Of the reign of Titus in Egypt we find no trace beyond his coins struck each year at Alexandria, and his name carved on one or two temples which had been built in former reigns.

Of the reign of Domitian (81—­96 A.D.) we learn something from the poet Juvenal, who then held a military post in the province; and he gives us a sad account of the state of lawlessness in which the troops lived under his commands.  All quarrels between soldiers and citizens were tried by the officers according to martial law; and justice was very far from being even-handed between the Roman and the poor Egyptian.  No witness was bold enough to come forward and say anything against a soldier, while everybody was believed who spoke on his behalf.  Juvenal was at a great age when he was sent into Egypt; and he felt that the command of a cohort on the very borders of the desert was a cruel banishment from the literary society of Rome.  His death in the camp was hastened by his wish to return home.  As what Juvenal chiefly aimed at in his writings was to lash the follies of the age, he, of course, found plenty of amusement in the superstitions and sacred animals of Egypt.  But he sometimes takes a poet’s liberty, and when he tells us that man’s was almost the only flesh that they ate without sinning, we need not believe him to the letter.  He gives a lively picture of a fight which he saw between the citizens of two towns.  The towns of Ombos and Tentyra, though about a hundred miles apart, had a long-standing quarrel about their gods.  At Ombos they worshipped the crocodile and the crocodile-headed god Savak, while at Tentyra they worshipped the goddess Hathor, and were celebrated for their skill in catching and killing crocodiles.  So, taking advantage of a feast or holiday, they marched out for a fight.  The men of Ombos Avere beaten and put to flight; but one of them, stumbling as he ran away, was caught and torn to pieces, and, as Juvenal adds, eaten by the men of Tentyra.  Their worship of beasts, birds, and fishes, and even growing their gods in the garden, are pleasantly hit off by him; they left nothing, said he, without worship, but the goddess of chastity.  The mother goddess, Isis, the queen of heaven, was the deity to whom they bowed with the most tender devotion, and to swear by Isis was their favourite oath; and hence the leek, in their own language named Isi, was no doubt the vegetable called a god by the satiric Juvenal.

At the same time also the towns of Oxyrrhynchos and Cynopolis, in the Heptanomos, had a little civil war about the animals which they worshipped.  Somebody at Cynopolis was said to have caught an oxyrrhynchus fish in the Nile and eaten it; and so the people of Oxyrrhynchos, in revenge, made an attack upon the dogs, the gods of Cynopolis.  They caught a number of them, killed them in sacrifice to their offended fish-god, and ate them.  The two parties then flew to arms and fought several battles; they sacked one another’s cities in turns, and the war was not stopped till the Roman troops marched to the spot and punished them both.