but they received their favours with little gratitude, and hardly professed that they felt any love towards the gods in return.  But after the time of the Christian era, we meet with more kindly feelings even among the pagans.  We find from the Greek names of persons that they at least had begun to think their gods deserving of love, and in this group of the mother and child, such a favourite also in Christian art, we see in what direction these more kindly feelings found an entrance into the Egyptian religion.  As fast as opinion was raising the great god Serapis above his fellows and making the wrathful judge into the ruler of the world, so fast was the same opinion creating for itself a harbour of refuge in the child Horus and its mother.

[Illustration:  080.jpg HARPOCRATES]

The deep earnestness of the Egyptians in the belief of their own religion was the chief cause of its being adopted by others.  The Greeks had borrowed much from it.  Though in Rome it had been forbidden by law, it was much cultivated there in private; and the engraved rings on the fingers of the wealthy Romans which bore the figures of Harpocrates and other Egyptian gods easily escaped the notice of the magistrate.  But the superstitious Domitian, who was in the habit of consulting astrologers and Chaldaean fortune-tellers, allowed the Egyptian worship.  He built at Rome a temple to Isis, and another to Serapis; and such was the eagerness of the citizens for pictures of the mother goddess with her child in her arms that, according to Juvenal, the Roman painters all lived upon the goddess Isis.  For her temple in the Campus Martius, holy water was even brought from the Nile to purify the building and the votaries; and a regular college of priests was maintained there by their zeal and at their cost, with a splendour worthy of the Roman capital.  Domitian, also, was somewhat of a scholar, and he sent to Alexandria for copies of their books, to restore the public library at Rome which had been lately burnt; while his garden on the banks of the Tiber was richer in the Egyptian winter rose than even the gardens of Memphis and Alexandria.

During this century the coinage continues one of the subjects of chief interest to the antiquary.  In 92 A.D., in the eleventh year of his reign, when Domitian took upon himself the tribunitian power at Rome for a second period of ten years, the event was celebrated in Alexandria with a triumphal procession and games in the hippodrome, of all which we see clear traces on the Egyptian coins.

[Illustration:  081.jpg COINS OF DOMITIAN]

The coinage is almost the only trace of Nerva (96—­98 A.D.) having reigned in Egypt; but it is at the same time enough to prove the mildness of his government.  The Jews who by their own law were of old required to pay half a shekel, or a didrachm, to the service of their temple, had on their conquest been made to pay that sum as a yearly tribute to the Ptolemies, and afterwards to the emperors.  It was a poll-tax levied on every Jew throughout the empire.  But Nerva had the humanity to relieve them from this insulting tribute, and well did he deserve the honour of having it recorded on the coins struck in his reign.