Note 170 — LETTER III.

This passage occurs in the life of Saturninus, who uses it in support of an invective against the Egyptians. The quotation is from a letter of Hadrian’s preserved in the works of his freedman Phlegon. (Vopiscus, in Historiæ Augustæ Scriptores, ii. 719, in the Leyden edition of 1671.) The Egyptians still hatch chickens in ovens, but the heat is supplied by a fire, and not by the hot-bed mentioned in the text. The process is described in Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, ii. 450.