ife slipped by in a round of revels.

As an impressionable young man, Horemheb must have watched the gradual
development of freethought in the palace, and the ever-increasing
irritation and chafing against the bonds of religious convention which
bound all Thebans to the worship of the god Amon. Judging by his future
actions, Horemheb did not himself feel any real repulsion to Amon,
though the religious rut into which the country had fallen was
sufficiently objectionable to a man of his intellect to cause him to
cast in his lot with the movement towards emancipation. In later life he
would certainly have been against the movement, for his mature judgment
led him always to be on the side of ordered habit and custom as being
less dangerous to the national welfare than a social upheaval or change.

Horemheb seems now to have held the appointment of captain or commander
in the army, and at the same time, as a "Royal Scribe," he cultivated
the art of letters, and perhaps made himself acquainted with those legal
matters which in later years he was destined to reform.

When Amenhotep III. died, the new king, Akhnaton, carried out the
revolution which had been pending for many years, and absolutely banned
the worship of Amon, with all that it involved. He built himself a new
capital at El Amarna, and there he instituted the worship of the sun, or
rather of the heat or power of the sun, under the name of Aton. In so
far as the revolution constituted a breaking away from tiresome
convention, the young Horemheb seems to have been with the King. No one
of intelligence could deny that the new religion and new philosophy
which was preached at El Amarna was more worthy of consideration on
general lines than was the narrow doctrine of the Amon priesthood; and
all thinkers must have rejoiced at the freedom from bonds which had
become intolerable. But the world was not ready, and indeed is still not
ready, for the schemes which Akhnaton propounded; and the unpractical
model-kingdom which was uncertainly developing under the hills of El
Amarna must have already been seen to contain the elements of grave
danger to the State.

Nevertheless the revolution offered many attractions. The frivolous
members of the court, always ready for change and excitement, welcomed
with enthusiasm the doctrine of the moral and simple life which the King
and his advisers preached, just as in the decadent days before the
French Revolution the court, bored wit