un. On coins of other years we have a camelopard, Horus
sitting on the lotus-flower, and a sacrifice to Isis, which was
celebrated on the last day of the year.

The coins also tell us of the bountiful overflow of the Nile, and of
the goodness of the harvests that followed; thus, in the ninth, tenth,
thirteenth, and seventeenth years, we see the river Nile in the form
of an old man leaning on a crocodile, pouring corn and fruit out of a
cornucopia, while a child by his side, with the figures 36, tells
us that in those years the waters of the Nile rose at Memphis to the
wished-for height of sixteen cubits. From these latter coins it would
seem that but little change had taken place in the soil of the Delta by
the yearly deposit of mud; Herodotus says that sixteen cubits was the
wished-for rise of the Nile at Memphis when he was there. And we should
almost think that the seasons were more favourable to the husbandman
during the reign of an Antonine than of a Caligula, did we not set it
down to the canals being better cleansed by the care of the prefect, and
to the mildness of the government leaving the people at liberty to enjoy
the bounties of nature, and at the same time making them more grateful
in acknowledging them.

[Illustration: 112.jpg COINS OF ANTONINUS PIUS.]

The mystic emblems on the coins are only what we might look for from the
spread of the Gnostic opinions, and the eagerness with which the Greeks
were copying the superstitions of the Egyptians; and, while astrology
was thus countenanced by the state, of course it was not less followed
by the people. The poor Jews took to it as a trade. In Alexandria the
Jewess, half beggar, half fortune-teller, would stop people in the
streets and interpret dreams by the help of the Bible, or sit under a
sacred tree like a sibyl, and promise wealth to those who consulted her,
duly proportioned to the size of the coin by which she was paid. We find
among the Theban ruins pieces of papyrus with inscriptions, describing
the positions of the heavens at particular hours in this reign, for the
astrologers therewith to calculate the nativities of the persons then
born. On one is a complete horoscope, containing the places of the sun,
moon, and every planet, noted down on the zodiac in degrees and minutes
of a degree; and with these particulars the mathematician undertook to
foretell the marriage, fortune, and death of the person who had been
born at the instant when the heavenl