God, in imitation of the Egyptian title of Son of the Sun.  After Egypt lost its liberty, we no longer find any gold coinage in the country; that metal, with everything else that was most costly, was carried away to pay the Roman tribute.  This was chiefly taken in money, except, indeed, the tax on grain, which the Egyptian kings had always received in kind, and which was still gathered in the same way, and each year shipped to Rome, to be distributed among the idle poor of that great city.  At this time it amounted to twenty millions of bushels, which was four times what was levied in the reign of Philadelphus.  The trade to the east was increasing, but as yet not large.  About one hundred and twenty small vessels sailed every year to India from MyosHormos, which was now the chief port on the Red Sea.

No change was made in the Egyptian religion by this change of masters; and, though the means of the priests were lessened, they still carried forward the buildings which were in progress, and even began new ones.  The small temple of Isis, at Tentyra, behind the great temple of Hathor, was either built or finished in this reign, and it was dedicated to the goddess, and to the honour of the emperor as Jupiter Liberator, in a Greek inscription on the cornice, in the thirty-first year of the reign, when Publius Octavius was prefect of the province.

[Illustration:  018.jpg A Koptic Maiden]

The large temple at Talmis, in Nubia, was also then built, though not wholly finished; and we find the name of Augustus at Philae, on some of the additions to the temple of Isis, which had been built in the reign of Philadelphus.  In the hieroglyphical inscriptions on these temples, Augustus is called Autocrator Caesar, and is styled Son of the Sun, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the other titles which had always been given by the priests to the Ptolemies and their own native sovereigns for so many centuries.  These claims were evidently unknown in Rome, where the modesty of Augustus was almost proverbial.

The Greeks had at all times been forward in owning the Egyptians as their teachers in religion; and in the dog Cerberus, the judge Minos, the boat of Charon, and the river Styx of their mythology, we see a clear proof that it was in Egypt that the Greeks gained their faint glimpse of the immortality of the soul, a day of judgment, and a future state of rewards and punishments; and, now that Rome was in close intercourse with Egypt, the Romans were equally ready to borrow thence their religious ceremonies.  They brought to Rome the Egyptian opinions with the statues of the gods.  They ran into the new superstition to avoid the painful uneasiness of believing nothing, and, though the Romans ridiculed their own gods, they believed in those of Egypt.  So fashionable was the worship of Isis and Serapis becoming in Italy, that Augustus made a law that no Egyptian ceremonies should enter the city or even the suburbs of Rome.  His subjects might copy the luxuries, the follies, and the vices of the Alexandrians, but not the gloomy devotion of the Egyptians.  But the spread of opinions was not so checked; even Virgil taught the doctrine of the Egyptian millennium, or the resurrection from the dead when the thousand years were ended; and the cripple asking for alms in the streets of Rome would beg in the name of the holy Osiris.