[Illustration: 051.jpg FARMING IN EGYPT]

The Egyptian sour wine, however, made very good vinegar, and it was then
exported for sale in Rome. During this half-century that great national
work, the lake of Moeris, by which thousands of acres had been flooded
and made fertile, and the watering of the lower country regulated, was,
through the neglect of the embankments, at once destroyed. The latest
traveller who mentions it is Strabo, and the latest geographer Pomponius
Mela. By its means the province of Arsinoe was made one of the most
fruitful and beautiful spots in Egypt. Here only does the olive grow
wild. Here the vine will grow. And by the help of this embanked lake the
province was made yet more fruitful. But before Pliny wrote, the bank
had given way, the pentup waters had made for themselves a channel into
the lake now called Birket el Kurun, and the two small pyramids, which
had hitherto been surrounded by water, then stood on dry ground. Thus
was the country slowly going to ruin by the faults of the government,
and ignorance in the foreign rulers. But, on the other hand, the
beautiful temple of Latopolis, which had been begun under the Ptolemies,
was finished in this reign; and bears the name of Claudius with those of
some later emperors on its portico and walls.

In the Egyptian language the word for a year is _Bait_, which is also
the name of a bird. In hieroglyphics this word is spelt by a palm-branch
_Bai_ and the letter T, followed sometimes by a circle as a picture of
the year. Hence arose among a people fond of mystery and allegory a mode
of speaking of the year under the name of a palm-branch or of a bird;
and they formed a fable out of a mere confusion of words. The Greeks,
who were not slow to copy Egyptian mysticism, called this fabulous bird
the _Phoenix_ from their own name for the palm-tree. The end of any long
period of time they called the return of the phonix to earth. The Romans
borrowed the fable, though perhaps without understanding the allegory;
and in the seventh year of this reign, when the emperor celebrated the
secular games at Rome, at the end of the eighth century since the city
was built, it was said that the phoenix had come to Egypt and was thence
brought to Rome. This was in the consulship of Plautius and Vitellius;
and it would seem to be only from mistakes in the name that Pliny
places the event eleven years earlier, in the consulship of Plautius
and Papinius, and that Tacitu