[Illustration:  056.jpg EGYPTIAN THRESHING MACHINE]

The rocky island of Malta, with the largest and safest harbour in the Mediterranean, was a natural place for ships to touch at between Alexandria and Italy.  Its population was made up of those races which had sailed upon its waters first from Carthage and then from Alexandria; it was a mixture of Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Graeco-Egyptians.  To judge from the skulls turned up in the burial-places, the Egyptians were the most numerous, and here as elsewhere the Egyptian superstitions conquered and put down all the other superstitions.  While the island was under the Phoenicians, the coins had the head of the Sicilian goddess on one side, and on the other the Egyptian trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Nepthys.  When it was under the Greek rule the head on the coins received an Egyptian head-dress, and became that of the goddess Isis, and on the other side of the coin was a winged figure of Osiris.  It was at this time governed by a Roman governor.  The large temple, built with barbarian rudeness, and ornamented with the Phoenician palm-branch, was on somewhat of a Roman plan, with a circular end to every room.  But it was dedicated to the chief god of Egypt, and is even yet called by its Greek name Hagia Chem, the temple of Chem.  The little neighbouring island of Cossyra, between Sicily and Carthage, also shows upon its coins clear traces of its taste for Egyptian customs.

[Illustration:  057.jpg MALTESE COIN]

The first five years of this reign, the quinquennium Neronis, while the emperor was under the tutorship of the philosopher Seneca, became in Rome proverbial for good government, and on the coinage we see marks of Egypt being equally well treated.  In the third year we see on a coin the queen sitting on a throne with the word agreement, as if to praise the young emperor’s good feeling in following the advice of his mother Agrippina.  On another the emperor is styled the young good genius, and he is represented by the sacred basilisk crowned with the double crown of Egypt.  The new prefect, Balbillus, was an Asiatic Greek, and no doubt received his Roman names of Tiberius Claudius on being made a freedman of the late emperor.  He governed the country mildly and justly; and the grateful inhabitants declared that under him the Nile was more than usually bountiful, and that its waters always rose to their just height.  But in the latter part of the reign the Egyptians smarted severely under that cruel principle of a despotic monarchy that every prefect, every sub-prefect, and even every deputy tax-gatherer, might be equally despotic in his own department.

[Illustration:  058.jpg COIN OF COSSYRA]

On a coin of the thirteenth year of the reign of this ruler, we see a ship with the word emperor-bearer, being that in which he then sailed into Greece, or in which the Alexandrians thought that he would visit their city.  But if they had really hoped for his visit as a pleasure, they must have thought it a danger escaped when they learned his character; they must have been undeceived when the prefect Caecinna Tuscus was punished with banishment for venturing to bathe in the bath which was meant for the emperor’s use if he had come on his projected visit.