THE HISTORY OF
BY
SAMUEL SHARPE.
EDWARD MOXON.
1838.
Printed by ARTHUR
TAYLOR,
TO THE READER.
THE Author has given neither the arguments nor
the whole of the authorities on which the sketch of the earlier history in the Introduction
rests, as it would have had too much of the dryness of an antiquarian enquiry,
and as he has already published them in his Early History of Egypt. In the rest
of the book he has in every case pointed out in the margin the sources from
which he has drawn his information.
Canonbury, 12th November, 1838.
Works published by the same Author.
The EARLY HISTORY of
EGYPTIAN INSCRIPTIONS, from the
Rudiments of a VOCABULARY of EGYPTIAN
HIEROGLYPHICS.
ERRATA. [IMPLEMENTED]
Page 103, line
23, for
Page 104,
line 4, for Syrians read Macedonians.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION. Abraham: shepherd kings: Joseph:
kings of Thebes: era of Menophres, exodus of the Jews, Rameses the Great,
buildings, conquests, population, mines: Shishank, B.C. 970: Solomon: kings of
Tanis: Bocchoris of Sais: king, of Ethiopia, B.C. 730: kings of Sais: Africa is
sailed round, Greek mercenaries and settlers, Solon and Pythagoras: Persian conquest,
B.C. 525: Inarus rebels: Herodotus and Hellanicus: Amyrtaeus, Nectanebo: Eudoxus,
Chryrippus, and Plato: Alexander the Great: oasis of Ammon, native judges, Cleomenes.
PTOLEMY SOTER, B.C. 322. Funeral of Alexander:
Perdiccas overcome: Phenicia and Coelo-Syria conquered: the bull Apis: buildings
of Alexandria: Serapis: the Museum: papyrus: Cyrene conquered: Cyprus
conquered: Egyptian soldiers: Demetrius beaten: city of Petra; it stops Antigonus:
Hecataeus: the Jews: Demetrius conquers at sea: Antigonus beaten: Rhodes: coins:
Apelles, Euclid, Diodorus Cronus, and Antiphilus: Thais and her children:
Eurydice and her children: Berenice and her children: Ptolemy lays aside the
crown.
PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS, B.C. 284. His tutor
Philetas: his coronation: Cyrene revolts: his two brothers killed: embassy to
Rome: the Carthaginians ask a loan: the light-house: port of Berenice: canal:
elephants caught: Demetrius Phalerius, Zenodotus, Euclid, Ctesibius,
Theocritus, Callimachus, Hegesias, Philostephanus, Aristippus, Arete,
Metrodidactus, Theodorus, Strato: Timocharis, Aristillus, and Aristarchus, the
astronomers: Aratus and his translators: Sosibius, Zoilus, Timon, Manetho, Petosiris,
Timosthenes the admiral: Menander sent for: Colotes: public readers: Pamphilus,
Neacles, and Helena: the Jews: the Bible translated: Arsinoë and her children: Arsinoë,
his sister: coins: Ergamenes: statue of Diana: Cleombrotus, Erisistratus, and
Herophilus: provinces, forces, revenue, treasure.
iv CONTENTS.
PTOLEMY EUERGETES, B.C. 246. Conquests in
PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR, B.C. 221. His mother and
brother put to death: battle of Raphia: the Jewish temple: huge ships: the
queen put to death: Agathocles, Sosibius, Tlepolemus: Sphaerus, Eratosthenes
Ptolemy the son of Agesarchus, Timaeus: buildings: coins.
PTOLEMY EPIPHANES, B.C. 204. Death of Agathocles
and his family: revolt of Scopas: guardianship of
PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR, B.C. 180. War with Antiochus;
coronation:
PTOLEMY
EUERGETES II. B.C. 145. He
kills his nephew: the journey of Scipio Africanus: the Maccabees: the king flies
to
CLEOPATRA COCCE and
CLEOPATRA COCCE and PTOLEMY
PTOLEMY SOTER II. B.C. 87. The rebellion and
ruin of
CONTENTS.
v
CLEOPATRA
BERENICE, B.C. 80. She
is ordered to marry Alexander, and to reign jointly with him: his will.
PTOLEMY ALEXANDER II. B.C. 80. He marries Berenice,
murders her, and is killed.
PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS, B.C. 80. Demetrius accused
of sobriety:
CLEOPATRA and her BROTHERS, B.C. 51. She
quarrels with Ptolemy: Pompey's death: Julius Caesar: battle in
Index of Names.
THE HISTORY OF
INTRODUCTION.
WHEN letters first rose in
In each case, the history of the country begins
with scattered and dark hints, which some minds seize upon as treasures and
others overlook as worthless, but which the historian can neither safely lean
upon nor yet wholly fling from him; and this is the case with the history of
Egypt before the time when Abraham drove his herds into that country in search
of food, which the drought had made scarce in Canaan.
2 INTRODUCTION.
[Manetho.] some of them
The city of
We likewise have the name of one king who
reigned at Heracleopolis; and, as that city is close to
The people of both Upper and
Their buildings were much the same as those
which afterwards rose in such massive grandeur. Venephres, king of This, had
al-
ABRAHAM. 3
ready built pyramids at a city named Cochome;
the older part of [Wilkinson's
The carved writing, by means of figures of men
and animals, which was afterwards, when easier ways of writing came into use,
called sacred carving, or hieroglyphics, was even then not new. [
The journey of Abraham into
Abraham found Lower Egypt a well-tilled corn
country; the king, [Gen.
xii.] or
Pharaoh, was surrounded by princes and servants, and was by no means looked
upon by Abraham as his equal, as the little kings of
Abraham did not remain long in Lower Egypt; from
the head of the Red Sea he went southward, and returned home by Mount Sinai and
Petra; but the Phenicians settled in crowds in the Delta,
INTRODUCTION. 4
[Eratosthenes.] and may have been a cause of great wealth to
the country, as about that time Suphis, and his brother and successor
Sensuphis, who were Coptic kings of
But the Phenicians soon got too strong for the
country which had given them a home; they chose a king of their own, named
Salatis, who at first ruled over his countrymen without rebelling against the
Egyptians; but he afterwards seized Memphis, and from thence sent forth his
armed bands, each year, at harvest time, to gather in a duty upon corn, and the
pay for his troops. He had an army of two hundred and forty thousand men; and
he strongly fortified the city of
It was in the reign of Apophis, one of these
Phenicians, when the two countries of Canaan and Lower Egypt were filled by the
same people, that, among other slaves brought into Egypt by the caravans [Gen. xxxvii.] from the east, was a
young Jew named Joseph, who chanced to be sold into the service of the captain
of the guard. Little could his master have foreseen the coming greatness of his
slave, or how much his name would be known in after ages.
Joseph soon rose to the head of his master's
household, and afterwards to be the king's chief minister. He foresaw a
scarcity of corn, and bought up the harvest in years of plenty; and with these
stores, in the years of scarcity, he bought from the starving Egyptians the
freeholds of their estates, which he afterwards let them hold as tenants of the
crown, at a rent of one-fifth of the crop. The
PHENICIAN SHEPHERD KINGS. 5
priests, however, were allowed to keep their
freeholds, as being a privileged order in the state.
Thus this Asiatic minister made the king the
landlord of the country, and the land was held by what is now known in
Asseth, one of these Phenician kings, is said to
have brought, no [Manetho.] doubt from
Soon after the death of Apophis, the kings of
6 INTRODUCTION.
$$$ From this time we find Upper Egypt rising in
wealth and power; and though we are still told the names of the kings of
Memphis, they seem to have been under the sceptre of their more powerful [Wilkinson's
[Manetho.] Chebros, the son of Amosis, reigned after him;
and the Jews, who had been well treated in the Delta in grateful recollection
of Exodus, [Exodus,
i. 8.] the
services of Joseph, now began to be harshly used by the Theban kings;
task-masters were set over them, and they were cruelly [i. 11.] over-worked at the
fortifications of Memphis and Heliopolis, and at the other buildings of Lower
Egypt.
THEBAN KINGS. 7
$$$ Amun-Nitocris, or Neit-thor (for the
guttural is written either with a TH or a C), the last Memphite sovereign, then
reigned over
Mesphra-Thothmosis II. was most likely the
husband of Nitocris; he outlived her, and in many cases had her name cut out of
the [Wilkinson's
Thothmosis III. also added to the buildings at
There are two chains of reasoning by which we
may hope to fix the date of this reign: first, Herodotus says that Moeris, a
king who governed
8 INTRODUCTION.
the month of Thoth, or B.C. 1321. On which we remark
- first, that Moeris and Menophres were most likely a Thothmosis, as they are
nearer to Mesphres than to any other name; second, that the figure of
Thothmosis III. is often drawn with a palm-branch, the hieroglyphic for ‘year,’
in each hand, which may be meant to point out that he made some change in the
length of the civil year; third, that Plutarch says that the god Thoth, who may
in this case have been meant for Thothmosis, taught the Egyptians the true
length of the year. These reasons are perhaps not very strong; but in a part of
the history where we find so few traces of chronology, we follow any thing
which seems as if it would guide us.
[Wilkinson's
[Exodus, xii. 37.] The Jews marched out of the Delta, in
number six hundred thousand men, beside women and children. After leaving the
head of the Red Sea, they turned southward, along the coast, to Mount Sinai,
and then northward, by
THEBAN KINGS. 9
$$$ Thothmosis IV. built the small temple between
the fore-legs of [Hieroglyphics
plate 80.] the
great Sphinx near
Amunothph III. seems to have built more in
Ethiopia than any other Egyptian king; he also began the temple of Luxor; but
he is most known by his colossal statue at Thebes, called the statue of Memnon,
which is sixty feet high though sitting, and which Strabo, Pausanias, and so
many other Greek and Roman travellers, heard utter its far-famed musical sounds
at sunrise.
Of Amunmai Anamek we know little beyond his
statue in the
Amunmai Amunaan, or
This king seems to have been successful in his
wars, and among the paintings on the walls of his tomb is a procession of the
several conquered nations bringing their gifts.
Rameses II., or the Great, was the king under
whom
10 INTRODUCTION.
ruins are even now looked at with wonder by our
travellers: it was called the Memnonium, from the king's first name, Amun-mai,
or Mi-amun, which the Greeks changed into Memnon. He added to the
The sculptures on the walls of the Memnonium at
The population of the country may be counted at
five millions and a half, as there were seven hundred thousand men able to
carry [Diod.
Sic. lib. i. 49.]
arms; and the gold and silver mines alone were said to bring in each year the
unheard-of sum of three million two hundred thousand minae, or seven millions
sterling.
After the reigns of three other kings, about
whom we know but little, came Rameses III., whose palace at Medinet Abu, and
other buildings and historical sculptures, prove that his reign fell very
little short of that of Rameses II. in wealth and conquests.
He was followed by eight or ten other kings of
the family, and most of them of the name, of Rameses; but, during their reigns,
SHISHANK. 11
Upper Egypt was falling and Lower
We are unable to show how the line of Theban
kings joins that of Lower Egypt; but the first king of Lower Egypt who sat upon
the throne of Rameses was Shishank of Bubastus, who has left the [B.C. 970.] history of his
conquests in Asia and Ethiopia carved upon the great temple of Karnak, by the
side of those of Rameses II.; and on the figure of one of the conquered kings
is written ‘The king of Judah,’ in boast of his well-known conquest of
Rehoboam. [2
Chron. xii.]
Solomon had married the daughter of an Egyptian
king, most [I
Kings, ix.]
likely of Shishank, who, having taken the city of
The trade of
12 INTRODUCTION.
$$$ Thebes never regained the power which it
then lost. Its crowded population had been fed by the rich corn-fields of the
Delta, its priests and nobles had been enriched by the tributes of its foreign
provinces, and by the trade which floated upon the Nile: it lost every thing
when it lost Lower Egypt, and it soon found itself unable to hold
[Herodotus, lib.
ii.] Shishank,
also, if he was the same king as the Sesostris of Herodotus, overran Scythia
and Thrace, and on his return home left a body of troops behind him, who
founded the city of Colchis. He also tried to gain part of the trade of the Red
Sea for Lower Egypt, by making a ship-canal between Suez and the nearest branch
of the [Aristoteles,
de Rep. vii. 10.]
[Manetho.]
[Manetho.] Osorkon II., Shishank II., and other kings of
Tanis, then governed Egypt; and after them Bocchoris of Sais, one of the great
Egyptian lawgivers; and it was no doubt from the weakness brought upon the
country by these civil wars and changes that Egypt then fell an easy prey to
the Ethiopians.
[Wilkinson's
ETHIOPIANS. - KINGS OF
So, was master of the whole of
On the fall of the Ethiopians, the kings of
Nechepsus, the first of the Saitic kings, has
left a name known [Ausonius,
Ep. 409, 20.]
for his priestly learning; and his astronomical writings are quoted by Pliny.
He was followed by
Necho sent some Phenicians on a voyage of
discovery, to circumnavigate [Herodotus, lib. ii.] Africa; they set sail down the Red Sea, and
after a coasting voyage of two years, they again reached
14 INTRODUCTION.
that the voyage was really performed: they said
that as they sailed towards the west the sun was on their right hand. This
could only have been true on the south side of the equator.
We do not know by what soldiers Shishank and the
other kings of
[Herodotus, lib.li., and Jeremiah, xxxvii.] Apries, or Hophra,
succeeded; and to him Zedekiah sent for help when Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to
[Herodotus, lib. ii.] Amasis built a temple
to Isis at
Amasis conquered the
THE PERSIANS. 15
Museum the sarcophagus of one of his wives, a
daughter of Psammetichus. [
Under the favour now shown to the Greeks, Solon
the Athenian [Plutarch. in Solone.] lawgiver
visited
Psammenitus succeeded his father Amasis, but his
reign was short [Herodotus.
lib. ii. B.C. 525.]
and unfortunate. Cambyses king of Persia marched against Egypt at the head of a
large army; on his approach, Phanes, with a body of Greek mercenaries, went
over to him, and he overthrew the Egyptian army, with the rest of the Greeks,
near Pelusium; he then took Memphis and Sais, and put Psammenitus to death
within six months of his coming to the throne.
Thus ended the dynasties of
Cambyses governed the Egyptians with the
harshness and cruelty of a conqueror; he ill-treated the nobles, scourged the
priests, laughed at their religion, killed the sacred bull Apis with his own
hand, and carried away with him all the gold and silver that he
INTRODUCTION. 16
could find in the temples. He made
[Herodotus. lib. vii. 1-7. B.C. 517.] Darius Hystaspes was
so far taken up with his wars with
[lib. vii. 7. B.C. 485.] Xerxes, in the second
year of his reign, again made
[Thucydides. lib. i. B.C. 461.] In the beginning of
the reign of Artaxerxes, Inarus king of
Artaxerxes then sent to
It was in the reign of Artaxerxes that
Herodotus, the father of history, visited
NATIVE KINGS. 17
to which the arts and sciences had been there
carried as by the wonders of the Sphinx and pyramids; and he carried back to
About the same time, though most likely a little
earlier, Hellanicus [A.
Gellius, lib. xv. 23.]
visited
In the reign of Darius Nothus, the Persians were
again driven [Manetho.
B.C. 414.] out
of
Pausiris, his son, succeeded him, but rather as
a satrap of
18 INTRODUCTION.
[Diogenes Laertius; and Strabo, lib. xvii.] In this reign Eudoxus the
astronomer, Chrysippus the physician, and Plato, the still more famous
philosopher, came to
We find the name of Nectanebo on the buildings
of
[Diod. Sic. lib. xv. 92.] Teos, or Tachus, then
succeeded; but he had to defend his throne against the power of the Persians,
who still looked upon
[Aristoteles, de Cura reif. lib. ii.]
In this
hard struggle for freedom, when the treasure of Tachus, and the sums raised
willingly by the priests, were spent, Chabrias persuaded the king to put a duty
on the sale of corn; before this time all taxes, except the crown-rent on land,
were unknown in Egypt.
ALEXANDER. 19
$$$ When Tachus led his Greek mercenaries into
Nectanebo II. was for several years successful
in keeping his throne against the armies of
On this,
Alexander was stopt for some time before the
little town of
20 INTRODUCTION.
round the walls of the city, as Achilles had
dragged the body of Hector.
[Arrian. lib. iii.] On the seventh day after leaving
[Arrian. lib. iii.] The Persian forces had been for the
most part withdrawn from the country by Sabaces, the satrap of
ALEXANDER. 21
north of
In the struggles of the Egyptians to throw off the
Persian yoke, we have seen little more than the Athenians and Spartans carrying
on their old quarrels on the plains of the Delta; hence, when Alexander by his
successes in Greece had put a stop to the feuds at home, the mercenaries of
both parties flocked to his conquering standard, and he found himself on the
throne of Upper and Lower Egypt without any struggle being made against him by
the Egyptians.
Alexander's success as a general is almost
thrown into the shade by his wisdom as a statesman. On reaching
22 INTRODUCTION.
$$$ But though the temple of Pthah at Memphis,
in which the state ceremonies were performed, had risen in beauty and
importance by the repeated additions of the later kings, who had fixed the seat
of government in Lower Egypt, yet the Sun, or Amun-Ra, or Kneph-Ra, the god of
Thebes, or Jupiter-Ammon as he was called by the Greeks, was the god under
whose spreading wings Egypt had seen its proudest days. Every Egyptian king had
called himself 'the son of the Sun;' those who had reigned at Thebes had
boasted that they were' beloved by Amun-Ra;' and when Alexander ordered the
ancient titles to be used towards himself, he wished to lay his offerings in
the temple of the god, and to be acknowledged by the priests as his son. As a
reader of Homer, and the pupil of Aristotle, he must have wished to see the
wonders of 'Egyptian Thebes,' the proper place for this ceremony; and it could
only have been because, as a general, he had not time for a march of nine
hundred miles, that he chose the nearer and less known temple of Kneph-Ra, in
the Oasis of Ammon.
[Arrian. lib. iii.] Accordingly, he floated down the river
from
ALEXANDER. 23
$$$ From Rhacotis he marched along the coast to
Paraetonium, a [Arrian.
lib. iii.] distance
of about two hundred miles through the desert; and there, [Q. Curtius, lib. iv.] or on his way there, he was met by the
ambassadors from
Alexander graciously received the gifts of the
Cyrenaeans, and [Q.
Curtius, lib. iv.]
promised them his friendship, but could not spare the time to visit their city;
and, without stopping, he marched southward to the oasis.
The oasis of Ammon is the most northerly of the
three oases [Arrian.
lib. iii.]
of the
Here stood the
24 INTRODUCTION.
of the merchants, who left their treasures in
the strong rooms of the temple while they rested their camels under the
palm-trees, had loaded the statue with jewels. On holidays the priests carried
the god about on a gilt barge, with silver dishes hanging from each side, while
matrons and virgins followed singing his praises.
Alexander, on his approach with his army, was
met by the chief priest of the temple, who, whether willing or unwilling, had
no choice but to hail the conqueror of Egypt as 'the son of Amun-Ra;' and
having left his gifts in the temple, and gained the end of his [Arrian. lib. iii.] journey, he returned
the shortest way to
[Plutarch. in Alexand.] Alexander has been
much laughed at by the Greeks for calling himself the son of Ammon; but it
should be remembered that it was only among people who worshipped and built
temples to their kings that he, for reasons of state, called himself a god;
that he never was guilty of the folly of claiming such honours in Greece, or of
his Greek soldiers; and that among his friends he always allowed his divinity
to be made the subject of a good-humoured joke.
[Arrian. lib. iii.] At Memphis he received the ambassadors
that came from Greece to wish him joy of his success; he reviewed his troops,
and gave out his plans for the government of his new kingdom; he divided the
country into two nomarchies or judgeships, and to fill these two offices of nomarchs
or chief judges, the highest civil offices in the kingdom, he chose Doloaspis
and Pet-isis, two Egyptians. Their duty was to watch over the due
administration of justice, one in Upper and the other in
He left the garrisons in the command of his own
Greek generals; Pantaleon commanded the counts, or knights-companions, who
garrisoned
ALEXANDER. 25
These were the chief fortresses in the kingdom:
This is perhaps the earliest instance that
history has recorded, of a conqueror governing a province according to its own
laws, and upholding the religion of the conquered as the established religion
of the state; and the length of time that the Graeco-Egyptian monarchy lasted,
and the splendour with which it shone, prove the wisdom and humanity of the
founder. This example has been copied, with equal success, in our own colonial
and Indian governments; but we do not know whether Alexander had any such
example to guide his views, or whether his own good sense pointed out to him
the folly of those who wished to make a people not only open their gates to the
garrisons, but their minds to the civil and religious opinions of the
conquerors. At any rate, the highest meed of praise is due to the statesman,
whoever he may have been, who first taught the world this lesson of
statesmanlike wisdom and religious humanity.
Alexander did not stay longer than was necessary
to give these orders. He had found time to talk with Psammo, the philosopher [Plutarch. in Alexandro.] of the greatest name
then in
26 INTRODUCTION.
of Upper Egypt were unvisited, he hastened
towards the
[Aristoteles, de Cura reif. lib. ii.]
One summer,
when the harvest had been less plentiful than usual, Cleomenes forbad the
export of corn, which was a large part of the trade of
At another time, when passing along the
Alexander had left orders that the great market
should be moved from
ALEXANDER. 27
ried Alexander's orders into execution, and
closed the market of their city.
But instances, such as these, of a public
officer making use of dishonest means to raise the amount of revenue which it
was his duty to collect, might, unfortunately, be found even in countries which
were for the most part enjoying the blessings of wise laws and good government;
and it is not probable that, while Alexander was with the army in Persia, the
acts of fraud and wrong should have been fewer in his own kingdom of Macedonia.
The dishonesty of Cleomenes was indeed equally
shown toward the Macedonians, by his wish to cheat the troops out of part of
their pay. The pay of the soldiers was due on the first day of each month, but
on that day he took care to be out of the way, and the soldiers were paid a few
days later; and by doing the same on each following month, he at length changed
the pay-day to the last day of the month, and cheated the army of a month's
pay.
A somatophylax, in the Macedonian army, was no
doubt at first, as the word means, one of the officers who had to answer for
the safety of the king's person - perhaps, in modern language, a colonel in the
body-guards or household troops: but as, in unmixed monarchies, the faithful
officer who was nearest the king's person, to whose watchfulness he trusted in
the hour of danger, often found himself the king's adviser in matters of state,
so, in the time of Alexander, the title of somatophylax was given to those
generals on whose wisdom the king chiefly leant, and by whose advice he was
usually guided. Among these, and foremost in Alexander's love and esteem, was
Ptolemy the son of Lagus. [Arrian. lib. iii.]
Philip, the father of Alexander, had given
Arsinoë, one of his [Pausanias,
lib. i. 6.]
relations, in marriage to Lagus; and her eldest son Ptolemy, born soon after
the marriage, was always thought to be the king's son,
28
INTRODUCTION.
though never so acknowledged. He was put into
the highest offices by Philip, without raising in Alexander's mind the distrust
which might have been felt if Ptolemy had boasted that he was the elder
brother. He had earned the good opinion of Alexander by his military successes
in Asia, and had gained his gratitude by saving his life when he was in danger
among the Oxydracae, near the river Indus; and moreover, Alexander looked up to
him as the historian whose literary powers and knowledge of military tactics
were to hand down to the wonder of future ages those conquests of which he was
an eye-witness.
Alexander's victories over Darius, and march to
the river
In this weighty matter, Ptolemy showed the
wisdom and judgement which had already gained him his high character. Though
his military rank and skill were equal to those of anyone of the generals of
Alexander, and his claim by birth perhaps equal to that of Arridaeus, he was
not one of those who had aimed at the throne; nor had he even aimed at the
second place, but left to Perdiccas the regency, with the care of the king's
person, in whose name that ambitious general vainly hoped to govern the whole
of Alexander's conquests. But Ptolemy, more wisely measuring his strength with
ALEXANDER. 29
the several tasks, chose the province of Egypt,
the province which was of all others, from its insulated position, the easiest
to be held as an independent kingdom against the power of Perdiccas: and, [Arrian. ap. Photium, lib.
x.] when
Egypt was given to Ptolemy by the council of generals, Cleomenes was at the
same time and by the same power made second in command, and he governed Egypt
for one year before Ptolemy's arrival.
THE FAMILY OF THE LAGIDAE.
[GENEALOGICAL
CHART = PAGE 30 (PDF PAGE 38)]
31
PTOLEMY THE SON OF LAGUS, OR PTOLEMY SOTER.
WHENEVER a man of ambition aims at raising
himself by means [B.C.
322.] of
industry and ability to a higher rank in the world than that in which he was
born, if he seeks to throw off his family and to break those ties by which he
fancies that he is held back, the opinion of the world as certainly chains him
to the load that he wishes to rise from. Any body with less good sense and
knowledge of mankind than Ptolemy would have called himself the natural son of
Philip Amyntas, and would have wished his relationship with Lagus to have been
forgotten; but we may be sure that in that case the name of Lagus would have
been thrown at him as a reproach, and he more wisely took it as his title; instead
of being ashamed of his father's name he ennobled it, and took care that his
children and his children's children should be proud of being of the family of
the Lagidae.
He was one of those who, at the death of
Alexander, had raised [Pausanias,
lib. i. 6.]
their voices against giving the whole of the conquered countries to one king;
he had wished that they should have been shared equally among the generals as
independent kingdoms; but in this he was overruled, and he accepted his
government as the lieutenant of Philip Arridaeus, though no doubt with the
fixed purpose of making Egypt an independent kingdom. On reaching
32 PTOLEMY SOTER.
in the name of his young and weak-minded king,
by all his fellow generals.
The Greek and foreign mercenaries, of which the
army of Alexander was made up, and who were faithful to his memory and to his
family, had little to guide them in the choice of which leader they should
follow to his distant province, beside the thought of where they should be best
treated; and Ptolemy's high character for wisdom, generosity, and warlike skill
had gained many friends for him among the officers: they saw that the wealth of
Egypt would put it in his power to reward those whose services were valuable to
him; and hence crowds flocked to his standard.
On reaching their provinces, the Greek soldiers,
proud of their conquests and of their late king, always called themselves
Macedonians; they pleased themselves with the thought that the whole of the
conquered countries were still governed by the brother of Alexander; and no one
of his generals was unwise enough, in his wildest thoughts of ambition - whether
aiming like Ptolemy at founding a kingdom, or like Perdiccus at the government
of the world, - to throw off the title of lieutenant to Philip Arridaeus, and
to forfeit the love of the Macedonian soldiers and his best claim to their
loyalty.
The first act of Ptolemy was to put to death
Cleomenes, who had been made receiver-general of the taxes by Alexander, and
who had afterwards been made sub-governor of
FUNERAL OF ALEXANDER. 33
he could not trust him in his plans for making
himself king of
The first addition which he made to his kingdom
was the little [Diod.
Sic. lib. xviii.]
state of
In the second year after the death of Alexander,
the funeral train [B.C.
321.] set
out from
Perdiccas had given orders that it should be
carried to AEga in [Pausanias,
lib. i. 6; and Arrian. ap. Photium, lib. x.] Macedonia, the burial-place of Philip and his
forefathers; for such was the love borne by the soldiers to Alexander, even
after his death, that it was thought that the city which should have the honour
of being his last resting-place would be the seat of government for the whole of
his wide conquests.
But Ptolemy had gained over Arridaeus to favour
his ambitious [Diod.
Sic. lib. xviii.]
views; and when the funeral reached
34
PTOLEMY SOTER.
ceive it; and we shall soon see that Ptolemy,
who never forgot to reward anyone who had been of use to him, gave to Arridaeus
the earliest and greatest gift that he had in his power to give.
Perdiccas, who, in the death of Cleomenes and
the seizure of the body of Alexander, had seen quite enough proof that Ptolemy,
though he was too wise to take the name of king, had in reality grasped the
power, now led the Macedonian army against Egypt, [Pausanias, lib. i. 6.] to enforce obedience
and to punish the rebellious lieutenant. He carried with him the two kings,
Philip Arridreus and the infant Alexander AEgus, the son of Alexander the Great
born after his father's death, both to ornament his army and to prove his right
to issue orders over the provinces. At Pelusium he was met by Ptolemy, who had
strengthened all his cities, and had left garrisons [Diod. Sic. lib. xviii.] in them; and, when he
laid siege to a small fortress near Pelusium, Ptolemy forced him to withdraw
his troops and to retire to his camp. At night, however, he left his trenches
without any noise, and marched hastily towards
In this bold and as it would seem rash step,
Perdiccas was badly supported by his generals. He was stem and overbearing in
his manner; he never asked advice from a council of war; his highest officers
were kept in the dark about tomorrow's march; he wished to be obeyed, without
caring to be loved. Ptolemy, on the other hand, was just and mild to every
body; he always sought the advice of his generals, and listened to them as his
equals: he was beloved alike by officers and soldiers. Hence when Perdiccas, in
his attempt to cross the Nile near
PERDICCAS OVERCOME. 35
Alexander as Perdiccas himself, and who would no
longer put up with his haughty commands. On this the disorder spread through the
whole army, and Perdiccas soon fell by the hand of one of his own soldiers.
On the death of their leader, all cause of war
ceased. Ptolemy sent food into the camp of the invading army, which then asked
for orders from him who the day before had been their enemy. The princes,
Philip Arridaeus and the young Alexander, both fell into his hands; and he
might then, as guardian, in their name have sent his orders over the whole of
Alexander's conquests. But, by grasping at what was clearly out of his reach,
he would have lost more friends and power than he would have gained; and when
the Macedonian phalanx, whose voice was law to the rest of the army, asked his
advice in the choice of a guardian for the two princes, he recommended to them
Python and Arridaeus - Python, who had just joined him, and had been the cause
of the rout of the Macedonian army, and Arridaeus, who had given up to him the
body of Alexander.
The Macedonian army, accordingly, chose Python
and Arridaeus as guardians, and as rulers with unlimited power over the whole
of Alexander's conquests; but, though none of the Greek generals who now held
Asia Minor, Syria, Babylonia, Thrace, or Egypt, dared to acknowledge it to the
soldiers, yet in reality the power of the guardians was limited to the little
kingdom of Macedonia. With the death of Perdiccas, and the withdrawal of his
army, Phenicia and Coelo-Syria were left unguarded, and almost without a
master; and Ptolemy, who had before been kept back by his wise forethought
rather than by the moderation of his views, sent an army under the command of
Nicanor to conquer those countries.
36 PTOLEMY SOTER.
[Josephus, contra Apionem.] army; but Nicanor,
seeing that on every seventh day the garrison withdrew from the walls, chose
that day for the assault, and gained the city.
In the earlier times of Egyptian history, when
navigation was less easy and seas separated kingdoms instead of joining them,
the Thebaid enjoyed, under the Coptic kings, the trading wealth which followed
the stream of its great river, the longest piece of inland navigation then
known; but, with the improvement in navigation and ship-building, countries
began to feel their strength in the timber of their forests and the number of
their harbours; and, as timber and sea-coast were equally unknown in the
Thebaid, that country fell as Lower Egypt rose; the wealth which before centred
in Thebes was then found in the ports of the Delta, where the barges of the
Nile met the ships of the Mediterranean. What used to be
The wise and mild plans which were laid down by
Alexander for the government of
phis, the chief of the animals which were kept
and fed at the cost of the several cities, and who had died of old age soon
after Ptolemy came to Egypt, he spent the sum of fifty talents or eight
thousand five hundred pounds on its funeral: and the priests, who had not
forgotten that Cambyses their former conqueror had wounded the Apis of his day
with his own sword, must have been highly pleased with this mark of his care
for them.
The Egyptians, who during the two last centuries
had sometimes had their temples plundered and their trade crushed by the
grasping tyranny of the Persian satraps, and had at other times been almost as
much hurt by their own vain struggles for freedom, now found themselves in the
quiet enjoyment of equal laws, with a prosperity which promised soon to equal
that of the reigns of Necho or Amasis.
It is true that they had not regained their
independence and political liberty, and that they only enjoyed their civil
rights during the pleasure of a Greek autocrat; but then it is to be remembered
that the native rulers with whom Ptolemy was compared were the kings of Lower
Egypt, who like himself were surrounded by Greek mercenaries, and who never
rested their power on the broad base of national pride and love of country; and
that nobody could have hoped to see a Theban king arise to bring back the days
of Thothmosis and Rameses.
The building of the city of
38 PTOLEMY SOTER.
many of the public works were only finished in
the reign of his son. [Strabo,
lib. xvii.]
The two main streets crossed one another at right angles in the middle of the
city, which was thirty stadia or three miles long, and seven stadia broad; and
the whole of the streets were wide enough for carriages. In front of the city
is a long narrow island named Pharos, which in the piercing mind of Alexander
only needed a little help from art to become the breakwater of a large harbour.
Accordingly one end of the
On the other side of the Heptastadium, and on
the outside of the city, were some more docks, and a ship-canal into the lake
Mareotis; the Necropolis or public burial-place for the city; also a theatre,
an amphitheatre, a gymnasium with a large stoa
or portico, a stadium in which games were celebrated every fifth year,
THE MUSEUM. 39
a hall of justice, public groves or gardens, and
a hippodrome for chariot races.
On the outside of the city, with these
buildings, was the
But among the public buildings of
40 PTOLEMY SOTER.
there was an exhedra
or seat on which the philosophers sometimes sat in the open air. The professors
or fellows of the college were supported by a public income. Ptolemy was
himself an author; his history of the wars of Alexander was highly praised by
Arrian, in whose pages we now read much of it; his love of art was shown in the
buildings of Alexandria; and those agreeable manners and that habit of
rewarding skill and knowledge wherever he could find them, which had already
brought to his army many of the bravest of Alexander's soldiers, were now
equally successful in bringing to his court such painters and sculptors, such
poets, historians, and mathematicians, as soon made the Museum of Alexandria
one of the brightest spots in the known world. The arts and letters, which he
then planted, did not perhaps bear their richest fruit till the reign of his
son, but they took such good root that they continued to flourish under the
last of his successors, unchoked by the vices and follies by which they were
then surrounded.
[Pliny, lib. xiii. 21.] In return for the
literature which
While
SELEUCUS. 41
had taken place among them in the short space of
eight years [B.C.
315] which
had passed since the death of Alexander. Philip Arridaeus, [Diod. Sic. lib. xix.] in whose name the
provinces had been governed, had been put to death; Antigonus was master of
Asia Minor, with a kingdom more powerful though not so easily guarded as Egypt;
Cassander held Macedonia, and had the care of the young Alexander AEgus, who
was then called the heir to the whole of his father's wide conquests, and whose
life, like that of Arridaeus, was soon to end with his minority; Lysimachus was
trying to form a kingdom in Thrace; and Seleucus had for a short time held
Babylonia.
With the wars which brought about these changes
Ptolemy had no part, beyond being once or twice called upon to send troops to
guard his
The large fleet and army which Antigonus got
together for the invasion of
42 PTOLEMY SOTER.
use of his army within the year. By these means
he raised his fleet to two hundred and forty-three long gallies or ships of
war.
[B.C. 313.] Ptolemy was called off for a short time from
the war in
When this trouble at home was put an end to,
Ptolemy crossed over to
The large and safe harbours of
art of making steel was first learnt, but, as
the furnaces were heated with wood, the iron must often have been hardened into
steel by the mere accident of the air being shut out, and it seems difficult to
believe that the armour of Demetrius could have been made of any thing else. If
this be granted it would carry back the use of steel to some centuries earlier,
as the Cyprian breast-plate in which [Iliad, xi. 20.] Agamemnon fought against
From
This inroad seems to have been meant to draw off
the enemy from Coelo-Syria, and it had the wished-for effect; for Demetrius,
who commanded the forces of his father Antigonus in that quarter, marched
northward to the relief of Cilicia, but he did not arrive there till Ptolemy's
fleet was already under sail for
Ptolemy, on reaching
There are in all ages some nations who are so
much before others in warlike skill and courage, that no inequality of numbers
can make up for it. Not that one Greek could overcome ten barbarians, but that
a body of Greeks, if large enough to make an army, with a centre, wings,
heavy-armed, light-armed, and cavalry, would
46 PTOLEMY SOTER.
tion to the strength of the place, made it a
favourite resting-place for caravans, which, whether they were coming from
[Diod. Sic. lib. xix.] Antigonus heard that
the Nabataeans had left
The Nabataeans then sent to Antigonus to
complain of this attack upon
GREEK SETTLERS. 47
brave Demetrius, were unable to force their way
through the narrow pass into the city.
Had Antigonus been master of the sea, he might
perhaps have marched through the desert, along the coast of the
This was followed by a treaty of peace between
these generals, [B.C.
310.] by
which it was agreed that each should keep the country that he then held; that
Cassander should govern Macedonia until Alexander AEgus, the son of Alexander
the Great, should be of age; that Lysimachus should keep Thrace, Ptolemy Egypt,
and Antigonus Asia Minor; and each wishing to be looked upon as the friend of
the soldiers by whom his power was upheld and the whole of these wide conquests
kept in awe, added the very unnecessary article, that the Greeks living in each
of these countries should be governed according to their own laws.
All the provinces held by these generals became
more or less Greek kingdoms, yet in no one did so many Greeks settle as in
48 PTOLEMY SOTER.
who kept the shops and filled the lower ranks,
and though the Greeks must very much have married Egyptian wives, yet it was
long before these mixed races were melted down into Egyptians. [Vocab. Hier. No. 722.] The same
hieroglyphical word stood for Greek and for Lower Egyptian; Lycophron seems to
speak of the Egyptian nation under [Polybius, lib. xv.] the name of Macedonians; and whenever,
during the reigns of the Ptolemies, the citizens of the capital of Egypt met in
public assembly, they were addressed, 'Ye men of Macedonia.' [Diod. Sic. lib. xix.]
By this treaty Ptolemy, in the thirteenth year
after the death of Alexander, was left undisputed master of
It was under the government of Ptolemy that the
wonders of
[lib. xvii. 5.] Hecataeus had been an officer in the army of
Alexander, and he [lib.
ii. 47.]
afterwards joined himself to Ptolemy; but he is best known as an [lib. i. 46.] author. Among other
works, he wrote a history of the Hyperborean or northern nations, and also a
history or rather a description of
THE MEMNONIUM. 49
Siculus. When he travelled in Upper Egypt,
Many of the Theban tombs, which are sets of
rooms tunnelled into the hills on the Libyan side of the
The Memnonium, the great
50 PTOLEMY SOTER.
[Diod. Sic. lib. i.] One of its rooms, perhaps after the
days of its builder, had been fitted up as a library, and held the histories
and records of the priests; but the golden zodiac or circle, on which were
engraved the days of the year, with the heliacal rising and setting of the
stars, by which each day was known, had been taken away by Cambyses. Hecataeus
also saw the three other palace-temples of
If Ptolemy did not make his government as much
feared by the half-armed Ethiopians as it was by the well-disciplined
Europeans, it must have been because the Thebans wished to guard their own
frontier rather than because his troops were always wanted against a more
powerful enemy; but the inroads of the Ethiopians were so far from being
checked that the country to the south of Thebes was unsafe for travellers, and
no Greek was able to reach Syene and the lower cataracts during this reign. The
trade through
In the wars between
THE JEWS. 51
large a part of the trading population of the
Delta. Hence, when [Josephus,
Antiq. xii.]
Ptolemy treated the Jews with the same kindness that he did his own subjects,
and held out the full privilege of Macedonian citizenship to those who would
settle in his rising city of Alexandria, he was followed by crowds of
industrious traders, manufacturers, and men of letters, who chose to live in
Egypt in peace and wealth, rather than to stay in Palestine in the daily fear
of having their houses sacked and burnt at every fresh quarrel between Ptolemy
and Antigonus.
Among these Jews was the high-priest Hezekias,
who was not more looked up to for his rank than for his eloquence and knowledge
of mankind; and Mosollam, who was known for his bravery and skill as an archer.
Hecataeus, who wrote a history of the Jews, gained his knowledge of the nation
from the learned men who then followed Ptolemy into
No sooner was the peace agreed upon between the
four generals, [Diod.
Sic. lib. xix. B.C. 309.]
who were the most powerful kings in the known world, than Cassander, who held
Macedonia, put to death Roxana, and her son the young Alexander AEgus, then
thirteen years old, in whose name these generals had each governed his kingdom
with unlimited sway, and who was then of an age that the soldiers, the givers
of all power, were already planning to make him the real king of Macedonia, and
of the wide conquests of his father.
The Macedonian phalanx, which formed the pride
and sinews of
52 PTOLEMY SOTER.
every army, were equally held by their deep-rooted
loyalty to the memory of Alexander, whether they were fighting for Ptolemy or
for Antigonus, and equally thought that they were guarding a province for his
heir; and it was through fear of loosening their hold upon the faithfulness of
these their best troops, that Ptolemy and his rivals alike chose to govern their
kingdoms under the unpretending title of lieutenants of the king of Macedonia.
Hence, upon the death of Alexander AEgus, there was a throne, or at least a
state prison, left empty for a new claimant.
[Diod. Sic. lib. xx.] Polysperchon, an old
general of Alexander's army, then thought that he saw a way to turn Cassander
out of
The children of Alexander having been in their
turns murdered by their guardians, Cleopatra his sister was the only one left
alive of the royal family of
The treaty of peace between the generals seems
never wholly to
have stopped the warfare. Ptolemy was busy in
helping the cities of
This naval victory gave Demetrius the means of unburdening
[Plutarch.
Vit. Demet.]
his proud mind of a debt of gratitude to his enemy; and accordingly,
remembering what Ptolemy had done after the battle of Gaza, he sent back to
Egypt, unasked for and unransomed, the whole of the prisoners who were of high
rank, that is to say, the whole that had any choice about which side they
fought for; and [Justinus,
lib. xv. 2.]
among them were Leontiscus the son, and Menelaus the brother, of Ptolemy.
Antigonus was overjoyed with the news of this
victory, which, by lessening the power of Ptolemy, had done much to smooth his
own path to the sovereignty of Alexander's empire, which was then
54 PTOLEMY SOTER.
[Diod. Sic. lib. xx.] left without an heir;
and he immediately took the title of king, and gave the same title to his son
Demetrius. In this he was followed by Ptolemy and the other generals, but with
this difference, that while Antigonus called himself king of all the provinces,
Ptolemy called himself king of Egypt; and while Antigonus gained Syria and Cyprus,
Ptolemy gained the friendship of every other kingdom, and of every free city in
Greece: they all looked upon him as their best ally against Antigonus the
common enemy.
[B.C. 301.] The next year Antigonus mustered the whole of
his forces in Coelo-Syria, and got ready for a second attack upon
$$$ Antigonus then turned the whole weight of
his mighty kingdom against the little island of Rhodes, which, though in sight
of the coast of Asia Minor, held itself independent of him, and in close
friendship with Ptolemy.
The island of Rhodes had from the earliest dawn
of history held a high place among the states of Greece; and in all the arts of
civilized life, in painting, sculpture, letters, and commerce, it had been
lately rising in rank while the other free states had been falling. Its
maritime laws were so highly thought of that they were copied by most other
states, and being afterwards adopted into the Pandects of Justinian they have
in part become the law of modern
Against this little state Demetrius led two
hundred long gallies and one hundred and seventy transports, with more than
forty thousand men. The whole of the Greek world looked on with the deepest
interest while the veterans of Antigonus were again and again driven back from
the walls of the blockaded city by its brave and virtuous citizens; who, while
their houses were burning and [Plutarch. Vit. Demet.] their walls crumbling under the battering-ram,
left the statues of Antigonus and Demetrius standing unhurt in the
market-place, saved by their love of art and the remembrance of former
kindness, which with a true greatness of mind they would not let the cruelties of
the siege outweigh. The gallies of Ptolemy, though unable [Diod. Sic. lib. xx.] to keep at sea against
the larger fleet of Demetrius, often forced their way into the harbour with the
welcome supplies of corn. Month after month every stratagem and machine which
the ingenuity of Demetrius could invent were tried and failed; and after the
siege had lasted more than a year he was glad to find an excuse
56 PTOLEMY SOTER.
for withdrawing his troops; and the Rhodians in
their joy hailed Ptolemy with the title of Soter or saviour. This name he ever. afterwards kept, though by the Greek
writers he is more often called Ptolemy the son of Lagus, or Ptolemy Lagus.
If we search the history of the world for a
second instance of so small an island daring to withstand the armies of so
mighty an empire, we shall perhaps not find anyone more remarkable than that of
the same island. Seventeen hundred years afterwards it again drew upon itself
the eyes of all the world, while it beat off the forces of the
One of the most valuable gifts which
[Visconti, Icon. Grec.] His coins are of gold,
silver, and copper, and are in a fine style of Greek workmanship. On the one
side they bear the portrait of the king, without a beard, having the head bound
with the royal diadem, which, unlike the modern crown of gold and precious
APELLES. 57
stones, is a plain ribband tied in a bow behind.
On the other side they have the words AI?7+9!3?K ESI/C?E, 'of Ptolemy Soter;' or #!E37+SG AI?7+9!3?K, 'of King Ptolemy:' with an eagle standing upon a thunderbolt, which
was only another way of drawing the eagle and sun, the hieroglyphical
characters for the title Pharaoh. As the coins are not of the same weight as
those of Greece, we must suppose that Ptolemy followed the Egyptian standard of
weight; the drachma weighs fifty-five grains, making the talent of silver worth
about one hundred and seventy pounds sterling. The cities in which the coins
were struck in this reign seem to have been Abydus and Pelusium, if we are to
judge by the letters on the coins; though we may be sure that they were also
struck at
The art of engraving coins did not flourish
alone in
It was perhaps at one of these dinners, at which
Ptolemy enjoyed [Proclus.
Comm. ii. 4.]
the society of the men of letters, that he asked Euclid if he could not show
him a shorter and easier way to the higher truths of mathematics than that by
which he led the pupils in the Museum; and Euclid, as if to remind him of the
royal roads of Persia, which ran by the side of the high-roads, but were kept
clear and free for
58 PTOLEMY SOTER.
the king's own use, made him the well-known
answer, that there was no royal road to geometry.
[Diog. Laert.] At another of these literary dinners, Diodorus
Cronus the rhetorician, who is thought to have been the inventor of the
Dilemma, was puzzled by a question put to him by Stilpo, and was so teazed by
Ptolemy for not being able to answer it, that it was said to have embittered
the rest of his life. This was the person against whom Callimachus some years
later wrote a bitter epigram, beginning 'Cronus is a wise man.'
[Pliny, xxxv.37.] Antiphilus, who was born in
The angry feelings of Apelles were by no means
cooled by this gift, but they boiled over in his great picture of Calumny. On
the right of the picture sat Ptolemy, holding out his hand to Calumny who was
coming up to him. On each side of the king stood a woman who seemed meant for
Ignorance and Suspicion. Calumny was a beautiful maiden, but with anger and
deep-rooted malice in her face; in her left hand was a lighted torch, and with
her right she was dragging along by the hair a young man, who was stretching
forth his hands to heaven and calling upon the gods to bear witness that he was
guiltless. Before her walked Envy, a pale,
HIS FAMILY. 59
hollow-eyed, diseased man, perhaps a portrait of
the accuser; and behind were two women, Craft and Deceit, who were encouraging
and supporting her. At a distance stood Repentance, in the ragged black garb of
mourning, who was turning away her face for shame as Truth came up to her.
Ptolemy Soter was plain in his manners, and
scarcely passed his [Plutarch.
Apophthegm.]
own generals in the costliness of his way of life. He often supped and slept at
the houses of his friends; and his own house had so little of the palace that
he borrowed dishes and tables of his friends when he asked any number of them
to sup with Mm in return, saying that it was the part of a king to enrich
others rather than to be rich himself.
Before he took the title of king he was styled
by friendly states [Pausanius,
lib. vi. 3; x. 7.]
by the simple name of Ptolemy the Macedonian; and during the whole of his reign
he was as far from being overbearing or tyrannical in his behaviour as from
being kinglike in his dress and household. Once when he wished to laugh at a
boasting antiquarian, [Plutarch.
de Irâ cohib.]
he asked him, what he knew could not be answered, who was the father of Peleus;
and the other let his wit so far get the better of his prudence as in return to
ask the king, who had never heard the name of his grandfather, if he knew who
was the father of Lagus. But Ptolemy took no further notice of this than to
remark that if a king cannot bear rude answers he ought not to ask rude
questions.
An answer which Ptolemy once made to a
soothsayer might [Appian.
Syriac. 56.]
almost be taken as the proverb which had guided him through life. When his
soldiers met with an anchor in one of their marches, and were discouraged by
being told by the soothsayer that it was a proof that they ought to stop where
they then were, the king answered, that an anchor was an omen of safety, not of
delay.
60 PTOLEMY SOTER.
[Athenaeus lib. xiii. 5.] Ptolemy first married
Thais the noted courtesan, but their sons [Justinus, lib. xv. 2.] seem not to have been
thought legitimate. Leontiscus, the eldest, we afterwards hear of, fighting
bravely against Demetrius; of the second, named Lagus after his grandfather, we
hear nothing.
[Pausanias. lib. 1. 6.] He then married
Eurydice the daughter of Antipater, by whom [lib. i. 16.] he had several children. The eldest
son, Ptolemy, was named Ceraunus, the
Thunderer, and was banished by his father from
[Pausanias, lib. i. 7.] Another son of Ptolemy
and Eurydice was put to death by Ptolemy Philadelphus, for plotting against his
throne, to which, as the elder brother, he might have thought himself the best
entitled.
[lib. i. 9. 10.] Their daughter Lysandra married
Agathocles the son of Lysimachus; but when Agathocles was put to death by his
father, she fled to
[lib. i. 6.] Ptolemy's second wife was Berenice, a lady who
came into
Perhaps all young queens may be beautiful in the
eyes of the
HIS FAMILY. 61
poet; but the following lines, by Asclepiades of
Samos, on mistaking the picture of Berenice for that of Venus, may be quoted
for their neatness, if not to prove the queen's beauty.
'This form is
Cytherea's; - nay [Anthol. Graec. Merivale.]
'Tis Berenice's, I
protest:
So like to both, you
safely may
Give it to either you
like best.'
With Berenice, Ptolemy spent the rest of his
life without any thing to trouble the happiness of his family. He saw their
elder son Ptolemy, whom we must call by the name which he took late in life - Philadelphus,
grow up every thing that he could wish him to be; and, moved alike by his love
for the mother and by the good qualities of the son, he chose him as his
successor on the throne, instead of his eldest son Ptolemy Ceraunus, who had
shown, by every act in his life, his unfitness for the trust.
His daughter Arsinoë married Lysimachus in his
old age, and [Pausanias,
lib. i. 10.]
urged him against his son Agathocles, the husband of her own sister. She
afterwards married her half-brother Ptolemy Ceraunus; and [Justinus, lib. xvii. 2.] lastly, we shall see
her the wife of her brother Philadelphus.
Argaeus, his youngest son, was put to death by
Philadelphus, on a charge of treason. [Pausanias, lib. i. 7.]
Of his youngest daughter Philotera we know
nothing, except that [Strabo,
lib. xv.] her
brother Philadelphus afterwards named a city of
In the last defeat of Demetrius, Ptolemy had
regained Coelo-Syria and
62 PTOLEMY SOTER.
to befriend all those states which like his own
were threatened by that mad ambition in others.
[Justinus, lib. xvi. 2.] His last public act,
in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, was ordered by the same wisdom and
forbearance which had governed every part of his life. Feeling the weight of
years press heavily upon him - that he was less able than formerly to bear the
duties of his office, and wishing to see his son firmly seated on the throne,
he laid aside his diadem and his title, proclaimed Ptolemy, his son by
Berenice, king, and contented himself with the modest rank of somatophylax, or
satrap, to his successor.
This is perhaps the most successful instance
known of a king, who had been used to be obeyed by armies and by nations,
willingly giving up his power when he found his bodily strength no longer equal
to it. Charles V. gave up the empire in disappointment, and hid himself in a
monastery to avoid the sight of any thing which could remind him of his former
greatness. Diocletian, who, more like a philosopher, did not refuse to hear
news from the world of politics which he had left, had his last days embittered
and his life shortened by witnessing the misconduct of his successors. But Ptolemy
Soter had the happiness of having a son willing to follow in the track which he
had laid down for him, and of living to see the wisdom of his own laws proved
by the well-being of the kingdom under his successor.
But while we are watching the success of
Ptolemy's plans, and the rise of this Greek monarchy at Alexandria, we cannot
help being pained with the thought that the Copts of Upper Egypt are forgotten,
and asking whether it would not have been still better to have raised Thebes to
the place which it once held, and to have recalled the days of Rameses, instead
of trying, what might seem the hopeless task, to plant Greek arts in Africa.
REMARKS. 63
$$$ But a review of this history will show that,
as far as human forethought can judge, this could not have been done. If Thebes
had only fallen on the conquest by Cambyses - if the rebellions against the
Persians had been those of Copts throwing off their chains and struggling for
freedom, - we might have hoped to have seen Egypt, on the fall of Darius, again
rise under kings of the blood and language of the people; and we should have
thought the gilded and half-hid chains of the Ptolemies were little better than
the heavy yoke of the Persians.
This, however, is very far from having been the
case. We first see the kings of Lower Egypt guarding their thrones at
National character, national pride, love of
country, and the better feelings of clanship, are the chief grounds upon which
a great people can be raised. These feelings are closely allied to self-denial,
or a willingness on the part of each man to give up much for the good of the
whole. By this, chiefly, public monuments are built, and citizens stand by one
another in battle; and these feelings were certainly strong in
64 PTOLEMY SOTER.
ness. But, when the throne was moved to Lower
Egypt - when the kingdom was governed by the kings of Sais, and even
afterwards, when it was struggling against the Persians, - these virtues were
wanting: few public buildings were raised, though the country was overflowing
with wealth, and they trusted to foreign hirelings in their struggle for
freedom. The Delta was peopled by three races of me - Copts, Greeks, and
Phenicians or Arabs; and even before the sceptre was given to the Greeks by
Alexander's conquests it would seem as if the Copts had lost the power to hold
it.
65
PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
FEW princes ever mounted a throne with such fair
prospects [B.C.
284.]
before them as the second Ptolemy. He had been brought up with great care, and
being a younger son was not spoilt by that flattery which in all courts is so
freely offered to the heir. He was born in the
66 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
the fruit where his father had planted, and that
like Lorenzo de' Medici he has received the praise for reaping the harvest
which is due to the father for his wisdom in sowing the seed, yet we must at
the same time acknowledge that Philadelphus was a successor worthy of Ptolemy
Soter.
The first act of his reign, or rather the last
of his father's reign, was the proclamation, or the ceremony of showing the new
king to the troops and people. All that was dazzling, all that was costly or
curious, all that the wealth of Egypt could buy or the gratitude of the
provinces could give, was brought forth to grace this religious show, which was
copied rather from the triumphs of Rameses and Thothmosis, than from anything
that had been seen in Greece.
[Athenaeus, lib. v.] The procession began with the pomp of
Osiris, at the head of which were the Sileni in scarlet and purple cloaks, who
opened the way through the crowd. Twenty satyrs followed, on each side of the
road, bearing torches; and then Victories with golden wings, clothed in skins,
each with a golden staff six cubits long, twined round with ivy. An altar was
carried next, covered with golden ivy-leaves, with a garland of golden vine-leaves
tied with white ribands; and this was followed by a hundred and twenty boys, in
scarlet frocks, carrying bowls of crocus, myrrh, and frankincense. Then came
forty satyrs crowned with golden ivy-leaves, with their naked bodies stained
with gay colours, each carrying a crown of vine-leaves and gold. Then two
Sileni in scarlet cloaks and white boots, one having the hat and wand of
Mercury and the other a trumpet; and between them walked a man, six feet high,
in tragic dress and mask, meant for the Year, carrying a golden cornucopia. He
was followed by a tall and beautiful woman, meant for the Lustrum of five
years, carrying in one hand a crown and in the other a palm-branch. Then came
an altar and a troop of satyrs,
HIS CORONATION. 67
in gold and scarlet, carrying golden wine-vases
and drinking-cups.
Then came Philiscus the poet, the priest of
Osiris, with all the servants of the god. Then the Delphic tripods, the prizes
which were to be given in the wrestling matches; that for the boys was nine cubits
high, and that for the men twelve cubits high. Next came a four-wheeled car,
fourteen cubits long and eight wide, drawn along by one hundred and eighty men,
on which was the statue of Osiris, fifteen feet high, pouring wine out of a
golden vase, and having a scarlet frock down to his feet, with a yellow
transparent robe over it, and over all a scarlet cloak. Before the statue was a
large golden bowl, and a tripod with bowls of incense on it. Over the whole was
an awning of ivy and vine-leaves; and in the same chariot were the priests and
priestesses of the god.
This was followed by a smaller chariot drawn by
sixty men, in which was the statue of
On another chariot drawn by an elephant came
Osiris, as he returned from his Indian conquests. He was followed by twenty-four
chariots drawn by elephants, sixty drawn by goats, twelve by lions, seven by
rhinoceroses, four by wild asses, fifteen by buffaloes, eight by ostriches, and
seven by stags. Then came chariots loaded with the tributes of the conquered
nations; men of
68 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
[Athenaeus, lib. v.] rying six hundred elephants' teeth;
sixty huntsmen leading two thousand four hundred dogs; and one hundred and
fifty men carrying trees, in the branches of which were tied parrots and other
beautiful birds. Next walked the foreign animals, Ethiopian and Arabian sheep,
Brahmin bulls, a white bear, leopards, panthers, bears, a camelopard, and a
rhinoceros.
In another chariot was seen Bacchus running away
from Juno, and flying to the altar of Rhea. After that came the statues of
Alexander and Ptolemy Soter crowned with gold and ivy: by the side of Ptolemy
stood the statues of Virtue, of the god Chem, and of the city of Corinth; and
he was followed by female statues of the conquered cities of Ionia, Greece,
Asia Minor, and Persia; and the statues of the other gods. Then came crowds of
singers and cymbal-players, and two thousand bulls with gilt horns, crowns, and
breast-plates.
Then came Amun-Ra and the other gods; and the
statue of Alexander between Victory and the goddess Neith, in a chariot drawn
by elephants: then a number of thrones of ivory and gold; and on one was a
golden crown, on another a golden cornucopia, and on the throne of Ptolemy
Soter was a crown worth ten thousand aurei,
or nearly six thousand pounds sterling: then three thousand two hundred golden
crowns, twenty golden shields, sixty-four suits of golden armour; and the whole
was closed with forty waggons of silver vessels, twenty of golden vessels,
eighty of scents, and fifty-seven thousand six hundred foot soldiers, and
twenty-three thousand two hundred horse. The procession began moving by
torch-light before the sun rose in the morning, and the sun set in the evening
before it had all passed.
It went through the streets of
that was costly in art, or scarce in nature, was
brought together in honour of the day. At the public games, Ptolemy Soter was
presented with twenty golden crowns, Berenice with twenty-three, and their son
the new king with twenty, beside other costly gifts; and two thousand two
hundred and thirty-nine talents, or four hundred thousand pounds, were spent on
the amusements of the day. For the account of this curious procession we are
indebted to Callixenes of Rhodes, who was then travelling in
One of the earliest troubles in the reign of
Philadelphus was the [Pausanias,
lib. i. 7.]
revolt of
Magas, without waiting till the large armies of
Egypt were drawn together to crush his little state, marched hastily towards
Alexandria, in the hopes of being joined by some of the restless thousands of
that crowded city. But he was quickly recalled to
More than a century before this time, the Celts,
or Gauls, had found their own forests too crowded for their way of life, and,
moving southward, had overrun the fair plains of the north of
70 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
fierce barbarians bad wandered as far as
Philadelphus had reason to believe that four
thousand of these Gauls, who formed part of the army which he was leading
against
Magas had married Apime, the daughter of
Antiochus Soter, king of
After the war between the brothers had lasted
five years, Magas [Pausanias,
lib. i. 6.]
made an offer of peace, which was to be sealed by a marriage between [Justinus, lib. xxvi. 3.] his only child
Berenice and the son of Philadelphus. To this offer Philadelphus yielded; as by
the death of Magas, who was already worn out by luxury and disease,
but, notwithstanding the efforts made by his
widow to break the agreement, the treaty was kept, and on this marriage
But the black spot upon the character of
Philadelphus, which all the blaze of science and letters by which he was
surrounded cannot make us overlook, is the death of two of his brothers. A son
of [Pausanias,
lib. i. 7.]
Eurydice, who might perhaps have thought that he was robbed of the throne of
Egypt by his younger brother, and who was unsuccessful in raising the island of
Cyprus in rebellion; and a younger brother, Argaeus, who was also charged with
joining in a plot, both lost their lives by his orders. Well might the
historians believe that the name of Philadelphus, which he took to show his
love for a sister, was given him as a reproach for the murder of two brothers
and the war of five years against a third.
In reviewing the history of the world during
past ages, we place ourselves, in thought, at each century, on that spot of the
earth on which the historians of the time lived; and from that spot, as from a
height, we look over the other kingdoms of the world as far countries, about
which we know nothing but what is known at the place where we then stand. Thus,
in the time of Moses, we live in
72 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
an ambassador to the senate, to wish them joy of
their success, and to make a treaty of peace with the republic. The embassy, as
we might suppose, was received in Rome with great joy; and four ambassadors - three
of the proud name of Fabius, with Quintus Ogulnius - were sent back to seal the
treaty.
[Dion Cassius, Frag. 147.] Philadelphus gave them
some costly gifts, probably those usually given to ambassadors; but Rome was
then young, her citizens had not yet made gold the end for which they lived,
and the ambassadors returned the gifts, for they could receive nothing beyond
the [Appian.
Sicul. i.] thanks
of the senate for having done their duty. This treaty was never broken; and
when, soon afterwards, the Carthaginians, in their war with Rome, sent to
Alexandria to beg for a loan of two thousand talents, Philadelphus refused it,
saying that he would help them against his· enemies, but not against his
friends.
From that time forward we find
[Goltzius, de Re Numm.] At the time of this
embassy, when Greek arts were nearly unknown [Livy,lib. xv. 6.] to the Romans, the
ambassadors must have seen much that was new to them, and much that was worth
copying; and three years afterwards, when two of them, Quintus Ogulnius and
Caius Fabius Pictor, were chosen consuls, they coined silver for the first time
in
[B.C. 265.] About the middle of this reign, Berenice, the
mother of the king, died; and it was most likely then that Philadelphus began
to date from the beginning of his own reign: he had before gone on dating like
his father, from the beginning of his father's reign.
BUILDINGS. 73
$$$ In the year after her death, the feast of
Osiris, in the month of [Theocritus,
Idyll. 15.]
Mesore, was celebrated at
Among other buildings, Philadelphus raised a
temple in honour [Idyll.
17.] of his
father and mother, and placed in it their statues, made of ivory and gold, and
ordered that they should be worshipped like the gods and other kings of the
country.
In this reign was finished the light-house on
the
The navigation of the Red Sea, along which the
wind blows hard from the north for nine months in the year, was found so
dangerous by the coasting vessels from the south of
74 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
He also built four public inns or watering
houses, where the caravans might find water for the camels on their twelve
days' journey through the desert from Coptos to this new port.
[Wilkinson's
[Pliny, lib. vi. 33.] Philadelphus also
built a city at the head of the Red Sea, where Suez now stands, and named it
Arsinoë, after his sister; and he finished the canal which Sesostris and Darius
had begun, by which ships could pass from this city on the Red Sea to the Nile
near [lib.
vi. 34.] Pelusium.
He also built a second city of the name of Berenice, called the Troglodytic
Berenice, on the coast of the Red Sea, in the same latitude as Meroë the
capital of Ethiopia, and most likely on the site of the port to which the
Ethiopian traders had gone to meet the vessels from Arabia, in those years when
the trade came to Egypt through Ethiopia.
In the number of ports which were then growing
into the rank of cities, we see full proof of the great trade of
[lib. vi. 34.] In the same latitude with the Troglodytic
Berenice, but separated from it by one of the forests of
THE MUSEUM. 75
from
The
At the head of this library had been Demetrius
Phalereus, who, [Hieronymus,
in Dan. xi.]
after ruling
76 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
that he put before him books which, from their
praise of freedom and hatred of tyrants, few persons would even speak of in the
presence of a king.
[Diog. Laert.] But Demetrius had also been consulted by Soter
about the choice of a successor, and had given his opinion that the crown ought
to be left to his eldest son, and that wars would arise between his children if
it were not so left; hence we can hardly wonder that, on the death of Soter,
Demetrius should have been ordered to leave Alexandria.
[Suidas.] Soon after this, we find Zenodotus of Ephesus
filling the office of librarian to the Museum. He was a poet, who, with others,
had been employed by Soter in the education of his children. He was also a
critic, and is known as the first who turned his thoughts towards mending the
text of Homer, which had become faulty through the carelessness of the copiers.
At the head of the mathematical school was
Euclid, who is, however, less known to us by what his pupils have said of him
than by his own work, which is one of the few of the scientific writings of the
ancients which have come down to us. The discoveries of the man of science are
made-use of by his successor, and the discoverer perhaps loses part of his
reward when his writings are passed by, after they have served us as a
stepping-stone to mount by. If he wishes his works to live with those of the
poet and orator, he must, like them, cultivate those beauties of style which
are fitted to his matter.
THEOCRITUS. 77
every single step in the path, and wishes with
Ptolemy Soter for a shorter road; but, upon the whole,
Ctesibius ranked equally high in mixed
mathematics, although [Athenaeus,
lib. ix.] his
name is now little known; he wrote on the theory of hydrostatics, [Pliny, lib. vii. 38.] and was the inventor
of several water-engines; an application of mathematics which was much called
for by the artificial irrigation of
Among the best known of the men of letters who
now came to
The muse of Theocritus is wholly Sicilian; he
has drawn no pictures from the country to which he had removed. He hardly
mentions
78 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
[Suidas.] In a narrow back street of
[Hymn to Apollo.] He calls upon Apollo by the name of Carneus,
because, after [Hymn
to
[
$$$ Philostephanus of Cyrene, the friend of
Callimachus, was a [Athenaeus,
lib. viii.]
naturalist who wrote upon fishes, and is the first we hear of who limited his
studies to one branch of natural history.
But
The Cyrenaic sect thought happiness, not
goodness, was the end to be aimed at through life, and selfishness, rather than
kindness to others, the right spring of men's actions. It would hardly be fair
to take their opinions from the mouths of their enemies; and the dialogues of
Socrates with their founder, as told to us by Xenophon, [Memorabilia.] would prove a lower
tone of morality than he is likely to have held. But often as this false rule
has been set up for our guidance, there have always been found many to make use
of it in a way not meant by the teacher. The Cyrenaic sect soon fell into the
disrepute to which these principles were likely to lead it, and wholly ceased
when Epicurus taught the same opinions more philosophically.
The chair of philosophy at Cyrene was afterwards
filled by Arete the daughter of Aristippus; and after her death by her son
Aristippus, who, having been brought up in the lecture-room of his mother, was
Called, in order to distinguish him from his grandfather of the same name,
Metrodidactus, or mother-taught.
History has not told us whether he took this name himself in gratitude for the
80 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
debt which he owed this learned lady, or whether
it was given him by his pupils; but in either case it was a sure way of giving
to the mother the fame which was due to her for the education of her son; for
no one can fail to ask what was the name of the mother of Metrodidactus.
[Diog. Laert.] Theodorus, one of the pupils of Metrodidactus,
though at one time banished from
Strato, the pupil of Theophrastus, though
chiefly known for his writings on physics, was also a writer on many branches
of knowledge. He was one of the men of learning who had taken part in the
education of Philadelphus; and the king showed his gratitude to his teacher, by
making him a present of eighty talents or thirteen thousand pounds sterling. He
was for eighteen years at the head of one of the schools of
[Ptolemy, Syntax. Mag. lib. vii. 3.] Timocharis the
astronomer began his observations at
[Ptolemy, Syntax. Mag. lib. vii. 3.] Aristillus also made
observations of the same kind at
ARATUS. 81
$$$ Aristarchus the astronomer of Samos most
likely came to
Aratus, who was born in
82 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
philosopher, perhaps before he himself knew in
which of the paths of letters he was soon to take the lead, translated this
poem; and it is not a little proof of the high place which Cicero's writings
held in the opinions of those with whom he lived, that this is perhaps the only
copy of school-boys' verses which has come down to us from the ancients.
The next translation is by Germanicus Caesar,
whose early death and many good qualities have thrown such a bright light upon
his name. He shone as a general, as an orator, and as an author; but his Greek
comedies, his Latin orations, and his poem on Augustus, are all lost, while his
translation of Aratus is all that is left, to prove that this high name in
literature was not given to him for his political virtues alone.
Lastly Avienus, a writer in the reign of
Diocletian, or perhaps of Theodosius, has left a rugged unpolished translation
of this much valued poem.
[Athenaeus, lib. xi. 12.] Sosibius was one of
the rhetoricians of the Museum who lived upon the bounty of Philadelphus. The
king, wishing to laugh at his habit of verbal criticism, once told his
treasurer to refuse his salary, and say that it had been already paid. Sosibius
complained to the king, and the book of receipts was sent for, in which
Philadelphus found the names of Soter, Sosigenes, Bion, and Apollonius, and
showing to Sosibius one syllable of his name in each of those words, said that
putting them together, they must be taken as the receipt for his salary.
[Vitruvius, lib. vii. praef.] Among others who were
brought to
MANETHO. 83
manner of finding fault, that he even refused to
relieve him when in distress. He told him that while thousands had earned a
livelihood by pointing out the beauties of the Iliad and Odyssey in their
public readings, surely one person who was so much wiser might be able to live
by pointing out their faults.
Timon, a tragic poet, was also one of the
visitors to this court; [Diog.
Laert.] but,
as Antigonus wittily said of him that he was fond of eating and drinking and
sometimes at leisure for philosophy, we need not wonder at our knowing nothing
of his tragedies, and at his not being made a professor by Philadelphus. But he
took his revenge on the better-fed philosophers of the court, in a poem in
which he [Athenaeus,
lib. i. 19.]
calls them literary fighting-cocks, who were fattened by the king, and were
always quarrelling in the coops of the Museum.
Such were the Greek authors who basked in the
sunshine of royal favour at Alexandria; who could have told us, if they had
thought it worth their while, all that we now wish to know of the trade, religion,
language, and early history of Egypt. But they thought that the barbarians were
not worth the notice of men who called themselves Macedonians. Philadelphus,
however, thought otherwise; and by his command Manetho, an Egyptian priest of [Syncellus.]
84 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
sand years, is shown by our finding the kings'
names agree with every Egyptian inscription with which they can be compared.
Beside his history, Manetho has left us a work
on astrology, called Apotelesmatica, or Events,
a work of which there seems no reason to doubt the genuineness. It is a poem in
hexameter verse, in good Greek, addressed to king Ptolemy, in which he calls,
not only upon Apollo and the Muse, but, like a true Egyptian, upon Hermes, from
whose darkly-worded writings he had gained his knowledge. He says that the
king's greatness might have been foretold from the places of Mars and the Sun
at the time of his birth, and that his marriage with his sister Arsinoë arose
from the places of Venus and Saturn at the same time.
But while we smile at this being said as the
result of astronomical calculations, we must remember that for centuries
afterwards, almost in our own time, the science of judicial astrology was made
a branch of astronomy, and that the fault lay rather in the age than in the
man; and we have the pain of thinking that, while many of the valuable writings
of Manetho are lost, the copiers and readers of manuscripts have carefully
preserved this near]y worthless poem on astrology.
[Manetho, Apotelesm.] Petosiris was a writer
on astronomy, who was highly praised by his friend Manetho, and whose
calculations on the distances of the [Lib. ii.] sun and planets are quoted by Pliny. His works
are lost; but his name calls for our notice, as he must have been a native
Egyptian, and a priest.
[Strabo, lib. ix. 421.] Timosthenes, the
admiral of Philadelphus, must not be forgotten in this list of authors; for
though his verses to Apollo were little worth notice, his voyages of discovery,
and his work in ten books on harbours, placed him in the first rank among
geographers.
But we must not only give Philadelphus credit
for the learned and
COLOTES. 85
famous authors whom he brought to
Philadelphus sent a ship to
Colotes, a pupil and follower of Epicurus,
dedicated to Philadelphus [Plutarch. in Colotem.] a work of which the very title proves the nature
of his philosophy, and how soon the rules of his master had fitted themselves
to the habits of the sensualist. Its title was, 'That no man need live
according to the philosophical rules of another;' a looseness of principle
which must at last be granted by everybody who, like Epicurus, makes happiness
instead of goodness the end to be aimed at through life. It was a good deal
read and talked about; and three hundred years afterwards Plutarch thought it
not a waste of time to write against it at some length.
At a time when books were few, and far too dear
to be within reach of the many, and indeed when the number of those who could
read must have been small, other means were of course taken to meet the thirst
after knowledge; and the chief of these were the public readings in the
Theatre. This was not overlooked by Philadelphus, who employed Hegesias to read
Herodotus, and Hermophantus [Athenaeus, lib. xiv. 3.] to read Homer, the earliest historian and the
earliest
86 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
poet, the two authors who had taken deepest root
in the minds of the Greeks.
[Plutarch. Aratus.] Philadelphus was not less fond of
paintings and statues than of books; and he seems to have joined the Achaian
league as much for the sake of the pictures which Aratus, its general, was in
the habit of sending him, as for political reasons. Aratus, the chief of
[Pliny, lib. xxxv. 36.] Pamphilus was famed
for his perspective; and he is said to have received from every pupil the large
sum of ten talents, or seventeen hundred pounds, a year. His best-known pieces
were, Ulysses in his ship, the victory of the Athenians, and the battle of
Phliuntes; but we are not told whether either of these were sent to Philadelphus.
It was through Pamphilus that, at first in
[lib. xxxv. 40.] Neacles also painted for Aratus; and we
might almost suppose that it was as a gift to the king of Egypt that he painted
his Sea-fight between the Egyptians and the Persians, in which the painter
shows us that it was fought within the mouth of the Nile by making a crocodile
bite at an ass drinking on the shore.
[Ptolemaeus, apud Photium.] Helena, the daughter
of Timon, was a painter of great note at this time, at Alexandria; but the only
piece of hers known to us by name is the battle of Issus, which three hundred
years afterwards was hung up by Vespatian in the Temple of Peace at Rome. We
must wonder at a woman choosing to paint the horrors and pains of a
battle-piece; but, as we are not told what point of time was chosen, we may
hope that it was after the battle, when Alex-
THE SEPTUAGINT. 87
ander, in his tent, raised up from their knees
the wife and lovely daughter of Darius, who had been found among the prisoners.
We hear but little of the statues and sculptures
made for Philadelphus; [Athenaeus,
lib. x. 7.]
but we cannot help remarking, that, while the public places of Athens were
filled with the statues of the great and good men who had deserved well of
their country, the statues which were most common in Alexandria were those of
Cline, a favourite damsel, who filled the office of cup-bearer to the king.
The favour shown to the Jews by Ptolemy Soter
was not withdrawn [Josephus,
Antiq. xii. 2.]
by his son. He even bought and freed from slavery one hundred and twenty
thousand men of that nation, who were scattered over
Accordingly, to please them Philadelphus sent
Aristaeus, a man whose wisdom had gained his friendship, and Andraeus a captain
of the guard, both of them Greek Jews, with costly gifts to Eleazer the high
priest of Jerusalem; and asked him to employ learned and fit men to make a
Greek translation of the Bible for the library at Alexandria. Eleazar named
seventy elders to undertake the task, who held their first sitting on the
business at the king's dinner-
88 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
[Diog. Laert.] table; when Menedemus the Socratic
philosopher, the pupil of Plato, was also present, who had been sent to
Philadelphus as ambassador from
[Plutarch. Aratus.] When Aratus of Sicyon first laid a plot
to free his country from its tyrant, he sent to Philadelphus for help in money;
but the king seems to have thought the plans of this young man too wild to be
countenanced. Aratus however soon raised his state to a level with the first
states of Greece, and made himself leader of the Achaian league, under which
band and name the Greeks were then struggling for freedom against the great
surrounding kingdoms; and when by his courage and success he had shown himself
worthy of the proud name which was afterwards given him - of the last of the
Greeks, Philadelphus, like other patrons, gave him the help which he less
needed. Aratus, as we have seen, bought his friendship with pictures, the gifts
of all others the most welcome; and, when he went to Egypt, Philadelphus gave
him one hundred and fifty talents or twenty-five thousand pounds, and joined
the Achaian league, on the agreement that he was to direct the war by sea and
land.
The friendship of Philadelphus, indeed, was
courted by all the [Pausanias,
lib. i. 6.]
neighbouring states; the Athenians named one of the tribes of [Inscript. Letronne,
Recherches.]
their city by his name; the little island of Delos set up its statue to him;
and the cities of Greece vied with one another in doing him honour.
He had, when young, married Arsinoë the daughter
of Lysima-
ARSINOË. 89
[Scholiast. in Theocrito, xvil. 128.] chus of Thrace, by
whom he had three children, Ptolemy, who succeeded him, Lysimachus, and
Berenice; but having found that his wife was intriguing with Amyntas, and with
Crysippus a physician of Rhodes, he put these two to death, and banished Arsinoë
to Coptos in the Thebaid.
He then took Arsinoë his own sister as the
partner of his throne. She had married first the old Lysimachus king of
She was a woman of an enlarged mind; her husband
and her [Athenaeus,
lib. vii. 1.]
step-children alike valued her; and Eratosthenes showed his opinion of her
learning and strong sense by giving the name of Arsinoë to one of his works,
which perhaps a modern writer would have named Table-talk.
This marriage, however, did not escape blame
with the Greeks [lib.
xiv. 4.] of
In the Egyptian inscriptions Ptolemy and Arsinoë
are always called the Brother-gods; on the coins they are called Adelphi, the brothers; and afterwards the king
took the name of Philadelphus or sister-loving,
by which he is now usually known.
90 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
$$$ In the first half of his reign Philadelphus
dated his coins from the year that his father came to the throne; and it was
not till the nineteenth year of his reign, soon after the death of his mother,
that he made an era of his own, and dated his coins by the year of his own [Visconti, Icon. Grec.] reign. Among them is
one with the heads of Soter and Philadelphus on the one side, and the head of
Berenice, the wife of the one and mother of the other, on the other side. This
we may suppose to have been struck during the first two years of his reign, in
the lifetime of his father.
Another bears on one side the heads of Ptolemy
Soter and Berenice, with the word 1+S;, 'of the gods,' and on the other side the heads of Philadelphus and
his second wife Arsinoë, with the word !)+7MS;, 'of the brothers.'
A third was struck by the king in honour of his
queen and sister. On the one side is the head of the queen, with the words !CG3;?/G M37!)+7M?K, 'of Arsinoë the brother-loving,' and on the other is the double
cornucopia.
[Pliny, lib. xxxvi. 14.] On the death of Arsinoë
he built a tomb for her in
ERGAMENES. 91
$$$ As a further honour to his sister,
Philadelphus is said to have [lib. xxxiv. 42.] listened to the whimsical proposal of
Dinochares the architect, to build a room of load-stone, in her tomb; so that
an iron statue of the queen should hang in the air between the floor and the
roof. But the death of the king and of the architect took place before this was
tried.
Philadelphus lived in peace with Ergamenes king
of Meroë, [Diod.
Sic. lib. iii. 6.]
who, while seeking for a knowledge of philosophy and the arts of life from his
Greek neighbours, seems also to have gained a love of despotism, and a dislike
of that control with which the priests of
The wars between Philadelphus and his great
neighbour Antiochus [Hieronymus,
in Dan. xi.]
Theos seem not to have been carried on very actively, though they did not
wholly cease, till Philadelphus offered as a bribe his daughter Berenice, with
a large sum of money under the name of a dower. Antiochus was already married
to Laodice, whom he loved dearly, and by whom he had two children, Seleucus and
Antiochus; but, notwithstanding this, he agreed to declare this first marriage
void, and his two sons illegitimate, and that his children, if any should be
born to him by Berenice, should inherit the throne of
92 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
$$$ [Libanius, Orat. xi.] The peace between the
two countries lasted as long as Philadelphus lived, and was strengthened by
kindnesses which each did to the other. Ptolemy, when in
[Pliny, lib. vii. 37.] Antiochus, when ill,
sent to
[lib. xxix. 2, 3.] Erasistratus of Cos also had the credit
of having once cured [Suidas.] Antiochus. He was the
grandson of Aristotle, and held high rank as a physician, and may even be called
the father of the science of anatomy: his writings are often quoted by
Dioscorides. Antiochus in his youth had fallen deeply in love with his young
stepmother, and was pining away in silence and despair. Erasistratus found out
the cause of his illness, which was straightway cured by Seleucus giving up his
wife to his own son. This act strongly points out the changed opinions of the
world in matters of right and wrong; for it was then thought the father's best
title to the name of Nicanor; he had before conquered his enemies, but he then
conquered himself.
Erasistratus was the first who thought that a
knowledge of anatomy should be made a part of the healing art. Before his time
surgery and medicine had been deemed one and the same; they had both been studied
by the slow and uncertain steps of expe-
ANATOMY. 93
rience unguided by theory. Every man who had
been ill, whether through disease or wound, and had regained his health,
thought it his duty to the god and his neighbours to write up in the temple of
Esculapius the nature of his ailings and the simples to which he fancied that
he owed his cure. By copying these loose but well-meant inscriptions of medical
cases, Hippocrates had, a century before, laid the foundations of the science;
but nothing further was added to it till Erasistratus, setting at nought the
prejudices of the Greeks, began dissecting the human body in the schools of
Alexandria.
Herophilus lived about the same time with
Erasistratus, and was [Celsus,
lib. i.] like
him famous for his knowledge of the anatomy of man. But so hateful was this
study in the eyes of the Greeks, that these anatomists were charged, by writers
who ought to have known better, with the cruelty of cutting men open when
alive.
They had few followers in the hated use of the
dissecting knife. It was from their writings that Galen borrowed the anatomical
parts of his work; and thus it was to the dissections of these two great men,
helped indeed by opening the bodies of animals, that the world owed almost the
whole of its knowledge of the anatomy of man, till the fifteenth century, when
surgeons were again bold enough to face the outcry of the mob, and to study the
human body with the knife.
Philadelphus, though a lover of learning beyond
other kings [Athenaeus,
lib. xiii. 5.]
of his time, also surpassed them in his unmeasured luxury and love of pleasure.
He had many mistresses, Egyptian as well as Greek, and the names of some of
them have been handed down to us. He often boasted that he had found out the
way to live for [lib.
xii. 9.] ever;
but, like other free-livers, he was sometimes, by the gout in his feet, made to
acknowledge that he was only a man, and indeed
94 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
to wish that he could change places with the
beggar whom he saw from his palace windows, eating the refuse on the banks of
the
[
These large forces were maintained by a yearly
income, equally large, of fourteen thousand eight hundred talents, or two
millions and a half pounds sterling, beside the tax on corn, which was taken in
kind, of a million and a half of artabas, or about five millions of [Appian. Praef. 10.] bushels. To this we
may add a mass of gold, silver, and other valuable stores in the treasury,
which were reckoned at the unheard-of sum of seven hundred and forty thousand
talents, or above one hundred million pounds sterling.
The trade down the
REMARKS. 95
the coasting trade on the Mediterranean was
wholly new; the people were rich and happy; justice was administered to the
Egyptians according to their own laws, and to the Greeks of Alexandria
according to the Macedonian laws; the navy commanded the whole of the eastern
half of the Mediterranean; the schools and library had risen to a great height
upon the wise plans of Ptolemy Soter; in every point of view Alexandria was the
chief city in the world. Philadelphus, by joining to the greatness and good
government of his father the costly splendour and pomp of an eastern monarch,
so drew the eyes of after ages upon his reign, that his name passed [Philo Judaeus, de Mose.] into a proverb: if any
work of art was remarkable for its good taste or costliness, it was called
Philadelphian; even history and chronology were set at nought, and we sometimes
find poets of a century later counted among the Pleiades of Alexandria in the
reign of Philadelphus.
It is true that many of these advantages were
forced in the hotbed of royal patronage; that the navy was built in the
harbours of Palestine; and that the men of letters who then drew upon
themselves the eyes of the world were only Greek settlers, whose writings could
have done little to raise the character of the native Copts. But the Ptolemies,
in raising this building of their own, were not at the same time crushing
another. Their splendid monarchy had not been built on the ruins of freedom;
and even if the Greek settlers in the Delta had formed themselves into a
96 PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS.
the Greeks, and its remaining under the
Ptolemies, as a blessing to the people of
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] Philadelphus died in
the thirty-eighth year of his reign, leaving the kingdom as powerful and more
wealthy than when it came to him from his father; and he had the happiness of
having a son who would carry on, even for the third generation, the wise and
good plans of the first Ptolemy.
97
PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
$$$ No sooner was Philadelphus dead, than
Antiochus, who had married [Justinus, lib. xxvii. I.] Berenice only because it was one of the
articles of the treaty [B.C.
246.] with
The cities of Asia Minor hastily sent help to
the queen and her son, while Ptolemy Euergetes, her brother, marched without
loss of time into
Many of the states of Asia Minor, moved by
hatred of their king's cruelty, opened their gates to the army of Euergetes;
and, had he not been recalled to
98 PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
$$$ [Callimachus, ap. Catullum.] It was while the king
was from home upon this Assyrian war, that his queen Berenice, sacrificing a
bull to the gods, vowed that, if they brought her husband safe home, she would
cut off her beautiful tresses, and hang them up in the temple in token of her
thankfulness. Euergetes soon afterwards returned a conqueror, and the queen's
locks were yielded up to the knife, while the whole court praised her heroism.
Conon the astronomer was then busy in noting the
places of the fixed stars, and immediately grouping together into a
constellation one of those many clusters which the earlier astronomers had left
unnamed, he marked it out on his globe and gave it to the world as the new
constellation of the Hair of Berenice. Callimachus took the hint from the
courtly astronomer, and, in a poem which we know only in the translation of
Catullus, makes the hair swear by the head from which it was cut off, that it
was against its will that it left the queen, and was raised to the skies; but
what could it do against the force of steel? The poet and the astronomer have
here been of use to one another; the constellation of Coma Berenices is known
to hundreds who have not read Callimachus or Catullus, but it is from the poet
that we learn why it was set among the stars.
[Justinus, lib. xxvii. 2.] No sooner had
Euergetes reached home than Seleucus, in his turn, marched upon
STATUES REGAINED. 99
Antiochus, after the rout of his army, fled to
The Romans, on hearing of the war, sent to
The king, in his attack upon Seleucus, carried
off a large booty [Hieronymus,
in Dan. xi.]
of forty thousand talents of silver,
and, what he seems to have valued even more than that treasure, two thousand
five hundred vases and statues of the gods; many of which either really were,
or were said to be, those carried away from Egypt by Cambyses nearly three
hundred years before. These were replaced in the temples of
In Alexander the Egyptians had seen a deliverer
from the Persian yoke, and a humane conqueror, who left them their customs and
their religion. In Ptolemy Soter they had a brave and just king who kept war at
a distance, and by his wise laws laid the foundation of the future greatness of
his family, of
100 PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
was a native Egyptian, and though perhaps the
least of these great kings, in the eyes of the priests he must have ranked at
their head. He seems to have thought more of conquering Ethiopia than Assyria;
he was the only one of the Ptolemies who is known to have honoured the once
great city of Thebes with a visit; he enriched the temples, and sacrificed to
the gods of the country, not [Rosetta Stone.] through policy but through choice; and when,
during the minority of his grandson, the priests and temples were again
flourishing, they showed their gratitude by saying that the young king had
acted in obedience to the will of the god Euergetes.
[Wilkinson's
He built a temple to Osiris at
CONQUERS
$$$ In the hieroglyphical inscriptions he is
usually called 'beloved by Pthah,' the god of
Hieroglyphics seem to have flourished in their
more ancient style and forms under the generous patronage of the Ptolemies. In
the time of the Egyptian kings of Lower Egypt, we find new grammatical endings
to the nouns, and more letters used to spell each word than under the kings of
Thebes; but on comparing the hieroglyphics of the Ptolemies with the others, we
find that in these and some other points they are more like the older writings,
under the kings of Thebes, than the newer, under the kings of Sais.
But while the Egyptians were flattered and no
doubt raised in moral worth by their monarch's taking up the religious feelings
of the country, and throwing aside some of the Greek habits of his father and
grandfather, Euergetes was sowing the seeds of a greater change than he could
have been himself aware of. It was by Greek arms and arts of war that
Euergetes, finding himself at peace with all his
neighbours on [Cosmas
Indicopleustes.]
the coasts of the
We ought not perhaps to feel sure that the
inscription on the base of this chair was written by the same king, because it
is dated in the twenty-seventh year of his reign, while Euergetes
102 PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
seems only to have reigned twenty-five years;
and because the first half of the inscription on the chair is in the third
person, while the second half, on the base, speaks in the first: but it adds,
that he stretched his march to the foot of the snowy mountains in which the
Nile rises, and conquered the frankincense country on the borders of the desert
plains of central Africa: that from these tribes he brought away a large booty
of slaves and treasure, but was more often content with their acknowledging his
sovereignty and promising a yearly tribute, which they may have promised the
more readily as he left no forces to collect it: that he then carried his foot
soldiers across the Red Sea, and conquered the Arabs and Sabaeans, and made
their kings promise, not only a yearly tribute, but what was even of more
value, a free passage by land and sea for the traders through their country.
For a copy of this curious inscription, usually
called the Monumentum Adulitanum, we
are indebted to Cosmas, a merchant of
[Josephus. Antiq. xii. 3.] In the latter end of this
reign Onias, the high-priest of
On this, Joseph the nephew of Onias set out for
CLEOMENES. 103
and turn away the king's anger, and he made
himself so agreeable that he was lodged in the palace at
Euergetes did not forget his allies in
But Cleomenes, while struggling to raise his
little kingdom to its former rank among the states
Cleomenes then sent to
104
PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
an army of twenty thousand men; but he was soon
afterwards beaten at Sellasia by Antigonus with thirty thousand, and the whole
of the Peloponnesus, weakened by the jealousy of its states, then fell under
the power of the Macedonians. Upon this, Cleomenes sailed for Alexandria, where
he was kindly received by Euergetes, who then saw how mistaken he had been in
distrusting this brave Spartan, and gave him twenty-four talents or four
thousand pounds a-year for his maintenance in Egypt, till he should be sent
back to Greece with a fleet and army to regain his throne.
[Suidas.] Among the men of letters who at this time
lived and taught in the schools of Alexandria, was Aristophanes the grammarian,
who gained the high office of head of the Museum in a very remarkable [Vitruvius, lib. vii.
praef.]
way. At one of the public sittings at which the king was to hear the poems and
other writings of the pupils read, and, by the help of seven men of letters who
sat with him as judges, was to give away honours and rewards to the best
authors, one of the chairs was empty - one of the judges happened not to be
there. The king asked who should be called up to fill his place; and, after
thinking over the matter, the six judges fixed upon Aristophanes, who had made
himself known to them by being seen daily reading in the public library. When
the reading was over, the king, the public, and the six other judges were agreed
upon which was the best piece of writing; but Aristophanes was bold enough to
think otherwise, and he was able by means of his great reading to find the very
book in the library from which the pupil had copied the greater part of his
work. The king was much struck with this proof of his learning, and soon
afterwards made him keeper of the library.
[Pliny, lib. vi. 34.] Eratosthenes, the
inventor of astronomical geography, was at this time at the head of the
mathematical school. He was the first who fixed the place of a city upon the
earth by the help of astro-
ERATOSTHENES. 105
nomy, or by means of its latitude, which he
learnt from the length of the sun's shadow at noon on the equinoctial days; and
he named this observation the Theory of Shadows. From this he found that [Strabo, lib. i.] the earth was a ball;
and, by measuring the distance between two places, he learnt the length of a
degree of latitude, which he found to be seven hundred stadia, and that three
hundred and sixty times that distance, or two hundred and fifty-two thousand
stadia, was the measure of the earth's circumference.
With this knowledge, he lessened the mistakes in
maps, which before his time had been drawn without any help from astronomy, and
in which the distances in miles had been mostly laid down by days' journeys, or
by measuring along the crooked roads. By these great strides of science, he
justly earned the name of Surveyor of the World.
By measuring the sun's shadow, at a place, on
the longest and on [Ptolemy,
lib. i.]
the shortest day in the year, he learned the obliquity of the ecliptic, which
he fixed at more than 23° 50', and less than 23° 52' 30". But in pure
mathematics he did not rank so high. Hipparchus said [Strabo, lib. i.] that he wrote
mathematically about geography, and geographically about mathematics: indeed
Hipparchus, in his Commentaries on the Geography of Eratosthenes, in many
places defended the old maps against his too bold changes.
He was a man of such unbounded knowledge, and so
nearly at the head of every branch of science, that, as in philosophy he was
called a second Plato, and was spoken
of in the same way in many other sciences, he was jokingly called Beta, or
Number Two.
His longest work now remaining is a description
of the constellations. He also wrote a history of
106 PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
numents from which they were each taken, we can
well understand how the boldness of Eratosthenes sometimes called down the
blame of Hipparchus, 'the lover of truth.' But nevertheless his history is of great
use to us; for, while Manetho's lists only give us the separate dynasties of
the several cities, without saying which king reigned over all Egypt, and which
was under the sceptre of another, Eratosthenes has given us a straightforward
list of the kings of Thebes, without separating them into dynasties.
But what most strikes us with wonder and regret
is, that these two writers, - Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek;
Eratosthenes, a Greek who understood Egyptian, - neither of them took the
trouble to lay open to their readers the peculiarities of the hieroglyphics.
Through all these reigns, the titles and praises of the Ptolemies were carved
upon the temples in the sacred characters. These two histories were translated
from the same inscriptions. We even now read the names of the kings which they
mention carved on the granite temples and statues; and yet the language of the
hieroglyphics still remained unknown beyond the class of priests; such was the
want of curiosity on the part of the Greek grammarians of
[Diog. Laert.] Lycon of Troas succeeded Strato, whom we have
before spoken of, at the head of one of the schools in the Museum. He was very
successful in bringing up the young men, who needed, he used to say, modesty
and the love of praise, as a horse needs bridle and spur. His eloquence was so
pleasing that he was wittily called Glycon, or the sweet.
[Suidas.] Apollonius, who was born at
APOLLONIUS RHODIUS. 107
voyage of Jason to
His master Callimachus showed his dislike of his
young rival by [Suidas.
Callimachus.]
hurling against him a reproachful poem, in which he speaks of him under the
name of an Ibis. This is now lost, but it was copied by Ovid in his poem of the
same name; and from the Roman we can gather something of the dark and learned
style in which Callimachus threw out his biting reproaches. We do not know from
what this quarrel arose, but it seems to have been the cause of Apollonius
leaving
Many of the old philosophers were fond of
clothing wisdom in [
Lycophron, the tragic writer, lived about this
time at
108 PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
or Cassandra, of which the lines most striking
to the historian are those in which the prophetess foretells the coming
greatness of [Line
1227.]
[Old Testam. Apocrypha.] In this list of
Alexandrian authors, we must not forget to mention Jesus the son of Sirach, who
came into
Apollonius of Perga came to
But while we are dazzled by the brilliancy of the
clusters of men of letters and science who graced the court of Alexandria, we
must not shut our eyes to those faults which must always be found in
REMARKS. 109
works called forth rather by the fostering
warmth of royal pensions than by a love of knowledge in the people. The
well-fed and well-paid philosophers of the Museum were not likely to overtake
the mighty men of Athens, who had studied and taught without any pension from
the government, without taking any fee from their pupils; who were urged
forward only by the love of knowledge and of honour; who had no other aim than
that of being useful to their hearers, and looked for no reward beyond their
love and esteem.
Books may, if we please, be divided into works
of industry and works of taste. Among the first we may place mathematics,
criticism, and compilations; among the second we ought to find poetry and
oratory. Works of industry and care may be found in many ages and in many
countries, but those which have gained the praises of all mankind, for their
pure taste and fire of genius, seem to have ripened only on those spots and in
those times at which the mind of man, from causes perhaps too deep for our
search, has been able to burst forth with more than usual strength.
When we review the writings of the authors of
The coins of Euergetes bear the words AI?7+9!3?K #!G37+SG, [Visconti, Icon. Grec.] 'of Ptolemy the king,' round the head on the one side, with no title
by which they can be known from the other kings of the same name. But his
portrait is known from his Phenician coins, as none but the first five
Ptolemies could have coined in Phenicia, and the likenesses of the other four
of them are well known.
110 PTOLEMY EUERGETES.
$$$ In the same way the coins of his queen
Berenice have only the words #+C+;35/E #!E373EE/G; 'of Berenice the queen,' but they are known from those of the later
queens by the beauty of their workmanship, which soon fell far below that of
the first Ptolemies.
Euergetes had married his cousin Berenice, who
like the other queens of
We may be sure that in these prosperous reigns
life and property were safe, and justice was administered fairly by judges who
were [Plutarch.
Apophthegm.]
independent of the crown; as even centuries afterwards we find that it was part
of a judge's oath on taking office, that if he were ordered by the king to do
what was wrong, he would not obey him.
But here the bright pages of Egyptian history
end. Though trade and agriculture still enriched the country, though arts and
letters did not quit Alexandria in an instant, we have from this time forward
to mark the growth of only vice and luxury, and to measure the wisdom of
Ptolemy Soter by the length of time that his laws and institutions were able to
bear up against misrule and folly.
111
PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
THE first act of the new king was to call
together his council, [Plutarch.
Cleomenes.]
and to ask their advice about putting to death his mother Berenice [Polybius, lib. v.] and his brother Magas.
Their crime was being too much liked by [B.C. 221.] the army, and the council was called upon to
say whether it would be safe to have them killed. Cleomenes, the banished king
of
Berenice and Magas were however put to death,
but the speech of Cleomenes was not forgotten. If his popularity with the
mercenaries could secure their allegiance, he could, when he chose, make them
rebel: and from that time he was treated rather as a prisoner than as a friend,
and he lost all chance of being helped to regain his kingdom.
Nothing is known of the death of Euergetes, the
late king, and there is no proof that it was by unfair means. But when his son
began a cruel and wicked reign by putting to death his mother and brother, and
by taking the name of Philopator, or father-loving,
the world seems to have thought that he was the murderer of his father, and had
taken this name to throw a cloak over the deed.
112 PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
$$$ [Polybius, lib. v.] The task of the historian would be more
agreeable if he always had to point out how crime and goodness were followed by
their just rewards; but unfortunately history is not free from acts of
successful wickedness. By the murder of his brother, and by the minority both
of Antiochus king of
But on the death of Euergetes the happiness of
the people came to an end. In a despotic monarchy, where so much rests upon the
good qualities of the king, we can hardly hope to find a longer course of good
government than we have seen at
The first trouble which arose from his loose and
vicious habits
was an attempt made upon his life by Cleomenes,
who found his palace in
Soon after this, Seleucia, the capital of Syria,
which had been taken by Euergetes, was retaken by the young Antiochus,
afterwards called the Great, or rather given up to him by the treachery of the
garrison. Theodotus also, the Egyptian governor of Coelo-Syria, offered to
deliver up to him that province, and Antiochus marched southward, and had taken
Tyre and Ptolemais before the Egyptian army could be brought into the field.
On this, Philopator for once roused himself from
his idleness, and led the whole of his forces in person against the coming
danger. He was followed by the royal guard of three thousand men under
Eurylochus of Magnesia; two thousand peltastae under Socrates of Boeotia; the
phalanx of twenty-five thousand men under Andromachus and Ptolemy the son of
Thaseas; eight thousand mercenaries under Phoxidas; the horse of the royal
guard, the African horse, and the Egyptian horse, in all three thousand men,
under Polycrates; the Greek and foreign horse, who were two thousand highly
disciplined men, under Echecrates of Thessaly; three thousand Cretans under
Cnopias of Alorus; three thousand Africans, armed like Macedonians, under
Ammonius of Barce; the Egyptian phalanx of twenty thousand men under Sosibius,
the king's chief adviser; and lastly, four thousand Gauls and Thracians under
Dionysus of Thrace. There were in all seventy-three thousand men, and
seventy-three elephants, or one
114 PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
elephant to every thousand men, which was the
number usually allowed to the armies about this time.
With this army, followed by a tleet of
transports, Philopator met Antiochus at Raphia, the border town between
By this victory Philopator regained Coelo-Syria,
and he then made a hasty and disgraceful treaty with the enemy, that he might
the sooner get back to his life of ease.
Before going home he passed through
The city was thrown into alarm by this
unheard-of wickedness; the streets were filled with men and women in despair;
the air was rent with shrieks and cries, and the priests prayed to Jehovah to
guard his own temple from the stain. The king's mind, however, was not to be
changed, the refusal of the priests only strengthened his wish, and all
struggle was useless while the court of the
THE JEWS. 115
rian, fell to the ground in a fit, like a reed
broken by the wind, and was carried out speechless by his friends and generals.
On his return to
The Egyptians, who, when the Persians were
conquered by Alexander, could neither help nor hinder the Greek army, and who,
when they formed part of the troops under the first Ptolemy, were uncounted and
unvalued, had by this time been armed and disciplined like Greeks; and in the
battle of Raphia the Egyptian [Polybius, lib. v.] phalanx had shown itself not an unworthy rival
of the Macedonians. By this success in war, and by their hatred of their
vicious and cruel king, the Egyptians were now for the first time encouraged to
take arms against the Greek government. But history has told us nothing more of
the rebellion, than that it was successfully put down; for, much as the Greeks
were lowered in warlike courage by the wealth and luxury of
The ships built by Philopator do not raise his
navy in our opinion, for they were more remarkable for their huge unwieldy
size,
116 PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
their luxurious and costly furniture, than for
their fitness for war. [Athenaeus,
lib. v. 8.]
One was four hundred and twenty feet long, and fifty-seven feet wide, with
forty banks of oars. The longest oars were fifty-seven feet long, and weighted
with lead at the handles, that they might be the more easily moved. This huge
ship was to be rowed by four thousand rowers, its sails were to be shifted by
four hundred sailors, and three thousand soldiers were to stand in ranks upon
the deck. There were seven beaks in front, by which it was to strike and sink
the ships of the enemy.
The royal barge, in which the king and court
moved on the quiet waters of the
[lib. v. 10.] A third ship, which even surpassed these in
its fittings and ornaments, was given to Philopator by Hiero king of
[Livy, lib. xxvii. 4.] During this reign the
Romans were wholly taken up with their long and still doubtful war with
AGATHOCLES. 117
gifts robes of purple for Philopator and Arsinoë,
and for Philopator a chair of ivory and gold, which was the usual gift of the
republic to friendly kings. The Egyptians kept upon terms offriendship both
with the Romans and the Carthaginians during the whole of the Punic wars.
When the city of
On the birth of his son and heir ambassadors crowded
to
Philopator, soon after the birth of this his
only child, employed [Justinus,
lib. xxx. 1.]
Philammon, at the bidding of his mistress, to put to death his queen and sister
Arsinoë, or Eurydice, as she is sometimes called. He had already forgot his
rank, and his name ennobled by the virtues of three generations, and had given
up his days and nights to vice and riot. He kept in his pay several fools, or
laughing-stocks as [Athenaeus,
lib. vi. 12.]
they were then called, who were the chosen companions of his meals; and was the
first who brought eunuchs into the court of Alexandria.
His mistress Agathoclea, her brother Agathocles,
and their [Justinus,
lib. xxx. 1.]
mother OEnanthe, held the king bound by all those chains which clever,
worthless, and selfish favourites throw around the mind of a weak and debauched
king. Agathocles, who never left his side,
118 PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR.
was his adviser in all matters of business or
pleasure, and governed alike the army, the courts of justice, and the women.
Thus was spent a reign of seventeen years, during which the king had never but
once, when he met Antiochus in battle, roused himself from his life of sloth.
[Polybius, Excerpt. xv.] The misconduct and
vices of Agathocles raised such an outcry against him, that Philopator, without
giving up the pleasure of his favourite's company, was forced to take away from
him the charge of receiving the taxes. That high post was then given to
Tlepolemus, a young man, whose strength of body and warlike courage [Excerpt. xvi.] had made him the
darling of the soldiers. Sosibius, also, was forced to give up to Tlepolemus
the king's ring, or what in modern language would be called the great seal of
the kingdom, the badge of office by which Egypt was governed; and the world
soon saw that a body of luxurious mercenaries were as little able to choose a
wise statesman as the king had been.
[Excerpt. xv.] Sosibius had, indeed, made himself more hated
than Agathocles; he had been the king's ready tool in all his murders. He had
been stained, or at least reproached, with the murder of Arsinoë the daughter
of Lysimachus, and Lysimachus the son of Philadelphus; then of Magas the son of
Euergetes, and Berenice the widow of Euergetes; of Cleomenes the Spartan; and
lastly, of Arsinoë the wife of Philopator.
But, with all his vices, Philopator had yet
inherited the love of letters which has thrown so bright a light around the
whole of the family; and to his other luxuries he sometimes added that of the
society of the learned men of the Museum.
[Diog. Laert.] When one of the professorships was empty, he
wrote to Cleanthes, to ask him either to come to Alexandria himself, or to send
him a philosopher whom he could recommend, and he sent Sphaerus the
TIMAEUS. 119
stoic, the pupil of Zeno. One day, when Sphaerus
was dining with the king, he said that a wise man should never guess, but only
say what he knows. Philopator, wishing to tease him, ordered some waxen
pomegranates to be handed to him, and, when Sphrerus bit one of them, he
laughed at him for guessing that it was a real fruit. But the stoic answered
that there are many cases in which we must be guided by what seems probable.
None of the works of Sphaerus have come down to us.
Eratosthenes, of whom we have before spoken, was
librarian of [Suidas.] the Museum during this
reign; and Ptolemy, the son of Agesarchus, [Athenaeus, lib. x. 7.] then wrote his history
of
Timaeus, it seems, wrote his history in his own
study, a thing [Polybius,
lib. xii.]
which no modern historian would be afraid of being blamed for; but, when
writing was little used, when letters between friends and public records were
few, when there were no newspapers nor other helps to the historian, if he
wished to get at the truth, he was forced to travel from place to place, to
seek it upon the spot, or he would be often nllsled by hearsay. The division of
labour was so little known in literature, that the historian ought to have been
himself a traveller.
Philopator built a temple to Homer, in the middle
of which he [AElianus,
V. H. xiii. 22.]
placed a sitting figure of the poet, and round it seven statues, meant for the
seven cities which claimed the honour of giving him birth. He also built a
small temple near Medinet Abu; his name is seen upon the
Some of his coins bear the words AI?7+9!3?K M37?A!I?C?E, [Visconti, Icon. Grec.] 'of Ptolemy
Philopator,' while those of the queen have !CG3;?/G
120 PTOLEHY PHILOPATOR.
M37?A!I?C?E, 'of Arsinoë
Philopator,' around the head. They are of a good style of art.
[Josephus Antiq. xiii. 3.] The king was also
sometimes named Eupator, and it was under that name that the people of Paphus
set up a monument to him [Letronne, Recherches.] in the
The first three Ptolemies had been loved by
their subjects and feared by their enemies; but Philopator, though his power
was still acknowledged abroad, had by his vices and cruelty made himself hated
at home, and had undermined the foundations of the government. He began his reign
like an eastern despot; instead of looking to his brother as a friend for help
and strength, he distrusted him as a rival, and had him put to death. He
employed the ministers of his vicious pleasures in the high offices of
government; and, instead of philosophers and men of learning, he brought [Porphyrius, ap. Scal.] eunuchs into the
palace as the companions of his son. He died, worn out with disease, in the
seventeenth year of his reign, and about the forty-first of his age.
121
PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
$$$ ON the death of Philopator his son was only
five years old. [Justinus,
lib. xxx. 2.]
Agathocles, who had ruled over the country with unbounded [B.C. 204.] power, endeavoured, by
the help of Agathoclea and the other mistresses of the late king, to keep his
death secret; so that, while the women seized the money and jewels of the
palace, he might have time to take such steps as would secure his own power
over the kingdom. But the secret could not be long kept, and Agathocles called
together the citizens of
He went to the meeting, followed by his sister
Agathoclea and [Polybius,
lib. xv.]
the young Ptolemy, afterwards called Epiphanes. He began his speech, 'Ye men of
122 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
[Polybius, lib. xv.] saw that his life was in danger, and he
left the meeting in doubt whether he should seek for safety in flight, or
boldly seize the power which he was craftily aiming at, and rid himself of his
enemies by their murder.
While he was wasting these precious minutes in
doubt, the streets were filled with groups of men, and of boys, who always
formed a part of the mobs of
Agathocles, in his doubt, did nothing; he sat
down to supper with his friends, perhaps hoping that the storm might blow over
of itself, perhaps trusting to chance and to the strong walls of the palace.
His mother OEnanthe ran to the
RIOTS. 123
$$$ The riot did not lessen at sunset. Men,
women, and boys were moving through the streets all night with torches. The
crowds were greatest in the stadium and in the theatre of Bacchus, but most
noisy in front of the palace. Agathocles was awakened by the noise, and in his
fright ran to the bed-room of the young Ptolemy; and, distrusting the palace
walls, hid himself, with his own family, the king, and two or three guards, in
the underground passage which led from the palace to the theatre.
The night, however, passed off without any
violence; but at day-break the murmurs became louder, and the thousands in the
palace-yard called for the young king. By that time the Greek soldiers joined
the mob, and then the guards within the gates were no longer to be feared. The
gates were soon burst open, and the palace searched.
The mob rushed through the halls and lobbies,
and learning where the king had tied, hastened to the underground passage. It
was guarded by three doors of iron grating; but when the first was beaten in,
Aristomenes was sent out to offer terms of surrender. Agathocles was willing to
give up the young king, his misused power, his ill-gotten wealth and estates;
he asked only for his life. But this was sternly refused, and a shout was
raised to kill the messenger; and Aristomenes, the best of the ministers, whose
only fault was the being a friend of Agathocles, and the having named his
little daughter Agathoclea, would certainly have been killed upon the spot, if
somebody had not reminded them that they wanted to send back an answer.
Agathocles, seeing that he could hold out no
longer, then gave up the little king, who was set upon a horse, and led away to
the stadium, amid the shouts of the crowd. There they seated him on the throne,
and while he was crying at being surrounded by
124 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
[Polybius, lib. xv.] strange faces, the mob loudly called
for revenge on the guilty ministers. Sosibius the somatophylax, the son of the
former general of that name, seeing no other way of stopping the fury of the
mob and the child's sobs, asked him if the enemies of his mother and of his
throne should be given up to the people. The child of course answered 'yes,'
without understanding what was meant, and on that they let Sosibius take him to
his own house to be out of the uproar.
Agathocles was soon led out bound, and was
stabbed by those who two days before would have felt honoured by a look from
him. Agathoclea and her sister were then brought out, and lastly OEnanthe their
mother was dragged away from the altar of Ceres and Proserpine. Some bit them,
some struck them with sticks, some tore their eyes out; as each fell down her
body was tom to pieces, and her limbs scattered among the crowd - to such
lengths of madness and angry cruelty was the Egyptian mob sometimes driven.
In the mean while some of the women called to
mind that Philammon, who had been employed in the murder of Arsinoë, had within
those three days come to
[Justinus, lib. xxxi. 1.] While
THE ROMANS. 125
vinces between them. Antiochus marched against Coelo-Syria
and Phenicia, and the guardians of the young Ptolemy sent against him an army
under Scopas the AEtolian, who was at first successful, but was soon beaten by
Antiochus, and driven back into Egypt. In [Josephus, Antiq. xii. 3.] these battles the
Jews, who had not forgotten the ill-treatment that they had received from
Philopator, joined Antiochus; and in return he released Jerusalem from all
taxes for three years, and sent a large sum of money for the service of the
Temple.
Scopas, on his return to
About this time the Romans sent ambassadors to
This was almost the last time that the Greek
126
PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
ness to the government when the character of the
sovereign failed. Nor was there in the place of it a body of men, who, having
through their wealth and birth a stake in the country worth guarding, and a
hold on the minds of their countrymen, take care, for their own sakes, both to
uphold the throne and to check its too great power.
Perhaps there was not much virtue among the
philosophers and men of letters, who were the chief men of
[Justinus, lib. xxx. 2.] In answer to this
embassy, the Alexandrians sent to
The Romans, in return, gave the wished-for
answer; they sent ambassadors to Antiochus and Philip, to order them to make no
attack upon
[Goltzius, de re Numm.] This high honour was
afterwards mentioned by Lepidus, with pride, upon the coins struck when he was
consul, in the eighteenth year of this reign. They have the city of
ANTIOCHUS AND PHILIP. 127
side, and on the other the words TUTOR REGIS,
among other titles, with the figure of the Roman in his toga, putting the
diadem on the head of the young Ptolemy. But the coins struck by [Livy. lib. xxxi. 50.] Sextus AElius Catus,
when he was aedile in the eighth year of this reign, and was employed to bring
com from Africa for the use of Rome, seem to claim for the Roman people
sovereign power over Egypt, as on one side of them is the very eagle and
thunderbolt which we see on almost all the coins of the Ptolemies.
The haughty orders of the senate at first had
very little weight with the two kings. Antiochus conquered. Phenicia and
Philip marched against
128 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
$$$ If we now look back for two centuries, to
the time when Egypt fought its battles and guarded its coasts by the help of
Greek arms, and remark that from that time it sunk till it became a province of
Macedonia, we cannot fail to see that the Greek kingdom of Egypt was in its
turn at this time falling by the same steps by which it had then risen, and
that it was already, though not in name yet in reality, a Roman province. But
while, during this second fall, the Egyptians looked upon the proud but
unlettered Romans only as friends, as allies, who asked no tribute, who took no
pay, who fought only for ambition and for the glory of their own country, we
cannot but remark, and with sorrow for the cause of arts and letters, that in
their former fall the Egyptians had only seen the elegant and learned Greeks in
the light of mean hirelings, of mercenaries who fought with equal pleasure on
either side, and who looked only for their pay, with very little thought about
the justice of the cause, or their country's greatness. While we thus look at
the two nations, we are strongly reminded of the virtues which the Romans
gained with their strict feelings of clanship or pride of country, and which
the Greeks, after the time of Alexander, lost by becoming philosophic citizens
of the world.
[Polybius. lib. xvii.] Soon after this, the
battle of Cynocephalae in
The phalanx was a body of spearsmen, in such
close array that
each man filled a space of only one square yard.
The spear was seven yards long, and, when held in both hands, its point was
five yards in front of the soldier's breast. There were sixteen ranks of these
men, and when the first five ranks lowered their spears the point of the fifth
spear was one yard in front of the foremost rank. The Romans, on the other
hand, fought in open ranks, with one yard between each, or each man filled a
space of four square yards, and in a charge would have to meet ten Macedonian
spears.
But then the Roman soldiers went into battle
with very different feelings from the Greeks. In
Moreover, the warlike skill of the Romans was
far greater than any that had yet been brought against the Greeks. They saw
that the phalanx could use its whole strength only on a plain; that a wood, a
bog, a hill, or a river were difficulties which this close body of men could not
always overcome. A charge or a retreat equally lessened its force; the phalanx
was meant to stand the charge of others. The Romans, therefore, chose their own
time and their own ground, they loosened their ranks and widened their front,
avoided the charge, and attacked· the Greeks at the side and in the rear; and
the fatal discovery was at last made, that the Macedonian phalanx was not
unconquerable. This news must have been heard by every statesman of
130 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
[Polybius, lib. xvii.] alarm; the Romans were
now their equals, or even their masters, and we can hardly believe that the
prophecy of Lycophron, that 'the children of AEneas would hold the sceptre of
the sea and land,' could have been written before this battle was fought.
But to return to Egypt; Polycrates, beside
having been of use in crushing the rebellion of Scopas, and in holding the
island of Cyprus faithfully for the king during these times of trouble, had
likewise made himself of weight, by bringing over with him from Cyprus the
taxes of that island, which were much wanted in the empty treasury. He now
advised that they should declare the minority at an end, and that the king was
of age: for though Ptolemy was only fifteen years old, and had not reached the
age which the law had fixed, yet Polycrates thought that it might add some
strength to his weak government, or at least get rid of [B.C. 196.] the Roman
guardianship; and accordingly, in the ninth year of his reign, the young king
was crowned with great pomp at Memphis, the ancient capital of the kingdom.
[Rosetta Stone.] On this occasion he came to
Ptolemy is there styled 'King of Upper and Lower
Egypt, son of the gods Philopatores, approved by Pthah, to whom Ra has given
victory, a living image of Amun, son of Ra, Ptolemy immortal, beloved by Pthah,
god Epiphanes most gracious.' In the date of the decree we are told the names
of the priests of Alexander, of the gods Soteres, of the gods Adelphi, of the
gods Euer-
ROSETTA STONE. 131
getae, of the gods Philopatores, of the god
Epiphanes himself, of Berenice Euergetis, of Arsinoë Philadelphus, and of
Arsinoë Philopator. The preamble mentions with gratitude the services of the
king, or rather of his wise minister Aristomenes; and the enactment orders that
the statue of the king shall be worshipped in every temple of Egypt, and be
carried out in the processions with those of the gods of the country; and
lastly, that the decree is to be carved at the foot of every statue of the
king, in sacred, in common, and in Greek writing.
It is to this stone, with its three kinds of
writing, and to the [Young's
Hierog. Disc.]
skill and industry of Dr. Young, that we now owe our knowledge of
hieroglyphics. The Greeks of Alexandria, and after them the Romans, who might
have learned how to read this kind of writing if they had wished, seem never to
have taken the trouble; it fell into disuse on the rise of Christianity in
Egypt; and it was left for an Englishman to unravel the hidden meaning after it
had been forgotten for nearly fifteen centuries.
During the minority of the king the taxes were
lessened; the [Rosetta
Stone.]
crown debtors were forgiven; those who were found in prison charged with crimes
against the state were released; the allowance from government for upholding
the splendour of the temples was continued, as was the rent from the glebe or
land belonging to the priests; the first fruits, or rather the taxes paid by
the priests to the king on the year of his coming to the throne, which we may
suppose were by custom allowed to be less than what the law ordered, were not
increased; the priests were relieved from the heavy burthen of making a yearly
voyage to do homage at Alexandria; there was a stop put to the pressing of men
for the navy, which had been felt as a great cruelty by an inland people whose
habits and religion alike made them hate the sea, and this
132 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
was a boon which was the more easily granted, as
the navy of
From this decree we gain some little insight
into the means by which the Ptolemies raised their taxes, and we also learn
that they were so new and foreign from the habits of the people that they had no
Egyptian word by which they could speak of them; and [Early Hist. plate 6.] therefore borrowed the
Greek word Syn-taxes, as we have
since done.
History gives us many examples of kings who like
Epiphanes gained great praise for the weakness and mildness of the government, [Diod. Sic. Euerpt. 294.] during their minorities.
Aristomenes the minister, who had governed
CLEOPATRA. 133
over his mind which Aristomenes lost, and it was
not long before [Excerpt.
297.] this
wise tutor and counsellor was put to death by being ordered to drink poison.
Epiphanes then lost that love of his people which the wisdom of the minister
had gained for him; and he governed the kingdom with the cruelty of a tyrant,
rather than with the legal power of a king. Even Aristonicus his favourite
eunuch, who [Polybius,
Excerpt. xxi.]
was of the same age as himself, and had been brought up as his play-fellow,
passed him in the manly virtues of his age, and earned the praise of the
country for setting him a good example, and checking him in his career of vice.
In the thirteenth year of his reign, when he
reached the age of [Hieronymus,
in Dan. xi.]
eighteen, Antiochus the Great sent his daughter Cleopatra into [B.C. 192.]
Cleopatra was a woman of strong mind and
enlarged understanding; and Antiochus hoped, that, by means of the power which
she would have over the weak mind of Epiphanes, he should gain more than he
lost by giving up Coelo-Syria and Phenicia. But she acted the part of a wife
and a queen, and instead of betraying her husband into the hands of her father,
she was throughout the reign his wisest and best counsellor.
The war was still going on between Antiochus and
the Romans, [Livy,
lib. xxxvi. 4.]
and Epiphanes soon sent to
134 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
$$$ [Rosetta Stone.] At the beginning of this reign a
rebellion had broken out at Lycopolis, in the Delta, which ended by that city
being besieged and taken by the king's troops; and in the latter years of the
reign, [Polybius,
Excerpt. xx.]
unless the historian has fallen into a mistake in the name of the city,
Lycopolis was again the seat of civil war. At the head of the rebellion were
Athinis, Posiris, Chesuphis, and Irobashtus, whose Coptic names clearly prove
that it was a struggle on the part of the Egyptians to throw off the Greek
yoke. But they could not long hold out against Polycrates at the head of the
Greek mercenaries, and, yielding to the greater force of the besiegers, and to
the king's promises of pardon, they came out of their stronghold, and were
brought to the king at Sais.
Epiphanes, in whose heart were joined the
cruelty and the cowardice of a tyrant, who had not even shown himself to the
army during the siege, was now eager to act the conqueror; and in spite of the
promises of safety on which these brave Copts had laid down their arms, he had
them tied to his chariot wheels, and, copying the vices of men whose virtues he
could not even understand, like Achilles and Alexander, he dragged them living
round the city walls, and then ordered them to be put to death.
[Suidas.] Apollonius, whom we have spoken of in the
reign of Euergetes, and who had been teaching at Rhodes during the reign of
Philopator, was recalled to
[Visconti, Icon. Grec.] The coins of this king
are known by the glory or rays of sun which surround his head, and which agrees
with his name Epiphanes, 'illustrious,'
or as it is written in the hieroglyphics 'light-bearing.' On the other side is
the cornucopia between two stars, with the words #!E37+SG AI?7+9!3?K, 'of King Ptolemy.'
No temples, and few additions to temples, seem
to have been
HIS DEATH. 135
built in
But Epiphanes planned an attack upon Coelo-Syria,
against the [Hieronymus,
in Dan. xi.]
advice of his generals. He is said to have been asked by one of them, how he
should be able to pay for the large forces which he was getting together for
that purpose; and he playfully answered, that his treasure was in the number of
his friends. But his joke was taken in earnest; they were afraid of new taxes
and fresh levies on their estates, and means were easily taken to poison him.
He [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
died in the twenty-ninth year of his age, after a reign of twenty-
136 PTOLEMY EPIPHANES.
four years; leaving the navy unmanned, the army
in disobedience, the treasury empty, and the whole frame-work of government out
of order.
[Polybius, Legat. lvii.] Just before his death
he had sent to the Achaians to offer to send ten gallies to join their fleet;
and Polybius the historian, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of these
reigns, although he had not yet reached the age called for by the Greek law,
was sent by the Achaians as one of the ambassadors, with his father, to return
thanks; but before they had quitted their own country they were stopt by the
news of the death of Epiphanes.
Those who took away the life of the king seem to
have had no thoughts of mending the form of government, nor any plan by which
they might lessen the power of his successor. It was only one of those
outbreaks of private vengeance which have often happened in unmixed monarchies,
where men are taught that the only way to check the king's tyranny is by his
murder; and the little notice that was taken of it by the people proves their
want of public virtue as well as of political wisdom.
137
PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
EPIPHANES left behind him two sons, each named
Ptolemy, and [Porphyrius.
ap. Scalig.]
a daughter named Cleopatra; the elder son, though still a child, [B.C. 180.] mounted the throne
under the able guardianship of his mother Cleopatra, and took the very suitable
name of Philometor, or mother-loving.
When Philometor· reached his fourteenth year,
the age at which [Polybius,
Legat. 78.]
his minority ceased, the Anacleteria, or ceremony of his coronation, [B.C. 173.] was celebrated with
great pomp. Ambassadors from several foreign states were sent to
While Cleopatra lived, she had been able to keep
her son at peace [Hieronymus,
in Dan. xi.]
with her brother Antiochus Epiphanes, and to guide the vessel of the state with
a steady hand. But upon her death Leneus and the eunuch Eulaius, who then had
the care of the young king, sought to reconquer Coelo-Syria; and they embroiled
the country in a war at a time when weakness and decay might have been seen in
every part of the army and navy, and when there was the greatest need of peace.
Coelo-Syria and Phenicia had been given to Ptolemy Epiphanes as his wife's dower;
but, when Philometor seemed too
138 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
[Polybius, Legat. 82.] weak to grasp them,
Antiochus denied that there had ever been such a treaty, and got ready to march
against
[Hieronymus, in Dan. xi.] When Antiochus entered
[Porphyrius. ap. Scalig.] On this, the younger
Ptolemy, the brother of Philometor, who [B.C. 170.] was with his sister Cleopatra in
Antiochus threw a bridge across the Nile and sat
down before
ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES. 139
$$$ Ptolemy Macron, the Egyptian governor of
Antiochus, like most invaders, carried off
whatever treasure fell [Athenaeus,
lib. v. 5.]
into his hands.
By these acts, and by the garrison left in
Pelusium, the eyes of [Livy,
lib. xiv. 11]
Philometor were opened, and he saw that his uncle had not entered Egypt for his
sake, but to make it a province of Syria, after it had been weakened by civil
war. He therefore wisely forgave his rebellious brother and sister in
On this treaty between the brothers the year was
called the [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
twelfth of Ptolemy Philometor and the first of Ptolemy Euergetes, [B.C. 170.] and the public deeds
of the kingdom were so dated.
The next year Antiochus Epiphanes again entered
140 PHILOMETOR AND EUERGETES II.
ambassadors, who ordered him to quit the
country. On his hesitating, Popilius, who was one of them, drew a circle round
him on the sand with his stick, and told him that, if he crossed that line
without promising to leave Egypt at once, it should be taken as a [Livy, lib. xlv. 13.] declaration of war
against
[lib. xlvi. 21.] The unhappy quarrels between the
brothers, however, soon broke out again, and, as the party of Euergetes was the
stronger, Philometor was driven from his kingdom, and he fled to
As soon as the senate heard that Philometor was
in
Cassius Longinus, who was next year consul at
ventius Thalna, who was consul the year after,
were, most likely, [Goltzius,
de re Numm.]
among the ambassadors who replaced Philometor on the throne; for they both of
them put the Ptolemaic eagle and thunderbolt on their coins, as though to claim
the sovereignty of Egypt for the senate.
To these orders Euergetes was forced to yield;
but the next [Livy,
lib. xlvi. 32.]
year he went himself to
During his stay in
He left
Philometor received the Roman ambassadors with all
due honours; he sometimes gave them fair promises, and sometimes put them off
till another day; and tried to spin out the time without saying either yes or
no to the message of the senate. Euergetes
142 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
sent to
[Polybius, Legat. 116.] At last the Roman
ambassadors left
[Legat. 115.] But, while this was going on, the state of
Cyrene had risen in arms against Euergetes; his vices and cruelty had made him
hated, they had gained for him the nicknames of Kakergetes, or mischief-maker, and Physcon, or bloated; and while wishing to gain
Cyprus [Legat.
132.] he
was in danger of losing his own kingdom. When he marched against the rebels he
was beaten and wounded, either in the battle, or by an attack upon his life
afterwards.
When he had at last put down this rising he
sailed for Rome to urge his complaints against Philometor, upon whom he laid
the blame of the late rebellion; and the senate, after hearing both sides, sent
a small fleet with Euergetes, not large enough to put him on the throne of
Cyprus, but gave their allies in Greece and Asia leave to enlist as mercenaries
under his standard.
[Excerpt. 31.] The Roman troops seem not to have helped
Euergetes, but he landed in Cyprus with his own mercenaries, and was there met
by Philometor who had brought over the Egyptian army in person; Euergetes was soon
forced to shut himself up in the city of Lapitho, and at last to lay down his
arms before his elder brother.
FALL OF
$$$ If Philometor had upon this put his brother
to death, the deed would have seemed almost blameless after the family murders
at which we have already shuddered in this history. But, with a goodness of
heart which is rarely met with in the history of kings, and which, if we looked
up to merit as much as we do to success, would throw the warlike virtues of his
forefathers into the shade, he a second time forgave his brother all that had
passed, he replaced him on the throne of Cyrene, and promised to give him his
daughter in marriage.
We are not told whether the success in arms and
forgiving mildness of Philometor had turned the Roman senate in his favour, or
whether their troops were wanted in other quarters; but at any [Diodorus Sic. Excerpt.
334.] rate
they left off trying to enforce their decree; Philometor kept
At a time when so few great events cross the
stage we must not let the fall of
During the wars in
144 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
[Josephus,
Onias built his temple at Leontopolis near
Bubastus, on the site of an old Egyptian temple, which had fallen into disuse
and decay. It was built after the model of the
[Josephus, in Apion. ii.] Onias was much
esteemed by Philometor, and bore high offices in the government; as also did
Dositheus, another Jew, who had been very useful in helping the king to crush a
rebellion.
[Inscript. Letronne, Recherches.] Since the Ptolemies
had found themselves too weak to hold
Philometor also built a temple at Antaeopolis,
to Antaeus, a god
of whom we know nothing, but that he gave his
name to the city, and another to Aroëris at Ombos; and in the same way he
carved the dedications on the porticoes in the Greek language. This custom
became common after that time, and proves both the lessened weight which the
native Egyptians bore in the state, and that the kings had forgotten the wise
rules of Ptolemy Soter, in regard to the religious feelings of the people. They
must have been greatly shocked by this use of foreign writing in the place of
the old characters of the country, which, from having been used in the temples,
even for ages beyond the reach of history, had at last been called sacred.
It is to this reign, also, that we seem to owe
the great temple at [Wilkinson's
The old religion of the country was perhaps in
the Delta falling [Josephus,
Antiq. xiii. 6.]
into disuse, some of the Egyptian temples below Memphis were in ruins; while
the Greek language had become so common that even in the last reign it was
called 'Lower Egyptian writing'; and [Vocab. Hierog. p. 110.] even in Thebes the
legal deeds were sometimes written in duplicate, [Papyrus, Young’s Disc.] in Egyptian and Greek.
146 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
$$$ Some light may be thrown upon the priesthood
in this reign by one of these deeds; which is a sale by the priests of one half
of a third of their collections for the dead who had been buried in Thynabunum,
the Libyan suburb of Thebes. This sixth share of the collections consisted of
seven or eight families of slaves; the price of it was four hundred pieces of
brass; the bargain was made in the presence of sixteen witnesses, whose names
are given; and the deed was registered and signed by one of the public officers
of the city of
This custom of giving offerings to the priests
for the good of the dead would seem to have been a cause of some wealth to the
temples, and must have been common even in the time of Moses. [Deuteron. xxvi. 14.] It was one among the
many Egyptian customs forbidden by that lawgiver, and most likely continued in
use at least from his time till the time of this deed.
[Suidas.] Aristarchus, who had been the tutor of Euergetes
II., and of a son of Philometor, was one of the ornaments of this reign. He had
been a pupil of Aristophanes the grammarian, and had then studied under Crates
at Pergamus. He died at
Aristarchus had also the good fortune to be
listened to in his lecture-room by one whose name is far more known than those
of his two royal pupils. Moschus of Syracuse, the pastoral poet, was one of his
hearers; but his fame must not be claimed for
ARISTARCHUS. 147
whose death he so beautifully bewails, and from
whose poems he generously owns that he learned so much. It may be as well to
add, that the lines in which he says that Theocritus, who had been dead a
century, joined with him in his sorrow for the death of Bion are later
additions not found in the early manuscripts of his poems.
It has sometimes been made a question how far
the poet and orator have been helped forward, or even guided, by the rules of
the critic; and at other times it has been thought that the more tender flowers
of literature have rather been choked by this weed which entwined itself round
them. But history seems to teach us that neither of these opinions is true.
While Aristarchus was writing there were no poets in Alexandria to be bound
down by his laws, no orators to be tamed by the fear of his lashes: and, on the
other hand, none wrote at his bidding or rose to any real height by the narrow
steps by which he meant them to climb. It would seem as if the fires of genius
and of liberty had burned out together, as if the vices which were already
tainting the manners had also poisoned the literary taste of the Alexandrians.
The golden age of poetry had passed before the brazen age of criticism began.
The critics wrote at a time when the schools of literature would have been
still more barren without them.
Nicander the poet and physician is also claimed
by
But by far the greatest man of
148 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
Timocharis had before made a few observations on
the fixed stars, but Hipparchus was the first to form a catalogue of any size.
His great observations were made with a fixed armillary sphere, or rather a
fixed instrument having a plane parallel to the equator, and gnomon parallel to
the earth's pole. If he was the inventor of this instrument, it was at least
made upon principles known to Eratosthenes, and contained in his Theory of
Shadows.
With this instrument he noted the hour of the
equinoctial day on which the sun shone equally upon the top and the bottom of
the equatorial plane; that hour was the time of the equinox. By making many
such observations he learned the length of the year, which he found was less
than three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter. He found that the four
quarters of the year were not of equal length. He also made the great discovery
of the precession of the equinox, or that the sidereal year, which is measured
by the stars, was not of the same length as the common year, which is measured
by the seasons. Thus he found that the star Spica
Virginis, which in the time of Timocharis had been eight degrees before the
equinoctial point, was then only six degrees before it. Hence he said that the precession
of the equinox was not less than one degree in a century, and added, that it
was not along the equator but along the ecliptic. He was a man of great
industry, and unwearied in his search after truth; and he left a name that was
not equalled by that of any astronomer in the fifteen centuries which followed.
Hero, the pupil of Ctesibius, ranked very high
as a mathematician and mechanic. He has left a work which treats upon several
branches of mechanics: on making warlike machines for throwing stones and
arrows; and on automatons, or figures which were made to move, as if alive, by
machinery under the floor. His chief work
THE
is on pneumatics, on making forcing pumps and
fountains by the force of the air. Among other clever toys he made birds which
sang, or at least uttered one note, by the air being driven by water out of a
close vessel through small pipes. Other playthings were moved by the force of
air rarified by heat; and one, to which the modern discovery of the
steam-engine has given a value which it by no means deserved, was moved by the
force of steam. The steam was driven into a vessel through a hole in the axis
on which it was to turn, and rushed out of it through two holes in the line of
its tangents; so that the vessel turned round on the well-known principle [
The portrait of the king is known from those
coins which bear [Visconti,
Icon. Grec.]
the words #!G37+SE AI?7+9!3?K 1+?K M37?9/I?C?G, 'of King Ptolemy the mother-loving god.' The eagle on the other side
of the coin has a phoenix or palm branch on his wing or by his side. We have
not before met with the title 1+?K, 'god,' on the coins of the Ptolemies, but as every one of them had
been so called in the hieroglyphical inscriptions, it can scarcely be called
new.
The palm-branch or phoenix is the hieroglyphical
character for [Vocab.
Hier. No. 636, 645.]
'year,' and it seems to have been placed upon the coins in acknowledgement of
the return of quiet and good government during the latter half of this reign,
after two reigns of misrule and trouble; but as the reasons for this conjecture
are rather far fetched it will be best to explain them. The civil year had only
three hundred and sixty-five days, and hence the new-year's day, which ought to
have fallen, with the rising of Sirius and the overflow of the
150 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
was looked for as the return of the golden age.
It was however a long time to wait for, and the Egyptians fancied that each
quarter of the time had been marked by the reign of a king of more [Tacitus, Annal. iv.] than usual greatness.
These kings were Sesostris, Amasis, and Euergetes, who, if Sesostris be meant
for Shishank, reigned about three hundred and sixty-five years after one
another, and after the year B.C. 1321. But in this reign, as at the end of that
of Tiberius, the Egyptians, without waiting for the year A.D. 140, seem to have
thought that the phoenix had returned to the land with all the blessings of
good government.
[Polybius, Excerpt. 31.] When Philometor
quitted the
[Justinius, lib. xxxv. 1.] By this treachery of
Demetrius, Philometor was made his enemy, and he joined Attalus king of
Pergamus and Ariarathes king of Cappadocia in setting up Alexander Balas as a
pretender to the [I
Maccabeees, ch. x.]
throne of Syria, who beat Demetrius in battle, and put him to death. Philometor
than gave his elder daughter Cleopatra in marriage to Alexander, and led her
himself to Ptolemais, where the marriage was celebrated with great pomp.
[Josephus, Antiq. xiii. 8.] But even in Ptolemais,
the city in which Alexander had been so covered with favours, Philometor was
near falling under the treachery of his new son-in-law. He learned that a plot
had been formed against his life by Ammonius, and he wrote to Alexander to beg
that the traitor might be given up to justice. But Alexander acknowledged the
plot as his own, and refused to give up his servant. On this, Philometor
recalled his daughter, and turned against Alexander the forces which he had led
into
HIS DEATH. 151
hold him. He then sent to the young Demetrius,
the son of his late enemy, to offer him the throne and wife which he had lately
given to Alexander Balas, and Demetrius was equally pleased with the two
offers. Philometor then entered
Philometor and Demetrius then marched against
Alexander, routed his army, and drove him into
Thus fell Ptolemy Philometor, the last of the
Ptolemies to whom [Polybius,
Excerpt. 31.]
history can point with pleasure. His reign began in trouble: before he had reached
the years of manhood the country had been overrun by foreigners, and tom to
pieces by civil war; but he left the kingdom stronger than he found it, a
praise which he alone can share with Ptolemy Soter. He was alike brave and
mild; he was the only one of the race who fell in battle, and the only one
whose hands were unstained with civil blood. At an age and in a country when
poison and the dagger were too often the means by which the king's authority
was upheld, when goodness was little valued, and when conquests were thought
the only measure of greatness, he had spared the life of a brother taken in
battle, he had refused the crown of Syria when offered to him; and not only
152 PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR.
no one of his friends or kinsmen, but no citizen
of
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] Philometor had reigned
thirty-five years; eleven years alone, partly while under age, then six years
jointly with his brother Euergetes II., and eighteen more alone while his
brother reigned in
153
PTOLEMY EUERGETES II.
ON the death of Philometor, his widow Cleopatra
and some of [Justinus,
lib. xxxviii. 8.]
the chief men of
The Alexandrians, after the vices and murders of
former kings, could not have been much struck by the behaviour of Euergetes
towards his family; but he was not less cruel towards his people.
154 PTOLEMY EUERGETES II.
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] In the lifetime of
Philometor he had never laid aside his claim to the throne of
[Diodorus Sic. Excerpt. 354.] In the next year he
went to
[Justinus, lib. xxxviii. 8.] He soon afterwards put
away his wife and married her younger daughter, his niece Cleopatra Cocce; and
for this and other acts against his family and his people he lived hated by
every body. [Athenaeus,
lib. xii. 12.]
He was so bloated with disease that his body was nearly six feet round, and he
was made weak and slothful by this weight of flesh. He never walked without a
crutch, and he wore a loose robe like a woman's, which reached to his feet and
hands. On the year that he was chosen priest of Apollo by the Cyrenaeans, he
showed his pleasure at the empty honour by feasting in a most costly manner all
those who had before filled that office.
[Justinus, lib. xxxiii. 8.] Such was the man who
received Scipio Africanus the younger and the other Roman ambassadors who were
sent by the senate to see that the kingdom of their ally was peaceably settled.
Euergetes went to meet him with great pomp, and received him with all the
honours due to his rank, and the whole city followed him in crowds through the
streets, eager to catch a sight of the con-
SCIPIO AFRICANUS. 155
queror of Carthage, of the greatest man who had
been seen in Alexandria, of one who had by his virtues and his triumphs added a
new glory even to the name of Scipio.
Euergetes showed him over the palace, and the
treasury; but, [Diod.
Sic. Legat. 32.]
though the Romans had already begun to run the down-hill race of luxury, in
which the Egyptians were so far ahead of them, yet Scipio, who held to the old
fashions and plain manners of the republic, was not dazzled by mere gold and
purple. But the trade of
He went by boat to
Scipio went no higher than Memphis; the
buildings of Upper Egypt, the oldest and the largest in the world, could not
draw him to Thebes, a city whose trade had fallen off, where the deposits of
bullion in the temples had lessened, and whose linen manufacture had moved
towards the Delta. Had this great statesman been a Greek he would perhaps have
gone on to this city, famous alike in history and in poetry; but as it was,
Scipio and his friends then sailed for Cyprus, Syria, and the other provinces
or kingdoms under the power of Rome, to finish this tour of inspection.
The kind treatment shown to these and other
Romans is also [Inscript.
Letronne, Recherches.]
proved by an inscription set up in the
156 PTOLEMY EVERGETES II.
and Caius Pedius, in gratitude to this king. It
is on a monument dedicated to Apollo and Artemis; but they have not told us
whether they were visitors, or whether they were employed in the service of
Euergetes.
For some time past the Jews, taking advantage of
the weakness [I
Maccabees, xiv. xv.]
of Egypt and Syria, had been struggling to make themselves free; [B.C. 143.] and, at the beginning
of this reign, Simon Maccabaeus the high priest sent an embassy to Rome, with a
shield of gold weighing one thousand minae, as a present, to get their
independence acknowledged by the Romans. On this the senate made a treaty of
alliance with the family of the Maccabees, and, using the high tone of command
to which they had for some time past been accustomed, they wrote letters to
Euergetes and the king of Syria ordering them not to make war upon their
friends the Jews.
[Diod. Sic. Excerpt. 361.] The vices and cruelty
of Euergetes called for more than usual skill in the minister to keep down the
angry feelings of the people. This skill was found in the general Hierax, who
was one of those men whose popular manners, habits of business, and knowledge
of war make them rise over every difficulty in times of trouble. On him rested
the whole weight of the government; his wise measures in part made up for the
vices of his master, and, when the treasure of the state had been turned to the
king's pleasures, and the soldiers were murmuring for want of pay, Hierax brought
forward his own money to quiet the rebellion.
[Livy, Epit. 59.] But at last the people could bear their
grievances no longer, the soldiers without pay, instead of guarding the throne,
were its greatest enemies, and the mob rose in Alexandria, set fire to the
palace, and Euergetes was forced to leave the city and withdraw to Cyprus.
The Alexandrians, when free from their tyrant,
sent for Cleopatra his sister and divorced queen, and set her upon the throne.
Her
MEMPHITES KILLED. 157
son by Philometor, in whose name she had before
claimed the throne, had been put to death by Euergetes; her son by Euergetes
was with his father in the
The birthday of Cleopatra was at hand, and it
was to be celebrated [Diod.
Sic. Excerpt. 374.]
in Alexandria with the usual pomp; and Euergetes, putting the head, hands, and
feet of his son Memphites into a box, sent it to Alexandria by a messenger, who
had orders to deliver it to Cleopatra in the midst of the feast, when the
nobles and ambassadors were making their accustomed gifts.
The grief of Cleopatra was only equalled by the
anger of the Alexandrians, who the more readily armed themselves under Marsyas
and marched against the army of Euergetes under Hegelochus. But the Egyptian
army was beaten on the Syrian frontier, and Marsyas sent prisoner to Euergetes;
who then showed the only act of mercy which can be mentioned to his praise, and
spared the life of a prisoner whom he thought he could make use of.
Cleopatra then sent to
Great indeed must be the cruelty which a people
will not bear from their own king rather than call in a foreign master to
relieve them. Among the various feelings by which men are governed, few are
stronger than the wish for national independence; hence the return of the hated
and revengeful Euergetes was not dreaded so much by the Alexandrians as the
being made a province of Syria. Cleopatra received no help from Demetrius, but
she lost the love of her people by asking for it, and she was soon forced to
fly from
158
PTOLEMY EUERGETES II.
[Inscript. Letronne, Recherches.] Demetrius in
Though the discontent of the people did not
again show itself in rebellion, it still broke out in loud murmurs, and a
petition of the priests of
The trade of the Egyptians had given them very
little knowledge of geography beyond their own coasts. Indeed the whole trade
of the ancients was carried on by buying goods from their nearest neighbours on
one side, and selling them to those on the other side of them. Long voyages
were wholly unknown; and though the trading wealth of
EUDOXUS CYZICENUS. 159
dropt down the River Indus, coasted Arabia, and
thence reached the Red Sea, this voyage was either forgotten or disbelieved,
and in the time of the Ptolemies it seems probable that nobody thought that
The long voyages of Solomon and Necho had been
limited to coasting Africa; the voyage of Alexander the Great had been from the
Indus to the
But the art of navigation was so far unknown
that but little use was made of this discovery; the goods of India, which were
all costly and of small weight, were still for the most part carried across the
desert on camels' backs, and we may remark that hardly more than twenty small
vessels ever went to India in one year
160 PTOLEMY EUEGETES II.
during the reigns of the Ptolemies, and that it
was not till
[2 Maccabees, i. 10.] Euergetes had been a
pupil of Aristobulus, a learned Jew, a [Clem. Alex. Strom. i.] writer of the
peripatetic sect of philosophers, and also of Aristarchus [Athenaeus, lib. ii. 84.] the grammarian; and
though he had given himself up to the lowest pleasures, yet he held with his
crown that love of letters and learning which had ennobled his forefathers. He
was himself an author, and like Ptolemy Soter wrote his Memorabilia, or an
account of what he had seen most remarkable in his lifetime. We may suppose
that his writings were not of a very high order; they were quoted by Athenaeus
who wrote in the reign of Marcus Aurelius; [lib. xiii. 5.] but we learn little else from them than the
names of the [lib.
xiv. 20.] mistresses
of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and that a flock of pheasants [lib. ii. 58.] was kept in the palace
ofAlexandria. He also wrote a commentary on Homer, of which we know nothing.
In this reign the schools of
[Suidas.] Sositheus, and his rival the younger Homer,
the tragic poets of this reign, have even been called two of the Pleiades of
Alexan-
PERGAMUS. 161
dria; but that was a title given to many authors
of very different ages, and to some of very little merit.
But, unfortunately, the larger number of the men
of letters had [Athenaeus,
lib. iv. 29.]
in the late wars taken part with Philometor against the cruel and luxurious
Euergetes. Hence, when the streets of
The city which was then rising highest in arts
and letters was Pergamus in Asia Minor, which under Eumenes and Attalus was
almost taking the place which
But even money and the commands of kings could
not procure [Galen,
in Hippocrat. ii. de Nat. Hom.] faultless copies of the books wanted; and Galen, who lived
in Per-
162 PTOLEMY EUERGETES II.
gemus under the Antonines, complains woefully of
the treatment which authors had received from these hasty copiers.
[Porphyrios, ap. Scalig.] Euergetes had reigned
six years with his brother, then eighteen years in
163
CLEOPATRA COCCE, AND PTOLEMY SOTER II.
ON the death of Euergetes, his widow Cleopatra
Cocce would [Justinus,
lib. xxxix. 3.]
have chosen her younger son Ptolemy Alexander, then a child, for [B.C. 116.] her partner on the
throne, most likely because it would have been longer in the course of years
before he would have claimed his share of power; but she was forced by a
threatened rising of the Alexandrians to make her elder son king. Before,
however, she would do this, she made a treaty with him, which would strongly
prove, if any thing were still wanting, the vice and meanness of the Egyptian
court. It was, that, although married to his sister Cleopatra, of whom he was
very fond, he should put her away and marry his younger sister Selene; because the
mother hoped that Selene would be false to her husband's cause, and weaken his
party in the state by her treachery: she planned the unhappiness of two
children and the guilt of a third. Perhaps history can hardly show another
marriage so wicked and unnatural, or a reign so little likely to end without a
civil war. The mother and the son were jointly styled sovereigns of
Ptolemy took the name of Soter II., though he is
more often called Lathyrus from a wart or stain upon his face; he was also [Pausanias, lib. i. 9.] called Philometor; and
we learn from an inscription on a temple
164 CLEOPATRA AND SOTER II.
[Inscript. Letronne, Recherches.] at Apollinopolis
Parva, that both these names formed part of the style in which the public acts
ran in this reign; it is dedicated by 'the queen Cleopatra and king Ptolemy,
gods Philometores, Soteres, and his children,' without mentioning his wife. The
name of Philometor was given to him by his mother, because, though he had
reached the years of manhood, she wished to act as his guardian; but her
unkindness to him was so remarkable that historians have thought that it was a
nickname.
[Justinus. lib. xxxix. 3.] Cleopatra the
daughter, who gained our pity for being put away by her husband at the command
of her mother, soon forfeited it by the steps which she then took. She made a
treaty of marriage with Antiochus Cyzicenus, the friend of her late husband,
who was struggling in unnatural warfare for the throne of Syria with his
brother Antiochus Grypus, the husband of her sister Tryphaena; and in her way
to Syria she stopped at Cyprus, where she raised a large army, and took it with
her as her dower, to help her new husband against his brother and her sister.
With this army Cyzicenus met his brother in
battle, and was beaten; and Cleopatra shut herself up in the city of
THE JEWS. 165
This unnatural cruelty however was soon
overtaken by punishment: in the next battle Cyzicenus was the conqueror, and he
put Tryphaena to death, to quiet the ghost of her murdered sister.
In the third year of her reign Cleopatra Cocce
gave the
She had given the command of her army to two
Jews, Chelcias, [Josephus,
Antiq. xiii. 18.]
and Ananias the son of Onias the priest of
By this act Lathyrus must have lost the good
will of the Jews of Lower Egypt, who, since their countrymen had raised Judaea
to the rank of a
During these years the building was going
forward of the beautiful [Wilkinson's
166 CLEOPATRA AND SOTER II.
[Denon, pl. 53.] Latopolis, on the other side of the
167
CLEOPATRA COCCE, AND PTOLEMY ALEXANDER.
THE two sons were so far puppets in the hands of
their clever [B.C.
106.] but
wicked mother, that on the recalling of Alexander no change was seen in the
government beyond that of the names which were placed at the head of the public
acts. The former year was called [Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] the tenth of Cleopatra
and Ptolemy Soter, and this year was called the eleventh of Cleopatra and
eighth of Ptolemy Alexander; as Alexander counted his years from the time when
he was sent with the title of king to
While the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria were alike
weakened by civil wars and by the vices of their kings, Judaea, as we have
seen, had risen under the wise government of the Maccabees to the rank of an
independant state; and latterly, Aristobulus the eldest son of [Josephus, Antiq. xiii.
20.]
Hircanus, and afterwards Alexander Jannaeus his second son, had made themselves
kings. But
The city of
168 CLEOPATRA AND ALEXANDER.
[Josephus, Antiq. xiii. 21.] took ten thousand
prisoners and a large booty. He then sat down before the city of
Cleopatra now began to fear that her son
Lathyrus would soon make himself too powerful if not checked in his career of
success, and that he might be able to march upon
Cleopatra, after taking Ptolemais, sent part of
her army to help that which had been led by Chelcias; and Lathyrus was forced
to shut himself up in
On this success, Cleopatra was advised to seize upon
the throne of Jannaeus, and again to add to
THE JEWS. 169
dislike for war, did not yield to the reasons of
her general Ananias through any kind feeling towards his countrymen: but the
Jews of Lower Egypt were too strong to be treated with slight; it was by the
help of the Jews that Cleopatra had driven her son Lathyrus out of Egypt; they
formed a large part of the Egyptian armies, which were no longer even commanded
by Greeks; and it must have been by these clear and unanswerable reasons that
Ananias was able to turn the queen from the thoughts of this conquest, and to
renew the league between Egypt and Judaea.
Cleopatra however was still afraid that Lathyrus
would be helped [Justinus,
lib. xxxix. 4.]
by his friend Antiochus Cyzicenus to conquer
Ptolemy Alexander, who had been a mere tool in
the hands of his mother, was at last tired of his gilded chains: but he saw no
means of throwing them off, and of gaining that power in the state which his
birth and title, and the age which he had then reached, ought to have given
him. The army was in favour of his mother, and an unsuccessful effort would
certainly have been punished with death; so he took perhaps the only path open
to him, he left
Cleopatra might well doubt whether she could
keep her throne against both her sons, and she therefore sent messengers with
fair promises to Alexander, to ask him to return to
170 PTOLEMY ALEXANDER.
on his return, he formed a plot against her life
by letters. In this double game Alexander had the advantage of his mother; her
character was so well known that he needed not to be told of what was going on;
while she perhaps thought that the son whom she had so long ruled as a child
would not dare to act as a man. Alexander's plot was of the two the best laid,
and on his reaching
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] Thus died by the
orders of her favourite son, after a reign of twenty-eight years, this wicked
woman, who had married the husband of her mother, who had made her daughters
marry and leave their husbands at her pleasure, who had made war upon one son
and had plotted the death of the other.
[Justinus, lib. xxxix. 5.] But Alexander did not
long enjoy the fruits of his murder. The next year the Alexandrians rose
against him in a fury. He was hated not perhaps so much for the murder of his
mother as for the cruelties which he had been guilty of, or at least had to
bear [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
the blame of, while he reigned with her. His own soldiers turned against him,
and he was forced to seek his safety by flying on board a vessel in the
harbour, and he left
He was followed by a fleet under the command of
Tyrrhus, but he reached Myrae, a city of
Though others may have been guilty of more
crimes, Alexander had perhaps the fewest good qualities of any of the family of
the Lagidae. During his idle reign of twenty years, in which the crimes [Athenaeus, lib. xii. 12.] ought in fairness to
be chiefly laid to his mother, he was wholly given up to the lowest and worst
of pleasures, by which his mind and body were alike ruined. He was so bloated
with vice and
COINS. 171
disease, that he seldom walked without crutches;
but at his feasts he could leap from his raised couch and dance with naked feet
upon the floor with the companions of his vices. He was blinded by flattery,
ruined by debauchery, and hated by the people.
His coins are not easily known from those of the
other kings, which also bore the words AI?7+9!3?K #!G37+SE, 'of Ptolemy the king;' round the eagle; but one, on which are
rams-horns to the head, is no doubt of this king, as the ram's-horns [Numismata Pembroch.] were symbolical of
Alexander the Great, whose name he bore.
Some of the coins of his mother have the same
words round the eagle on one side, while on the other is her head, with a
helmet formed like the head of an elephant, or her head with the words [Visconti, Icon. Grec.] #!G373GG/E 57+?A!IC!G, 'of Queen Cleopatra.' There are other coins with the same head of
Cleopatra, with two eagles to point [British Museum.] out the joint sovereignty of herself
and her son.
History has not told us who was the first wife
of Alexander, but he left a son by her named after himself Ptolemy Alexander,
who we have seen sent by his grandmother for safety to the
In the middle of this reign died Ptolemy Apion
the king of [Livy,
Epit. lxx.]
172 PTOLEMY ALEXANDER.
bought a truce during his lifetime, by making
the Roman people his heirs in his will.
173
PTOLEMY SOTER II.
ON the flight of Alexander, the Alexandrians
sent an embassy [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
to Cyprus to bring back Soter II., or Lathyrus as he is called; and [B.C. 87.] he entered Egypt
without opposition. He had before reigned ten years with his mother, and then
eighteen years by himself in
His reign is remarkable for the rebellion and
ruin of the once powerful city of
174 PTOLEMY SOTER II.
[Pausanias, lib. i. 9.] We can therefore
hardly wonder that, when Lathyrus landed in
Perhaps the only time before when
The traveller now counts the Arab villages which
stand within its bounds, and perhaps pitches his tent in the desert space in
the middle of them. But the ruined temples still stand to call forth his
wonder. They have seen the whole portion of time of which history keeps the
reckoning roll before them: they have seen kingdoms and nations rise and fall;
the Babylonians, the Jews, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. They have
seen the childhood of all that we call ancient; and they still seem likely to
stand, to tell their tale to those who will hereafter call us the ancients.
LUCULLUS. 175
$$$ After this rebellion, Lathyrus reigned in
quiet, and was even able to be of use to his Greek allies; and the Athenians,
in gratitude, [Pausanias,
lib. i. 9.]
set up statues of bronze to him, and Berenice his daughter.
During this reign, the Romans were carrying on a
war with Mithridates, [Plutarch.
Lucullus.] king
of
Lucullus found time to enjoy the society of Dio,
the academic [Cicero,
Acad. iv. 4.]
philosopher, who was then teaching at Alexandria; and there he might have been
seen with Antiochus of Athens, the pupil of Philo, and Heraclitus of Tyre, his
fellow-pupil, talking together about the two newest works of Philo, which had
just come to Alexandria. Antiochus could not read them without showing his
anger: such opinions had never before been heard of in the Academy; but they
knew the hand-writing of Philo, they were certainly his. Silius and Tetrilius,
who were there, had heard him teach the same opinions at
Lathyrus was as much afraid of the enmity of
Mithridates as of [Plutarch.
Lucullus.] the
Romans, and he wisely wished not to quarrel with either. He therefore at once
made up his mind not to grant the fleet which
176 PTOLEMY SOTER II.
Lucullus had been sent to ask for. It had been
usual for the kings of
[Visconti, Icon. Grec.] The coins of Lathyrus
are not easily or certainly known from those of the other Ptolemies; but those
of his second wife Selene bear her head on the one side, with the words #!G373GG/G G+7/;/G, 'of queen Selene,' and on the other side the eagle, with the words #!G37+SG AI?7+9!3?K, 'of king Ptolemy.'
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] He had before reigned
ten years with his mother, and after his brother's death he reigned six years
and a half more; but, as he counted the years that he had reigned in
177
CLEOPATRA BERENICE.
ON the death of Lathyrus, or Ptolemy Soter II.,
his daughter [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
Cleopatra Berenice, the widow of Ptolemy Alexander, mounted the [B.C. 80.] throne of
Alexander had been sent to the
178
PTOLEMY ALEXANDER II.
[B.C. 80.] THE orders of Sylla, the Roman dictator, were
of course obeyed, and the young Alexander landed at
Though the Romans had already seized the smaller
179
PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS.
ON the death of Ptolemy Alexander, the
Alexandrians might [B.C.
80.] easily
have changed their weak and wicked rulers, and formed a government for
themselves, if they had known how. But society is only held together by
everybody believing that his neighbour will act fairly and justly, while more
than usual self-denial, love of right, and trust in one another, are needed to
form these bonds anew; and the whole of the scattered hints, which are all that
is left to us of this history, show that those whose place in society had
formed them to think and to be the leaders of their fellow citizens, wanted
every virtue fitting for the task.
As there was no other claimant, the crown fell
to a natural son [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
of Lathyrus. His claims had been wholly overlooked at the death of his father;
for though by the Egyptian law every son was held to be equally legitimate, it
was not so by the Macedonian law. He took the name of Neus Dionysus, or the
young Osiris as we find [Egypt
Inscrip. plate 4.]
it written in the hieroglyphics, though he is usually called Auletes, the piper; because he was more proud of
his skill in playing on the flute than of his knowledge of the art of
governing.
From the first he gave himself up to his natural
bent for pleasure and debauchery. At times when virtue is uncopied and
unrewarded, it is usually praised and let alone; but in this reign sobriety was
a crime in the eyes of the king, a quiet behaviour was thought a reproach
against his irregularities. Demetrius the Platonic [Lucian. de Calumniâ.] philosopher was in
danger of being put to death because it
180 PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS.
was told to the king that he never drank wine,
and had been seen at the feast of Bacchus in his usual dress, while every other
man was in the dress of a woman. But the philosopher was allowed to disprove
the charge of sobriety, or at least to make amends for his fault: on the king's
sending for him the next day, he made himself drunk publicly in the sight of
all the court, and danced with cymbals in a loose dress of Tarentine gauze.
[Dion. Cass. lib. xxxix.] As Auletes felt
himself hardly safe upon the throne, his first wish was to get himself
acknowledged as king by the Roman senate. For this end he sent to
[Goltzius. de re Numm.] On a coin of Lentulus
Sura, who was consul in the tenth year [B.C. 71.] of this reign, we find the Ptolemaic eagle and
thunderbolt, as if he had been sent to Egypt by the senate to exercise some act
of sovereignty; and on a coin of Licinius Crassus, who was consul the next
year, we see a crocodile on one side and the prow of a ship on the other, which
must be understood to mean that he had beaten [B.C. 65.] the Egyptian fleet at the mouth of the
Nile. Five years later we again meet with the eagle and thunderbolt on the
consular coins [Cicero.
ii. contr. Rullum.]
of Aurelius Cotta, and we learn from
We next find the Roman senate debating whether
they should not seize the kingdom as their inheritance under the will of
Ptolemy Alexander II., but, moved by the bribes of Auletes and perhaps by other
reasons which we are not told, they seem to have acknowledged him as king.
$$$ But his brother Ptolemy who was reigning in
Every thing, at least in this history, disproves
the saying that the people are happy when their annals are short. There was
more virtue and happiness, and perhaps even less bloodshed, with the stir of
mind while Ptolemy Soter was at war with Antigonus, than during this dull
unwarlike time. Auletes had been losing his [Dion. Cassius, lib. xxxix.] friends and weakening
his government, and at last, when he refused to quarrel with the senate about
the island of Cyprus, the Egyptians rose against him in arms, and he was forced
to fly from Alexandria.
He took ship for
182 CLEOPATRA TRYPHAENA AND BERENICE.
$$$ [Plutarch. Cato.] Cato gave him the best advice; that,
instead of going to
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] On the flight of their
king, the Alexandrians set the two eldest of his daughters, Cleopatra Tryphaena
and Berenice, on the throne, and sent an embassy, at the head of which was Dio
the academic philosopher, to plead their cause at Rome against the king. But [Cicero. frag. de rege
Alexandrino.]
the gold of Auletes had already gained the senate; and Cicero spoke, on his
behalf, one of his great speeches, now unfortunately lost, in which he rebuts
the charge that Auletes was at all to be blamed for the death of Alexander,
whom he thought justly killed by his [Suetonius, Caesar, xi.] guards, for the murder
of his queen and kinswoman. Caesar, whose [Plutarch. Caesar.] year of consulship was then drawing to
an end, took his part warmly, and Auletes became in debt to him in the sum of
seventeen million drachmae, or about half a million sterling, either for money
lent to bribe the senators, or for bonds then given to Caesar instead of [Cicero, pro Coelio.] money. By these means,
the door of the senate was shut against the Egyptian ambassadors, and Dio, the
head of the embassy, was murdered in
[Epist. ad Q. Fratrem, ii. 2.] This high employment
was then sought for by Lentulus and Pompey; and the senate at first leaned in
favour of the former, who would perhaps have gained it, if the Roman creditors
of Auletes, who were already trembling for their money, had not
GABINIUS. 183
bribed openly in favour of Pompey, on whom the
choice of the senate at last fell.
Pompey then took Auletes into his house, as his
friend and guest, [Dion.
Cassius, lib. xxxix.]
and would perhaps have got orders to lead him back into his kingdom at the head
of a Roman army, had not the tribunes of the people, fearing any addition to
Pompey's great power, had recourse to their usual state-engine the Sibylline
books; and the pontifex, at their bidding, publicly declared that it was
written in those sacred pages that the king of Egypt should have the friendship
of Rome, but should not be helped with an army.
But though Caesar and Pompey were each strong
enough to stop the other from having this high command, Auletes was not without
hopes that some Roman general would be led, by the promise of money, and by the
honour, to undertake his cause, though it would be against the laws of Rome to
do so without orders from the senate.
Auletes then went, with pressing letters from
Pompey, to Gabinius, [Dion
Cass. lib. xxxix.]
the proconsul of
While Auletes had been thus pleading his cause
at
184 BERENICE.
[Strabo, lib. xvii.] enough to be joined with Berenice on
the throne, the Alexandrian sent to Syria, to Seleucus, the son of Antiochus
Grypus and of Selene the sister of Lathyrus, to come to Egypt and marry
Berenice.
He was low-minded in all his pleasures and
tastes, and got the nickname of Cybiosactes, the scullion. He was even said to have stolen the golden sarcophagus
in which the body of Alexander was buried; and was so much disliked by his
young wife, that she had him strangled on the fifth day after their marriage.
Berenice then married Archelaus, a son of
Mithridates Eupator [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
king of
[Cicero, pro Rabirio.] Gabinius, on marching,
gave out as an excuse for quitting his province, that it was in self-defence;
that
[Cicero, pro Rabirio.] Gabinius had refused
to undertake this affair, which was the more dangerous because against the laws
of
DIODORUS SICULUS. 185
him all he was worth, and borrowed the rest of
his friends; and as soon as Auletes was on the throne, he went to
Rabirius had been for a time mortgagee in
possession of the revenues of
It was in this reign that the historian Diodorus
Siculus travelled [Diod.
Sic. lib. i. 83.]
in
186 PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS.
they had almost passed off the page of history,
worth the notice of a philosopher.
The temple of Pthah, and every other building of
One part of their task they have well fulfilled:
they have outlived any portion of time that their builders could have dreamed
of. But in another they seem to have failed: they have not yet unfolded to us
their builders' names and history. The Thebans, more wisely, covered their
buildings with writing; but the unlettered people of the Delta, overlooking the
reed which was growing in their marshes, the papyrus, to which the great minds
of Greece afterwards trusted their undying names, have only taught us how much
safer it would have been, in their wish to be thought of and talked of in after
ages, to have leant upon the poet and historian.
$$$ The religion of the Copts was still
flourishing. Though some of the temples of Lower Egypt had fallen into decay,
and though the throne was then tottering to its fall, the priests in
The square low body of the temple is almost hid
behind a portico, [Denon,
pl. 38, 39, 40.]
which is wider and loftier than the rest, and is itself nearly one half of the
building, and which shows a front of six thick columns, each having the head of
a woman for its capital. All the massive walls slope a little inwards, which
adds both to the strength and to the appearance of it. They are covered with
hieroglyphics, but are otherwise plain, without window, niche, or any ornament
but the deep overshadowing eaves of the roof. On entering the portico, you see
that its ceiling is upheld by twenty-four columns, in four rows of six each;
you thence enter the body of the temple, through a doorway, into the chief
room, where there are six more columns, and, passing straight forward through
two other rooms, you reach the fourth and last, leaving several smaller rooms
on each side. The larger temples of
188 PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS.
[Diod. Sic. lib. i. 84.] The sacred animals
were still kept by the several cities, and their funerals were celebrated with
great pomp, particularly that of the bull Apis; and at a cost, in one case, of
one hundred talents, or seventeen thousand pounds; which was double what Ptolemy
Soter, in his wish to please his new subjects, spent upon the Apis of his day.
After the funeral the priests looked for a calf with the right spots, a custom
which must have been older than the time [Numbers, xix. 2.] of Moses, as the Jews were by him
ordered to choose a red heifer without a spot. When they had chosen the calf
they fattened it for forty days, and brought it to
The cat also was at all times one of the animals
held most sacred [British
Museum.] by
the Egyptians. In the earliest and latest times we find the statues of their
goddesses with cats' heads; and when the cats of
It is to
[Diod. Sic. lib. i. 83.] So deeply rooted in
the minds of the Egyptians was the worship of these animals, that when a Roman
soldier had killed a cat unawares, though the Romans were masters of the
country, the whole of the people rose against him in a fury. In vain the king
sent a
THE CAT. 189
message to quiet the mob, to let them know that
the cat was killed by accident; and though the fear of Rome would most likely
have saved a Roman soldier unharmed, whatever other crime he might have been
guilty of, in this case nothing would quiet the people but his death, and he
was killed before the eyes of Diodorus the historian.
One nation rises above another not so much from
its greater strength or skill in arms as from its higher aim and stronger wish
for power. The Egyptians, we see, had not lost their courage, and when the
occasion called them out they showed a fearlessness not unworthy of their
Theban forefathers; on seeing a dead cat in the streets they rose against the
king's orders and the power of Rome; had they thought their own freedom or
their country's greatness as much worth fighting for, they could with ease have
gained them.
But the Egyptians had no civil laws or rights
that they cared about, they had nothing left that they valued but their
religion, and this the Romans took good care not to meddle with. Had the Romans
made war upon the priests and temples as the Persians had done, they would
perhaps in the same way have been driven out of Egypt; but they never shocked
the religious feelings of the people, and even after Egypt had become a Roman
province, when the beautiful temples of Esne, Dendera, and other cities, were
dedicated in the names of the Roman emperors, they never once copied the
example of Philometor, and put Greek, much less Roman writing on the portico,
but continued to let the walls be covered with hieroglyphical inscriptions.
Every Egyptian, who was rich enough to pay for
it, still had the [Diod.
Sic. lib. i. 92.]
bodies of his friends embalmed at their death, and made into mummies; though
the priests, to save part of the cost, often put the [Archaeologia, xxvii.
262.] mummy
of a man just dead into a mummy-case which had been
190 PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS.
made and used in the reign of a Thothmothis or
an Amunothph. When the mummy was finished, it was part of the funeral to ferry
it across a lake, and there before a judge, and a jury of forty-two, to try the
dead man for what he had done when living.
But human nature is the same in all ages and in
all countries, and, whatever might have been the past life of the dead, the
judge, not to hurt the feelings of the friends, always declared that he was [Plutarch. Prov. Alex.] 'a righteous good
man:' and, notwithstanding this show of truth, it passed into a proverb to say
of a wicked man, that he was too bad to be praised even at his funeral.
Though the old laws of
We may form some opinion of the wealth of
GOLD MINES. 191
two millions sterling; just one half of which
was paid by the port [Diod.
Sic. lib. xvii. 52.]
of
But though much of the trade of the country was
lost, though [lib.
iii. 12.]
many of the royal works had ceased, though the manufacture of the finer linen
had left the country, the digging in the gold mines, the only source of wealth
to a despot, never ceased. Night and day in the mines near Berenice did slaves,
criminals, and prisoners of war work without pause, chained together in gangs,
and guarded by soldiers, who were carefully chosen for their not being able to
speak the language of these unhappy workmen.
The rock which held the gold was broken up into
small pieces; when hard, it was first made brittle in the fire; the broken
stone was then washed to separate the waste from the heavier grains which held
the gold; and, lastly, the valuable parts when separated were kept heated in a
furnace for five days, at the end of which time the pure gold was found melted
into a button at the bottom. We are not told the value of the gold, but it must
have been a very small part of the seven millions sterling which the mines are
said to have yielded every year in the reign of Rameses II.
As the country fell off in wealth, power, and
population, the schools of
192 PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS.
a treatise on the joints of the body, and
dedicated his work to Ptolemy king of that island. The work is still remaining
in manuscript, though unpublished. But so few are the deeds worth mentioning in
the falling state, that we are pleased even to be told that, [Pausanias, lib. v. 21.] in the one hundred and
seventy-eighth Olympiad, Straton of Alexandria conquered in the Olympic games,
and was crowned in the same day for wrestling, and for pancratium, or wrestling and boxing joined.
[Hieroglyphics, plate 65.] Beside his name of
Neus Dionysus, the king is in the hieroglyphics sometimes called Philopator and
Philadelphus; and in a [Inscript.
Letronne, Recherch. 134.]
Greek inscription on a statue at
[Visconti, Icon. Grec.] The coins which are
usually thought to be his are in a worse style of art than those of the kings
before him.
[Porphyrius, ap. Scalig.] He died in the
twenty-ninth year of his reign, leaving four children; namely, Cleopatra, Arsinoë,
and two Ptolemies.
193
CLEOPATRA.
PTOLEMY AULETES had by his will left his kingdom
to Cleopatra [J.
Caesar,
He had also begged them to undertake the
guardianship of his [Eutropius.
lib. vi. 21.]
son, and the senate voted Pompey tutor to the young king, or governor of
Cleopatra fled into
194 CLEOPATRA.
[J. Caesar,
But gratitude is a virtue little known to
princes, and Pompey's heart misgave him as he stept into the Egyptian vessel
which was sent out to receive him with promises of safety and kind treatment.
In this civil war between Pompey and Caesar, the Egyptians would have been glad
to be the friends of both, but that was now out of the question; Pompey's
coming made it necessary for them to choose which they should join, and the
council of Ptolemy chose to side with the strong, and though they had just
given to Pompey a promise of safety they put him to death on his landing.
Shortly after this, Caesar landed at
In the mean while he claimed the right, as Roman
consul, of settling the dispute between Cleopatra and her brother, and though
he had only four thousand men himself, he ordered them both to disband their
armies. Ptolemy, who was at Alexandria, seemed willing to obey, but Photinus
his guardian would not agree to it, and secretly sent orders to Achillas, the
general at Pelusium, to bring the army to Alexandria, that they might be able
to give
LIBRARY BURNT. 195
orders rather than to receive them from Caesar
and his four thousand men. On the other hand Ptolemy, at the command of Caesar,
sent Dioscorides and Serapion to order Achillas to remain at Pelusium; but
these messengers were not even allowed to return, one was killed and the other
badly wounded, and Achillas entered
Caesar, during the few days that he had been in
He took with him the two young Ptolemies, their
sister Arsinoë, [J.
Caesar.
But unfortunately the fire did not stop at the
gallies; from the [Amm.
Marcel. lib. xxii. 16.]
docks it caught the neighbouring buildings, and the Museum which was close upon
the harbour was soon wrapt in flames. It was to the Museum with its seven
hundred thousand volumes, that
196 CLEOPATRA.
who had studied there that the history of the
Ptolemies is chiefly valuable. It had been begun by the first of the Lagidae,
and had grown not only with his son and grandson, but, when the love of
learning and of virtue had left the latter princes of the family, they still
added to the library, and Alexandria was still the first school of science,
and, next to Athens, the point to which all men of learning looked.
Caesar, the historian of his own great deeds,
could have told us of the pain with which he saw the flames rise from the rolls
of dry papyrus, and of the trouble which he took to quench the fire; but his
guilty silence leads us to believe that he found the burning pile a useful
flank to the line of walls that his little body of troops had to guard, and we
must fear that the feelings of the scholar were for the time lost in those of
the soldier.
[J. Caesar, Bell. Civ. iii.] He must have known that,
in keeping the young princes and their guardian, he was keeping traitors in his
camp. This was first shown by Arsinoë making her escape from the palace, and
reaching the quarters of Achillas in safety; and then by Photinus being found
out in sending word to Achillas of Caesar's want of stores, and in urging him
not to give over his attacks upon the palace. [A. Hirtius, Bell. Alex.] Upon this Caesar put
Photinus to death, and the escape of Arsinoë soon turned out a gain, as she
quarrelled with Achillas the general, and had him murdered by her eunuch
Ganimedes.
[Plutarch. Caesar.] Cleopatra was all this time with her
army near Pelusium, but believing that her charms would have more weight with Caesar,
in his judging between herself and her brother, than any thing that she could
say by letter, she came in disguise with one friend to
PTOLEMY DROWNED. 197
had before ordered that she should obey her
father's will, and reign jointly with her brother, she found herself mistress
of his heart, and through him of the kingdom of Egypt.
On this, Ptolemy joined the army against Caesar,
and after a year [A.
Hirtius,
On reaching
While Ptolemy her second husband was a boy, and
could claim [Porphyrius,
ap. Scalig.]
no share of the government, he was allowed to live with all the
198 CLEOPATRA.
outward show of royalty, but as soon as he
reached the age of fifteen, at which he might call himself the equal and would
soon [B.C.
43.] be the
master of Cleopatra, she had him put to death. She had then reigned four years
with her elder brother, and four years with her younger brother, and from that
time forward she reigned alone.
At a time when vice and luxury claimed the
thoughts of all who were not busy in the civil wars, we cannot hope to find the
fruits of genius in Alexandria; but the mathematics are plants of a hardy [Pliny, lib. xviii. 57.] growth, and are not
choked so easily as poetry and history. Sosigenes was then the first astronomer
in
[Suidas.] Didymus was another of the writers that we
hear of at that time. He was a man of great industry, both in reading and
writing; but when we are told that he wrote three thousand five hundred
volumes, or rolls, it rather teaches us that a great many rolls of papyrus
would be wanted to make a modern book, than what number of books he wrote.
Dioscorides, the physician of Cleopatra, has
left a work on herbs and minerals, and on their uses in medicine; also on
poisons and poisonous bites. To these he has added a list of prescriptions. His
works have been much read in all ages, and have only been set aside by the
discoveries of the last few centuries.
MARC
$$$ Serapion was another physician of this
reign. He followed medicine [Celst.] rather than surgery;
and, while trusting chiefly to his experience gained in clinical or bed-side
practice, was laughed at by the surgeons as an empiric.
The small temple at Hermonthis, near
Although the history of
As
200 CLEOPATRA.
best attire,' and told her that she had nothing
to fear from the kind and gallant
[Shakspeare, from Plutarch.]
The barge she sat in,
like a burnish'd throne,
Burn'd on the water: the
poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so
perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick
with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of
flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they
beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their
strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description.
She did lie
In her pavilion, cloth
of gold, of tissue,
O'er-picturing that
Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork
nature; on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled
boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured
fans. -
Her
gentlewomen, like the Nereids,
So many mermaids, tended
her i' the eyes
And made their bends adornings;
at the helm
A seeming mermaid
steers; the silken tackle
Swell with the touches
of those flower-soft hands,
That yarely frame the
office. From the barge,
A strange invisible
perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs.
The city cast
Her people out upon her;
and
Enthroned in the
market-place, did sit alone.
EAR-RINGS. 201
$$$ On her landing, she invited him and his
generals to a dinner,
in which the whole
of the dishes placed before him were of gold, set with precious stones, and the room and the
twelve couches were ornamented with purple and gold. On
The next day he again dined with her, and
brought a larger number of his friends and generals, and was of course startled
to see a costliness which made that of the day before seem nothing; and she
again gave him the whole of the gold upon the table, and gave to each of his
friends the couch upon which he sat.
These costly and delicate dinners were continued
every day; and [Pliny,
lib. ix. 58.]
one evening, when
Next day the dinner was as grand and dainty as
those of the former days; but when
She wore in her ears two pearls, the largest
known in the world, which, like the diamonds of European kings, had come to her
with her crown and kingdom, and were together valued at that large sum. On the
servants removing the meats, they set before her a glass of vinegar, and she
took one of these ear-rings from her ear and dropt it into the glass, and when
dissolved drank it off. Plancus, one of the guests, who had been made judge of
the wager.
202 CLEOPATRA.
snatched the other from the queen's ear, and saved
it from being drunk up like the first, and then declared that
[Plutarch.
[Josephus, Antiq. xv. 4.] The first favour which
she asked of her lover equals any cruelty that we have met with in this
history: it was, that he would have her sister Arsinoë put to death. Caesar had
spared her life, after his triumph, through love of Cleopatra; but he was
mistaken in the heart of his mistress, she would have been then better pleased
at Arsinoë's death; and Antony, at her bidding, had her murdered in the temple
of Diana at Ephesus.
[Plutarch.
HER CHILDREN. 203
$$$ The lovers visited each other every day, and
the waste of their entertainments passed belief. Philotas, a physician who was
then following his studies at Alexandria, told Plutarch's grandfather that he once
saw Antony's dinner cooked, and, among other meats, were eight wild boars
roasting whole; and the cook explained to him that, though there were only
twelve guests, yet as each dish had to be roasted to a single turn of the spit,
and Antony did not know at what hour he should dine, it was necessary to cook
at least eight dinners.
But the most costly of the luxuries then used in
Cleopatra, who held her power at the pleasure of
the Roman legions, [Plutarch.
In the next year, however, he was again in
204
CLEOPATRA.
mistress: he gave her the wide provinces of
Phenicia,
[Vaillant, Hist. Ptolem.] On the early coins of
Cleopatra we see her head on the one side and the eagle or the cornucopia on
the other side, with the words #!E373GG/E 57,?A!IC!E, 'of queen Cleopatra.' On the later coins we find the head of
[Plutarch.
NEW LIBRARY. 205
well aware how much the library of the Museum
had added to the glory of
By the help of this new library, the city still
kept its high rank as a school of letters; and when the once proud kingdom of Egypt
was a province of Rome, and when almost every trace of the monarchy was lost,
and centuries after Philo the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria had asked,
'Where are now the Ptolemies?' the historian [Philo de Jos.] could have found an
answer by pointing to the mathematical schools and the library of the Serapeum.
With whom the blame should rest for the loss of
these valuable books we do not well know. Many seem to have been destroyed [Orosius, lib. iv. 15.] when the
The Arabic historian tells us that, when
206
CLEOPATRA.
favour if he had not thought it necessary to ask
leave of the
In weighing the loss that befel the world in the
burning of these great libraries, that of the Museum and that of the Serapeum,
or as they should perhaps be called that of Alexandria and that of Pergamus, we
must remember that by no care could the manuscripts have escaped the wear and
tear of time, and lived till printing came into use. We have very few
manuscripts on vellum more than a thousand years old, and most of those volumes
were written on papyrus, a much less lasting substance. Hence we must think
only of what the men of learning then lost, and of the copies that might have
been made from them.
When Egypt was conquered by the Arabs in the
seventh century, and the schools of Alexandria were overthrown, and the books
fell into the hands of men with so little knowledge that they could burn them,
we see at once that we should have gained little by their being left unhurt,
but at the same time unread and uncopied. And though it was otherwise when the
library of the Museum was burnt by Julius Caesar, when the schools, crowded
with foreign students, were at once robbed of their books, and the writers, who
were there earning their livelihood by copying, were at once stopped in their
work, yet the loss was more easily repaired from the other copies in the hands
of the learned. Upon the whole it may perhaps be shown that the loss to the world
of the numerous valuable Greek works is more owing to the cloud of darkness
which over-
MARC
spread Europe in the middle ages, than to any
such accidents; yet when we read of the beauties of the poets and orators now
lost, and of the historians who could have filled up for us the great gaps
which disfigure history, the student cannot help setting down much of his loss
to the burning of these great libraries in Alexandria.
But to return to our history. When
He called together the Alexandrians, and seating
himself and Cleopatra on two golden thrones, he declared her son Caesarion her
colleague, and that they should hold
The death of Julius Caesar and afterwards of
Brutus and Cassius [Plutarch.
208 CLEOPATRA.
'The
Imperator
[Plutarch.
[Plutarch.
HER DEATH. 209
before their fall: but while they were wasting
these few weeks in pleasure, Octavianus was moving his fleet and army upon
When he landed on the coast,
On the death of
210 CAESARION PUT TO DEATH.
[Lucanus, lib. x. 360.] in his way. The
flatterers of the conqueror would of course say that Caesarion was not the son
of Julius, but of Ptolemy, the elder of the two boys who had been called the
husbands of Cleopatra. The feelings of humanity might have added that he was
the only son of the uncle to whom Octavianus owed every thing; that he was
helpless and friendless, being cast off as illegitimate both by Alexandria and
by Rome; and that he never could trouble the undisputed [Plutarch.
While we have in this history been looking at
the Romans from afar, and only seen their dealings with foreign kings, we have
been able to note some of the changes in their manners nearly as well as if we
had stood in the Forum. When Epiphanes, Philometor, and Euergetes II. owed
their crowns to Roman help,
REMARKS. 211
and the Egyptian monarchy was left to stand in
the reigns of Auletes and Cleopatra, because the Romans were still more greedy
than when they seized
Thus fell the family of the Ptolemies, a family
that had perhaps done more for arts and letters than any that can be pointed
out in history. Like other kings who have bought the praises of poets, orators,
and historians, they may have smothered the fire which they seemed to foster,
and have misled the talents which they wished to guide; but in rewarding the
industry of the mathematicians and anatomists, of the critics, commentators,
and compilers, they seem to have been highly successful.
It is true that Alexandria never sent forth
works with the high tone of philosophy, the lofty moral aim, and the pure taste
which mark the writings of Greece in its best ages, and which ennoble the mind
and mend the heart; but it was the school to which the world long looked for
knowledge in all those sciences which help the body and improve the arts of
life, and which are sometimes called useful knowledge. It was almost the
birth-place of anatomy, geometry, conic sections, geography, astronomy, and
hydrostatics.
If we retrace the steps by which this Graeco-Egyptian
monarchy rose and fell, we shall see that virtue and vice, wisdom and folly,
care and thoughtlessness were for the most part followed by the rewards which
to us seem natural.
We see in Ptolemy Soter plain manners, careful
plans, untiring activity, and a wise choice of friends. By him talents were
highly
212 REMARKS.
paid wherever they were found; no service left
unrewarded; the people trusted and taught the use of arms, their love gained by
wise laws and even-handed justice; docks, harbours, and fortresses built,
schools opened; and by these means a great monarchy founded.
Ptolemy was eager to fill the ranks of his
armies with soldiers, and his
Before the death of Ptolemy Soter the habits of
the people had so closely entwined themselves round the throne that
Philadelphus was able to take the kingdom and the whole of its wide provinces
at the hands of his father as a family estate. He did nothing to mar his
father's wise plans which then ripened into fruit-bearing. Trade crowded the
harbours and markets, learning filled the schools, conquests rewarded the
discipline of the fleets and armies; power, wealth, and splendour followed in
due order. The blaze thus cast around the throne would by many kings have been
made to stand in the place of justice and mildness, but under Philadelphus it
REMARKS. 213
only threw a light upon his good government. He
was acknowledged both at home and abroad to be the first king of his age;
Greece and its philosophers looked up to him as a friend and patron; and though
as a man he must take rank far below his father, by whose wisdom the eminence
on which he stood was raised, yet in all the gold and glitter of a king
Philadelphus was the greatest of his family.
The Egyptians had been treated with kindness by
both of these Greek kings. As far as they had been able or willing to copy the
arts of
But in the next reign the fruits of this change
were seen to be most unfortunate. Philopator was an eastern despot, surrounded
by eunuchs and drowned in pleasures. The country was governed by his women and
vicious favourites. The army, which at the beginning of his reign amounted to
seventy-three thousand men beside the garrisons, was at first weakened by
rebellion, and before
214 REMARKS.
the end of his reign it had fallen to pieces like
a rope of sand. Nothing however happened to prove his weakness to surrounding
nations; Egypt was still the greatest of kingdoms, though Rome on the conquest
of Carthage, and Syria under Antiochus the Great, were fast gaining ground upon
it; but he left to his infant son a throne shaken to the very foundations.
The ministers of Epiphanes, the infant autocrat,
found the government without a head and without an army, the treasury without
money, and the people without virtue or courage; and they at once threw the
kingdom into the hands of the Romans, to save it from being shared between the
kings of
During the latter half of this history the
kingdom was under the shield, but also under the sceptre of
REMARKS. 215
scarcely be said to fall when it became a part
of the great empire of Augustus.
During these reigns the style of building, the
religion, the writing, and the language of the Copts in the Thebaid were nearly
the same as when their own kings were reigning in
The change of fashion must needs be slow in
buildings which are only raised by the untiring labour of years, and which when
built stand for ages; but in the later temples we find less strength as
fortresses, few obelisks or sphinxes, and no colossal statues or pyramids.
Into the religion there was brought a second
Osiris, with a bull's head, as judge of the dead, named Serapis; a second
Horus, with a hawk's head, which made it necessary to call the other one Aroëris,
or the elder Horus; a second Anubis, with a dog's head, most likely the same
god as Macedo, from whom the Macedonian kings were said to have sprung; while
the trinities, or groups of three, into which these Egyptian polytheists, like
the Hindoos, arranged their gods, became less common.
Many new characters crept into the
hieroglyphics, as the camelopard, the mummy lying on a couch, the ship with
sails, and the chariot with horses; there were more words spelt with letters,
the groups were more crowded, and the titles of the kings within the ovals
became much longer.
With the papyrus, which was becoming common
about the time of the Persian invasion, we find the running hand, the enchorial
or common writing, as it was called, coming into use, in which
216 REMARKS.
there were few symbols, and most of the words
were spelt with letters. Each letter was of the easy sloping form, which came
from its being made with a reed or pen, instead of the stiff form of the
hieroglyphics, which were mostly cut in stone. But there is a want of neatness
which has thrown a difficulty over them, and made these writings less easy to
read than the hieroglyphics.
Least of all can we trace the changes in the
language, which is only really known to us through the Bible, which was
translated into Coptic, with Greek letters, about two centuries after the fall
of the Ptolemies. The language of the old hieroglyphics seems to have been
nearly the same as this, but they must be much better understood than they are
before we can point out the changes in the language in which they were written.
When the country fell into the hands of
Augustus, the Copts were in a much lower state than when conquered by
Alexander. They had been slaves for three hundred years, sometimes trusted and
well-treated, but more often trampled on and ground down with taxes and
cruelty. They had never held up their heads as freemen or felt themselves lords
of their own soil: they had fallen off in numbers, in wealth, and in knowledge:
nothing was left to them but their religion, their temples, their
hieroglyphics, and the painful remembrance of their faded glories.
THE END.
217
INDEX OF NAMES.
Abraham,
1.
Achaemenes,
16.
Achillas,
194.
Achoris,
17.
AElius Catus, 127.
AEschylus, 25.
Agathoclea, 117.
Agathocles, 117.
Agathocles, son of Lysim. 60.
Agesilaus of
Alexander the Great, 19.
Alexander AEgus, 41.
Alexander Balas, 150.
Alexander Jannaeus, 167.
Amasis, 14.
Ammonius, 150.
Alexander of Barce. 113.
Amosis,
5.
Amru
ben al Aas. 205.
Amunaan,
9.
Amunmai-Thor,
6.
Amunothph,
6.
Amyrtaeus
of Sais, 17.
Anamek. 9.
Ananias, 165.
Andraeus, 87.
Andromachus, 113.
Antigonus, 41.
Antigonus of
Antiochus Soter, 70.
Antiochus Theos, 91.
Antiochus Hierax, 98.
Antiochus the Great, 113.
Antiochus Epiphanes, 137.
Antiochus Grypus, 162.
Antiochus Cyzicenus, 164.
Antiochus of
Antipater of
Antiochus of
Antiphilus, 58.
Apelles, 57.
Apime, wife of Magas, 70.
Apollonius Rhodius, 106.
Apollonius of Perga, 108.
Apollonius of Cittium, 191.
Apollonius son of Mnestheus, 137.
Apophis, 4.
Apries, 14.
Aratus, 81.
Aratus of Sycion, 86.
Arcesilaus, 160.
Archelaus, 184.
Archimedes of
Archias, 150.
Arete. 79.
Argaeus, 61.
Ariarathes, 150.
Aristaeus, 87.
Aristaeus Battus, 23.
Aristarchus, 146.
Aristarchus of
Aristillus, 80.
Aristippus. 79.
Aristo of
Aristobulus the peripatetic, 160.
Aristobulus son of Hyrcanus, 167.
Aristomenes, 123.
Aristonicus, 133.
Aristophanes the grammarian, 104.
Aristus of
Arrian, 40.
Arridaeus, 33.
Arsinoë Philadelphus, 89.
Arsinoë Philopator, 114.
Arsinoë dau. of Auletes, 195.
Arsinoë mother of Soter, 27.
Arsinoë daughter of Lysimachus, 88.
Artaxerxes, 16.
Artaxerxes Mnemon, 17.
Asclepiades, 61.
Aaseth, 5.
Athinis, 134.
Atilius Calatinus, 75.
Attalus of Pergamus, 150, 161.
Aurelius Cotta, 180.
Avienus, translator of Aratus, 82.
Batis, 19.
Battus, 14.
Berenice Soter, 60.
Berenice Euergetis, 98.
Berenice dau. of Auletes, 182.
Berenice daughter of Philadelphus, 91.
Bion. 147.
Bocchoris, 12.
Brutus, 199.
Caesar, 195.
Caesarion, 197.
Callimachus, 78.
Callixenes, 69.
Cambyses, 15.
Cassander, 41.
Cassius, 199.
218 INDEX OF NAMES.
Cassius Longinus, 140.
Cato, 181.
Chabrias, 18.
Chaereas, 170.
Chebros, 6.
Chelcias, 165.
Chesuphis, 134.
Chrysippus, 18.
Cleanthes, 118.
Cleombrotus of
Cleomenes, 26.
Cleomenes of
CLEOPATRA, 193.
CLEOPATRA Cocca, 163.
CLEOPATRA Berenice, 177.
CLEOPATRA daug. of Philip, 52.
CLEOPATRA Epiphanes, 133.
CLEOPATRA Philometor, 139.
CLEOPATRA dau. of Philom, 150.
CLEOPATRA Tryphaena, 182.
CLEOPATRA Selene, 203.
CLEOPATRA daughter of Euergetes II, 162.
Cline,
87.
Cnopias,
113.
Colotes,
85.
Conon,
98.
Comelia,
141.
Cosmas
Indicopleustes, 102.
Crates of Pergamus, 146.
Ctesibius, 77.
Ctesidemus, 58.
Darius Hystaspes, 16.
Darius Nothus, 17.
Darius Codomanus, 20.
Dellius, 199.
Demetrius, son of Antig. 42.
Demetrius Soter, 140.
Demetrius Nicator, 151.
Demetrius Phalerius, 75.
Demetrius the Platonist, 179.
Didymus, 198.
Dinochares,
91.
Dinocrates,
22.
Dio,
175.
Diodorus
Cronus, 58.
Diodorus
Siculus, 185.
Dionysus,
113.
Dioscorides,
198.
Doloaspis,
24.
Dositheus.
144.
Echecrates,
113.
Eirene,
153.
Eleazar,
87.
Eliakim,
13.
Ephippus,
25.
Erasistratus,
92.
Eratosthenes,
104.
Ergamenes,
91.
Euclid,
57, 76.
Eudoxus,
18, 77.
Eudoxus
Cyzicenus, 159.
Eugnostus,
25.
Eulaius, 137.
Eumenes of
Eumenes of Pergamus, 161.
Eurydice, 60.
Eurylochus, 113.
Fulvia,
202.
Fabius
Pictor, 72.
Gabinius,
183.
Ganimedes,
196.
Germanicus
Caesar, 82.
Grinnus,
23.
Ham,
2.
Hannibal,
116.
Hecataeus,
48.
Hegesias,
78, 85.
Hegelochus,
157.
Helena,
86.
Hellanicus,
17.
Heraclitus,
175.
Hercules,
son of Alexander, 52
Hermophantus,
85.
Hero,
148.
Herod, 204.
Herodotus, 16.
Herophilus, 93.
Hezekias, 51.
Hierax, 156.
Hiero of
Hipparchus, 147.
Hippocrates, 77, 93.
Hiram, 11.
Homer the younger, 160.
Hophra, 14.
Hoshea, 13.
Hyrcanus, son of Joseph, 117.
Ichonuphys, 18.
Inarus, 16.
Iphicrates of
Irobashtus, 134.
Jehoahaz, 13.
Jesus, son of Sirach, 108.
John of
Josiah, 13.
Joseph, 4.
Joseph, nephew of Onias, 102.
Juventius Thalna, 141.
Lagus,
27.
Laodice,
97.
Leneus,
137.
Lentulus
Sura, 180.
Leon,
77.
Leontiscus,
53.
Lepidus,
126.
Licinius
Crassus, 180.
Lucullus, 175.
Lycon of
Lycophron, 107.
Lysandra, 60.
Lysimachus of
Lysimachus son of Philadelphus, 89.
Magas, 69.
Magas son of Euergetes, 111.
Malichus. 204.
Manetho, 83.
INDEX OF NAMES. 219
Marius, 172.
Marsyas, 157.
Mazakes, 20.
Megabazus, 16.
Melanthius, 86.
Memphites, 157.
Menander, 85.
Menedemus, 88, 108.
Menelaus, son of Lagus, 53.
Menophres,
7.
Mesphra
Thothmosis, 6.
Metrodidactus,
79.
Mithridates
of Pontus, 175.
Mithridates
of Pergamus,
197.
Moeris, 7.
Moschus of
Mosollam, 51.
Muthes, 17.
Neacles, 86.
Nebuchadnezzar, 13.
Nechepsus, 13.
Necho, 13.
Nectanebo, 17, 19.
Nepherites, 17.
Nicander, 147.
Nicanor,
35.
Nicocreon,
42.
Nileus,
75.
Nitocris,
7.
Octavianus, 199.
OEnanthe, 117.
Ogulnius, 72.
Omar, 206.
Onias, 102.
Onias of Leontopolis, 144.
Osirei, 9.
Osirtesen, 3.
Osorkon, 12.
Pamphilus,
86.
Panaretus,
160.
Pantaleon,
24.
Pausiris,
17.
Pedius,
156.
Perdiccas,
28.
Petisis,
24.
Petosiris, 84.
Pharnabazus, 17.
Philammon, 117.
Philetas of
Philiscus, 67.
Philip, father of Magas, 60.
Philip Amyntas, 27.
Philip Arridaeus, 28.
Philip king of
Philo, 175.
Philo Judaeus,
205.
Philostephanus,
79.
Philotas,
203.
Philotera,
61.
Photinus,
193.
Phoxidas,
113.
Plancus,
201.
Plato,
18.
Plutarch,
188, 203.
Polemon,
24.
Polybius,
136.
Polycrates,
113.
Polysperchon,
52.
Pompey,
193.
Popilius,
140.
Posiris,
134.
Psammenitus,
15.
Psammetichus,
13, 14.
Paammo,
25.
Psammuthes,
17.
PTOLEMY
SOTER, 31.
PTOLEMY
PHILADELPHUS, 65.
PTOLEMY
EUERGETES, 97.
PTOLEMY
PHILOPATOR, 111.
PTOLEMY
EPIPHANES, 121.
PTOLEMY
PHILOMETOR, 137.
PTOLEMY
EUERGEES II. 153.
PTOLEMY
SOTER II. 164, 173.
PTOLEMY
ALEXANDER, 167.
PTOLEMY
ALEXANDER II. 178.
PTOLEMY
NEUS DION. 179.
Ptolemy Ceraunus, 60.
Ptolemy Eupator, 153.
Ptolemy Apion, 171.
Ptolemy king of
Ptolemy son of Auletes, 197.
Ptolemy son of
Ptolemy son of Thaseas, 113.
Ptolemy son of Agesarchus, 119.
Ptolemy Macron, 139.
Pythagoras, 15.
Python, 35.
Rabirius Posthumus, 184.
Rameses,
9.
Rehoboam,
11.
Roxana,
51.
Sabaces,
20.
Sabacon,
12.
Salatis, 4.
Satyrus, 90.
Scipio Africanus the younger, 154.
Scopas,
125.
Scylax,
157.
Selene,
162.
Seleucus,
41.
Seleucus
Callinicus, 97.
Seleucus
Cybiosactes, 184.
Sensuphis,
4.
Serapion,
199.
Sesostris,
12.
Sevechus,
12.
Shishank, 11.
Silius, 175.
Simon Maccabaeus, 156.
So, 13.
Socrates of
Solomon, 11.
Solon, 15.
Sosibius, 111.
Sosibius the younger, 124.
Sosibius the philosopher, 82.
Sosigenes, 198.
Sositheus, 160.
220 INDEX OF NAMES.
Sostratus. 73.
Sotades, 89.
Sphaerus, 118.
Strato, 80.
Straton of
Suphis, 4.
Sylla,
177.
Tachus, 18.
Takelothe, 12.
Tetrilius, 175.
Thais, 60.
Theatetus. 77.
Theocritus, 73, 77.
Theodorus, 80.
Theodotus, 113.
Thermus, 153.
Thothmosis, 7, 9.
Tigranes, 207.
Timaeus,
119.
Timocharis, 80.
Timon, 83.
Timosthenes, 84.
Tirhakah, 13.
Tlepolemus, 118.
Tryphaena, 162.
Tyrrhus, 170.
Valerius, 137.
Venephres, 2.
Xerxes,
16.
Zenodotus,
76.
Zoilus, 82.
Zopyrus, 191.
1838.