raced the
military class, and he found himself without an army when Sennacherib
invaded his country. Sethos fell asleep in the temple, and the god,
appearing to him in a vision, told him that divine succour would come
to the Egyptians.[127] In the night before the battle, field-mice
gnawed the quivers and shield-handles of the foe, who fled on finding
themselves thus disarmed. 'And now,' says Herodotus, 'there standeth a
stone image of this king in the temple of Hephaestus, and in the hand
of the image a mouse, and there is this inscription, "Let whoso
looketh on me be pious."'

Prof. Sayce[128] holds that there was no such person as Sethos, but
that the legend 'is evidently Egyptian, not Greek, and the name of
Sennacherib, as well as the fact of the Assyrian attack, is correct.'
The legend also, though Egyptian, is 'an echo of the biblical account
of the destruction of the Assyrian army,' an account which omits the
mice. 'As to the mice, here,' says Prof. Sayce, 'we have to do again
with the Greek dragomen (_sic_). The story of Sethos was attached to
the statue of some deity which was supposed to hold a mouse in its
hand.' It must have been easy to verify this supposition; but Mr.
Sayce adds, 'mice were not sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as
symbols, or found on the monuments.' To this remark we may suggest
some exceptions. Apparently this one mouse _was_ found on the
monuments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says mice do occur in the sculptures,
but they were not sacred. Rats, however, were certainly sacred, and as
little distinction is taken, in myth, between rats and mice as between
rabbits and hares. The rat was sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like
all totems) was not to be eaten.[129] This association of the rat and
the Sun cannot but remind us of Apollo and his mouse. According to
Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did worship the shrew-mouse. The
Athribitae, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis, are the people to whom he
attributes this cult, whom he mentions (xvii. 831) among the other
local animal-worships of Egypt.[130] Several porcelain examples of the
field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called Apollo by the Greeks) may
be seen in the British Museum.

That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on
the evidence of the Ritual of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian
art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue
'had a mouse on its hand.' Elsewhere, it is certain that the story