y make an unjust claim
he shall pay four times the amount to the informer and six times the
amount to the emperor. But royal decrees could do little or nothing
where there were no judges to enforce them; and the people of Upper
Egypt must have felt this law as a cruel insult when they were told that
they might take up their complaints to Basilides, at Alexandria. The
employment of the informer is a full acknowledgment of the weakness
of this absolute government, and that the prefect had not the power
to enforce his own decrees; and, when we compare this law with that
of Alexander on his conquest of the country, we have no difficulty in
seeing why Egypt rose under the Ptolemies and sunk under the selfish
policy of Augustus.

Claudius was somewhat of a scholar and an author; he wrote several
volumes both in Greek and in Latin. The former he might perhaps think
would be chiefly valued in Alexandria; and when he founded a new college
in that city, called after himself the Claudian Museum, he ordered that
on given days every year his history of Carthage should be publicly
read in one museum, and his history of Italy in the other; thus securing
during his reign an attention to his writings which their merits alone
would not have gained.

Under the government of Claudius the Egyptians were again allowed to
coin money; and in his first year begins that historically important
series in which every coin is dated with the year of the emperor's
reign. The coins of the Ptolemies were strictly Greek in their
workmanship, and the few Egyptian characters that we see upon them are
so much altered by the classic taste of the die-engraver that we hardly
know them again. But it is far otherwise with the coins of the emperors,
which are covered with the ornaments, characters, and religious
ceremonies of the native Egyptians; and, though the style of art is
often bad, they are scarcely equalled by any series of coins whatever in
the service they render to the historian.

It was in this reign that the route through Egypt to India first became
really known to the Greeks and Romans. The historian Pliny, who died in
79 A.D., has left us a contemporary account of these early voyages. "It
will not be amiss," he says in his _Natural History_, "to set forth the
whole of the route from Egypt, which has been stated to us of late, upon
information on which reliance may be placed and is here published for
the first time. The subject is one well worth