ighteous
Ethiopians.

The cat was at all times one of the animals held most sacred by the
Egyptians. In the earliest and latest times we find the statues of their
goddesses with cats' heads. The cats of Alexandria were looked upon as
so many images of Neith or the Minerva of Sais, a goddess worshipped
both by Greeks and Egyptians; and it passed into a proverb with the
Greeks, when they spoke of any two things being unlike, to say that
they were as much like one another as a cat was to Minerva. It is to
Alexandria also that we trace the story of a cat turned into a lady to
please a prince who had fallen in love with it. The lady, however, when
dressed in her bridal robes, could not help scampering about the room
after a mouse seen upon the floor; and when Plutarch was in Egypt it had
already become a proverb, that any one in too much finery was as awkward
as a cat in a crocus-coloured robe.

So deeply rooted in the minds of the Egyptians was the worship of these
animals that, when a Roman soldier had killed a cat unawares, though
the Romans were masters of the country, the people rose against him in a
fury. In vain the king sent a message to quiet the mob, to let them know
that the cat was killed by accident; and, though the fear of Rome would
most likely have saved a Roman soldier unharmed whatever other crime he
might have been guilty of, in this case nothing would quiet the people
but his death, and he was killed before the eyes of Diodorus, the
historian. One nation rises above another not so much from its greater
strength or skill in arms as from its higher aim and stronger wish for
power. The Egyptians, we see, had not lost their courage, and when the
occasion called them out they showed a fearlessness not unworthy of
their Theban forefathers; on seeing a dead cat in the streets they rose
against the king's orders and the power of Rome; had they thought their
own freedom or their country's greatness as much worth fighting for,
they could perhaps have gained them.

[Illustration: 291.jpg EGYPTIAN FUNERAL CEREMONIES]

But the Egyptians had no civil laws or rights that they cared about;
they had nothing left that they valued but their religion, and this the
Romans took good care not to meddle with. Had the Romans made war upon
the priests and temples, as the Persians had done, they would perhaps in
the same way have been driven out of Egypt: but they never shocked the
religious feelings of the people, and even aft