The orders of Sulla, the Roman dictator, were of course obeyed; and the young Alexander landed at Alexandria, as King of Egypt and the friend of Rome. He married Berenicê; and on the nineteenth day of his reign, with a cruelty unfortunately too common in this history, he put her to death. The marriage had been forced upon him by the Romans, who ordered all the political affairs of the kingdom; but, as they took no part in the civil or criminal affairs, he seems to have been at liberty to murder his wife. But Alexander was hated by the people as a king thrust upon them by foreign arms; and Berenicê, whatever they might have before thought of her, was regretted as the queen of their choice. Hence his crime met with its reward. His own guards immediately rose upon him; they dragged him from the palace to the gymnasium, and there put him to death.
Though the Romans had already seized the smaller kingdom of Cyrene under the will of Ptolemy Apion, they could not agree among themselves upon the wholesale robbery of taking Egypt under the will which Alexander had made in their favour. They seized, however, a paltry sum of money which he had left at Tyre as a place of safety; and it was a matter of debate for many years afterwards in Rome, whether they should not claim the kingdom of Egypt. But the nobles of Rome, who sold their patronage to kings for sums equal to the revenues of provinces, would have lost much by handing the kingdom over to the senate. Hence the Egyptian monarchy was left standing for two reigns longer.
On the death of Ptolemy Alexander, the Alexandrians might easily have changed their weak and wicked rulers, and formed a government for themselves, if they had known how. The legitimate male line of the Ptolemies came to an end on the death of the young Alexander II. The two natural sons of Soter II. were then the next in succession; and, as there was no other claimant, the crown fell to the elder. He was young, perhaps even a minor under the age of fourteen. 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 it written in the hieroglyphics, though he is usually called Auletes, the piper; a name afterwards given him because he was more proud of his skill in playing on the flute than of his very slender knowledge of the art of governing.
It was in this reign that the historian Diodorus Siculus travelled in Egypt, and wrote his account of the manners and religion of the people. What he tells us of the early Egyptian history is of little value when compared with the history by Manetho, who was a native of the country and could read the hieroglyphic records, or even with that by Herodotus; but nevertheless he deserves great praise, and our warmest thanks, for being nearly the first Greek writer when Egyptian learning could no longer be thought valuable; when the religion, though looked down upon, might at any rate be studied with ease—for being nearly the first writer who thought the manners of this ancient people, after they had almost passed off the page of history, worth the notice of a philosopher.
Diodorus never quotes Manetho, but follows Herodotus in making one great hero for the chief actions of antiquity, whom he calls Sesoosis or Sesonchosis. To him he assigns every great work of which the author was unknown, the canals in the Delta, the statue of Amenhôthes III., the obelisks of Ramses II., the distant navigation under Necho, the mounds and trenches dug against Assyrian and Persian invasion, and even the great ship of Ptolemy Philopator; and not knowing that Southern Arabia and even Ethiopia had by the Alexandrians been sometimes called India, he says that this hero conquered even India beyond the Ganges. On the other hand, the fabulous conquest of the great serpent, the enemy of the human race, which we see sculptured on the sarcophagus of Oimenepthah, he describes as an historic fact of the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus. He tells us how this huge beast, forty-five feet long, was beaten down by troops of archers, slingers, and cavalry, and brought alive in a net to Alexandria, where Eve’s old enemy was shown in a cage for the amusement of the curious citizens.
Memphis was then a great city; in its crowded streets, its palaces and temples, it was second only to Alexandria. A little to the west stood the pyramids, which were thought one of the seven wonders of the world. Their broad bases, sloping sides, and solid masonry had withstood the weather for ages; and their huge unwieldy stones were a less easy quarry for after builders than the live rock when nearer to the river’s side. The priests of Memphis knew the names of the kings who, one after the other, had built a new portico to their great temple of Phtah; but as to when or by whom the pyramids were built, they had perhaps less knowledge than the present day historian. The modern Egyptologist, with his patient investigation, assigns the largest of these three pyramids to Khûfûi or Kheops, a famous ruler of the fourth dynasty, and the others were erected by his immediate successors. The temple of Phtah, and every other building of Memphis, is now gone, and near the spot stands the great city of Cairo, whose mosques and minarets have been quarried of its ruins, but the pyramids still stand, after fifty-six centuries of broken and changing history, unbroken and unchanged. They have outlived any portion of time that their builders could have dreamed of, but their worn surface no longer declares to us their builders’ names and history. Their sloping sides, formed to withstand attacks, have not saved the inscriptions which they once held; and the builders, in thus 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 leaned upon the poet and historian.
The beautiful temples of Dendera and Latopolis, which were raised by the untiring industry of ages and finished, under the Roman emperors, were begun about this reign. 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 Upper Egypt were still building for immortality. The religion of the Kopts was still flourishing.
The Egyptian’s opinion of the creation was the growth of his own river’s bank. The thoughtful man, who saw the Nile every year lay a body of solid manure upon his field, was able to measure against the walls of the old temples that the ground was slowly but certainly rising. An increase of the earth was being brought about by the river. Hence he readily believed that the world itself had of old been formed out of water, and by means of water. The philosophers were nearly of the same opinion. They held that matter was itself eternal, like the other gods, and that our world, in the beginning, before it took any shape upon itself, was like thin mud, or a mass of water containing all things that were afterwards to be brought forth out of it. When the water had by its divine will separated itself from the earth, then the great Ra, the sun, sent down his quickening heat, and plants and animals came forth out of the wet-land, as the insects are spawned out of the fields, before the eyes of the husbandman, every autumn after the Nile’s overflow has retreated. The crafty priests of the Nile declared that they had themselves visited and dwelt in the caverns beneath the river, where these treasures, while yet unshaped, were kept in store and waiting to come into being.