Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/594

582 like him, was born at Constantinople, reared at Carcassonne, and educated at the College de Navarre. Entering the army at seventeen, he left it soon afterwards ; and at twenty he produced Azemire, a tragedy, which had a languid sort of success. His next venture, Charles IX., which commenced the renown of Talma, excited an extraordinary enthusiasm (1789), and still keeps the stage. In 1791 appeared Henri VIII. and Calas, with the performance of the first of which the Theatre de la Republique was solemnly inaugurated; in 1792 he produced his Caius Gracchus, which was proscribed and burned at the instance of Albitte for an anti-anarchical hemistich (Des lois et non du sang /); and in 1793 his Timolcon, set in Mehul s music, was also proscribed. His brother s death on the scaffold is supposed to have diverted him from the theatre ; and only once again, in 1804, with his unsuccessful Cyrus, did he attempt the scene. Long a prominent member of the Jacobins Club, Joseph Che"nier was one of the busiest of literary politicians, one of the most prolific of political poets. He was a member of the Convention and of the Council of Five Hundred, over both of which he presided ; he had a seat in the Tribunate ; he belonged to the Committees of Public Instruction, of General Security, and of Public Safety. In 1801 he was one of the educational jury for the Seine ; from 1803 to 180G he was inspector-general of public instruction. In 1806 and 1807 he delivered a course of lectures at the Athe ne e on the language and literature of France from the earliest years ; and in 1808, at the emperor s request, he prepared his Tableau his- tonque de I etat et du progres de la litterature fran^aise a work, reprinted so late as 18G2, in which he shows to great advantage, as a writer, as a critic, as a man. He died January 10, 1811. The list of his works is too long for quotation ; a glance at them will indicate his industry and the suppleness and strength of his talent. He wrote hymns and national songs among others, the famous Chant du Depart ; odes Sur la Mort de Mirabeau, Sur I Oligarchic de Robespierre, &c. ; tragedies, which never reached the stage Brutus et Cassius, Philippe Deux, Tibere ; translations from Sophocles and Lessing, from Gray and Horace, from Tacitus and Aristotle; with elegies, dithyrambics, and Ossianic rhapsodies. As a satirist he is said to possess great merit see La Calomnie (1797) and the Epitre a Voltaire (1806) though he sins from an excess of severity, and is sometimes malignant and unjust.

1em  CHEOPS, the name of an Egyptian king Khufu, called Cheops by Herodotus, Chembes by Diodorus, Souphis by Manetho, and Saophis by Eratosthenes. He was the second king of the fourth dynasty of Manetho, and the builder of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, 120 stadia distant from Memphis and about 45 from the Nile. According to Diodorus, each side was 7 plethra long, and the height 6 plethra ; or according to Herodotus, each side of the base was 8 plethra in extent, and the height the same. The former sides are supposed to have been each 764 feet long, their present dimensions being about 746 feet, while the actual present height is 450 feet r and the angle of the casing stones 51 50, according to the measurements of Perring. This wonder of the ancient world, the sepulchre of the monarch, was constructed at great expense and suffering, 100,000 men, changed every three months, being employed by forced labour ten years in constructing the causeway by which the blocks of stone were transported from the Tourah quarries, in the Arabian chain, to a quay on the banks of the Nile, where they were transported by boat from the other bank. Immense expense was entailed in the execu tion of this cuStly sepulchre, and according to a popular but improbable tradition, Cheops was compelled through want of money to sacrifice the honour of his daughter to complete the task. Other popular tales, according to the gloss or extract of Manetho, depicted him as impious towards the gods, closing the temples and stopping the worship, but subsequently repenting, and writing a sacred book much esteemed by the Egyptians. His name was supposed to mean wealthy, or having much hair. Tbe monumental in formation about Cheops does not confirm the Greek his torians ; on the contrary, it records the construction of temples in honour of the gods, the repair of the shrine and the gift of various figures of the temple of Isis and Athor close to his own pyramid, and his construction or repairs of the temple of the same goddess Athor, the Egyptian Venus, at Denderah or Tentyris. The sacred book may have been part of the Egyptian rituals, portions of which were attri buted to the early kings of Egypt, and a medical papyrus records the discovery in his reign of a treatise on medicine in a temple of a goddess at the town of Debmut. Cheops carried on war at the Vady Magarah in the Peninsula of Sinai in Arabia, and a rock tablet represents him having conquered the hostile tribes in the presence of the god Thoth, who had revealed the mines of the locality. His oppression had so afflicted Egypt that the charges of impiety had attached to his name ; but the tombs of his children reveal no change in the established religion, and his pyramid only differs from those of his predecessors and immediate successor by its rather larger size and greater beauty. His name Khufu, sometimes with the addition of that of the god Ivhnum as Khnum-Khufu, has been found on several monuments, and was found scrawled on the stones from the quarries of Tourah or the MODS Troicus employed in the so-called chambers of construction of the Great Pyramid. There is no known monument with the date of a regnal year of this monarch, so that it is uncertain if he reigned the sixty- three years attributed to him by Manetho, or the twenty-nine assigned by Eratosthenes. It is just possible, from fragment 30 of the Papyrus of Turin, that he may have lived ninety-five years and reigned the higher number, as generally recognized by Egyptologists. The date of Cheops according to Lepsius is 3095-3032 B.C., but great difference of opinion, amounting to nearly 2000 years, exists as to the time of Menes, from whom the lists separate him by the interval of 898 years. Priests of the Apis and Mnevis bulls are mentioned in the tombs of his period. (Herodotus, ii. 124; Dicdorus, i. 64 ; De Piouge, liecherches, pp. 52, 54 ; Mariette, Monuments de Boidaq, pp. 207-209, Birch, in Zeitschri/t f agyplische Sprache, 1871, pp. 61-64 ; Duemichen, Bauurkunde, pi. xvi., a, b ; Lepsius, Denkm., ii. 2 )  CHEPHREN, an Egyptian monarch, called in the hieroglyphs Khafra, by Herodotus Chephren, by Diodorus Cephren or Chabrias, by Manetho Souphis II., and by Eratosthenes Saophis II. He was, according to the legends, the son or brother of Cheops, and acted in the same tyrannical manner. Chephren built the second of the great pyramids at Gizeh close to the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, and was said to be hated like his brother, his mummy not buried in the sepulchre but torn to pieces, and the sarcophagi emptied of their contents, The present length of the base of this pyramid is 690 feet 9 inches, and its perpendicular height 447 feet 6 inches, its angle 52 20, but it is not built with the same care. The wife of Chephren, named Merisankh, was priestess of the god Thoth, and Kheman another prince of the family, priest of Thoth at Hermopolis. There is no reason for believing in the impiety of the monarch, or any oppression more than in the case of his predecessors and successor, all whose tombs were pyramids. Chephren also built the small temple behind the great Sphinx, but does not appear 