s places it thirteen years earlier in the
consulship of Fabius and Vitellius. This fable is connected with some
of the remarkable epochs in Egyptian history. The story lost nothing by
travelling to a distance. In Rome it was said that this wonderful bird
was a native of Arabia, where it lived for five hundred years, that on
its death a grub came out of its body which in due time became a perfect
bird; and that the new phonix brought to Egypt the bones of its parent
in the nest of spices in which it had died, and laid them on the altar
in the temple of the sun in Heliopolis. It then returned to Arabia to
live in its turn for five hundred years, and die and give life again
to another as before. The Christians saw in this story a type of the
resurrection; and Clement, Bishop of Rome, quotes it as such in his
Epistle to the Corinthians.

We find the name of Claudius on several of the temples of Upper Egypt,
particularly on that of Apollinopolis Magna, and on the portico of the
great temples of Latopolis, which were being built in this reign.

In the beginning of the reign of Nero, 55 A.D., an Egyptian Jew,
who claimed to be listened to as a prophet, raised the minds of his
countrymen into a ferment of religious zeal by preaching about the
sufferings of their brethren in Judaea; and he was able to get together
a body of men, called in reproach the Sicarii, or _ruffians_, whose
numbers are variously stated at four thousand and thirty thousand,
whom he led out of Egypt to free the holy city from the bondage of the
heathen. But Felix, the Roman governor, led against them the garrison of
Jerusalem, and easily scattered the half-armed rabble. By such acts of
religious zeal on the part of the Jews they were again brought to blows
with the Greeks of Alexandria. The Macedonians, as the latter still
called themselves, had met in public assembly to send an embassy to
Rome, and some Jews who entered the meeting, which as citizens they had
a full right to do, were seized and ill-treated by them as spies. They
would perhaps have even been put to death if a large body of their
countrymen had not run to their rescue. The Jews attacked the assembled
Greeks with stones and lighted torches, and would have burned the
amphitheatre and all that were in it, if the prefect, Tiberius
Alexander, had not sent some of the elders of their own nation to calm
their angry feelings. But, though the mischief was stopped for a time,
it soon broke out again;