parating the province from the more cultivated tribes of Upper
Ethiopia or Meroe. The cities along the banks of the Nile in Lower
Ethiopia, between Nubia and Meroe, were ruined by being in the debatable
land between the two nations. The early Greek travellers had counted
about twenty cities on each side of the Nile between Syene and Meroe;
but when, in a moment of leisure, the Roman government proposed to
punish and stop the inroads of these troublesome neighbours, and sent
forward a tribune with a guard of soldiers, he reported on his return
that the whole country was a desert, and that there was scarcely a
city inhabited on either side of the Nile beyond Nubia. But he had not
marched very far. The interior of Africa was little known; and to seek
for the fountain of the Nile was another name for an impossible or
chimerical undertaking.

But Egypt itself was so quiet as not to need the presence of so large
a Roman force as usual to keep it in obedience; and when Vespasian, who
commanded Nero's armies in Syria, found the Jews more obstinate in their
rebellion and less easily crushed than he expected, the emperor sent the
young Titus to Alexandria, to lead to his father's assistance all the
troops that could be spared. Titus led into Palestine through Arabia two
legions, the Fifth and the Tenth, which were then in Egypt.

We find a temple of this reign in the oasis of Dakleh, or the Western
Oasis, which seems to have been a more flourishing spot in the time
of the Romans than when Egypt itself was better governed. It is so far
removed from the cities in the valley of the Nile that its position, and
even existence, was long unknown to Europeans, and to such hiding-places
as this many of the Egyptians fled, to be farther from the tyranny of
the Roman tax-gatherers.

Hitherto the Roman empire had descended for just one hundred years
through five emperors like a family inheritance; but, on the death of
Nero, the Julian and Claudian families were at an end, and Galba, who
was raised to the purple by the choice of the soldiers, endeavoured to
persuade the Romans and their dependent provinces that they had regained
their liberties. The Egyptians may have been puzzled by the word
_freedom_, then struck upon the coins by their foreign masters, but must
have been pleased to find it accompanied with a redress of grievances.

Galba began his reign with the praiseworthy endeavour of repairing the
injustice done by his cruel predece