e
and reconciliation, where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried,
in the Great Abbey ... the dust of the illustrious accused should have
mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers. This was not to
be."--_Critical and Historical Essays_, 1843, iii. 465.]

[257] {542}[The Cleopatra whose mummy is preserved in the British Museum
was a member of the Theban Archon family. Her date was _circ._ A.D.
100.]

[258] [According to Strabo (_Rerum Geog._, xvii. ed. 1807, ii. 1127),
Ptolemaeus Soter brought Alexander's body back from Babylon, and buried
it in Alexandria, in the spot afterwards known as the _Soma_. There it
lay, in Strabo's time, not in its original body-mask of golden
chase-work, which Ptolemaeus Cocces had stolen, but in a casket of
glass. Great men "turned to pilgrims" to visit Alexander's grave.
Augustus crowned the still life-like body with a golden laurel-wreath,
and scattered flowers over the tomb: Caligula stole the breastplate, and
wore it during his pantomimic triumphs; Septimius Severus buried in the
sarcophagus the writings of the priests, and a clue to the
hieroglyphics. Finally, the sarcophagus and its sacred remains
disappear, and Alexander himself passes into the land of fable and
romance. In 1801 a sarcophagus came into the possession of the English
Army, and was presented by George III. to the British Museum.
Hieroglyphics were as yet undeciphered, and, in 1805, the traveller
Edward Daniel Clarke published a quarto monograph (_The Tomb of
Alexander, etc._), in which he proves, to his own satisfaction, that
"this surprising sarcophagus in one entire block of green Egyptian
_breccia_," had once contained the ashes of Alexander the Great. Byron
knew Clarke, and, no doubt, respected his authority (see letter December
15, 1813, _Letters_, 1898, ii. 308); and, hence, the description of
"Alexander's urn" as "a show." The sarcophagus which has, since 1844,
been assigned to its rightful occupant, Nectanebus II. (Nekht-neb-f), is
a conspicuous object in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum. It
is a curious coincidence that in the Ethiopic version of the
Pseudo-Callisthenes, Alexander is said to have been the son of
Nectanebus II., who threw a spell over Olympias, the wife of Philip of
Macedon, and won her love by the exercise of nefarious magic. (See the
_Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great_, by E. A. Wallis Budge,
Litt.D., F.S.A., Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in