take to his heels in order to escape with his life.[161] Perhaps it is a far cry, but it seems as though a people who made such preparations as the Egyptians did for the dead, would have been chary of causing the death of those who had sprung from their own loins. For the care of the dead was not confined to the noble and the wealthy alone—the lower classes were also affected by the desire for a proper kind of funeral, to the extent that enterprising people procured an old empty tomb, enlarged it, and let places out in it. Hither then, came the fisherman, the peasant, and the dancing girl—in death they were the equal of the king, for they were buried with ceremony, their bodies were placed where the tomb equipment might be by them—and thus with the king, the noble, and the wealthy, they waited the time that was to be.[162] Among such a people it is hard to think that the death of even a child was treated lightly.[163] Of the Egyptians after the conquest of Alexander we must write as of the Greeks; and in the matter of children it is important to note that a recently discovered papyrus, written in Greek in the year 1 B. C., shows how completely the foreign point of view had been absorbed in a land in which four thousand years yielded up not a single evidence of the assassination of children. The papyrus is a letter from Illarion, whose home is at Oxyrhynchus, and who evidently has gone to Alexandria with other workmen. He has apparently not sent his wife many messages of affection despite the fact that she is about to have a child. When the other workmen are going to return home, he plans to stay in Alexandria, but he promises to send home some of his wages. The part of the letter that is most interesting to us is his injunction that if the child that is expected should turn out to be a female, it should be cast out. In the salutation, Illarion refers to his wife as his sister, marriages between brother and sister having been common in Egypt, and the term being one of endearment. The letter follows: “Illarion to Alis his sister, many Greetings, and to mother Berous and Apollonarion. Know that I am still even now at Alexandria. I urge and entreat you to be careful of the child, and if I receive wages soon I will send it to you. When you bear offspring, if it is a male let it be, if a female expose it.