V
THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES
The death of Alexander the Great was followed by some days of indescribable confusion. When a certain semblance of order was restored the view was officially promulgated that he had not died at all, but had simply "departed from the life among men." His memory was, accordingly, not damned; and, in a sense, his presence in the world which he had transformed continued to be recognized. But not in any real sense. The imperial coins, wherever issued, bore for some time the great king's face as Zeus Ammon; but no imperial cult existed to bring steadily to men's consciousness the idea that their dead lord had an honored place among the Olympians. It was not by the will of those who succeeded to his power, but by the force of historic developments, that his acta were validated.
His heirs were the Macedonians whom he had recently tried to oust from their ancestral partnership with him. They were now to be found, partly in Macedon, partly in detachments throughout the empire, and partly in Babylon where Alexander had died. Those in Babylon took it upon themselves to act for the whole people; and what they did was to establish a regency in the interest of Philip Arrhidæus and the son whom Roxane was expected to bear, and to concur in the "grab" of the important western satrapies which was at once made by their chief officers.
It was they, too, who decided not to proceed with Alexander's ambitious projects. These, as read to them from his papers,[77] were "to build in Phœnicia, Syria, Cilicia, and Cyprus one thousand battleships of the super-trireme pattern for the campaign against the Carthaginians and the other peoples dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean from Libya and Iberia clear round to Sicily; to construct a road along the coast from Cyrene to the Pillars of Hercules, and prepare harbors and naval stations at suitable places; to erect six temples at the enormous cost of $1,890,000 each (fifteen hundred talents); to found cities and transplant men and women both from Asia into Europe and from Europe into Asia, thus linking the two greatest continents by understandings based upon friendly intercourse and by brotherly feeling due to intermarriages." Alexander, it appeared, had looked upon his work as only half done: the Macedonians were eager to enjoy the fruits of an enterprise which they regarded as already finished.
Their sentiment was shared by Ptolemy, son of Lagos, formerly one of Alexander's aides. He had married a Persian princess at Alexander's order, but now he deserted her, and, taking his Athenian mistress, Thais, with him, he went off to Egypt, which had been given to him as his province. There he established himself securely, governed with power and sagacity for forty years, and, marrying in succession two Macedonian princesses, founded a dynasty which gave to Egypt its last great queen, Cleopatra VI, and prior to her accession, ten kings,[78] all of whom were named Ptolemy. Between them they reigned two hundred and seventy-one years; the average length of the reign was over thirty-two years; several of them were expelled temporarily and several of them had colleagues, but nine of them died in possession of the throne. That constitutes a statistical record which it is hard to parallel in all history.
It would be a fascinating study of human enterprise and human depravity to trace the careers of these eleven monarchs. But to do so would be to exhaust the space at my disposal without reaching the special subject of my essay. It must suffice, therefore, to observe that the history of the Ptolemies falls into an imperial period of four reigns and one hundred and twenty years (323-203 B.C.); and a domestic period, likewise of one hundred and twenty years (200-80 B.C.), in which the native peoples, encouraged by the weakness of the Ptolemies abroad, and by a ruinous schism between the military and the civil elements of the foreign-resident population, gained point after point at the expense of the dynasty. A third period follows of fifty years' duration, in which Egypt was at the mercy, not now of the Roman Senate, but of the all-powerful generals who had dethroned it.
The last king of Egypt, Ptolemy the Piper, a bastard by birth and instinct, demeaned himself for twenty-eight years (80-52 B.C.); but by bankrupting his treasury and sacrificing the good opinion of his countrymen, he managed to transmit a badly tarnished crown to his famous daughter, then a girl of seventeen years.
Cleopatra VI had an asset of much greater value than the servility and buffoonery of her father, namely, her personal attractiveness. She early lost all repugnance against using her physical charms, as well as her even more notable mental graces, in what, with all our dislike for the imperial courtesan, we must characterize as her gallant and patriotic effort to rescue her country from the spoiler, to make the queen of Egypt the consort instead of the slave of the coming Roman monarch, to set proud Alexandria beside imperious Rome at the head of the Mediterranean peoples.
She gave herself to Julius Cæsar; bore him a son; left her kingdom and joined him in Rome, where Cicero and others paid her court in Cæsar's gardens, wondering, perhaps, if she was to become their titular queen. In contemporary documents Cæsar is called "the savior and benefactor of the inhabitable world"; and during the last year of his life he was busied with projects of universal empire. He meant to add the districts not yet Roman to his realm, to subdue the Getæ, the Scythians, and the Parthians. Why was not Egypt, the richest prize of all, included in the list of his intended conquests? It was the country which he had tried over twenty years earlier to secure as his own province. But that was before he had met Cleopatra. That he left it out of the military programme on which he was engaged at the time of his murder shows, I think, that Cleopatra's solution of the Egyptian question was likely to be his also.