Without altering local conditions, Syria gradually came under the sway of the Egyptian satraps. Laomedon found means of escaping from Egypt; he fled to Alcetas in Caria, who had just withdrawn himself to the mountainous regions of Pisida, thence to begin the decisive war against Antigonus.
In the earlier times of Egyptian history, when navigation was less easy, and when seas separated kingdoms instead of joining them, the Thebaid enjoyed, under the Koptic 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 Egypt was an inland kingdom, surrounded by the desert; but Egypt under Ptolemy was country on the sea-coast; and, on the conquest of Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, he was master of the forests of Lebanon and Antilibanus, and stretched his coast from Cyrene to Antioch, a distance of twelve hundred miles. The wise and mild plans which were laid down by Alexander for the government of Egypt when a province were easily followed by Ptolemy when it became his own kingdom. The Greek soldiers lived in their garrisons or in Alexandria under the Macedonian laws, while the Egyptian laws were administered by their own priests, who were upheld in all the rights of their order and in their freedom from land-tax. The temples of Phtah, of Amon-Ra, and the other gods of the country were not only kept open, but were repaired and even built at the cost of the king; the religion of the people, and not that of their rulers, was made the established religion of the state. On the death of the god Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, 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 $42,500, 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 burial-place for the bulls is an arched gallery tunnelled into the hill behind Memphis for more than two thousand feet, with a row of cells on each side of it. In every cell is a huge granite sarcophagus, within which were placed the remains of a bull that had once been the Apis of its day, which, after having for perhaps twenty years received the honours of a god, was there buried with more than kingly state. The cell was then walled up, and ornamented on the outside with various tablets in honour of the deceased animal, which were placed in these dark passages by the piety of his worshippers. The priests of Thebes were now at liberty to cut out from their monuments the names of usurping gods, and to restore those that had been before cut out. They also rebuilt the inner room, or the holy of holies, in the great temple of Karnak.
It had been overthrown by the Persians in wantonness, or in hatred of the Egyptian religion; and the priests now put upon it the name of Philip Arridæus, for whom Ptolemy was nominally governing Egypt.
The Egyptians, who during the last two centuries had sometimes seen 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 good 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; that, as compared with the Greeks, they felt themselves an inferior race, 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 Thûtmosis and Ramses. Thebes was every day sinking in wealth and strength; and its race of hereditary soldiers, proud in the recollection of former glory, who had, after centuries of struggles, been forced to receive laws from Memphis, perhaps yielded obedience to a Greek conqueror with less pain than they did formerly to their own vassals of Lower Egypt.
Ptolemy’s government was in form nearly the same in Alexandria as in the rest of Egypt, but in reality it was wholly different. His sway over the Egyptians was supported by Greek force, but over the Greeks it rested on the broad base of public opinion. Every Greek had the privilege of bearing arms, and of meeting in the gymnasium in public assembly, to explain a grievance, and petition for its redress. The citizens and the soldiers were the same body of men; they at the same time held the force, and had the spirit to use it. But they had no senate, no body of nobles, no political constitution which might save their freedom in after generations from the ambitious grasp of the sovereign, or from their own degeneracy. While claiming to be equal among themselves they were making themselves slaves; and though at present the government so entirely bore the stamp of their own will that they might fancy they enjoyed a democracy, yet history teaches us that the simple paternal form of government never fails to become sooner or later a cruel tyranny. The building of Alexandria must be held the master-stroke of policy by which Egypt was kept in obedience. Here, and afterwards in a few other cities, such as Ptolemais in the Thebaid and Parembole in Nubia, the Greeks lived without insulting or troubling the Egyptians, and by their numbers held the country like so many troops in garrison. It was a wise policy to make no greater change than necessary in the kingdom, and to leave the Egyptians under their own laws and magistrates, and in the enjoyment of their own religion; and yet it was necessary to have the country garrisoned with Greeks, whose presence in the old cities could not but be extremely galling to the Egyptians. This was done by means of these new Greek cities, where the power by which Egypt was governed was stronger by being united, and less hateful by being out of sight. Seldom or never was so great a monarchy founded with so little force and so little crime.