While I was at Thebes the account often recurred to me which Tacitus gives of the visit of Germanicus to the monuments of that city. He was, being then about thirty years of age, the most accomplished and popular prince the family of the Cæsars produced. His many civic and martial virtues had attracted to him the eyes and the hearts of the world. These high expectations, however, his foul murder speedily and cruelly extinguished. The attention he bestowed on the historical monuments of Egypt enhances the regard we feel for him.
How many ingredients of interest would a picture combine which presented to us the young Cæsar standing, as the historian describes him, in the temple-palace of Rameses, by the side of the great kings prostrate granite colossus, attended by his Roman suite, and some of the elders of the Egyptian priests, who are explaining to him the records on the monuments. A pendant to it, which would possess sufficient connecting points and contrasts of interest, would be a picture of his adoptive ancestor, the great Dictator, in the Palace of the Ptolemies, dallying with the Calypso of the Nile.
Here is the passage from Tacitus’s Annals I had in my mind. ‘It was in the Consulate of M. Silanus and L. Norbanus that Germanicus visited Egypt. He gave out that he wished to see to the affairs of the province, but his real object was to make himself acquainted with its antiquities.... Starting from Canopus, and ascending the Nile, he reached the vast remains of Thebes. Enormous structures were still standing, covered with hieroglyphics, which chronicled the bygone grandeur of Egypt. One of the oldest and most distinguished of the priests was ordered to interpret to him the record. He told him that it stated that the population of the country had, at that old time to which it referred, been able to supply an army of 700,000 men of the military age; and that, with that army, King Rameses had conquered Libya, Ethiopia, Media, Persia, Bactria, and Scythia; and the whole of Syria and Armenia, and of the neighbouring Cappadocia. That he had then added to his empire all between the coast of Bithynia on one side, and that of Lycia on the other. They also read the amounts of tribute he had imposed on each nation; the weights of silver and of gold; the number of horses, and of different kinds of arms; the offerings to be made to the temples of ivory and of incense, and the quantity of corn, and of various kinds of vessels. The totals were not less magnificent than those now imposed by Parthian violence, or Roman might.
‘There were also other wonders to which Germanicus directed his attention. Among these were the stone figure of Memnon, which, when struck by the rays of the rising sun, emits a sound resembling the human voice; the Pyramids, which had, in a region of drifting and hardly passable sands, been raised by the rivalry and wealth of kings to the height of mountains; lakes that had been excavated for the storage of the overflow of the Nile; perplexing intricacies and inexplorable recesses, which in no direction could be penetrated by those who might wish to enter them. After he had visited these sights he went to Elephantiné and Syené, the gate formerly of the Roman Empire, which, however, has now been extended to the Red Sea.’
One would much like to know how Tacitus got these particulars of the Prince’s Egyptian tour. Romans were in the habit of keeping diaries, and we cannot doubt but that the practice was followed by one so accomplished and thoughtful as Germanicus. Was it then from the journal of the Prince himself? The family might have allowed the historian to make use of it for the purposes of his forthcoming work. Or was it from the journal of some unconscious Russell of the Prince’s suite? Or had Tacitus himself accompanied the Prince?
It may be worth noticing that the account the priests gave to Germanicus of the conquests of Rameses the Great was substantially the same as that which had been given to Herodotus four centuries and a half earlier. It was the same record, read from the same lithotome. Of course, Herodotus gives to him the name, by which he was known among the Greeks, of Sesostris.
All these monuments of early Egyptian history—for the remains of even the Labyrinth are still sufficient to enable one to make out the plan of the structure—our English Prince had an opportunity, a few years back, of seeing very much in the condition in which the Roman Prince saw them 1,850 years ago. The Empire which the world was expecting would have, under him, its eternal foundations strengthened, is now, like the Egypt he was studying, a thing of the past. We may be permitted to entertain the double hope, that such precious records of mans history may, for other thousands of years yet to come, escape the common fate of man’s works, and still not outlive the empire of their later visitor.