"From behind the rich curtains of his palace," as his stout adversary, Antigonus of Macedon,[84] phrased it, Ptolemy Philadelphus played cautiously and adroitly the great game of international politics. His emissaries, laden with gifts and money, were to be found at every capital from the Ganges to the Tiber. "Mighty kings" and "great cities," Theocritus tells us,[85] were in his pay; and in the harbor of Alexandria many great battleships lay ready to give emphasis to diplomacy, to support the agents whom his gold had brought into action.
By these means, too, he kept open the roads which led across the sea from all directions to Alexandria; shut off, by a fringe of Egyptian possessions, the great continental empire of the Seleucids from access to the Mediterranean; and kept Greece so persistently in insurrection against its suzerain, Macedon, that he was able to ward off all danger from that quarter.
He enlarged his inherited empire by seizing Ionia when Eumenes I of Pergamum threw off the suzerainty of the Seleucids and shattered their authority in Asia Minor (263-261 B.C.); but the gains he then made he had to abandon during the upheaval which accompanied the revolt of his "son" in Ephesus (259-255 B.C.), and he suffered still further losses in Asia during the war he waged thereafter (253-249 B.C.), with Macedon and Syria combined. These, however, his son, Euergetes, at the opening of his reign (246-242 B.C.), regained, and he acquired districts in Ionia and the Hellespont besides; and the position which he thereby secured he held till his death twenty years later. On the sea, however, he showed himself less persistent than his father. Philadelphus had lost control of the Ægean when beaten at Cos in 253 B.C. by Antigonus of Macedon, but had not rested till he had regained it four years later, when the league of the Islanders, which was the immediate bone of contention, came again under the authority of his admirals. Euergetes suffered a crushing naval defeat in 242 B.C. off the island of Andros at the hands of the "veteran" Antigonus; whereupon he let the Cyclades go altogether. That was not the only sequel, however; for in consequence of the large outlay for little gain entailed in building and keeping in readiness the huge battleships then employed, and perhaps also in consequence of the failure of the Carthaginians, despite great naval expense and preparations, to hold the sea against the improvised fleets of Rome in the First Punic War (which had just ended), the third Ptolemy, like the Barcid government in Carthage, abandoned the policy of maintaining a fleet strong enough to drive all enemies from their respective parts of the Mediterranean. It was a great mistake in each case. When at the end of the third century B.C. Macedon and Syria, the traditional and long-suffering enemies of Egypt, were in a position to renew their joint struggle with the Ptolemies, the far-spread Ptolemaic empire fell together like a house of cards, and Rome alone saved the dynasty from complete destruction.
A variety of motives actuated the early Ptolemies in their struggle for foreign dominions. Pride of possession was among them, of course. The court poet Callimachus[86] struck a responsive chord when, in his poem on the death of Arsinoë, the sister-wife of Philadelphus, he has the sad news flashed from beacon point to beacon point till it reaches Lemnos at the outer edge of the empire. National honor is a strong motive for action, but it is commonly stirred by the fear of losing something possessed rather than by the hope of acquiring something new. Hence we must look deeper for the reasons which led cautious statesmen like the first two Ptolemies to place round Egypt its girdle of power.
The motive suggested by Polybius[87] is quite different. It was with regard to possible movements on the part of the monarchs of Syria, Asia Minor, Thrace, and Macedon that the Ptolemies held, as he says, "the most important towns, places, and harbors along the whole coast" of the eastern Mediterranean. And there can be no doubt that he is right in attributing this rather malicious aim to them. They were, doubtless, great intriguers. But to Polybius, looking on from without, from one of the districts which had been affected by the close proximity of Egyptian garrisons and naval stations, the connection of these posts with the foreign policy of the Ptolemies was apt to obtrude itself to the exclusion of everything else. Nowadays historians are prone to a similar onesidedness because of the close attention they give to economic factors. They are quite right when they stress the importance of Ptolemaic naval power and of the vantage-points held in Europe and Asia for the development of Alexandrian commerce. The lighthouse which Ptolemy erected at the mouth of the Nile at a cost of a million dollars (eight hundred talents) was not only one of the seven wonders of the world: it was a messenger of good will to the trading vessels which came from all the dependencies with or without cargoes, to get for Greek consumption the varied products of the Alexandrian factories, the Egyptian grain-fields, and the Nile-borne traffic of Arabia, India, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. What the lighthouse symbolizes, the growth of Alexandria to half a million in a hundred years proves: the magnitude of the commerce which the transmarine possessions of Egypt stimulated, when they did not originate it.
Where the economic historians are wrong, however, is in doing what Polybius did. He made the imperial policy of the early Ptolemies primarily foreign; they make it primarily commercial. The truth is that it was dictated also by the plain necessities of the domestic situation. Let us see what that was.
The first Ptolemy had stepped into the place of the Pharaohs on Alexander the Great's death. The only right he cared to acknowledge for the obedience of the Egyptians was the right of conquest. As for them, we may be sure that just as they created the myth that Alexander was not really Philip's child, but a son begotten from Olympias by either Nectanebus, the last native Pharaoh, or Ammon, the great god himself who had taken the form of Nectanebus for the purpose; and just as they in later times represented Cæsar and Antony as Ammon reincarnate, that Cleopatra's bastard children might be legitimate Pharaohs: so, too, they applied to Ptolemy the fiction by which for thousands of years they had been wont to bridge over the gaps in the genealogy of their kings.[88]
The bridge was necessary, however; for, in their thinking, the gods, who had once lived among men, on withdrawing to the divine abodes, had left one of their number to rule over the world—which, of course, was Egypt. From him all their kings were descended. The Pharaoh was, accordingly, the only god who resided upon the earth, and, as such, fittingly the mediator between men and the great gods and goddesses of the upper and nether world.[89] The Pharaoh was, therefore, both the god-king and the chief priest. The whole land and people of Egypt were his property. Without his presence and ministrations the earth would literally languish and grow barren, and the men, women, and children would perish. Egypt was, accordingly, bound to have a legitimate Pharaoh. Ptolemy could be made Ammon's offspring as easily as Alexander the Great; but how it was done we do not know.