a Macedonian governor, brought back the images of the Egyptian gods, that had been carried off to Asia, to their old abode, and restored to the gods of Pe and Tep the land-gifts estranged from them; for the sacred temple-images brought home from Persia in the great victorious expedition of Euergetes the native priests convey their thanks to the king in the famous decree of Canopus in the year 238 B.C.; the customary insertion of the living rulers male or female in the circle of the native gods these foreigners acquiesced in for themselves just as did the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Roman rulers followed their example only to a limited extent. As respects title they doubtless entered, as we saw (p. 244, note), in some measure into the native cultus, but avoided withal, even in the Egyptian setting, the customary predicates that stood in too glaring a contrast to Occidental views. Since these ‘favourites of Ptah and of Isis’ took much the same steps in Italy against the Egyptian worship as against the Jewish, they betrayed nothing, as may readily be understood, of such love except in hieroglyphic inscriptions, and even in Egypt took no part in the service of the native gods. However obstinately the religion of the land was still retained under the foreign rule among the Egyptians proper, the Pariah position in which these found themselves alongside of the ruling Greeks and Romans, necessarily told heavily on the cultus and the priests; and of the leading position, the influence, the culture of the old Egyptian priestly order but scanty remains were discernible under the Roman government. On the other hand, the indigenous religion, from the outset disinclined to beauty of form and spiritual transfiguration, served, in and out of Egypt, as a starting-point and centre for all conceivable pious sorcery and sacred fraud--it is enough to recall the thrice-greatest Hermes at home in Egypt, with the literature attaching to his name of tractates and marvel-books, as well as the corresponding widely diffused practice. But in the circles of the natives the worst abuses were connected at this epoch with their cultus--not merely drinking-bouts continued through many days in honour of the individual local deities, with the unchastity thereto appertaining, but also permanent religious feuds between the several districts for the precedence of the ibis over the cat, or of the crocodile over the baboon. In the year A.D. 127, on such an occasion, the Ombites in southern Egypt were suddenly assailed by a neighbouring community[236] at a drinking-festival, and the victors are said to have eaten one of the slain. Soon afterwards the community of the Hound, in defiance of the community of the Pike, consumed a pike, and the latter in defiance of the other consumed a hound, and thereupon a war broke out between these two nomes, till the Romans interfered and chastised both parties. Such incidents were of ordinary occurrence in Egypt. Nor was there a want otherwise of