M. Letronne concludes, that the vocal statue did not yet

bear the name of Memnon, because Strabo does not give it that title. I do not think so absolute a conclusion may be drawn from so simple an omission. It is already answered in the passage from Manethon.
Fifth, M. Letronne believes, that he can fix the epoch when the miracle acquires celebrity, by the date of the earliest inscriptions engraved on the colossus. We may consent to his rejecting the authority of Dionysius Periegites, by taking advantage of the uncertainty respecting the time at which the poetical geographers wrote. But we cannot go along with him in supposing, that an historian, such as Tacitus,* a man who, in his youth, had conversed with the contempo- raries of Pison and of Germanicus, would, in relating the travels of that Prince, insert facts which could not have been observed till forty years afterwards. In order to establish
* Tacit, Annal, n. cap. lxi, and in. cap. xvi.
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the existence of so strange an inconsistency, it were necessary to produce positive proofs ; but none are brought forward by M. Letronne.
Sixth, Shall we conclude, with M. Letronne, that the miracu- lous sound was not heard by Germanicus, because we do not find the name of that Prince inscribed upon the colossus ? Aelius Gallus and Strabo both heard it, yet did not engrave their names on the stone as witnesses.
Seventh, M. Letronne has rendered valuable services to science, in collecting and deciphering the existing inscriptions ; but does he not go too far in saying, that the apparent miracle had no religious interest attached to it, for the natives, owing to the inscriptions being all Greek or Roman, could not decipher them ? And again, in supposing that their dates fixed the duration of the sonorous property between the reign of Nero and that of Septimus Severus.
Was it possible that a phenomenon, to say the least of it, sur- prising in itself, could either have existed for ages, or been sud- denly discovered, within the observation'of the most superstitious people in the world, and yet not have been sought out and turned to advantage by those who traded in the credulity of men ? This, indeed, would be a miracle, without a precedent in history ; and, in its own way, no less astonishing than the existence of a speak- ing stone. "We have traced the priest, in every country, to be the inventor of assumed miracles, or having dignified with this name natural facts, often in themselves scarcely extraordinary. Wherever the populace imagined they could discern the work of a God, privileged men were not long in appearing to receive, in the name of that God, the tributes of admiration and of gratitude. The Egyptian priests were not likely to prove exceptions, where so singular a phenomena, as the vocal statue, invited them to profit by it; even though by the Greeks and Romans, it was revered under a name they did not acknowledge, and which did not impart an idea of their own mythology to the
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credulous stranger. Thanks to the daily apparent miracle, which could be produced in no other temple, they were entitled to receive offerings on their altars, and to entertain respect for themselves.
But, it may be argued, they have celebrated it by no inscrip- tion. In Egypt the walls of the temples, and even the bodies of the statues, were loaded with hieroglyphics, the sense of which is, as yet, imperfectly revealed to us. Can we confidently affirm, that none of the mysterious inscriptions in the Memnonia, make mention of the vocal properties of the statue ?
Men, not belonging to the sacerdotal order, would not presume to supply the silence of the priests. The usurpation of such a right was incompatible with the sentiment of religious venera- tion, if we may judge ancient by modern manners. The devotees might fill the temple of the saint, to whom they believed them- selves indebted for some benefits, with their vows ; but to write on the statue itself, far from being a testimony of their gratitude it would be a sacrilegious profanation.
The Ptolemies introduced the worship of Saturn and of Serapis into Egypt, without being able to obtain permission to erect temples in the interior of cities, either to one or the other.* But whether from policy or superstition, and far from carrying this attempt on the national faith, the Lagidesf adopted both their
* Macrob. Saturn, lib. i. cap. vu.
f The Ptolomies were named Lagides, from the surname Lagus, being imposed on the first of their race, owing to the following tradition con- nected with his birth. Arsinse, the daughter of Meleager, having had a disgraceful intercourse with Philip of Macedon, was, in order to cover her disgrace married to Lagus, a Macedonian of low birth, but opulent. Lagus, as soon as the child was born, exposed it in the woods, where, says the tradition, an eagle sheltered him under her wings, and fed him with her prey. Lagus having had this prodigy divulged to him, adopted the infant and called him Ptolemy, from an idea that, having been so miraculously
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worship and their traditions. The priests, then, remained as formerly, the guardians of the images of the Gods, and preserved them from the injury they might receive from indiscreet admira- tion. It was only under Augustus, that the assumed miracles of Egypt were revealed to the disciples of a foreign religion, to whom they were then, for the first time, entirely subjected. The first travellers who visited Memnon, abstained, nevertheless, from an act which the natives, too recently subdued, would have regarded as an outrage. The Greeks and the Romans, thronging to the shores of the Nile, gradually familiarized the people with their propensity to recognize then own divinities in every country. They pretended to remember Memnon ; they had heard him, and among them, inscriptions were as allowable to private individuals as to the priesthood. The inscriptions multiplied, sometimes owing to superstition, sometimes to the pleasure of confirming the existence of a peculiar phenomenon, which might be doubted by those who were not themselves able to verify it. Vanity also played its part. No one could have been in Upper Egypt without boasting of having heard Memnon. These motives were gradually weakened by the number of visitors. The difficulty of being raised sufficiently high to find a space for the reception of new inscriptions,* caused this custom also to cease, after the death of
preserved and nurtured, he would become a great and powerful man. The supposition became true; for after the death of Alexander, one of whose generals Ptolemy had been, as the general division of the Macedonian Em- pire, the government of Egypt and Libya fell to the share of Ptolemy, who after he had ascended the Egyptian throne, preferred the title of Lagides to every other appellation ; and it was transmitted to all his descendants, ante- rior to the reign of Cleopatra. — Ed.
* The height of the statue was about thirty feet ; and on the legs of it only, the inscriptions in latin and greek^were engraven. Most of them belong to the period of the early Roman Emperors. There is a copy of this statue in the British Museum ; but it does not exceed nine feet six inches and a half in height. The head of the colossal Memnon, also in the British
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Severus and of Caracalla ; and other causes, independent of the duration of the miracle, may have contributed to the same effect. To presume a necessary connection between that duration and the date of the latest inscriptions, is to suppose that every witness must have written on the colossus ; and consequently, that the number of witnesses was not greater than that of the names pre- served in the seventy-two inscriptions collected by M. Letronne, which are inadmissible consequences, and proofs that the principle itself is erroneous.
History is silent respecting the restoration of the colossus, and consequently, it does not indicate the date. The fact is esta- blished by the existence of the remains of the blocks, placed upon the ancient base ; and it appears that Lucian and Philostratus were acquainted with it ; as they express themselves to the effect that, in their times, the statue was entire. Let us only remark, that in admitting their testimony, we must not mutilate it; the miraculous voice of the colossus is mentioned by both ; thus, contrary to M. Letronne's opinion, the apparent miracles must have continued after the restoration of the sacred image.
Lucian died in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and Juvenal in that of Adrian ; the restoration of the statue, consequently, must be placed between these two epochs ; and it must have been the work of Adrian or of Antonius.
This opinion, M. Letronne will not admit to be correct for according to his theory Severus must have been the author of the restoration, in order to make the silence of the God coincide with the date of the last inscriptions. But however little weight we may attach to the testimony of Philostratus, it certainly refutes this hypothesis. In addressing a tale, or rather a legend, to a superstitious Empress, would Philostratus have placed the resto-
Museum, is not that of the vocal Memnon. There were, indeed, many co- lossal statues called Meranonian, in Egypt ; but only one celebrated vocal Memnon. — Ed.
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ration of the colossus, an act not only eminently religious, but executed by the reigning Emperor, in the times of Domitian or of Titus ? Would the author of a work, dedicated to Queen Anne of Austria, have conducted a contemporary of Francis I. or of Henry II. to the celebrated procession, of the vow of Louis XIII?
In default of historical testimonies to the effect that the restora- tion took place under Septimus Severus, or in the absence of the hieroglyphical scrolls where it might be registered, M. Letronne asserts, that, in imitation of Spartian, the Emperor Severus avoided inscribing his name on the monuments which he raised. But this assertion seems only applicable to Roman monuments,