We know of few princes who ever mounted a throne with such fair
prospects before them as the second Ptolemy. He was born in Cos, an
island on the coast of Caria, which the Ptolemies kept as a family
fortress, safe from Egyptian rebellion and Alexandrian rudeness, and,
while their fleets were masters of the sea, safe from foreign armies. He
had been brought up with great care, and, being a younger son, was not
spoilt by that flattery which in all courts is so freely offered to the
heir. He first studied letters and philosophy under Philetas of Cos,
an author of some elegies and epigrams now lost; and as he grew up, he
found himself surrounded by all the philosophers and writers with whom
his father mixed on the easiest terms of friendship. During the
long reign of Ptolemy Soter the people had been made happy by wise
regulations and good laws, trade had been flourishing, the cities had
greatly prospered, and the fortresses had been everywhere strengthened.
[Illustration: 102.jpg PHAROS IN OLD ALEXANDRIA]
The Grecian troops were well trained, their loyalty undoubted, and the
Egyptians were enrolled in a phalanx, armed and disciplined like
the Macedonians. The population of the country was counted at seven
millions. Alexandria, the capital of the kingdom, was not only the
largest trading city in the world, but was one of the most favoured
seats of learning. It surely must have been easy to foresee that the
prince, then mounting the throne, even if but slightly gifted with
virtues, would give his name to a reign which could not be otherwise
than remarkable in the history of Egypt. But Philadelphus, though like
his father he was not free from the vices of his times and of his rank,
had more of wisdom than is usually the lot of kings; and, though we
cannot but see that he was only watering the plants and gathering
the fruit where his father had planted, yet we must at the same time
acknowledge that Philadelphus was a successor worthy of Ptolemy Soter.
He may have been in the twenty-third year of his age when his father
gave up to him the cares and honours of royalty.
The first act of his reign, or rather the last of his fathers reign,
was the proclamation, or the ceremony, of showing the new king to
the troops and people. All that was dazzling, all that was costly or
curious, all that the wealth of Egypt could buy or the gratitude of the
provinces could give, was brought forth to grace this religious show,
which, as we learn from the sculptures in the old tombs, was copied
rather from the triumphs of Ramses and Thûtmosis than from anything that
had been seen in Greece.
The procession began with the pomp of Osiris, at the head of which were
the Sileni in scarlet and purple cloaks, who opened the way through the
crowd. Twenty satyrs followed on each side of the road, bearing torches;
and then Victories with golden wings, clothed in skins, each with
a golden staff six cubits long, twined round with ivy. An altar was
carried next, covered with golden ivy-leaves, with a garland of golden
vine-leaves tied with white ribands; and this was followed by a hundred
and twenty boys in scarlet frocks, carrying bowls of crocus, myrrh,
and frankincense, which made the air fragrant with the scent. Then came
forty dancing satyrs crowned with golden ivy-leaves, with their naked
bodies stained with gay colours, each carrying a crown of vine leaves
and gold; then two Sileni in scarlet cloaks and white boots, one having
the hat and wand of Mercury and the other a trumpet; and between them
walked a man, six feet high, in tragic dress and mask, meant for the
Year, carrying a golden cornucopia. He was followed by a tall and
beautiful woman, meant for the Lustrum of five years, carrying in one
hand a crown and in the other a palm-branch. Then came an altar, and a
troop of satyrs in gold and scarlet, carrying golden drinking-cups.
Then came Philiscus the poet, the priest of Osiris, with all the
servants of the god; then the Delphic tripods, the prizes which were
to be given in the wrestling matches; that for the boys was nine cubits
high, and that for the men twelve cubits high. Next came a four-wheeled
car, fourteen cubits long and eight wide, drawn along by one hundred
and eighty men, on which was the statue of Osiris, fifteen feet high,
pouring wine out of a golden vase, and having a scarlet frock down to
his feet, with a yellow transparent robe over it, and over all a scarlet
cloak. Before the statue was a large golden bowl, and a tripod with
bowls of incense on it. Over the whole was an awning of ivy and vine
leaves; and in the same chariot were the priests and priestesses of the
god.
This was followed by a smaller chariot drawn by sixty men, in which was
the statue of Isis in a robe of yellow and gold. Then came a chariot
full of grapes, and another with a large cask of wine, which was poured
out on the road, as the procession moved on, and at which the eager
crowd filled their jugs and drinking-cups. Then came another band of
satyrs and Sileni, and more chariots of wine; then eighty Delphic vases
of silver, and Panathenaic and other vases; and sixteen hundred dancing
boys in white frocks and golden crowns: then a number of beautiful
pictures; and a chariot carrying a grove of trees, out of which flew
pigeons and doves, so tied that they might be easily caught by the
crowd.
On another chariot, drawn by an elephant, came Osiris, as he returned
from his Indian conquests. He was followed by twenty-four chariots drawn
by elephants, sixty drawn by goats, twelve by some kind of stags,
seven by gazelles, four by wild asses, fifteen by buffaloes, eight by
ostriches, and seven by stags of some other kind. Then came chariots
loaded with the tributes of the conquered nations; men of Ethiopia
carrying six hundred elephants teeth; sixty huntsmen leading two
thousand four hundred dogs; and one hundred and fifty men carrying
trees, in the branches of which were tied parrots and other beautiful
birds. Next walked the foreign animals, Ethiopian and Arabian sheep,
Brahmin bulls, a white bear, leopards, panthers, bears, a camelopard,
and a rhinoceros; proving to the wondering crowd the variety and
strangeness of the countries that owned their monarchs sway.
In another chariot was seen Bacchus running away from Juno, and flying
to the altar of Rhea. After that came the statues of Alexander and
Ptolemy Soter crowned with gold and ivy: by the side of Ptolemy stood
the statues of Virtue, of the god Chem, and of the city of Corinth;
and he was followed by female statues of the conquered cities of Ionia,
Greece, Asia Minor, and Persia; and the statues of other gods. Then came
crowds of singers and cymbal-players, and two thousand bulls with gilt
horns, crowns, and breast-plates. Then came Amon-Ra and other gods;
and the statue of Alexander between Victory and the goddess Neith, in a
chariot drawn by elephants: then a number of thrones of ivory and gold;
on one was a golden crown, on another a golden cornucopia, and on the
throne of Ptolemy Soter was a crown worth ten thousand _aurei_, or
nearly thirty thousand dollars; then three thousand two hundred golden
crowns, twenty golden shields, sixty-four suits of golden armour; and
the whole was closed with forty waggons of silver vessels, twenty
of golden vessels, eighty of costly Eastern scents, and fifty-seven
thousand six hundred foot soldiers, and twenty-three thousand two
hundred horse. The procession began moving by torchlight before day
broke in the morning, and the sun set in the evening before it had all
passed on its way.
[Illustration: 106.jpg BRONZE COSMETIC HOLDER]
It went through the streets of Alexandria to the royal tents on the
outside of the city, where, as in the procession, everything that was
costly in art, or scarce in nature, was brought together in honour of
the day. At the public games, as a kind of tax or coronation money,
twenty golden crowns were given to Ptolemy Soter, twenty-three to
Berenice, and twenty to their son, the new king, beside other costly
gifts; and two thousand two hundred and thirty-nine talents, or one
million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, were spent on the
amusements of the day. For the account of this curious procession we are
indebted to Callixenes of Rhodes, who was then travelling in Egypt, and
who wrote a history of Alexandria.
Ptolemy Soter lived two years after he had withdrawn himself from the
cares of government; and the weight of his name was not without its
use in adding steadiness to the throne of his successor. Instead of
parcelling out his wide provinces among his sons as so many kingdoms, he
had given them all to one son, and that not the eldest; and on his death
the jealousy of those who had been disinherited and disappointed broke
out in rebellion.
It is with peculiar interest that we hear in this reign for the
first time that the bravery and rising power of the Romans had forced
themselves into the notice of Philadelphus. Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus,
had been beaten by the Romans, and driven out of Italy; and the King of
Egypt thought it not beneath him to send an ambassador to the senate, to
wish them joy of their success, and to make a treaty of peace with the
republic. The embassy, as we might suppose, was received in Rome with
great joy; and three ambassadors, two of the proud name of Fabius, with
Quintus Ogulnius, were sent back to seal the treaty. Philadelphus gave
them some costly gifts, probably those usually given to ambassadors;
but Rome was then young, her citizens had not yet made gold the end for
which they lived, and the ambassadors returned the gifts, for they could
receive nothing beyond the thanks of the senate for having done their
duty. This treaty was never broken; and in the war which broke out in
the middle of this reign between Rome and Carthage, usually called the
first Punic war, when the Carthaginians sent to Alexandria to beg for
a loan of two thousand talents, Philadelphus refused it, saying that he
would help them against his enemies, but not against his friends.
From that time forward we find Egypt in alliance with Rome. But we also
find that they were day by day changing place with one another: Egypt
soon began to sink, while Rome was rising in power; Egypt soon received
help from her stronger ally, and at last became a province of the Roman
empire.
At the time of this embassy, when Greek arts were nearly unknown to the
Romans, the ambassadors must have seen much that was new to them, and
much that was worth copying; and three years afterwards, when one of
them, Quintus Ogulnius, together with Caius Fabius Pictor, were chosen
consuls, they coined silver for the first time in Rome. With them begins
the series of consular denarii, which throws such light on Roman life
and history.
About the middle of this reign, Berenicê, the mother of the king, died,
and it was most likely then that Philadelphus began to date from the
beginning of his own reign: he had before gone on like his father,
dating from the beginning of his fathers reign. In the year after her
death, the great feast of Osiris, in the month of Mesore, was celebrated
at Alexandria with more than usual pomp by the Queen Arsinoë. Venus, or
Isis, had just raised Berenice to heaven; and Arsinoë, in return, showed
her gratitude by the sums of money spent on the feast of Osiris, or
Adonis as he was sometimes called by the Greeks. Theocritus, who was
there, wrote a poem on the day, and tells us of the crowds in the
streets, of the queens gifts to the temple, and of the beautiful
tapestries, on which were woven the figures of the god and goddess
breathing as if alive; and he has given a free translation of the
Maneros, the national poem in which the priests each year consoled the
goddess Isis for the death of Osiris, which was sung through the streets
of Alexandria by a Greek girl in the procession. One of the chief
troubles in the reign of Philadelphus was the revolt of Cyrene. The
government of that part of Africa had been entrusted to Magas, the
half-brother of the king, a son of Berenice by her former husband.
Berenice, who had been successful in setting aside Ceraunus to make room
for her son Philadelphus on the throne of Egypt, has even been said to
have favoured the rebellious and ungrateful efforts of her elder son
Magas to make himself King of Cyrene. Magas, without waiting till the
large armies of Egypt were drawn together to crush his little state,
marched hastily towards Alexandria, in the hopes of being joined by
some of the restless thousands of that crowded city. But he was quickly
recalled to Cyrene by the news of the rising of the Marmaridas, the race
of Libyan herdsmen that had been driven back from the coast by the Greek
settlers who founded Cyrene. Philadelphus then led his army along the
coast against the rebels; but he was, in the same way, stopped by the
fear of treachery among his own Gallic mercenaries. With a measured
cruelty which the use of foreign mercenaries could alone have taught
him, he led back his army to the marshes of the Delta, and, entrapping
the four thousand distrusted Gauls* on one of the small islands, he
hemmed them in between the water and the spears of the phalanx, and they
all died miserably, by famine, by drowning, or by the sword.
* It is not known for certain from what part of the world
these Gauls were recruited. The race known as Gallic was at
one time spread over a wide district from Gallicia in the
East to Gallia in the West.
Magas had married Apime, the daughter of Antiochus Soter, King of Syria;
and he sent to his father-in-law to beg him to march upon Coele-Syria
and Palestine, to call off the army of Philadelphus from Cyrene. But
Philadelphus did not wait for this attack: his armies moved before
Antiochus was ready, and, by a successful inroad upon Syria, he
prevented any relief being sent to Magas.
After the war between the brothers had lasted some years, Magas made
an offer of peace, which was to be sealed by betrothing his only
child, Berenicê, to the son of Philadelphus. To this offer Philadelphus
yielded; as by the death of Magas, who was already worn out by luxury
and disease, Cyrene would then fall to his own son. Magas, indeed, died
before the marriage took place; but, notwithstanding the efforts made
by his widow to break the agreement, the treaty was kept, and on this
marriage Cyrene again formed part of the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt.
The black spot upon the character of Philadelphus, which all the blaze
of science and letters by which he was surrounded can not make us
overlook, is the death of two of his brothers: a son of Eurydice, who
might, perhaps, have thought that he was robbed of the throne of Egypt
by his younger brother, and who was unsuccessful in raising the island
of Cyprus in rebellion; and a younger brother, Argasus, who was also
charged with joining in a plot; both lost their lives by his orders.
It was only in the beginning of this reign, after Egypt had been for
more than fifty years under the rule of the Macedonians, that the evils
which often follow conquest were brought to an end. Before this reign
no Greek was ever known to have reached Elephantine and Syênê or Aswan
since Herodotus made his hasty tour in the Thebaid; and during much of
the last reign no part of Upper Egypt was safe for a Greek traveller,
if he were alone, or if he quitted the highroad. The peasants, whose
feelings of hatred we can hardly wonder at, waylaid the stragglers, and
Egyptian-like as the Greeks said, or slave-like as it would be wiser to
say, often put them to death in cold blood. But a long course of good
government had at last quieted the whole country, and left room for
further improvements by Philadelphus.
Among other buildings, Philadelphus raised a temple in Alexandria to the
honour of his father and mother, and placed in it their statues, made of
ivory and gold, and ordered that they should be worshipped like the
gods and other kings of the country. He also built a temple to Ceres and
Proserpine, and then the Eleusinian mysteries were taught in Alexandria
to the few who were willing and worthy to be admitted. The southeast
quarter of the city in which this temple stood was called the Eleusinis;
and here the troop of maidens were to be seen carrying the sacred basket
through the streets, and singing hymns in honour of the goddess; while
they charged all profane persons, who met the procession, to keep
their eyes upon the ground, lest they should see the basket and the
priestesses, who were too pure for them to look upon.
In this reign was finished the lighthouse on the island of Pharos, as
a guide to ships when entering the harbour of Alexandria by night. The
navigation of the waters of the Red Sea, along which the wind blows hard
from the north for nine months in the year, was found so dangerous by
the little vessels from the south of Arabia, that they always chose the
most southerly port in which they could meet the Egyptian buyers. The
merchants with their bales of goods found a journey on camels through
the desert, where the path is marked only by the skeletons of the
animals that have died upon the route, less costly than a coasting
voyage. Hence, when Philadelphus had made the whole of Upper Egypt to
the cataracts at Aswan (Syênê) as quiet and safe as the Delta, he made a
new port on the rocky coast of the Red Sea, nearly two hundred miles to
the south of Cosseir, and named it Berenicê after his mother. He also
built four public inns, or watering-houses, where the caravans might
find water for the camels, and shelter from the noonday sun, on their
twelve days journey through the desert from Koptos on the Nile to this
new port. He rebuilt, and at the same time renamed, the old port of
Cosseir, or Ænnum as it was before called, and named it Philotera after
his younger sister. The trade which thus passed down the Nile from
Syênê, from Berenicê, and from Philotera, paid a toll or duty at the
custom-house station of Phylake a little below Lycopolis on the west
bank of the river, where a guard of soldiers was encamped; and this
station gradually grew into a town.
[Illustration: 112.jpg ROSETTA BRANCH OF THE NILE]
Philadelphus also built a city on the sands at the head of the Red Sea,
near where Suez now stands, and named it Arsinoë, after his sister; and
he again opened the canal which Necho II. and Darius had begun, by which
ships were to pass from the Nile to this city on the Red Sea. This canal
began in the Pelusiac branch of the river, a little above Bubastis,
and was carried to the Lower Bitter Lakes in the reign of Darius. From
thence Philadelphus wished to carry it forward to the Red Sea, near
the town of Arsinoë, and moreover cleared it from the sands which
soon overwhelmed it and choked it up whenever it was neglected by the
government. But his undertaking was stopped by the engineers finding the
waters of the canal several feet lower than the level of the Red Sea;
and that, if finished, it would become a salt-water canal, which could
neither water the fields nor give drink to the cities in the valley. He
also built a second city of the name of Berenicê, called the Berenicê
Epidires, at the very mouth of the Red Sea on a point of land where
Abyssinia is hardly more than fifteen miles from the opposite coast of
Arabia. This naming of cities after his mother and sisters was no idle
compliment; they probably received the crown revenues of those cities
for their personal maintenance.
With a view further to increase the trade with the East, Philadelphus
sent Dionysius on an expedition overland to India, to gain a knowledge
of the country and of its means and wants. He went by the way of the
Caspian Sea through Bactria, in the line of Alexanders march. He
dwelt there, at the court of the sovereign, soon after the time that
Megasthenes was there; and he wrote a report of what he saw and learned.
But it is sad to find, in our search for what is valuable in the history
of past times, that the information gained on this interesting journey
of discovery is wholly lost.
In the number of ports which were then growing into the rank of cities,
we see full proof of the great trade of Egypt at that time; and we may
form some opinion of the profit which was gained from the trade of the
Red Sea from the report of Clitarchus to Alexander, that the people of
one of the islands would give a talent of gold for a horse, so plentiful
with them was gold, and so scarce the useful animals of Europe; and one
of the three towns named after the late queen, on that coast, was known
by the name of the Nubian or Golden Berenicê, from the large supply of
gold which was dug from the mines in the neighbourhood. In latitude 17°,
separated from the Golden Berenicê by one of the forests of Ethiopia,
was the new city of Ptolemais, which, however, was little more than a
post from which the hunting parties went out to catch elephants for
the armies of Egypt. Philadelphus tried to command, to persuade, and to
bribe the neighbouring tribes not to kill these elephants for food, but
they refused all treaty with him; these zealous huntsmen answered that,
if he offered them the kingdom of Egypt with all its wealth, they would
not give up the pleasure of catching and eating elephants. The Ethiopian
forests, however, were able to supply the Egyptian armies with about one
elephant for every thousand men, which was the number then thought best
in the Greek military tactics. Asia had been the only country from which
the armies had been supplied with elephants before Philadelphus brought
them from Ethiopia.
The temple of Isis among the palm groves in Philæ, a rocky island in the
Nile near the cataracts of Syênê, was begun in this reign, though not
finished till some reigns later. It is still the wonder of travellers,
and by its size and style proves the wealth and good taste of the
priests. But its ornaments are not so simple as those of the older
temples; and the capitals of its columns are varied by the full-blown
papyrus flower of several sizes, its half-opened buds, its closed buds,
and its leaves, and by palm-branches. It seems to have been built on the
site of an older temple which may have been overthrown by the Persians.
This island of Philo is the most beautiful spot in Egypt; where the bend
of the river just above the cataracts forms a quiet lake surrounded on
all sides by fantastic cliffs of red granite. Its name is a corruption
from Abu-lakh, the city of the frontier. This temple was one of the
places in which Osiris was said to be buried. None but priests ever set
foot on this sacred island, and no oath was so binding as that sworn in
the name of Him that lies buried in Philæ. The statues of the goddess
in the temple were all meant for portraits of the queen Arsinoë. The
priests who dwelt in the cells within the courtyards of the temples of
which we see the remains in this temple at Philæ, were there confined
for life to the service of the altar by the double force of religion and
the stone walls. They showed their zeal for their gods by the amount of
want which they were able to endure, and they thought that sitting upon
the ground in idleness, with the knees up to the chin, was one of the
first of religious duties.
[Illustration: 116.jpg TEMPLE OF PHILAE]
The Museum of Alexandria held at this time the highest rank among the
Greek schools, whether for poetry, mathematics, astronomy, or medicine,
the four branches into which it was divided. Its library soon held two
hundred thousand rolls of papyrus; which, however, could hardly have
been equal to ten thousand printed volumes. Many of these were bought by
Philadelphus in Athens and Rhodes; and his copy of Aristotles works was
bought of the philosopher Nileus, who had been a hearer of that great
man, and afterwards inherited his books through Theophrastus, to whom
they had been left by Aristotle. The books in the museum were of course
all Greek; the Greeks did not study foreign languages, and thought the
Egyptian writings barbarous.
At the head of this library had been Demetrius Phalereus, who, after
ruling Athens with great praise, was banished from his country, and fled
to Ptolemy Soter, under whom he consoled himself for the loss of power
in the enjoyment of literary leisure. He was at the same time the most
learned and the most polished of orators. He brought learning from the
closet into the forum; and, by the soft turn which he gave to public
speaking, made that sweet and lovely which had before been grave and
severe. Cicero thought him the great master in the art of speaking, and
seems to have taken him as the model upon which he wished to form his
own style. He wrote upon philosophy, history, government, and poetry;
but the only one of his works which has reached our time is his treatise
on elocution; and the careful thought which he there gives to the
choice of words and to the form of a sentence, and even the parts of a
sentence, shows the value then set upon style. Indeed he seems rather
to have charmed his hearers by the softness of his words than to have
roused them to noble deeds by the strength of his thoughts. He not only
advised Ptolemy Soter what books he should buy, but which he should
read, and he chiefly recommended those on government and policy; and
it is alike to the credit of the king and of the librarian, that he
put before him books which, from their praise of freedom and hatred of
tyrants, few persons would even speak of in the presence of a king.
But Demetrius had also been consulted by Soter about the choice of a
successor, and had given his opinion that the crown ought to be left
to his eldest son, and that wars would arise between his children if
it were not so left; hence we can hardly wonder that, on the death of
Soter, Demetrius should have lost his place at the head of the museum,
and been ordered to leave Alexandria. He died, as courtiers say, in
disgrace; and he was buried near Diospolis in the Busirite nome of the
Delta. According to one account he was put to death by the bite of
an asp, in obedience to the new kings orders, but this story is not
generally credited; although this was not an uncommon way of inflicting
death.
[Illustration: 118.jpg ANUBIS, GOD OF THE LOWER WORLD]
Soon after this we find Zenodotus of Ephesus filling the office of
librarian to the museum. He was a poet, who, with others, had been
employed by Soter in the education of his children. He is also known as
the first of those Alexandrian critics who turned their thoughts towards
mending the text of Homer, and to whom we are indebted for the tolerably
correct state of the great poets works, which had become faulty through
the carelessness of the copiers. Zenodotus was soon followed by other
critics in this task of editing Homer. But their labours were not
approved of by all; and when Aratus asked Timon which he thought the
best edition of the poet, the philosopher shrewdly answered, That which
has been least corrected.
At the head of the mathematical school was Euclid; who is, however,
less known to us by what his pupils have said of him than by his own
invaluable work on geometry. This is one of the few of the scientific
writings of the ancients that are still in use. The discoveries of the
man of science are made use of by his successor, and the discoverer
perhaps loses part of his reward when his writings are passed by, after
they have served us as a stepping-stone to mount by. If he wishes his
works to live with those of the poet and orator, he must, like them,
cultivate those beauties of style which are fitted to his matter. Euclid
did so; and his Elements have been for more than two thousand years the
model for all writers on geometry. He begins at the beginning, and
leads the learner, step by step, from the simplest propositions, called
axioms, which rest upon metaphysical rather than mathematical proof, to
high geometrical truths. The mind is indeed sometimes wearied by being
made to stop at every single step in the path, and wishes, with Ptolemy
Soter, for a shorter road; but, upon the whole, Euclids clearness has
never been equalled.
Ctesibus wrote on the theory of hydrostatics, and was the inventor of
several water-engines; an application of mathematics which was much
called for by the artificial irrigation of Egypt. He also invented that
useful instrument, the water-clock, to tell the time after sunset.
[Illustration: 120.jpg AT THE HEAD OF THE RED SEA]
Among the best known of the men of letters who came to Alexandria to
enjoy the patronage of Philadelphus was Theocritus. Many of his poems
are lost; but his pastoral poems, though too rough for the polished
taste of Quintilian, and perhaps more like nature than we wish any works
of imitative art to be, have always been looked upon as the model of
that kind of poetry. If his shepherds do not speak the language of
courtiers, they have at least a rustic propriety which makes us admire
the manners and thoughts of the peasant. He repaid the bounty of the
king in the way most agreeable to him; he speaks of him as one
to freemen kind,
Wise, fond of books and love, of generous mind;
Knows well his friend, but better knows his foe;
Scatters his wealth; when asked he neer says No,
But gives as kings should give.
Idyll, xiv. 60.
Theocritus boasted that he would in an undying poem place him in the
rank of the demigods; and, writing with the pyramids and the Memnonium
before his eyes, assured him that generosity towards the poets would
do more to make his name live for ever than any building that he could
raise.
In a back street of Alexandria, in the part of the city named Eleusinis,
near the temple of Ceres and Proserpine, lived the poet Callimachus,
earning his livelihood by teaching. But the writer of the Hymns could
not long dwell so near the court of Philadelphus unknown and unhonoured.
He was made professor of poetry in the museum, and even now repays
the king and patron for what he then received. He was a man of great
industry, and wrote in prose and in all kinds of verse; but of these
only a few hymns and epigrams have come down to our time. Egypt seems to
have been the birthplace of the mournful elegy, and Callimachus was the
chief of the elegiac poets. He was born at Cyrene; and though, from the
language in which he wrote, his thoughts are mostly Greek, yet he did
not forget the place of his birth. He calls upon Apollo by the name of
Carneus, because, after Sparta and Thera, Cyrene was his chosen seat.
He paints Latona, weary and in pain in the island of Delos, as leaning
against a palm-tree, by the side of the river Inopus, which, sinking
into the ground, was to rise again in Egypt, near the cataracts of
Syênê; and, prettily pointing to Philadelphus, he makes Apollo, yet
unborn, ask his mother not to give birth to him in the island of Cos,
because that island was already chosen as the birthplace of another god,
the child of the gods Soteres, who would be the copy of his father,
and under whose diadem both Egypt and the islands would be proud to be
governed by a Macedonian.
[Illustration: 123.jpg THE CARARACT ON THE ASWAN]
The poet Philastas, who had been the first tutor of Philadelphus, was
in elegy second only to Callimachus; but Quintilian (while advising us
about books, to read much but not many) does not rank him among the
few first-rate poets by whom the student should form his taste; and his
works are now lost. He was small and thin in person, and it was jokingly
said of him that he wore leaden soles to his shoes lest he should be
blown away by the wind. But in losing his poetry, we have perhaps lost
the point of the joke. While these three, Theocritus, Callimachus, and
Philastas, were writing in Alexandria, the museum was certainly the
chief seat of the muses. Athens itself could boast of no such poet
but Menander, with whom Attic literature ended; and him Philadelphus
earnestly invited to his court. He sent a ship to Greece on purpose to
fetch him; but neither this honour nor the promised salary could make
him quit his mother country and the schools of Athens; and, in the time
of Pausanias, his tomb was still visited by the scholar on the road to
the Pmeus, and his statue was still seen in the theatre.
Strato, the pupil of Theophrastus, though chiefly known for his writings
on physics, was also a writer on many branches of knowledge. He was
one of the men of learning who had taken part in the education of
Phil-adelphus; and the king showed his gratitude to his teacher by
making him a present of eighty talents, or sixty thousand dollars. He
was for eighteen years at the head of one of the Alexandrian schools.
Timocharis, the astronomer, made some of his observations at Alexandria
in the last reign, and continued them through half of this reign. He
began a catalogue of the fixed stars, with their latitudes and their
longitudes measured from the equinoctial point; by the help of which
Hipparchus, one hundred and fifty years afterwards, made the great
discovery that the equinoctial point had moved. He has left an
observation of the place of Venus, on the seventeenth day of the month
of Mesore, in the thirteenth year of this reign, which by the modern
tables of the planets is known to have been on the eighth day
of October, B.C. 272; from which we learn that the first year of
Philadelphus ended in October, B.C. 284, and the first year of Ptolemy
Soter ended in October, B.C. 322; thus fixing the chronology of
these reigns with a certainty which leaves nothing to be wished for.
Aris-tillus also made some observations of the same kind at Alexandria.
Few of them have been handed down to us, but they were made use of by
Hipparchus.
Aristarchus, the astronomer of Samos, most likely came to Alexandria
in the last reign, as some of his observations were made in the very
beginning of the reign of Philadelphus. He is the first astronomer who
is known to have taken the true view of the solar system. He said that
the sun was the centre round which the earth moved in a circle; and, as
if he had foreseen that even in after ages we should hardly be able to
measure the distance of the fixed stars, he said that the earths yearly
path bore no greater proportion to the hollow globe of the heavens in
which the stars were set, than the point without size in the centre of a
circle does to its circumference. But the work in which he proved these
great truths, or perhaps threw out these happy guesses, is lost; and the
astronomers who followed him clung to the old belief that the earth was
the centre round which the sun moved. The only writings of Aristarchus
which now remain are his short work on the distances and magnitude of
the sun and moon, in which the error in his results arises from the want
of good observations, rather than from any mistake in his mathematical
principles.
Aratus, who was born in Cilicia, is sometimes counted among the
pléiades, or seven stars of Alexandria. His _Phenomena_ is a short
astronomical poem, without life or feeling, which scarcely aims at
any of the grace or flow of poetry. It describes the planets and the
constellations one by one, and tells us what stars are seen in the head,
feet, and other parts of each figure; and then the seasons, and the
stars seen at night at each time of the year. When maps were little
known, it must have been of great use, to learners; and its being in
verse made it the more easy to remember. The value which the
ancients set upon this poem is curiously shown by the number of Latin
translations which were made from it. Cicero in his early youth, before
he was known as an orator or philosopher, perhaps before he himself knew
in which path of letters he was soon to take the lead, translated this
poem. The next translation is by Germanicus Cæsar, whose early death
and many good qualities have thrown such a bright light upon his name.
He shone as a general, as an orator, and as an author; but his Greek
comedies, his Latin orations, and his poem on Augustus are lost, while
his translation of Aratus is all that is left to prove that this high
name in literature was not given to him for his political virtues alone.
Lastly Avienus, a writer in the reign of Diocletian, or perhaps
of Theodosius, has left a rugged, unpolished translation of this
much-valued poem. Aratus, the poet of the heavens, will be read, said
Ovid, as long as the sun and moon shall shine.
Sosibius was one of the rhetoricians of the museum who lived upon the
bounty of Philadelphus. The king, wishing to laugh at his habit of
verbal criticism, once told his treasurer to refuse his salary, and say
that it had been already paid. Sosibius complained to the king, and the
book of receipts was sent for, in which Philadelphus found the names of
Soter, Sosigines, Bion, and Apollonius, and showing to the critic one
syllable of his name in each of those words, said that putting them
together, they must be taken as the receipt for his salary. Other
authors wrote on lighter matters. Apollodorus Gelous, the physician,
addressed to Philadelphus a volume of advice as to which Greek wines
were best fitted for his royal palate. The Italian and Sicilian were
then unknown in Egypt, and those of the Thebaid were wholly beneath
his notice, while the vine had as yet hardly been planted in the
neighbourhood of Alexandria. He particularly praised the Naspercenite
wine from the southern banks of the Black Sea, the Oretic from the
island of Euboea; the OEneatic from Locris; the Leuca-dian from the
island of Leucas; and the Ambraciote from the kingdom of Epirus.
[Illustration: 128.jpg AN ATHLETE DISPORTING ON A CROCODILE]
But above all these he placed the Peparethian wine from the island of
Peparethus, a wine which of course did not please the many, as this
experienced taster acknowledges that nobody is likely to have a true
relish for it till after six years acquaintance. Such were the Greek
authors who basked in the sunshine of royal favour at Alexandria; who
could have told us, if they had thought it worth their while, all that
we now wish to know of the trade, religion, language, and early history
of Egypt. But they thought that the barbarians were not worth the
notice of men who called themselves Macedonians. Philadelphus, however,
thought otherwise; and by his command Manetho, an Egyptian, wrote in
Greek a history of Egypt, copied from the hieroglyphical writing on
the temples, and he dedicated it to the king. We know it only in the
quotations of Josephus and Julius Africanus, and what we have is little
more than a list of kings names. He was a priest of Heliopolis, the
great seat of Egyptian learning. The general correctness of Manethos
history, which runs back for nearly two thousand years, is shown by our
finding the kings names agree with many Egyptian inscriptions. Manetho
owes his reputation to the merit of being the first who distinguished
himself as a writer and critic upon religion and philosophy, as well
as chronology and history, using the Greek language, but drawing his
materials from native sources, especially the Sacred Books. That he was
skilled in Greek letters: we learn from Josephus, who also declares
that he contradicted many of Herodotus erroneous statements. Manetho
was better suited for the task of writing a history of Egypt than any of
his contemporaries.
As an Egyptian he could search out and make use of all the native
Egyptian sources, and, thanks to his knowledge of Greek, he could
present them in a form intelligible to the Hellenes. It must be
confessed that he has occasionally fallen into the error of allowing
Greek thoughts and traditions to slip into his work. The great worth
in Manethos work lies in the fact that he relates the history of Egypt
based on monumental sources and charters preserved in the temples.
Moreover, he treats quite impartially the times of the foreign rulers,
which the form of the Egyptian history employed by Diodorus does not
mention; but above all, Manetho gives us a list of Egyptian rulers
arranged according to a regular system. But however important in
this respect Manethos work may be, it must not be forgotten what
difficulties he had to contend with in the writing of it, and what
unreliable sources lay in these difficulties. He could not use the
sources in the form in which he found them. He was obliged to re-write
them, and he added to them synchronisms and relations to other peoples
which necessarily exposed him to the dangers of colouring his report
correspondingly.
But a much greater difficulty consisted in the fact that the
chronological reports of the earlier history were all arranged according
to the reigning years of the rulers, so that Manetho was obliged to
construct an era for his work. Boeckh was the first to discover
with certainty the existence and form of this era. According to his
researches, the whole work of Manetho is based upon Sothicycles of 1460
Julianic years. The Egyptian year was movable, and did not need the
extra day every few years, but the consequence was that every year
remained a quarter of a day behind the real year.
[Illustration: 131.jpg MODERN SPHINX-LIKE FACE]
When 1460-1 years had elapsed this chronological error had mounted to
a whole year, and so the movable year and the fixed year fell together
again. It is this Sothic period which Manetho has employed in his
account of Egyptian history. Besides his history, Manetho has left us a
work on astrology, called _Apotelesmatica_, or Events, a work of which
there seems no reason to doubt the genuineness.
It is a poem in hexameter verse, in good Greek, addressed to King
Ptolemy, in which he calls, not only upon Apollo and the Muse, but, like
a true Egyptian, upon Hermes, from whose darkly worded writings he had
gained his knowledge. He says that the kings greatness might have been
foretold from the places of Mars and the Sun at the time of his birth,
and that his marriage with his sister Arsinoë arose from the places of
Venus and Saturn at the same time. But while we smile at this being said
as the result of astronomical calculations, we must remember that for
centuries afterwards, almost in our own time, the science of judicial
astrology was made a branch of astronomy, and that the fault lay rather
in the age than in the man; and we have the pain of thinking that,
while many of the valuable writings by Manetho are lost, the copiers and
readers of manuscripts have carefully saved for us this nearly worthless
poem on astrology.
Petosiris was another writer on astrology and astronomy who was highly
praised by his friend Manetho; and his calculations on the distances
of the sun and planets are quoted by Pliny. His works are lost; but his
name calls for our notice, as he must have been a native Egyptian, and
a priest. Like Manetho, he also wrote on the calculation of nativities;
and the later Greek astrologers, when what they had foretold did not
come to pass, were wont to lay the blame on Petosiris. The priests were
believed to possess these and other supernatural powers; and to help
their claims to be believed many of them practised ventriloquism.
Timosthenes, the admiral under Philadelphus, must not be forgotten in
this list of authors; for though his verses to Apollo were little worth
notice, his voyages of discovery, and his work in ten books on harbours,
placed him in the first rank among geographers. Colotes, a pupil and
follower of Epicurus, dedicated to Philadelphus a work of which the very
title proves the nature of his philosophy, and how soon the rules of his
master had fitted themselves to the habits of the sensualist. Its
title was That it is impossible even to support life according to the
philosophical rules of any but the Epicureans. It was a good deal read
and talked about; and three hundred years afterwards Plutarch thought it
not a waste of time to write against it at some length.
At a time when books were few, and far too dear to be within reach of
the many, and indeed when the number of those who could read must have
been small, other means were of course taken to meet the thirst after
knowledge; and the chief of these were the public readings in the
theatre. This was not overlooked by Phila-delphus, who employed
Hegesias to read Herodotus, and Hermophantus to read Homer, the earliest
historian and the earliest poet, the two authors who had taken deepest
root in the minds of the Greeks. These public readings, which were
common throughout Greece and its colonies, had not a little effect on
the authors. They then wrote for the ear rather than the eye, to be
listened to rather than to be read, which was one among the causes of
Greek elegance and simplicity of style.
Among others who were brought to Alexandria by the fame of Philadelphus
bounty was Zoilus, the grammarian, whose ill-natured criticism on
Homers poems had earned for him the name of Homeromastix, or the
scourge of Homer. He read his criticisms to Philadelphus, who was so
much displeased with his carping and unfair manner of finding fault,
that he even refused to relieve him when in distress. The king told him,
that while hundreds had earned a livelihood by pointing out the beauties
of the Iliad and Odyssey in their public readings, surely one person who
was so much wiser might be able to live by pointing out the faults.
Timon, a tragic poet, was also one of the visitors to this court; but,
as he was more fond of eating and drinking than of philosophy, we need
not wonder at our knowing nothing of his tragedies, or at his not
being made a professor by Philadelphus. But he took his revenge on the
better-fed philosophers of the court, in a poem in which he calls them
literary fighting-cocks, who were being fattened by the king, and were
always quarrelling in the coops of the museum.
The Alexandrian men of science and letters maintained themselves, some
few by fees received from their pupils, others as professors holding
salaries in the museum, and others by civil employments under the
government. There was little to encourage in them the feelings of noble
pride or independence. The first rank in Alexandria was held by the
civil and military servants of the crown, who enjoyed the lucrative
employments of receiving the taxes, hearing the lawsuits by appeal, and
repressing rebellions. With these men the philosophers mixed, not as
equals, but partaking of their wealth and luxuries, and paying their
score with wit and conversation. There were no landholders in the city,
as the soil of the country was owned by Egyptians; and the wealthy
trading classes, of all nations and languages, could bestow little
patronage on Greek learning, and therefore little independence on its
professors.
Philadelphus was not less fond of paintings and statues than of books;
and he seems to have joined the Achaian league as much for the sake of
the pictures which Aratus, its general, was in the habit of sending
to him, as for political reasons. Aratus, the chief of Sicyon, was an
acknowledged judge of paintings, and Sicyon was then the first school
of Greece. The pieces which he sent to Philadelphus were mostly those of
Pamphilus, the master, and of Melanthius, the fellow-pupil, of Apelles.
Pamphilus was famed for his perspective; and he is said to have received
from every pupil the large sum of ten talents, or seven thousand five
hundred dollars, a year. His best known pieces were, Ulysses in his
ship, and the victory of the Athenians near the town of Phlius. It was
through Pamphilus that, at first in Sicyon, and afterwards throughout
all Greece, drawing was taught to boys as part of a liberal education.
Neacles also painted for Aratus; and we might almost suppose that it was
as a gift to the King of Egypt that he painted his Sea-fight between the
Egyptians and the Persians, in which the painter shows us that it was
fought within the mouth of the Nile by making a crocodile bite at an ass
drinking on the shore.
Helena, the daughter of Timon, was a painter of some note at this time,
at Alexandria; but the only piece of hers known to us by name is the
Battle of Issus, which three hundred years afterwards was hung up by
Vespasian in the Temple of Peace at Rome. We must wonder at a woman
choosing to paint the horrors and pains of a battle-piece; but, as we
are not told what point of time was chosen, we may hope that it was
after the battle, when Alexander, in his tent, raised up from their
knees the wife and lovely daughter of Darius, who had been found among
the prisoners. As for the Egyptians, they showed no taste in painting.
[Illustration: 137.jpg METHOD OF EGYPTIAN DRAFTSMANSHIP]
Their method of drawing the human figure mathematically by means of
squares, which was not unsuitable in working a statue sixty feet high,
checked all flights of genius; and it afterwards destroyed Greek art,
when the Greek painters were idle enough to use it. We hear but little
of the statues and sculptures made for Philadelphus; but we cannot help
remarking that, while the public places of Athens were filled with
the statues of the great and good men who had deserved well of their
country, the statues which were most common in Alexandria were those of
Cline, a favourite damsel, who filled the office of cup-bearer to the
king of Egypt.
The favour shown to the Jews by Ptolemy Soter was not withdrawn by his
son. He even bought from his own soldiers and freed from slavery one
hundred and twenty thousand men of that nation, who were scattered over
Egypt. He paid for each, out of the royal treasury, one hundred and
twenty drachmas, or about fifteen dollars, to those of his subjects who
held them either by right of war or by purchase. In fixing the amount
of the ransom, the king would seem to have been guided by his Jewish
advisers, as this is exactly equal to thirty shekels, the sum fixed
by the Jewish law as the price of a slave. The Jews who lived in Lower
Egypt, in the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, looked upon that
country as their home. They had already a Greek translation of either
the whole or some part of their sacred writings, which had been made for
those whose families had been for so many generations in Egypt that they
could not read the language of their forefathers. But they now hoped,
by means of the kings friendship and the weight which his wishes must
carry with them, to have a Greek translation of the Bible which should
bear the stamp of official authority.
Accordingly, to please them, Philadelphus sent Aris-taaus, a man whose
wisdom had gained his friendship, and Andrseus, a captain of the guard,
both of them Greek Jews, with costly gifts to Eleazer, the high priest
of Jerusalem; and asked him to employ learned and fit men to make a
Greek translation of the Bible for the library at Alexandria. Eleazer,
so runs the tradition, named seventy elders to undertake the task, who
held their first sitting on the business at the kings dinner-table;
when Menedemus, the Socratic philosopher, the pupil of Plato, was also
present, who had been sent to Philadelphus as ambassador from Eubcea.
The translators then divided the work among themselves; and when each
had finished his task it wras laid before a meeting of the seventy, and
then published by authority. Thus was said to have been made the
Greek translation of the Old Testament, which, from the number of the
translators, we now call the Septuagint; but a doubt is thrown upon
the whole story by the fables which have been mingled with it to give
authority to the translation. By this translation the Bible became known
for the first time to the Greek philosophers. We do not indeed hear that
they immediately read it or noticed it, we do not find it quoted till
after the spread of Christianity; but it had a silent effect on
their opinions, which we trace in the new school of Platonists soon
afterwards rising in Alexandria.
When Aratus of Sicyon first laid a plot to free his country from its
tyrant, who reigned by the help of the King of Macedonia, he sent to
Philadelphus to beg for money. He naturally looked to the King of Egypt
for help when entering upon a struggle against their common rival; but
the king seems to have thought the plans of this young man too wild to
be countenanced. Aratus, however, soon raised Sicyon to a level with the
first states of Greece, and made himself leader of the Achaian league,
under which band and name the Greeks were then struggling for freedom
against Macedonia; and when, by his courage and success, he had shown
himself worthy of the proud name which was afterwards given him, of the
Last of the Greeks, Philadelphus, like other patrons, gave him
the help which he less needed. Aratus, as we have seen, bought his
friendship with pictures, the gifts of all others the most welcome;
and, when he went to Egypt, Philadelphus gave him one hundred and fifty
talents, or forty-five thousand dollars, and joined the Achaian league,
on the agreement that in carrying on the war by sea and land they should
obey the orders from Alexandria.
The friendship of Philadelphus, indeed, was courted by all the
neighbouring states; the little island of Delos set up its statue to
him; and the cities of Greece vied with one another in doing him honour.
The Athenians named one of the tribes of their city and also one
of their public lecture-rooms by his name; and two hundred years
afterwards, when Cicero and his friend Atticus were learning wisdom and
eloquence from the lips of Antiochus in Athens, it was in the gymnasium
of Ptolemy.
Philadelphus, when young, had married Arsinoë, the daughter of
Lysimachus of Thrace, by whom he had three children, Ptolemy, who
succeeded him, Lysimachus, and Berenicê; but, having found that his
wife was intriguing with Amyntas, and with his physician Chrysippus
of Rhodes, he put these two to death and banished the Queen Arsinoë to
Koptos in the Thebaid.
He then took Arsinoë, his own sister, as the partner of his throne. She
had married first the old Lysimachus, King of Thrace, and then Ceraunus,
her half-brother, when he was King of Macedonia. As they were not
children of the same mother, this second marriage was neither illegal
nor improper in Macedonia; but her third marriage with Philadelphus
could only be justified by the laws of Egypt, their adopted country.
They were both past the middle age, and whether Philadelphus looked
upon her as his wife or not, at any rate they had no children. Her
own children by Lysimachus had been put to death by Ceraunus, and she
readily adopted those of her brother with all the kindness of a mother.
She was a woman of an enlarged mind; her husband and her stepchildren
alike valued her; and Eratosthenes showed his opinion of her learning
and strong sense by giving the name of Arsinoë to one of his works,
which perhaps a modern writer would have named Table-talk.
[Illustration: 141.jpg Coin with the heads of Soter and Philadelphus and
Arsinoë]
This seeming marriage, however, between brother and sister did not
escape blame with the Greeks of Alexandria. The poet Sotades, whose
verses were as licentious as his life, wrote some coarse lines against
the queen, for which he was forced to fly from Egypt, and, being
overtaken at sea, he was wrapped up in lead and thrown overboard.
In the Egyptian inscriptions Ptolemy and Arsinoë are always called the
brother-gods; on the coins they are called Adelphi, the brothers; and
afterwards the king took the name of Philadelphus, or sister-loving,
by which he is now usually known. In the first half of his reign
Philadelphus dated his coins from the year that his father came to the
throne; and it was not till the nineteenth year of his reign, soon after
the death of his mother, that he made an era of his own, and dated his
coins by the year of his own reign. The wealth of the country is well
shown by the great size of those most in use, which were, in gold the
tetra-stater or piece of eight drachms, and in silver the tetra-drachma,
or piece of four drachms, while Greece had hardly seen a piece of gold
larger than the single stater. In Alexandrian accounts also the unit
of money was the silver didrachm, and thus double that in use among the
merchants of Greece.
[Illustration: 142.jpg COIN WITH THE HEADS OF SOTER, PHILADELPHUS AND
BERENICE]
Among the coins is one with the heads of Soter and Philadelphus on the
one side, and the head of Berenicê, the wife of the one and mother of
the other, on the other side. This we may suppose to have been struck
during the first two years of his reign, in the lifetime of his father.
Another bears on one side the heads of Ptolemy Soter and Berenicê, with
the title of the gods, and on the other side the heads of Philadelphus
and his wife Arsinoë, with the title of the brothers. This was struck
after the death of his parents. A third was struck by the king in honour
of his queen and sister. On the one side is the head of the queen, and
on the other is the name of Arsinoë, the brother-loving, with the
cornucopia, or horn of Amalthea, an emblem borrowed by the queens of
Egypt from the goddess Amalthea, the wife of the Libyan Anion. This was
struck after his second marriage.
On the death of Arsinoë, Philadelphus built a tomb for her in
Alexandria, called the Arsinoëum, and set up in it an obelisk eighty
cubits high, which had been made by King Nectanebo, but had been left
plain, without carving.
[Illustration: 143.jpg COIN OF ARSINOË, SISTER OF PTOLEMY II.]
Satyrus, the architect, had the charge of moving it. He dug a canal to
it as it lay upon the ground, and moved two heavily laden barges under
it. The burdens were then taken out of the barges, and as they floated
higher they raised the obelisk off the ground. He then found it a task
as great or greater to set it up in its place; and this Greek engineer
must surely have looked back with wonder on the labour and knowledge of
mechanics which must have been used in setting up the obelisks, colossal
statues, and pyramids, which he saw scattered over the country. This
obelisk now ornaments the cathedral of the Popes on the Vatican hill at
Rome. Satyrus wrote a treatise on precious stones, and he also carved
on them with great skill; but his works are known only in the following
lines, which were written by Diodorus on his portrait of Arsinoë cut in
crystal:
Een Zeuxis had been proud to trace
The lines within this pebble seen;
Satyrus here hath carved the face
Of fair Arsinoë, Egypts queen;
But such her beauty, sweetness, grace,
The copy falls far short, I ween.
Two beautiful cameos cut on sardonyx are extant, one with the heads of
Philadelphus and his first wife, Arsinoe, and the other with the heads
of the same king and his second wife, Arsinoë. It is not impossible that
one or both of them may be the work of Satyrus.
Philadelphus is also said to have listened to the whimsical proposal
of Dinochares, the architect, to build a room of loadstone in Arsinoës
tomb, so that an iron statue of the queen should hang in the air between
the floor and the roof. But the death of the king and of the architect
took place before this was tried. He set up there, however, her statue
six feet high, carved out of a most remarkable block of topaz, which had
been presented to his mother by Philemon, the prefect of the Troglodytic
coast in the last reign.
Philadelphus lived in peace with Ergamenes, King of Meroë or Upper
Ethiopia, who, while seeking for a knowledge of philosophy and the arts
of life from his Greek neighbours, seems also to have gained a love
of despotism, and a dislike of that control with which the priests of
Ethiopia and Egypt had always limited the power of their kings. The King
of Meroë had hitherto reigned like Amenôthes or Thutmosis of old, as
the head of the priesthood, supported and controlled by the priestly
aristocracy by which he was surrounded. But he longed for the absolute
power of Philadelphus. Accordingly he surrounded the golden temple with
a chosen body of troops, and put the whole of the priests to death; and
from that time he governed Ethiopia as an autocrat. But, with the loss
of their liberties, the Ethiopians lost the wish to guard the throne; by
grasping at more power, their sovereign lost what he already possessed;
and in the next reign their country was conquered by Egypt.
The wars between Philadelphus and his great neighbour, Antiochus Theos,
seem not to have been carried on very actively, though they did not
wholly cease till Philadelphus offered as a bribe his daughter Berenicê,
with a large sum of money under the name of a dower. Antiochus was
already married to Laodice, whom he loved dearly, and by whom he had two
children, Seleucus and Antiochus; but political ambition had deadened
the feelings of his heart, and he agreed to declare this first marriage
void and his two sons illegitimate, and that his children, if any should
be born to him by Berenicê, should inherit the throne of Babylon and the
East. Philadelphus, with an equal want of feeling, and disregarding the
consequences of such a marriage, led his daughter to Pelusium on her
journey to her betrothed husband, and sent with her so large a sum of
gold and silver that he was nicknamed the dower-giver.
The peace between the two countries lasted as long as Philadelphus
lived, and was strengthened by kindnesses which each did to the other.
Ptolemy, when in Syria, was much struck by the beauty of a statue of
Diana, and begged it of Antiochus as an ornament for Alexandria. But as
soon as the statue reached Egypt, Arsinoë fell dangerously ill, and she
dreamed that the goddess came by night, and told her that the illness
was sent to her for the wrong done to the statue by her husband; and
accordingly it was sent back with many gifts to the temple from which it
had been brought.
While Berenicê and her husband lived at Antioch, Philadelphus kindly
sent there from time to time water from the sacred Nile for her use, as
the Egyptians believed that none other was so wholesome. Antiochus,
when ill, sent to Alexandria for a physician; and Cleombrotus of Cos
accordingly went, by command of Ptolemy, to Syria. He was successful
in curing the king, and on his return he received from Philadelphus a
present of one hundred talents, or seventy-five thousand dollars, as a
fee for his journey.
Philadelphus was a weak frame of body, and had delicate health; and,
though a lover of learning beyond other kings of his time, he also
surpassed them in his unmeasured luxury and love of pleasure. He had
many mistresses, Egyptian as well as Greek, and the names of some of
them have been handed down to us. He often boasted that he had found out
the way to live for ever; but, like other free-livers, he was sometimes,
by the gout in his feet, made to acknowledge that he was only a man, and
indeed to wish that he could change places with the beggar whom he saw
from his palace windows, eating the garbage on the banks of the Nile
with an appetite which he had long wanted. It was during illness that
he found most time for reading, and his mind most open to the truths of
philosophy; and he chiefly wooed the Muses when ill health left him at
leisure from his other courtships. He had a fleet of eight hundred state
barges with gilt prows and poops and scarlet awnings upon the decks,
which were used in the royal processions and religious shows, and which
usually lay in dock at Schedia, on the Canopic River, five and twenty
miles from Alexandria. He was no doubt in part withheld from war by this
luxurious love of ease; but his reign taught the world the new lesson,
that an ambitious monarch may gratify his wish for praise and gain the
admiration of surrounding nations, as much by cultivating the blessed
arts of peace as by plunging his people into the miseries of war.
He reigned over Egypt, with the neighbouring parts of Arabia; also over
Libya, Phoenicia, Cole-Syria, part of Ethiopia, Pamphylia, Cilicia,
Lycia, Caria, Cyprus, and the isles of the Cyclades. The island of
Rhodes and many of the cities of Greece were bound to him by the closest
ties of friendship, for past help and for the hope of future. The
wealthy cities of Tyre and Sidon did homage to him, as before to his
father, by putting his crowned head upon their coins. The forces of
Egypt reached the very large number of two hundred thousand foot and
twenty thousand horse, two thousand chariots, four hundred Ethiopian
elephants, fifteen hundred ships of war and one thousand transports. Of
this large force, it is not likely that even one-fourth should have been
Greeks; the rest must have been Egyptians and Syrians, with some Gauls.
The body of chariots, though still forming part of the force furnished
for military service by the Theban tenants of the crown, was of no
use against modern science; and the other Egyptian troops, though now
chiefly armed and disciplined like Greeks, were very much below the
Macedonian phalanx in real strength. The galleys also, though no doubt
under the guidance and skill of Greeks and Phoenicians, were in part
manned by Egyptians, whose inland habits wholly unfitted them for the
sea, and whose religious prejudices made them feel the conscription for
the navy as a heavy grievance.
These large forces were maintained by a yearly income equally large, of
fourteen thousand eight hundred talents, or twelve million two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars, beside the tax on grain, which was taken
in kind, of a million and a half of artabas, or about five millions of
bushels. To this we may add a mass of gold, silver, and other valuable
stores in the treasury, which were boastfully reckoned at the unheard-of
sum of seven hundred and forty thousand talents, or above five hundred
million dollars.
[Illustration: 149.jpg A TYPICAL NILE PILOT]
The trade down the Nile was larger than it had ever been before; the
coasting trade on the Mediterranean was new; the people were rich and
happy; justice was administered to the Egyptians according to their own
laws, and to the Greeks of Alexandria according to the Macedonian laws:
the navy commanded the whole of the eastern half of the Mediterranean;
the schools and library had risen to a great height upon the wise plans
of Ptolemy Soter; in every point of view Alexandria was the chief city
in the world. Athens had no poets or other writers during this century
equal in merit to those who ennobled the museum. Philadelphus, by
joining to the greatness and good government of his father the costly
splendour and pomp of an eastern monarch, so drew the eyes of after ages
upon his reign that his name passed into a proverb: if any work of
art was remarkable for its good taste or costliness, it was called
Philadelphian; even history and chronology were set at nought, and we
sometimes find poets of a century later counted among the Pleiades of
Alexandria in the reign of Philadelphus. It is true that many of these
advantages were forced in the hotbed of royal patronage; that the navy
was built in the harbours of Phoenicia and Asia Minor; and that the men
of letters who then drew upon themselves the eyes of the world were
only Greek settlers, whose writings could have done little to raise
the character of the native Kopts. But the Ptolemies, in raising this
building of their own, were not at the same time crushing another. Their
splendid monarchy had not been built on the ruins of freedom; and even
if the Greek settlers in the Delta had formed themselves into a free
state, we can hardly believe that the Egyptians would have been so well
treated as they were by this military despotism. From the temples
which were built or enlarged in Upper Egypt, and from the beauty of the
hieroglyphical inscriptions, we find that even the native arts were
more flourishing than they had ever been since the fall of the kings of
Thebes; and we may almost look upon the Greek conquest as a blessing to
Upper Egypt.
Philadelphus, though weak in body, was well suited by his
keen-sightedness and intelligence for the tasks which the state of
affairs at that time demanded from an Egyptian king. He was a diplomat
rather than a warrior, and that was exactly what Egypt needed.
A curious anecdote about Ptolemy Philadelphus is related by Niebuhr. He
had reached the zenith of his glory, when suddenly he was attacked by
a species of insanity, consisting of an indescribable fear of death.
Chemical artifices were practised in Egypt from the earliest times; and
hence Ptolemy took every imaginable pains to find the elixir of life;
but it was all in vain, for his strength was rapidly decreasing. Once,
like Louis XI., he was looking from a window of his palace upon the
seacoast, and seriously meditated upon the subject of his longing; it
must have been in winter-time, when the sand, exposed to the rays of the
sun, becomes very warm. He saw some poor boys burying themselves in the
warm sand and screaming with delight, and the aged king began bitterly
to cry, seeing the ragged urchins enjoying their life without any
apprehension of losing it; for he felt that with all his riches he could
not purchase that happiness, and that his end was very near at hand. He
died in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, and perhaps the sixty-first
of his age. He left the kingdom as powerful and more wealthy than when
it came to him from his father; and he had the happiness of having a son
who would carry on, even for the third generation, the wise plans of the
first Ptolemy.
[Illustration: 153.jpg PAGE IMAGE]