did as the dogs do, they drank and ran away;” and the Romans found it necessary to place a body of troops near the cataracts of Syene to stop their marching northward and laying waste the Thebaid.  While the larger part of the Roman legions was withdrawn into Arabia on an unsuccessful quest for treasure, a body of thirty thousand of these men, whom we may call either Arabs, from their blood and language, or Ethiopians, from their country, marched northward into Egypt, and overpowered the three Roman cohorts at Elephantine, Syene, and Philas.  Badly armed and badly trained, they were led on by the generals of Candace, Queen of Napata, to the fourth cataract.  They were, however, easily driven back when Gallus led against them an army of ten thousand men, and drove them to Ethiopian Pselchis, now remaining as the modern village of Dakkeh.  There he defeated them again, and took the city by storm.  From Pselchis he marched across the Nubian desert two hundred and fifty miles to Premnis, on the northerly bend of the river, and then made himself master of Napata, the capital.  A guard was at the moment left in the country to check any future inroads; but the Romans made no attempts to hold it.

[Illustration:  016.jpg on the edge of the desert]

Of the state of the Ethiopie Arabs under Queen Candace we learn but little from this hasty inroad; but some of the tribes must have been very far from the barbarians that, from their ignorance of the arts of war, the Romans judged them to be.  Those nearest to the Egyptian frontiers, the Troglodyte and Blemmyes, were unsettled, wandering, and plundering; but the inhabitants of Meroe were of a more civilised race.  The Jews had settled in southern Ethiopia in large numbers, and for a long time; Solomon’s trade had made them acquainted with Adule and Auxum; some of them were employed in the highest offices, and must have brought with them the arts of civilised life.  A few years later (Acts VIII. 27) we meet with a Jewish eunuch, the treasurer of Queen Candace, travelling with some pomp from Ethiopia to the religious festivals at Jerusalem.  The Egyptian coins of Augustus and his successors are all Greek; the conquest of the country by the Romans made no change in its language.  Though the chief part of the population spoke Koptic, it was still a Greek province of the Roman empire; the decrees of the prefects of Alexandria and of the upper provinces were written in Greek; and every Roman traveller, who, like a schoolboy, has scratched his name upon the foot of the musical statue of Amenhothes, to let the world know the extent of his travels, has helped to prove that the Roman government of the country was carried on in the Greek language.  The coins often bear the eagle and thunderbolt on one side, while on the other is the emperor’s head, with his name and titles; and, after a few years, they are all dated with the year of the emperor’s reign.  In the earliest he is styled a Son of