CHAPTER III.—PTOLEMY PHILADELPHUS. B.C. 284-246
We know of few princes who ever mounted a throne with such fair prospects before them as the second Ptolemy. He was born in Cos, an island on the coast of Caria, which the Ptolemies kept as a family fortress, safe from Egyptian rebellion and Alexandrian rudeness, and, while their fleets were masters of the sea, safe from foreign armies. 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 first studied letters and philosophy under Philetas of Cos, an author of some elegies and epigrams now lost; and as he grew up, he found himself surrounded by all the philosophers and writers with whom his father mixed on the easiest terms of friendship. During the long reign of Ptolemy Soter the people had been made happy by wise regulations and good laws, trade had been flourishing, the cities had greatly prospered, and the fortresses had been everywhere strengthened.
The Grecian troops were well trained, their loyalty undoubted, and the Egyptians were enrolled in a phalanx, armed and disciplined like the Macedonians. The population of the country was counted at seven millions. Alexandria, the capital of the kingdom, was not only the largest trading city in the world, but was one of the most favoured seats of learning. It surely must have been easy to foresee that the prince, then mounting the throne, even if but slightly gifted with virtues, would give his name to a reign which could not be otherwise than remarkable in the history of Egypt. But Philadelphus, though like his father he was not free from the vices of his times and of his rank, had more of wisdom than is usually the lot of kings; and, though we cannot but see that he was only watering the plants and gathering the fruit where his father had planted, yet we must at the same time acknowledge that Philadelphus was a successor worthy of Ptolemy Soter. He may have been in the twenty-third year of his age when his father gave up to him the cares and honours of royalty.
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, as we learn from the sculptures in the old tombs, was copied rather from the triumphs of Ramses and Thûtmosis than from anything that had been seen in Greece.
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, which made the air fragrant with the scent. Then came forty dancing 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 in gold and scarlet, carrying golden 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 Isis in a robe of yellow and gold. Then came a chariot full of grapes, and another with a large cask of wine, which was poured out on the road, as the procession moved on, and at which the eager crowd filled their jugs and drinking-cups. Then came another band of satyrs and Sileni, and more chariots of wine; then eighty Delphic vases of silver, and Panathenaic and other vases; and sixteen hundred dancing boys in white frocks and golden crowns: then a number of beautiful pictures; and a chariot carrying a grove of trees, out of which flew pigeons and doves, so tied that they might be easily caught by the crowd.
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 some kind of stags, seven by gazelles, four by wild asses, fifteen by buffaloes, eight by ostriches, and seven by stags of some other kind. Then came chariots loaded with the tributes of the conquered nations; men of Ethiopia carrying 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; proving to the wondering crowd the variety and strangeness of the countries that owned their monarch’s sway.
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 other gods. Then came crowds of singers and cymbal-players, and two thousand bulls with gilt horns, crowns, and breast-plates. Then came Amon-Ra and 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; 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 thirty thousand dollars; 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 costly Eastern scents, and fifty-seven thousand six hundred foot soldiers, and twenty-three thousand two hundred horse. The procession began moving by torchlight before day broke in the morning, and the sun set in the evening before it had all passed on its way.
It went through the streets of Alexandria to the royal tents on the outside of the city, where, as in the procession, everything that was costly in art, or scarce in nature, was brought together in honour of the day. At the public games, as a kind of tax or coronation money, twenty golden crowns were given to Ptolemy Soter, twenty-three to Berenice, and twenty to their son, the new king, beside other costly gifts; and two thousand two hundred and thirty-nine talents, or one million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, 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 Egypt, and who wrote a history of Alexandria.
Ptolemy Soter lived two years after he had withdrawn himself from the cares of government; and the weight of his name was not without its use in adding steadiness to the throne of his successor. Instead of parcelling out his wide provinces among his sons as so many kingdoms, he had given them all to one son, and that not the eldest; and on his death the jealousy of those who had been disinherited and disappointed broke out in rebellion.
It is with peculiar interest that we hear in this reign for the first time that the bravery and rising power of the Romans had forced themselves into the notice of Philadelphus. Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus, had been beaten by the Romans, and driven out of Italy; and the King of Egypt thought it not beneath him to send 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 three ambassadors, two of the proud name of Fabius, with Quintus Ogulnius, were sent back to seal the treaty. 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 thanks of the senate for having done their duty. This treaty was never broken; and in the war which broke out in the middle of this reign between Rome and Carthage, usually called the first Punic war, when the Carthaginians 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 Egypt in alliance with Rome. But we also find that they were day by day changing place with one another: Egypt soon began to sink, while Rome was rising in power; Egypt soon received help from her stronger ally, and at last became a province of the Roman empire.
At the time of this embassy, when Greek arts were nearly unknown 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 one of them, Quintus Ogulnius, together with Caius Fabius Pictor, were chosen consuls, they coined silver for the first time in Rome. With them begins the series of consular denarii, which throws such light on Roman life and history.
About the middle of this reign, Berenicê, 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 like his father, dating from the beginning of his father’s reign. In the year after her death, the great feast of Osiris, in the month of Mesore, was celebrated at Alexandria with more than usual pomp by the Queen Arsinoë. Venus, or Isis, had just raised Berenice to heaven; and Arsinoë, in return, showed her gratitude by the sums of money spent on the feast of Osiris, or Adonis as he was sometimes called by the Greeks. Theocritus, who was there, wrote a poem on the day, and tells us of the crowds in the streets, of the queen’s gifts to the temple, and of the beautiful tapestries, on which were woven the figures of the god and goddess breathing as if alive; and he has given a free translation of the Maneros, the national poem in which the priests each year consoled the goddess Isis for the death of Osiris, which was sung through the streets of Alexandria by a Greek girl in the procession. One of the chief troubles in the reign of Philadelphus was the revolt of Cyrene. The government of that part of Africa had been entrusted to Magas, the half-brother of the king, a son of Berenice by her former husband. Berenice, who had been successful in setting aside Ceraunus to make room for her son Philadelphus on the throne of Egypt, has even been said to have favoured the rebellious and ungrateful efforts of her elder son Magas to make himself King of Cyrene. 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 Cyrene by the news of the rising of the Marmaridas, the race of Libyan herdsmen that had been driven back from the coast by the Greek settlers who founded Cyrene. Philadelphus then led his army along the coast against the rebels; but he was, in the same way, stopped by the fear of treachery among his own Gallic mercenaries. With a measured cruelty which the use of foreign mercenaries could alone have taught him, he led back his army to the marshes of the Delta, and, entrapping the four thousand distrusted Gauls* on one of the small islands, he hemmed them in between the water and the spears of the phalanx, and they all died miserably, by famine, by drowning, or by the sword.
* It is not known for certain from what part of the world
these Gauls were recruited. The race known as Gallic was at
one time spread over a wide district from Gallicia in the
East to Gallia in the West.
Magas had married Apime, the daughter of Antiochus Soter, King of Syria; and he sent to his father-in-law to beg him to march upon Coele-Syria and Palestine, to call off the army of Philadelphus from Cyrene. But Philadelphus did not wait for this attack: his armies moved before Antiochus was ready, and, by a successful inroad upon Syria, he prevented any relief being sent to Magas.
After the war between the brothers had lasted some years, Magas made an offer of peace, which was to be sealed by betrothing his only child, Berenicê, to the son of Philadelphus. To this offer Philadelphus yielded; as by the death of Magas, who was already worn out by luxury and disease, Cyrene would then fall to his own son. Magas, indeed, died before the marriage took place; but, notwithstanding the efforts made by his widow to break the agreement, the treaty was kept, and on this marriage Cyrene again formed part of the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt.
The black spot upon the character of Philadelphus, which all the blaze of science and letters by which he was surrounded can not make us overlook, is the death of two of his brothers: a son of 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, Argasus, who was also charged with joining in a plot; both lost their lives by his orders.
It was only in the beginning of this reign, after Egypt had been for more than fifty years under the rule of the Macedonians, that the evils which often follow conquest were brought to an end. Before this reign no Greek was ever known to have reached Elephantine and Syênê or Aswan since Herodotus made his hasty tour in the Thebaid; and during much of the last reign no part of Upper Egypt was safe for a Greek traveller, if he were alone, or if he quitted the highroad. The peasants, whose feelings of hatred we can hardly wonder at, waylaid the stragglers, and Egyptian-like as the Greeks said, or slave-like as it would be wiser to say, often put them to death in cold blood. But a long course of good government had at last quieted the whole country, and left room for further improvements by Philadelphus.
Among other buildings, Philadelphus raised a temple in Alexandria to the honour 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. He also built a temple to Ceres and Proserpine, and then the Eleusinian mysteries were taught in Alexandria to the few who were willing and worthy to be admitted. The southeast quarter of the city in which this temple stood was called the Eleusinis; and here the troop of maidens were to be seen carrying the sacred basket through the streets, and singing hymns in honour of the goddess; while they charged all profane persons, who met the procession, to keep their eyes upon the ground, lest they should see the basket and the priestesses, who were too pure for them to look upon.
In this reign was finished the lighthouse on the island of Pharos, as a guide to ships when entering the harbour of Alexandria by night. The navigation of the waters 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 little vessels from the south of Arabia, that they always chose the most southerly port in which they could meet the Egyptian buyers. The merchants with their bales of goods found a journey on camels through the desert, where the path is marked only by the skeletons of the animals that have died upon the route, less costly than a coasting voyage. Hence, when Philadelphus had made the whole of Upper Egypt to the cataracts at Aswan (Syênê) as quiet and safe as the Delta, he made a new port on the rocky coast of the Red Sea, nearly two hundred miles to the south of Cosseir, and named it Berenicê after his mother. He also built four public inns, or watering-houses, where the caravans might find water for the camels, and shelter from the noonday sun, on their twelve days’ journey through the desert from Koptos on the Nile to this new port. He rebuilt, and at the same time renamed, the old port of Cosseir, or Ænnum as it was before called, and named it Philotera after his younger sister. The trade which thus passed down the Nile from Syênê, from Berenicê, and from Philotera, paid a toll or duty at the custom-house station of Phylake a little below Lycopolis on the west bank of the river, where a guard of soldiers was encamped; and this station gradually grew into a town.
Philadelphus also built a city on the sands at the head of the Red Sea, near where Suez now stands, and named it Arsinoë, after his sister; and he again opened the canal which Necho II. and Darius had begun, by which ships were to pass from the Nile to this city on the Red Sea. This canal began in the Pelusiac branch of the river, a little above Bubastis, and was carried to the Lower Bitter Lakes in the reign of Darius. From thence Philadelphus wished to carry it forward to the Red Sea, near the town of Arsinoë, and moreover cleared it from the sands which soon overwhelmed it and choked it up whenever it was neglected by the government. But his undertaking was stopped by the engineers finding the waters of the canal several feet lower than the level of the Red Sea; and that, if finished, it would become a salt-water canal, which could neither water the fields nor give drink to the cities in the valley. He also built a second city of the name of Berenicê, called the Berenicê Epidires, at the very mouth of the Red Sea on a point of land where Abyssinia is hardly more than fifteen miles from the opposite coast of Arabia. This naming of cities after his mother and sisters was no idle compliment; they probably received the crown revenues of those cities for their personal maintenance.
With a view further to increase the trade with the East, Philadelphus sent Dionysius on an expedition overland to India, to gain a knowledge of the country and of its means and wants. He went by the way of the Caspian Sea through Bactria, in the line of Alexander’s march. He dwelt there, at the court of the sovereign, soon after the time that Megasthenes was there; and he wrote a report of what he saw and learned. But it is sad to find, in our search for what is valuable in the history of past times, that the information gained on this interesting journey of discovery is wholly lost.
In the number of ports which were then growing into the rank of cities, we see full proof of the great trade of Egypt at that time; and we may form some opinion of the profit which was gained from the trade of the Red Sea from the report of Clitarchus to Alexander, that the people of one of the islands would give a talent of gold for a horse, so plentiful with them was gold, and so scarce the useful animals of Europe; and one of the three towns named after the late queen, on that coast, was known by the name of the Nubian or Golden Berenicê, from the large supply of gold which was dug from the mines in the neighbourhood. In latitude 17°, separated from the Golden Berenicê by one of the forests of Ethiopia, was the new city of Ptolemais, which, however, was little more than a post from which the hunting parties went out to catch elephants for the armies of Egypt. Philadelphus tried to command, to persuade, and to bribe the neighbouring tribes not to kill these elephants for food, but they refused all treaty with him; these zealous huntsmen answered that, if he offered them the kingdom of Egypt with all its wealth, they would not give up the pleasure of catching and eating elephants. The Ethiopian forests, however, were able to supply the Egyptian armies with about one elephant for every thousand men, which was the number then thought best in the Greek military tactics. Asia had been the only country from which the armies had been supplied with elephants before Philadelphus brought them from Ethiopia.
The temple of Isis among the palm groves in Philæ, a rocky island in the Nile near the cataracts of Syênê, was begun in this reign, though not finished till some reigns later. It is still the wonder of travellers, and by its size and style proves the wealth and good taste of the priests. But its ornaments are not so simple as those of the older temples; and the capitals of its columns are varied by the full-blown papyrus flower of several sizes, its half-opened buds, its closed buds, and its leaves, and by palm-branches. It seems to have been built on the site of an older temple which may have ‘been overthrown by the Persians. This island of Philo is the most beautiful spot in Egypt; where the bend of the river just above the cataracts forms a quiet lake surrounded on all sides by fantastic cliffs of red granite. Its name is a corruption from Abu-lakh, the city of the frontier. This temple was one of the places in which Osiris was said to be buried. None but priests ever set foot on this sacred island, and no oath was so binding as that sworn in the name of Him that lies buried in Philæ. The statues of the goddess in the temple were all meant for portraits of the queen Arsinoë. The priests who dwelt in the cells within the courtyards of the temples of which we see the remains in this temple at Philæ, were there confined for life to the service of the altar by the double force of religion and the stone walls. They showed their zeal for their gods by the amount of want which they were able to endure, and they thought that sitting upon the ground in idleness, with the knees up to the chin, was one of the first of religious duties.
The Museum of Alexandria held at this time the highest rank among the Greek schools, whether for poetry, mathematics, astronomy, or medicine, the four branches into which it was divided. Its library soon held two hundred thousand rolls of papyrus; which, however, could hardly have been equal to ten thousand printed volumes. Many of these were bought by Philadelphus in Athens and Rhodes; and his copy of Aristotle’s works was bought of the philosopher Nileus, who had been a hearer of that great man, and afterwards inherited his books through Theophrastus, to whom they had been left by Aristotle. The books in the museum were of course all Greek; the Greeks did not study foreign languages, and thought the Egyptian writings barbarous.
At the head of this library had been Demetrius Phalereus, who, after ruling Athens with great praise, was banished from his country, and fled to Ptolemy Soter, under whom he consoled himself for the loss of power in the enjoyment of literary leisure. He was at the same time the most learned and the most polished of orators. He brought learning from the closet into the forum; and, by the soft turn which he gave to public speaking, made that sweet and lovely which had before been grave and severe. Cicero thought him the great master in the art of speaking, and seems to have taken him as the model upon which he wished to form his own style. He wrote upon philosophy, history, government, and poetry; but the only one of his works which has reached our time is his treatise on elocution; and the careful thought which he there gives to the choice of words and to the form of a sentence, and even the parts of a sentence, shows the value then set upon style. Indeed he seems rather to have charmed his hearers by the softness of his words than to have roused them to noble deeds by the strength of his thoughts. He not only advised Ptolemy Soter what books he should buy, but which he should read, and he chiefly recommended those on government and policy; and it is alike to the credit of the king and of the librarian, 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. 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 lost his place at the head of the museum, and been ordered to leave Alexandria. He died, as courtiers say, in disgrace; and he was buried near Diospolis in the Busirite nome of the Delta. According to one account he was put to death by the bite of an asp, in obedience to the new king’s orders, but this story is not generally credited; although this was not an uncommon way of inflicting death.
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 is also known as the first of those Alexandrian critics who turned their thoughts towards mending the text of Homer, and to whom we are indebted for the tolerably correct state of the great poet’s works, which had become faulty through the carelessness of the copiers. Zenodotus was soon followed by other critics in this task of editing Homer. But their labours were not approved of by all; and when Aratus asked Timon which he thought the best edition of the poet, the philosopher shrewdly answered, “That which has been least corrected.”
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 invaluable work on geometry. This is one of the few of the scientific writings of the ancients that are still in use. 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. Euclid did so; and his Elements have been for more than two thousand years the model for all writers on geometry. He begins at the beginning, and leads the learner, step by step, from the simplest propositions, called axioms, which rest upon metaphysical rather than mathematical proof, to high geometrical truths. The mind is indeed sometimes wearied by being made to stop at every single step in the path, and wishes, with Ptolemy Soter, for a shorter road; but, upon the whole, Euclid’s clearness has never been equalled.
Ctesibus wrote on the theory of hydrostatics, and was the inventor of several water-engines; an application of mathematics which was much called for by the artificial irrigation of Egypt. He also invented that useful instrument, the water-clock, to tell the time after sunset.
Among the best known of the men of letters who came to Alexandria to enjoy the patronage of Philadelphus was Theocritus. Many of his poems are lost; but his pastoral poems, though too rough for the polished taste of Quintilian, and perhaps more like nature than we wish any works of imitative art to be, have always been looked upon as the model of that kind of poetry. If his shepherds do not speak the language of courtiers, they have at least a rustic propriety which makes us admire the manners and thoughts of the peasant. He repaid the bounty of the king in the way most agreeable to him; he speaks of him as one
to freemen kind,
Wise, fond of books and love, of generous mind;
Knows well his friend, but better knows his foe;
Scatters his wealth; when asked he ne’er says No,
But gives as kings should give.
Idyll, xiv. 60.
Theocritus boasted that he would in an undying poem place him in the rank of the demigods; and, writing with the pyramids and the Memnonium before his eyes, assured him that generosity towards the poets would do more to make his name live for ever than any building that he could raise.
In a back street of Alexandria, in the part of the city named Eleusinis, near the temple of Ceres and Proserpine, lived the poet Callimachus, earning his livelihood by teaching. But the writer of the Hymns could not long dwell so near the court of Philadelphus unknown and unhonoured. He was made professor of poetry in the museum, and even now repays the king and patron for what he then received. He was a man of great industry, and wrote in prose and in all kinds of verse; but of these only a few hymns and epigrams have come down to our time. Egypt seems to have been the birthplace of the mournful elegy, and Callimachus was the chief of the elegiac poets. He was born at Cyrene; and though, from the language in which he wrote, his thoughts are mostly Greek, yet he did not forget the place of his birth. He calls upon Apollo by the name of Carneus, because, after Sparta and Thera, Cyrene was his chosen seat. He paints Latona, weary and in pain in the island of Delos, as leaning against a palm-tree, by the side of the river Inopus, which, sinking into the ground, was to rise again in Egypt, near the cataracts of Syênê; and, prettily pointing to Philadelphus, he makes Apollo, yet unborn, ask his mother not to give birth to him in the island of Cos, because that island was already chosen as the birthplace of another god, the child of the gods Soteres, who would be the copy of his father, and under whose diadem both Egypt and the islands would be proud to be governed by a Macedonian.
The poet Philastas, who had been the first tutor of Philadelphus, was in elegy second only to Callimachus; but Quintilian (while advising us about books, to read much but not many) does not rank him among the few first-rate poets by whom the student should form his taste; and his works are now lost. He was small and thin in person, and it was jokingly said of him that he wore leaden soles to his shoes lest he should be blown away by the wind. But in losing his poetry, we have perhaps lost the point of the joke. While these three, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Philastas, were writing in Alexandria, the museum was certainly the chief seat of the muses. Athens itself could boast of no such poet but Menander, with whom Attic literature ended; and him Philadelphus earnestly invited to his court. He sent a ship to Greece on purpose to fetch him; but neither this honour nor the promised salary could make him quit his mother country and the schools of Athens; and, in the time of Pausanias, his tomb was still visited by the scholar on the road to the Pmeus, and his statue was still seen in the theatre.
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 Phil-adelphus; and the king showed his gratitude to his teacher by making him a present of eighty talents, or sixty thousand dollars. He was for eighteen years at the head of one of the Alexandrian schools.
Timocharis, the astronomer, made some of his observations at Alexandria in the last reign, and continued them through half of this reign. He began a catalogue of the fixed stars, with their latitudes and their longitudes measured from the equinoctial point; by the help of which Hipparchus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, made the great discovery that the equinoctial point had moved. He has left an observation of the place of Venus, on the seventeenth day of the month of Mesore, in the thirteenth year of this reign, which by the modern tables of the planets is known to have been on the eighth day of October, B.C. 272; from which we learn that the first year of Philadelphus ended in October, B.C. 284, and the first year of Ptolemy Soter ended in October, B.C. 322; thus fixing the chronology of these reigns with a certainty which leaves nothing to be wished for. Aris-tillus also made some observations of the same kind at Alexandria. Few of them have been handed down to us, but they were made use of by Hipparchus.
Aristarchus, the astronomer of Samos, most likely came to Alexandria in the last reign, as some of his observations were made in the very beginning of the reign of Philadelphus. He is the first astronomer who is known to have taken the true view of the solar system. He said that the sun was the centre round which the earth moved in a circle; and, as if he had foreseen that even in after ages we should hardly be able to measure the distance of the fixed stars, he said that the earth’s yearly path bore no greater proportion to the hollow globe of the heavens in which the stars were set, than the point without size in the centre of a circle does to its circumference. But the work in which he proved these great truths, or perhaps threw out these happy guesses, is lost; and the astronomers who followed him clung to the old belief that the earth was the centre round which the sun moved. The only writings of Aristarchus which now remain are his short work on the distances and magnitude of the sun and moon, in which the error in his results arises from the want of good observations, rather than from any mistake in his mathematical principles.
Aratus, who was born in Cilicia, is sometimes counted among the pléiades, or seven stars of Alexandria. His Phenomena is a short astronomical poem, without life or feeling, which scarcely aims at any of the grace or flow of poetry. It describes the planets and the constellations one by one, and tells us what stars are seen in the head, feet, and other parts of each figure; and then the seasons, and the stars seen at night at each time of the year. When maps were little known, it must have been of great use, to learners; and its being in verse made it the more easy to remember. The value which the ancients set upon this poem is curiously shown by the number of Latin translations which were made from it. Cicero in his early youth, before he was known as an orator or philosopher, perhaps before he himself knew in which path of letters he was soon to take the lead, translated this poem. The next translation is by Germanicus Cæsar, 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 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. Aratus, the poet of the heavens, will be read, said Ovid, as long as the sun and moon shall shine.
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, Sosigines, Bion, and Apollonius, and showing to the critic 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. Other authors wrote on lighter matters. Apollodorus Gelous, the physician, addressed to Philadelphus a volume of advice as to which Greek wines were best fitted for his royal palate. The Italian and Sicilian were then unknown in Egypt, and those of the Thebaid were wholly beneath his notice, while the vine had as yet hardly been planted in the neighbourhood of Alexandria. He particularly praised the Naspercenite wine from the southern banks of the Black Sea, the Oretic from the island of Euboea; the OEneatic from Locris; the Leuca-dian from the island of Leucas; and the Ambraciote from the kingdom of Epirus.
But above all these he placed the Peparethian wine from the island of Peparethus, a wine which of course did not please the many, as this experienced taster acknowledges that nobody is likely to have a true relish for it till after six years’ acquaintance. 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, wrote in Greek a history of Egypt, copied from the hieroglyphical writing on the temples, and he dedicated it to the king. We know it only in the quotations of Josephus and Julius Africanus, and what we have is little more than a list of kings’ names. He was a priest of Heliopolis, the great seat of Egyptian learning. The general correctness of Manetho’s history, which runs back for nearly two thousand years, is shown by our finding the kings’ names agree with many Egyptian inscriptions. Manetho owes his reputation to the merit of being the first who distinguished himself as a writer and critic upon religion and philosophy, as well as chronology and history, using the Greek language, but drawing his materials from native sources, especially the Sacred Books. That he was “skilled in Greek letters”: we learn from Josephus, who also declares that he contradicted many of Herodotus’ erroneous statements. Manetho was better suited for the task of writing a history of Egypt than any of his contemporaries.
As an Egyptian he could search out and make use of all the native Egyptian sources, and, thanks to his knowledge of Greek, he could present them in a form intelligible to the Hellenes. It must be confessed that he has occasionally fallen into the error of allowing Greek thoughts and traditions to slip into his work. The great worth in Manetho’s work lies in the fact that he relates the history of Egypt based on monumental sources and charters preserved in the temples. Moreover, he treats quite impartially the times of the foreign rulers, which the form of the Egyptian history employed by Diodorus does not mention; but above all, Manetho gives us a list of Egyptian rulers arranged according to a regular system. But however important in this respect Manetho’s work may be, it must not be forgotten what difficulties he had to contend with in the writing of it, and what unreliable sources lay in these difficulties. He could not use the sources in the form in which he found them. He was obliged to re-write them, and he added to them synchronisms and relations to other peoples which necessarily exposed him to the dangers of colouring his report correspondingly.
But a much greater difficulty consisted in the fact that the chronological reports of the earlier history were all arranged according to the reigning years of the rulers, so that Manetho was obliged to construct an era for his work. Boeckh was the first to discover with certainty the existence and form of this era. According to his researches, the whole work of Manetho is based upon Sothicycles of 1460 Julianic years. The Egyptian year was movable, and did not need the extra day every few years, but the consequence was that every year remained a quarter of a day behind the real year.
When 1460-1 years had elapsed this chronological error had mounted to a whole year, and so the movable year and the fixed year fell together again. It is this Sothic period which Manetho has employed in his account of Egyptian history. Besides 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 by Manetho are lost, the copiers and readers of manuscripts have carefully saved for us this nearly worthless poem on astrology.
Petosiris was another writer on astrology and astronomy who was highly praised by his friend Manetho; and his calculations on the distances of the 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. Like Manetho, he also wrote on the calculation of nativities; and the later Greek astrologers, when what they had foretold did not come to pass, were wont to lay the blame on Petosiris. The priests were believed to possess these and other supernatural powers; and to help their claims to be believed many of them practised ventriloquism.
Timosthenes, the admiral under 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. Colotes, a pupil and follower of Epicurus, dedicated to Philadelphus 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 it is impossible even to support life according to the philosophical rules of any but the Epicureans.” 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 Phila-delphus, who employed Hegesias to read Herodotus, and Hermophantus to read Homer, the earliest historian and the earliest poet, the two authors who had taken deepest root in the minds of the Greeks. These public readings, which were common throughout Greece and its colonies, had not a little effect on the authors. They then wrote for the ear rather than the eye, to be listened to rather than to be read, which was one among the causes of Greek elegance and simplicity of style.
Among others who were brought to Alexandria by the fame of Philadelphus’ bounty was Zoilus, the grammarian, whose ill-natured criticism on Homer’s poems had earned for him the name of Homeromastix, or the scourge of Homer. He read his criticisms to Philadelphus, who was so much displeased with his carping and unfair manner of finding fault, that he even refused to relieve him when in distress. The king told him, that while hundreds 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 the faults.
Timon, a tragic poet, was also one of the visitors to this court; but, as he was more fond of eating and drinking than of philosophy, we need not wonder at our knowing nothing of his tragedies, or 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 calls them literary fighting-cocks, who were being fattened by the king, and were always quarrelling in the coops of the museum.
The Alexandrian men of science and letters maintained themselves, some few by fees received from their pupils, others as professors holding salaries in the museum, and others by civil employments under the government. There was little to encourage in them the feelings of noble pride or independence. The first rank in Alexandria was held by the civil and military servants of the crown, who enjoyed the lucrative employments of receiving the taxes, hearing the lawsuits by appeal, and repressing rebellions. With these men the philosophers mixed, not as equals, but partaking of their wealth and luxuries, and paying their score with wit and conversation. There were no landholders in the city, as the soil of the country was owned by Egyptians; and the wealthy trading classes, of all nations and languages, could bestow little patronage on Greek learning, and therefore little independence on its professors.
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 to him, as for political reasons. Aratus, the chief of Sicyon, was an acknowledged judge of paintings, and Sicyon was then the first school of Greece. The pieces which he sent to Philadelphus were mostly those of Pamphilus, the master, and of Melanthius, the fellow-pupil, of Apelles. Pamphilus was famed for his perspective; and he is said to have received from every pupil the large sum of ten talents, or seven thousand five hundred dollars, a year. His best known pieces were, Ulysses in his ship, and the victory of the Athenians near the town of Phlius. It was through Pamphilus that, at first in Sicyon, and afterwards throughout all Greece, drawing was taught to boys as part of a liberal education. 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.
Helena, the daughter of Timon, was a painter of some 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 Vespasian 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 Alexander, in his tent, raised up from their knees the wife and lovely daughter of Darius, who had been found among the prisoners. As for the Egyptians, they showed no taste in painting.
Their method of drawing the human figure mathematically by means of squares, which was not unsuitable in working a statue sixty feet high, checked all flights of genius; and it afterwards destroyed Greek art, when the Greek painters were idle enough to use it. We hear but little of the statues and sculptures made for Philadelphus; 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 of Egypt.
The favour shown to the Jews by Ptolemy Soter was not withdrawn by his son. He even bought from his own soldiers and freed from slavery one hundred and twenty thousand men of that nation, who were scattered over Egypt. He paid for each, out of the royal treasury, one hundred and twenty drachmas, or about fifteen dollars, to those of his subjects who held them either by right of war or by purchase. In fixing the amount of the ransom, the king would seem to have been guided by his Jewish advisers, as this is exactly equal to thirty shekels, the sum fixed by the Jewish law as the price of a slave. The Jews who lived in Lower Egypt, in the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, looked upon that country as their home. They had already a Greek translation of either the whole or some part of their sacred writings, which had been made for those whose families had been for so many generations in Egypt that they could not read the language of their forefathers. But they now hoped, by means of the king’s friendship and the weight which his wishes must carry with them, to have a Greek translation of the Bible which should bear the stamp of official authority.
Accordingly, to please them, Philadelphus sent Aris-taaus, a man whose wisdom had gained his friendship, and Andrseus, 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. Eleazer, so runs the tradition, named seventy elders to undertake the task, who held their first sitting on the business at the king’s dinner-table; when Menedemus, the Socratic philosopher, the pupil of Plato, was also present, who had been sent to Philadelphus as ambassador from Eubcea. The translators then divided the work among themselves; and when each had finished his task it wras laid before a meeting of the seventy, and then published by authority. Thus was said to have been made the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which, from the number of the translators, we now call the Septuagint; but a doubt is thrown upon the whole story by the fables which have been mingled with it to give authority to the translation. By this translation the Bible became known for the first time to the Greek philosophers. We do not indeed hear that they immediately read it or noticed it, we do not find it quoted till after the spread of Christianity; but it had a silent effect on their opinions, which we trace in the new school of Platonists soon afterwards rising in Alexandria.
When Aratus of Sicyon first laid a plot to free his country from its tyrant, who reigned by the help of the King of Macedonia, he sent to Philadelphus to beg for money. He naturally looked to the King of Egypt for help when entering upon a struggle against their common rival; but the king seems to have thought the plans of this young man too wild to be countenanced. Aratus, however, soon raised Sicyon 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 Macedonia; 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 forty-five thousand dollars, and joined the Achaian league, on the agreement that in carrying on the war by sea and land they should obey the orders from Alexandria.
The friendship of Philadelphus, indeed, was courted by all the neighbouring states; the little island of Delos set up its statue to him; and the cities of Greece vied with one another in doing him honour. The Athenians named one of the tribes of their city and also one of their public lecture-rooms by his name; and two hundred years afterwards, when Cicero and his friend Atticus were learning wisdom and eloquence from the lips of Antiochus in Athens, it was in the gymnasium of Ptolemy.
Philadelphus, when young, had married Arsinoë, the daughter of Lysimachus of Thrace, by whom he had three children, Ptolemy, who succeeded him, Lysimachus, and Berenicê; but, having found that his wife was intriguing with Amyntas, and with his physician Chrysippus of Rhodes, he put these two to death and banished the Queen Arsinoë to Koptos 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 Thrace, and then Ceraunus, her half-brother, when he was King of Macedonia. As they were not children of the same mother, this second marriage was neither illegal nor improper in Macedonia; but her third marriage with Philadelphus could only be justified by the laws of Egypt, their adopted country. They were both past the middle age, and whether Philadelphus looked upon her as his wife or not, at any rate they had no children. Her own children by Lysimachus had been put to death by Ceraunus, and she readily adopted those of her brother with all the kindness of a mother. She was a woman of an enlarged mind; her husband and her stepchildren 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 seeming marriage, however, between brother and sister did not escape blame with the Greeks of Alexandria. The poet Sotades, whose verses were as licentious as his life, wrote some coarse lines against the queen, for which he was forced to fly from Egypt, and, being overtaken at sea, he was wrapped up in lead and thrown overboard.
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. 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 reign. The wealth of the country is well shown by the great size of those most in use, which were, in gold the tetra-stater or piece of eight drachms, and in silver the tetra-drachma, or piece of four drachms, while Greece had hardly seen a piece of gold larger than the single stater. In Alexandrian accounts also the unit of money was the silver didrachm, and thus double that in use among the merchants of Greece.
Among the coins is one with the heads of Soter and Philadelphus on the one side, and the head of Berenicê, 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 Berenicê, with the title of “the gods,” and on the other side the heads of Philadelphus and his wife Arsinoë, with the title of “the brothers.” This was struck after the death of his parents. A third was struck by the king in honour of his queen and sister. On the one side is the head of the queen, and on the other is the name of “Arsinoë, the brother-loving,” with the cornucopia, or horn of Amalthea, an emblem borrowed by the queens of Egypt from the goddess Amalthea, the wife of the Libyan Anion. This was struck after his second marriage.
On the death of Arsinoë, Philadelphus built a tomb for her in Alexandria, called the Arsinoëum, and set up in it an obelisk eighty cubits high, which had been made by King Nectanebo, but had been left plain, without carving.
Satyrus, the architect, had the charge of moving it. He dug a canal to it as it lay upon the ground, and moved two heavily laden barges under it. The burdens were then taken out of the barges, and as they floated higher they raised the obelisk off the ground. He then found it a task as great or greater to set it up in its place; and this Greek engineer must surely have looked back with wonder on the labour and knowledge of mechanics which must have been used in setting up the obelisks, colossal statues, and pyramids, which he saw scattered over the country. This obelisk now ornaments the cathedral of the Popes on the Vatican hill at Rome. Satyrus wrote a treatise on precious stones, and he also carved on them with great skill; but his works are known only in the following lines, which were written by Diodorus on his portrait of Arsinoë cut in crystal:
E’en Zeuxis had been proud to trace
The lines within this pebble seen;
Satyrus here hath carved the face
Of fair Arsinoë, Egypt’s queen;
But such her beauty, sweetness, grace,
The copy falls far short, I ween.
Two beautiful cameos cut on sardonyx are extant, one with the heads of Philadelphus and his first wife, Arsinoe, and the other with the heads of the same king and his second wife, Arsinoë. It is not impossible that one or both of them may be the work of Satyrus.
Philadelphus is also said to have listened to the whimsical proposal of Dinochares, the architect, to build a room of loadstone in Arsinoë’s 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. He set up there, however, her statue six feet high, carved out of a most remarkable block of topaz, which had been presented to his mother by Philemon, the prefect of the Troglodytic coast in the last reign.
Philadelphus lived in peace with Ergamenes, King of Meroë or Upper Ethiopia, 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 Ethiopia and Egypt had always limited the power of their kings. The King of Meroë had hitherto reigned like Amenôthes or Thutmosis of old, as the head of the priesthood, supported and controlled by the priestly aristocracy by which he was surrounded. But he longed for the absolute power of Philadelphus. Accordingly he surrounded the golden temple with a chosen body of troops, and put the whole of the priests to death; and from that time he governed Ethiopia as an autocrat. But, with the loss of their liberties, the Ethiopians lost the wish to guard the throne; by grasping at more power, their sovereign lost what he already possessed; and in the next reign their country was conquered by Egypt.
The wars between Philadelphus and his great neighbour, Antiochus Theos, seem not to have been carried on very actively, though they did not wholly cease till Philadelphus offered as a bribe his daughter Berenicê, 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 political ambition had deadened the feelings of his heart, and 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 Berenicê, should inherit the throne of Babylon and the East. Philadelphus, with an equal want of feeling, and disregarding the consequences of such a marriage, led his daughter to Pelusium on her journey to her betrothed husband, and sent with her so large a sum of gold and silver that he was nicknamed the “dower-giver.”
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 Syria, was much struck by the beauty of a statue of Diana, and begged it of Antiochus as an ornament for Alexandria. But as soon as the statue reached Egypt, Arsinoë fell dangerously ill, and she dreamed that the goddess came by night, and told her that the illness was sent to her for the wrong done to the statue by her husband; and accordingly it was sent back with many gifts to the temple from which it had been brought.
While Berenicê and her husband lived at Antioch, Philadelphus kindly sent there from time to time water from the sacred Nile for her use, as the Egyptians believed that none other was so wholesome. Antiochus, when ill, sent to Alexandria for a physician; and Cleombrotus of Cos accordingly went, by command of Ptolemy, to Syria. He was successful in curing the king, and on his return he received from Philadelphus a present of one hundred talents, or seventy-five thousand dollars, as a fee for his journey.
Philadelphus was a weak frame of body, and had delicate health; and, though a lover of learning beyond other kings of his time, he 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 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 to wish that he could change places with the beggar whom he saw from his palace windows, eating the garbage on the banks of the Nile with an appetite which he had long wanted. It was during illness that he found most time for reading, and his mind most open to the truths of philosophy; and he chiefly wooed the Muses when ill health left him at leisure from his other courtships. He had a fleet of eight hundred state barges with gilt prows and poops and scarlet awnings upon the decks, which were used in the royal processions and religious shows, and which usually lay in dock at Schedia, on the Canopic River, five and twenty miles from Alexandria. He was no doubt in part withheld from war by this luxurious love of ease; but his reign taught the world the new lesson, that an ambitious monarch may gratify his wish for praise and gain the admiration of surrounding nations, as much by cultivating the blessed arts of peace as by plunging his people into the miseries of war.
He reigned over Egypt, with the neighbouring parts of Arabia; also over Libya, Phoenicia, Cole-Syria, part of Ethiopia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Lycia, Caria, Cyprus, and the isles of the Cyclades. The island of Rhodes and many of the cities of Greece were bound to him by the closest ties of friendship, for past help and for the hope of future. The wealthy cities of Tyre and Sidon did homage to him, as before to his father, by putting his crowned head upon their coins. The forces of Egypt reached the very large number of two hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horse, two thousand chariots, four hundred Ethiopian elephants, fifteen hundred ships of war and one thousand transports. Of this large force, it is not likely that even one-fourth should have been Greeks; the rest must have been Egyptians and Syrians, with some Gauls. The body of chariots, though still forming part of the force furnished for military service by the Theban tenants of the crown, was of no use against modern science; and the other Egyptian troops, though now chiefly armed and disciplined like Greeks, were very much below the Macedonian phalanx in real strength. The galleys also, though no doubt under the guidance and skill of Greeks and Phoenicians, were in part manned by Egyptians, whose inland habits wholly unfitted them for the sea, and whose religious prejudices made them feel the conscription for the navy as a heavy grievance.
These large forces were maintained by a yearly income equally large, of fourteen thousand eight hundred talents, or twelve million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, beside the tax on grain, which was taken in kind, of a million and a half of artabas, or about five millions of bushels. To this we may add a mass of gold, silver, and other valuable stores in the treasury, which were boastfully reckoned at the unheard-of sum of seven hundred and forty thousand talents, or above five hundred million dollars.
The trade down the Nile was larger than it had ever been before; the coasting trade on the Mediterranean was 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. Athens had no poets or other writers during this century equal in merit to those who ennobled the museum. 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 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 Phoenicia and Asia Minor; 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 Kopts. 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 free state, we can hardly believe that the Egyptians would have been so well treated as they were by this military despotism. From the temples which were built or enlarged in Upper Egypt, and from the beauty of the hieroglyphical inscriptions, we find that even the native arts were more flourishing than they had ever been since the fall of the kings of Thebes; and we may almost look upon the Greek conquest as a blessing to Upper Egypt.
Philadelphus, though weak in body, was well suited by his keen-sightedness and intelligence for the tasks which the state of affairs at that time demanded from an Egyptian king. He was a diplomat rather than a warrior, and that was exactly what Egypt needed.
A curious anecdote about Ptolemy Philadelphus is related by Niebuhr. He had reached the zenith of his glory, when suddenly he was attacked by a species of insanity, consisting of an indescribable fear of death. Chemical artifices were practised in Egypt from the earliest times; and hence Ptolemy took every imaginable pains to find the elixir of life; but it was all in vain, for his strength was rapidly decreasing. Once, like Louis XI., he was looking from a window of his palace upon the seacoast, and seriously meditated upon the subject of his longing; it must have been in winter-time, when the sand, exposed to the rays of the sun, becomes very warm. He saw some poor boys burying themselves in the warm sand and screaming with delight, and the aged king began bitterly to cry, seeing the ragged urchins enjoying their life without any apprehension of losing it; for he felt that with all his riches he could not purchase that happiness, and that his end was very near at hand. He died in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, and perhaps the sixty-first of his age. He left 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 plans of the first Ptolemy.
