Page:The Pharaohs and their people; scenes of old Egyptian life and history (IA pharaohstheirpeo00berkiala).pdf/234

 noticing it with curiosity or contempt. Herodotus and Strabo saw the sacred crocodiles in the Fayoum, adorned with golden ornaments, and fed with the flesh of the sacrifices. Diodorus tells us of the furious wrath of Egyptian villagers against a Roman soldier who had killed a cat. The comic writers of Greece and the satirists of Rome made merry over these peculiar deities.

'You are never done laughing every day of your lives at the Egyptians,' says an early Christian writer to his heathen contemporaries. Philo, the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, tells us that foreigners coming to Egypt knew not what to do for laughter at the divine animals, but that in the end they were themselves overpowered by the superstition. There were not wanting those who, acknowledging that the animals were to be regarded merely as symbolic, based their arguments against the custom on that very ground. The days of*