A collection of the decisions he was reputed to have delivered in famous cases existed in the Græco-Roman period, and one of them is quoted at length: he had very ingeniously condemned a courtesan to touch the shadow of a purse as payment for the shadowy favours she had bestowed in a dream on her lover.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin.
An Alexandrian poet, Pancrates, versified the accounts of this juridical collection,* and the artists of the Imperial epoch drew from it motives for mural decoration; they portrayed the king pronouncing judgment between two mothers who disputed possession of an infant, between two beggars laying claim to the same cloak, and between three men asserting each of them his right to a wallet full of food.**
* Pancrates lived in the time of Hadrian, and Athenæus, who
has preserved his memory for us, quotes the first book of
his Bocchoreidion.
** Considerable remains of this decorative cycle have been
discovered at Pompeii and at Rome, in a series of frescoes,
in which Lumbroso and E. Lowy recognise the features of the
legends of Bocchoris; the dispute between the two mothers
recalls the famous judgment of Solomon (1 Kings iii. 16-28).
A less favourable tradition represents the king as an avaricious and irreligious sovereign: he is said one day to have conceived the sacrilegious desire to bring about a conflict between an ordinary bull and the Mnevis adored at Heliopolis. The gods, doubtless angered by his crimes, are recorded to have called into being a lamb with eight feet, which, suddenly breaking into articulate speech, predicted that Upper and Lower Egypt would be disgraced by the rule of a stranger.*
* This legend, preserved by Manetho and Ulian is also known
from the fragments of a demotic papyrus at Vienna, which
contains the prophecy of the lamb.
