In the Egyptian language the word for a year is Bait, which is also the name of a bird.  In hieroglyphics this word is spelt by a palm-branch Bai and the letter T, followed sometimes by a circle as a picture of the year.  Hence arose among a people fond of mystery and allegory a mode of speaking of the year under the name of a palm-branch or of a bird; and they formed a fable out of a mere confusion of words.  The Greeks, who were not slow to copy Egyptian mysticism, called this fabulous bird the Phoenix from their own name for the palm-tree.  The end of any long period of time they called the return of the phonix to earth.  The Romans borrowed the fable, though perhaps without understanding the allegory; and in the seventh year of this reign, when the emperor celebrated the secular games at Rome, at the end of the eighth century since the city was built, it was said that the phoenix had come to Egypt and was thence brought to Rome.  This was in the consulship of Plautius and Vitellius; and it would seem to be only from mistakes in the name that Pliny places the event eleven years earlier, in the consulship of Plautius and Papinius, and that Tacitus places it thirteen years earlier in the consulship of Fabius and Vitellius.  This fable is connected with some of the remarkable epochs in Egyptian history.  The story lost nothing by travelling to a distance.  In Rome it was said that this wonderful bird was a native of Arabia, where it lived for five hundred years, that on its death a grub came out of its body which in due time became a perfect bird; and that the new phonix brought to Egypt the bones of its parent in the nest of spices in which it had died, and laid them on the altar in the temple of the sun in Heliopolis.  It then returned to Arabia to live in its turn for five hundred years, and die and give life again to another as before.  The Christians saw in this story a type of the resurrection; and Clement, Bishop of Rome, quotes it as such in his Epistle to the Corinthians.

We find the name of Claudius on several of the temples of Upper Egypt, particularly on that of Apollinopolis Magna, and on the portico of the great temples of Latopolis, which were being built in this reign.

In the beginning of the reign of Nero, 55 A.D., an Egyptian Jew, who claimed to be listened to as a prophet, raised the minds of his countrymen into a ferment of religious zeal by preaching about the sufferings of their brethren in Judaea; and he was able to get together a body of men, called in reproach the Sicarii, or ruffians, whose numbers are variously stated at four thousand and thirty thousand, whom he led out of Egypt to free the holy city from the bondage of the heathen.  But Felix, the Roman governor, led against them the garrison of Jerusalem, and easily scattered the half-armed rabble.  By such acts of religious zeal on the part of the Jews they were again brought to blows with the Greeks of Alexandria.