Ten years later Alexandria witnessed an extraordinary spectacle.[79] On a stage plated with silver two thrones of gold stood, and on them sat side by side Antony as Dionysus and Cleopatra as Isis. At their feet sat Cæsarion, Cleopatra's son by Cæsar, and on a level with him Alexander, her oldest son by Antony, in Persian costume and with the tiara of the Persian kings. Lower down sat Alexander's twin sister, Cleopatra Selene, and at her side her younger brother, Philadelphus, in Macedonian costume and with the headgear of the kings of Macedon. The significance of the tableau Antony himself explained: Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, Cyprus, and Cœle-Syria, was henceforth 'queen of queens'; her son, Cæsarion, 'king of kings.' Alexander was declared king of Armenia and of the states lying between the Euphrates and India, Philadelphus, of Syria and all the lands between the Euphrates and the Hellespont, Cleopatra Selene, queen of Libya including Cyrene. It was the restoration of the ancient empire of the Ptolemies, and in Antony "captured Italy" was symbolized. The Alexandrian siren had regained what her ancestors had lost; and, had the Roman whom she had enthralled only proved equal to the task of maintaining his initial ascendency in Italy, she might, indeed, have fulfilled her boast and administered justice on the Capitol. But Antony went down to defeat at Actium and the young Augustus came to Egypt, like the comrades of Ulysses to the shore of the tempters, with his ears stuffed with wax.
Pascal[80] says: Le nez de Cléopâtre: s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé. But Pascal speaks as a philosopher. He probably did not know that Cleopatra had a prominent nose. He was certainly ignorant that her death made little or no difference in the constitutional position of Egypt. In a sense Augustus was simply the executor of the great queen's policy; for, after his reorganization of the Roman empire was completed, "it is," as Mommsen[81] says, "quite as correct to say that the kings of Egypt ruled in Rome as that the prince of the Roman people reigned in the valley of the Nile." Be that as it may, the empire of the Ptolemies could not have been recalled from the past even by the magic of a woman's beauty; for, as we shall see when we come to look at the second period of its history, the death it had died was a natural one. It had but experienced the fate to which its constitution made it prone. It was beset from its birth with incurable weaknesses.
None the less it made a brave show during the first century of its existence; and during the reign of its second monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), its capital, Alexandria, was the London of the ancient world. Its only rival in trade and commerce was its neighbor to the west, Carthage. The golden age of the Ptolemies coincides with the one epoch in the history of the world in which Africa was the leader in business enterprise, in money power, in naval strength, in luxury, in science, and, till the real test came, in political prestige and influence. The commercial aristocracy of Carthage and the enlightened despots of Alexandria had the Mediterranean divided between them. West of Sicily lay a Carthaginian lake, into which foreign ships entered at their own peril; east of it, the chief harbors in the whole circuit from Cyrene to Corcyra, as well as the islands which lay in the area thus inclosed, the Ptolemies aimed to secure. Possession of the sea between Egypt and the Græco-Macedonian world and of the coasts which it washed and the islands which it surrounded, was the main object of the foreign policy of the early Ptolemies.
The founder of the dynasty was a brave soldier, but a cautious general. Again and again he withdrew from Asia before a land attack and put his main reliance upon the natural defenses of Egypt. He was no sailor at all; yet he became an admiral, and as the result of three great maritime expeditions (308-306, 295-294, 288-287 B.C.), he handed over to his unwarlike son the essential body of the possessions of the family outside of Egypt. The founder of the dynasty was at the same time the founder of the empire.
The Solomon of the Ptolemies, Philadelphus, is addressed by Theocritus,[82] a Sicilian poet who had recently come to Alexandria looking for a patron, in the following adulatory strains:—
"Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise,
Three thousand, yea three myriad; and o'er all
He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy.
Claims half Phœnicia, and half Araby,
Syria and Libya, and the Æthiops murk;
Sways the Pamphylian and Cilician braves,
The Lycian and the Carian trained to war,
And all the isles; for never fleet like his
Rode upon ocean: land and sea alike
And sounding rivers hail King Ptolemy."
The hero of these lines had just brought a war against his brother in Cyrene and his rival in Asia to a successful termination (273 B.C.); and, except for a probable interval of four years (253-249 B.C.), the invincible fleet which he then possessed ruled the sea till his death. But he was anything but a warrior king. During his whole life he never commanded an army or a fleet in person. Like Augustus Cæsar, with whom he has been compared, he had a delicate constitution which unfitted him for the rough and tumble of war. He had a lively intelligence, which was carefully cultivated, and, like the Emperor Hadrian, an insatiable thirst for novelties. A new book, an old painting, a strange animal, a useful invention, alike aroused his curiosity. One amazing woman—his own sister—swept him from his self-indulgent moorings. She made herself his wife—as any Egyptian woman might do with her brother—and, though she was his queen for six years at most (275-270 B.C.), when she was over forty and he over thirty-two, he followed her policy and cherished her memory for many long years.
That her acta might not be invalid he had her deified after her death, and that he might still be her consort, he had himself elevated at the same time to her side as the first self-constituted god-king since Alexander.
A sensualist by instinct, he surrounded himself in Alexandria with everything that appealed to his variegated lusts.[83] The women whom he took into his harem after his sister's death were given palaces and race-horses, public statues,—in costumes which were not always modest,—and even divine honors. Splendid new quarters were laid out in Alexandria, and public works erected there and elsewhere in his realm. The capital thronged with scientific, literary, and musical celebrities, attracted by the endowments and collections of the Museum, the richness of the library, the profusion of festivals, and the liberality of the king, who wished Alexandria to become to the new world what Athens had been to the old.
Yet despite all these manifold gratifications, life palled on the much-experienced monarch. He turned from the doctors to the quacks, and, shrinking from pain and death, experimented with draughts that were alleged to confer immortality: a strange act for one who was already a god! While suffering agony from the gout, he envied the lot of the fellahs, whom he saw from his window stretched out on the sand in the sun eating their simple meal. "Ye poor," he is said to have once exclaimed, "would that I had been one of you."