But to return to Egypt. It was, as we have seen, a country governed by men of a foreign race. Neither the poor who tilled the land, nor the rich who owned the estates, had any share in the government. They had no public duty except to pay taxes to their Greek masters, who walked among them as superior beings, marked out for fitness to rule by greater skill in the arts both of war and peace. The Greeks by their arms, or rather by their military discipline, had enforced obedience for one hundred and fifty years; and as they had at the same time checked lawless violence, made life and property safe, and left industry to enjoy a large share of its own earnings, this obedience had been for the most part granted to them willingly. They had even trusted the Egyptians with arms. But none are able to command unless they are at the same time able to obey. The Alexandrians were now almost in rebellion against their young king and his ministers; and the Greek government no longer gave the usual advantages in return for the obedience which it tyrannically enforced. Confusion increased each year during the childhood of the fifth Ptolemy, to whom Alexandrian flattery gave the title of Epiphanes, or The Illustrious. The Egyptian phalanx had in the last reign shown signs of disobedience, and at length it broke out in open rebellion. The discontented party strengthened themselves in the Busirite nome, in the middle of the Delta, and fortified the city of Lycopolis against the government; and a large supply of arms and warlike stores which they there got together proved the length of time that they had been preparing for resistance. The royal troops laid siege to the city in due form; they surrounded it with mounds and ditches; they dammed up the bed of the river on each side of it, and, being helped by a rise in the Nile, which was that year greater than usual, they forced the rebels to surrender, on the king's promise that they should be spared. But Ptolemy was not bound by promises; he was as false and cruel as he was weak; the rebels were punished; and many of the troubles in his reign arose from his discontented subjects not being able to rely upon his word.

The rich island of Cyprus also, which had been left by Philopator under the command of Polyerates, showed some signs of wishing to throw off the Egyptian yoke. But Polyerates was true to his trust; and, though the king's ministers were almost too weak either to help the faithful or punish the treacherous, he not only saved the island for the minor, but, when he gave up his government to Ptolemy of Megalopolis, he brought to the royal treasury at Alexandria a large sum from the revenues of his province. By this faithful conduct he gained great weight in the Alexandrian councils, till, corrupted by the poisonous habits of the place, he gave way to luxury and vice.

About the same time Scopas, who had lately led back to Alexandria his AEtolian mercenaries, so far showed signs of discontent and disobedience that the minister, Aristomenes, began to suspect him of planning resistance to the government. Scopas was greedy of money; nothing would satisfy his avarice.



The other Greek generals of his rank received while in the Egyptian service a mina, or ten dollars a day, under the name of mess-money, beyond the usual military pay; and Scopas claimed and received for his services the large sum of ten minas, or one hundred and twenty-five dollars, a day for mess-money. But even this did not content him. Aristomenes observed that he was collecting his friends for some secret purpose, and in frequent consultation with them. He therefore summoned him to the king's presence, and, being prepared for his refusal, he sent a large force to fetch him. Fearing that the mercenaries might support their general, Aristomenes had even ordered out the elephants and prepared for battle. But, as the blow came upon Scopas unexpectedly, no resistance was made, and he was brought prisoner to the palace. Aristomenes, however, did not immediately venture to punish him, but wisely summoned the AEtolian ambassadors and the chiefs of the mercenaries to his trial, and, as they made no objection, he then had him poisoned in prison.

No sooner was this rebellion crushed than the council took into consideration the propriety of declaring the king's minority at an end, as the best means of re-establishing the royal authority; and they thereupon determined shortly to celebrate his Anacleteria, or the grand ceremony of exhibiting him to the people as their monarch, though he wanted some years of the legal age; and accordingly, in the ninth year of his reign, the young king was crowned with great pomp at Memphis, the ancient capital of the kingdom.

On this occasion he came to Memphis by barge, in grand state, where he was met by the priests of Upper and Lower Egypt, and crowned in the temple of Phtah with the double crown, called Pschent, the crown of the two provinces. After the ceremony, the priests made the Decree in honour of the king, which is carved on the stone known by the name of the Rosetta Stone, in the British Museum. Ptolemy is there styled King of Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the gods Philopatores, approved by Phtah, to whom Ra has given victory, a living image of Amon, son of Ra, Ptolemy immortal, beloved by Phtah, god Epiphanes most gracious. In the date of the decree we are told the names of the priests of Alexander, of the gods Soteres, of the gods Adelphi, of the gods Euergetae, of the gods Philopatores, of the god Epiphanes himself, of Berenice Euergetis, of Arsinoe Philadelphus, and of Arsinoe Philopator. The preamble mentions with gratitude the services of the king, or rather of his wise minister, Aristomenes; and the enactment orders that the statue of the king shall be worshipped in every temple of Egypt, and be carried out in the processions with those of the gods of the country; and lastly, that the decree is to be carved at the foot of every statue of the king, in sacred, in common, and in Greek writing. It is to this stone, with its three kinds of letters, and to the skill and industry of Dr. Thomas Young, and of the French scholar, Champollion, that we now owe our knowledge of hieroglyphics. The Greeks of Alexandria, and after them the Romans, who might have learned how to read this kind of writing if they had wished, seem never to have taken the trouble: it fell into disuse on the rise of Christianity in Egypt; and it was left for an Englishman to unravel the hidden meaning after it had been forgotten for nearly thirteen centuries.

The preamble of this decree tells us also that during the minority of the king the taxes were lessened; the crown debtors were forgiven; those who were found in prison charged with crimes against the state were released; the allowance from government for upholding the splendour of the temples was continued, as was the rent from land belonging to the priests; the first-fruits, or rather the coronation money, a tax paid by the priests to the king on the year of his coming to the throne, which was by custom allowed to be less than what the law ordered, was not increased; the priests were relieved from the heavy burden of making a yearly voyage to do homage at Alexandria; there was a stop put to the impressing men for the navy, which had been felt as a great cruelty by an inland people, whose habits and religion alike made them hate the sea, and this was a boon which was the more easily granted, as the navy of Alexandria, which was built in foreign dockyards and steered by foreign pilots, had very much fallen off in the reign of Philopator. The duties on linen cloth, which was the chief manufacture of the kingdom, and, after grain, the chief article exported, were lessened; the priests, who manufactured linen for the king's own use, probably for the clothing of the army, and the sails for the navy, were not called upon for so large a part of what they made as before; and the royalties on the other linen manufactories and the duties on the samples or patterns, both of which seem to have been unpaid for the whole of the eight years of the minority, were wisely forgiven. All the temples of Egypt, and that of Apis at Memphis in particular, were enriched by his gifts; in which pious actions, in grateful remembrance of their former benefactor, and with a marked slight to Philopator, they said that he was following the wishes of his grandfather, the god Euergetes. From this decree we gain some little insight into the means by which the taxes were raised under the Ptolemies; and we also learn that they were so new and foreign that they had no Egyptian word by which they could speak of them, and therefore borrowed the Greek word syntaxes.

History gives us many examples of kings who, like Epiphanes, gained great praise for the mildness and weakness of the government during their minorities. Aristomenes, the minister, who had governed Egypt for Epiphanes, fully deserved that trust. While the young king looked up to him as a father, the country was well governed, and his orders obeyed; but, as he grew older, his good feelings were weakened by the pleasures which usually beset youth and royalty. The companions of his vices gained that power over his mind which Aristomenes lost, and it was not long before this wise tutor and counsellor was got rid of. The king, weary perhaps with last night's debauchery, had one day fallen asleep when he should have been listening to the speech of a foreign ambassador. Aristomenes gently shook him and awoke him. His flatterers, when alone with him, urged him to take this as an affront. If, said they, it was right to blame the king for falling asleep when worn out with business and the cares of state, it should have been done in private, and not in the face of the whole court. So Aristomenes was put to death by being ordered to drink poison. Epiphanes then lost that love of his people which the wisdom of the minister had gained for him; and he governed the kingdom with the cruelty of a tyrant, rather than with the legal power of a king.



Even Aristonicus, his favourite eunuch, who was of the same age as himself, and had been brought up as his playfellow, passed him in the manly virtues of his age, and earned the praise of the country for setting him a good example, and checking him in his career of vice.

In the thirteenth year of his reign (B.C. 192), when the young king reached the age of eighteen, Antiochus the Great sent his daughter Cleopatra into Egypt, and the marriage, which had been agreed upon six years before, was then carried into effect; and the provinces of Coele-Syria, Phoenicia, and Judaea, which had been promised as a dower, were, in form at least, handed over to the generals of Epiphanes. Cleopatra was a woman of strong mind and enlarged understanding; and Antiochus hoped that, by means of the power which she would have over the weaker mind of Epiphanes, he should gain more than he lost by giving up Coele-Syria and Phoenicia. But she acted the part of a wife and a queen, and, instead of betraying her husband into the hands of her father, she was throughout the reign his wisest and best counsellor.

Antiochus seems never to have given up his hold upon the provinces which had been promised as the dower; and the peace between the two countries, which had been kept during the six years after Cleopatra had been betrothed, was broken as soon as she was married. The war was still going on between Antiochus and the Romans; and Epiphanes soon sent to Rome a thousand pounds weight of gold and twenty thousand pounds of silver, to help the republic against their common enemy. But the Romans neither hired mercenaries nor fought as such, the thirst for gold had not yet become the strongest feeling in the senate, and they sent back the money to Alexandria with many thanks.

In the twentieth year of his reign Epiphanes was troubled by a second serious rebellion of the Egyptians. Polycrates marched against them at the head of the Greek troops; and, as he brought with him a superior force, and the king's promise of a free pardon to all who should return to their obedience, the rebels yielded to necessity and laid down their arms. The leaders of the rebellion, Athinis, Pausiras, Chesuphus, and Irobashtus, whose Koptic names prove that this was a struggle on the part of the Egyptians to throw off the Greek yoke, were brought before the king at Sais. Epiphanes, in whose youthful heart were joined the cruelty and cowardice of a tyrant, who had not even shown himself to the army during the danger, was now eager to act the conqueror; and in spite of the promises of safety on which these brave Kopts had laid down their arms, he had them tied to his chariot wheels, and copying the vices of men whose virtues he could not even understand, like Achilles and Alexander, he dragged them living round the city walls, and then ordered them to be put to death. He then led the army to Naucratis, which was the port of Sais, and there he embarked on the Nile for Alexandria, and taking with him a further body of mercenaries, which Aristonicus had just brought from Greece, he entered the city in triumph.

Ptolemy of Megalopolis, the new governor of Cyprus, copied his predecessor, Polycrates, in his wise and careful management. His chief aim was to keep the province quiet, and his next to collect the taxes. He was at first distrusted by the Alexandrian council for the large sum of money which he had got together and kept within his own power; but when he sent it all home to the empty treasury, they were as much pleased as they were surprised.

Apollonius, whom we have spoken of in the reign of Euergetes, and who had been teaching at Rhodes during the reign of Philopator, was recalled to Alexandria in the beginning of this reign, and made librarian of the museum on the death of Eratosthenes. But he did not long enjoy that honour. He was already old, and shortly afterwards died at the age of ninety.



The coins of this king are known by the glory or rays of sun which surround his head, and which agrees with his name, Epiphanes, illustrious, or as it is written in the hieroglyphics, "light bearing." On the other side is the cornucopia between two stars, with the name of "King Ptolemy." No temples, and few additions to temples, seem to have been built in Upper Egypt during this reign, which began and ended in rebellion. We find, however, a Greek inscription at Philas, of "King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra, gods Epiphanes, and Ptolemy their son, to Asclepius," a god whom the Egyptians called Imothph the son of Pthah.

Cyprus and Cyrene were nearly all that were left to Egypt of its foreign provinces. The cities of Greece, which had of their own wish put themselves under Egypt for help against their nearer neighbours, now looked to Rome for that help; part of Asia Minor was under Seleu-cus, the son of Antiochus the Great; Cole-Syria and Phoenicia, which had been given up to Epiphanes, had been again soon lost; and the Jews, who in all former wars had sided with the Kings of Egypt, as being not only the stronger but the milder rulers, now joined Seleucus. The ease with which the wide-spreading provinces of this once mighty empire fell off from their allegiance, showed how the whole had been upheld by the warlike skill of its kings, rather than by a deep-rooted hold in the habits of the people. Instead of wondering that the handful of Greeks in Alexandria, on whom the power rested, lost those wide provinces, we should rather wonder that they were ever able to hold them.

After the death of Antiochus the Great, Ptolemy again proposed to enforce his rights over Ccele-Syria, which he had given up only in the weakness of his minority; and he is said to have been asked by one of his generals, how he should be able to pay for the large forces which he' was getting together for that purpose; and he playfully answered, that his treasure was in the number of his friends. But his joke was taken in earnest; they were afraid of new taxes and fresh levies on their estates; and means were easily taken to poison him. He died in the twenty-ninth year of his age, after a reign of twenty-four years; leaving the navy unmanned, the army in disobedience, the treasury empty, and the whole framework of government out of order.

Just before his death he had sent to the Achaians to offer to send ten galleys to join their fleet; and Polybius, the historian, to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of these reigns, although he had not yet reached the age called for by the Greek law, was sent by the Achaians as one of the ambassadors, with his father, to return thanks; but before they had quitted their own country they were stopped by the news of the death of Epiphanes.

Those who took away the life of the king seem to have had no thoughts of mending the form of government, nor any plan by which they might lessen the power of his successor. It was only one of those outbreaks of private vengeance which have often happened in unmixed monarchies, where men are taught that the only way to check the king's tyranny is by his murder; and the little notice that was taken of it by the people proves their want of public virtue as well as of political wisdom.



CHAPTER V—PTOLEMY PHILOMETOR AND PTOLEMY EUERGETES II.

The Syrian Invasion: The Jews and the Bible: Relations with Rome: Literature of the Age.

At the beginning of the last reign the Alexandrians had sadly felt the want of a natural guardian to the young king, and they were now glad to copy the customs of the conquered Egyptians. Epiphanes had left behind him two sons, each named Ptolemy, and a daughter named Cleopatra; and the elder son, though still a child, mounted the throne under the able guardianship of his mother, Cleopatra, and took the very suitable name of Philometor, or mother-loving. The mother governed the kingdom for seven years as regent during the minority of her son. "When Philometor reached his fourteenth year, the age at which his minority ceased, his coronation was celebrated with great pomp. Ambassadors from several foreign states were sent to Egypt to wish the king joy, to do honour to the day, and to renew the treaties of peace with him: Caius Valerius and four others were sent from Rome; Apollonius, the son of Mnestheus, was sent from Judaea; and we may regret with Polybius that he himself was not able to form part of the embassy then sent from the Achaians, that he might have seen the costly and curious ceremony, and given us an account of it.

While Cleopatra lived, she had been able to keep her son at peace with her brother, Antiochus Epiphanes, but upon her death, Leneus and the eunuch Eulaius, who then had the care of the young king, sought to reconquer Coele-Syria; and they embroiled the country in a war, at a time when weakness and decay might have been seen in every part of the army and navy, and when there was the greatest need of peace. Coele-Syria and Phoenicia had been given to Ptolemy Epiphanes as his wife's dower; but, when Philometor seemed too weak to grasp them, Antiochus denied that his father had ever made such a treaty, and got ready to march against Egypt, as the easiest way to guard Coele-Syria.

By this time the statesmen of Egypt ought to have learned the mistake in their foreign policy. By widening their frontier they always weakened it. They should have fortified the passes between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, not cities in Asia. When Antiochus entered Egypt he was met at Pelusium by the army of Philometor, which he at once routed in a pitched battle. The whole of Egypt was then in his power; he marched upon Memphis with a small force, and seized it without having to strike a blow, helped perhaps by the plea that he was acting on behalf of his nephew, Ptolemy Philometor, who then fell into his hands.

On this, the younger Ptolemy, the brother of Philometor, who was with his sister Cleopatra in Alexandria, and was about fifteen years old, declared himself king, and sent ambassadors to Rome to ask for help against Antiochus; and taking the name of the most popular of his forefathers, he called himself Euergetes. He is, however, better known in history as Ptolemy Physcon, or bloated, a nickname which was afterwards given to him when he had grown fat and unwieldy from the diseases of luxury.

Comanus and Cineas were the chief advisers of the young Euergetes; and in their alarm they proposed to send the foreign ambassadors to meet the invader on his march from Memphis, and to plead for peace. This task the ambassadors kindly undertook. There were then in Alexandria two embassies from the Achaians, one to renew the treaty of peace, and one to settle the terms of the coming wrestling match. There were there three embassies from Athens, one with gifts from the city, one about the Panathenaic games, and one about the celebration of the mysteries. There was also an embassy from Miletus, and one from Clazomenae. On the day of their arrival at Memphis, Antiochus feasted these numerous ambassadors in grand state, and on the next day gave them an audience. But their arguments for peace carried no weight with him; and he denied that his father, Antiochus the Great, had ever given Coele-Syria as a dower with his daughter Cleopatra to Epiphanes. To gain time he promised the ambassadors that he would give them an answer as soon as his own ambassadors returned from Alexandria; and in the meanwhile he carried his army down the Nile to Naucratis, and thence marched to the capital to begin the siege.

Antiochus, however, was defeated in his first assault upon Alexandria, and finding that he should not soon be able to bring the siege to an end, he sent off an embassy to Rome with a hundred and fifty talents of gold, fifty as a present to the senate, and the rest to be divided among the states of Greece, whose help he might need. At the same time, also, an embassy from the Rhodians arrived in the port of Alexandria, to attempt to restore peace to the country of their old allies. Antiochus received the Rhodian ambassadors in his tent, but would not listen to the long speech with which they threatened him, and shortly told them that he came as the friend of his elder nephew, the young Philometor, and if the Alexandrians wished for peace they should open the gates to their rightful king. Antiochus was, however, defeated in all his assaults on the city, and he at last withdrew his army and returned to Syria. He left Euergetes, King of the Greeks, at Alexandria, and Philometor at Memphis, King of the rest of Egypt. But he kept Pelusium, where he placed a strong garrison that he might be able easily to re-enter Egypt whenever he chose.

Ptolemy Macron, the Alexandrian governor of Cyprus, added to the troubles of the country by giving up his island to Antiochus. But he met with the usual fate of traitors, he was badly rewarded; and when he complained of his treatment, he was called a traitor by the very men who had gained by his treachery, and he poisoned himself in the bitterness of his grief. Antiochus, like most invaders, carried off whatever treasure fell into his hands. Egypt was a sponge which had not lately been squeezed, and his court and even his own dinner-table then shone with a blaze of silver and gold unknown in Syria before this inroad into Egypt.

By these acts, and by the garrison left in Pelusium, the eyes of Philometor were opened, and he saw that his uncle had not entered Egypt for his sake, but to make it a province of Syria, after it had been weakened by civil war. He therefore wisely forgave his rebellious brother and sister in Alexandria, and sent offers of peace to them; and it was agreed that the two Ptolemies should reign together, and turn their forces against the common enemy. It was most likely at this time, and as a part of this treaty, that Philometor married his sister Cleopatra. It was mainly by her advice and persuasion that the quarrel between the two brothers was for the time healed. On this treaty between the brothers the year was called the twelfth of Ptolemy Philometor and the first of Ptolemy Euergetes, and the public deeds of the kingdom were so dated.

The next year Antiochus Epiphanes again entered Egypt, claiming the island of Cyprus and the country round Pelusium as the price of his forbearance; and, on his marching forward, Memphis a second time opened its gates to him without a battle. He came down by slow marches towards Alexandria, and crossed the canal at Leucine, four miles from the city. There he was met by the Roman ambassadors, who ordered him to quit the country. On his hesitating, Popilius, who was one of them, drew a circle round him on the sand with his stick, and told him that, if he crossed that line without promising to leave Egypt at once, it should be taken as a declaration of war against Rome. On this threat Antiochus again quitted Egypt, and the brothers sent ambassadors to Rome to thank the senate for their help, and to acknowledge that they owed more to the Roman people than they did to the gods or to their forefathers.

The treaty made on this occasion between Philometor and Antiochus was written by Heraclides Lembus, the son of Serapion, a native of Oxyrynchus, who wrote on the succession of the philosophers in the several Greek schools, and other works on philosophy, but whose chief work was a history named the Lembeutic History.

Four years afterwards, in B. c. 164, Antiochus Epiphanes died; and the Jews of Judaea, who had been for some time struggling for liberty, then gained a short rest for their unhappy country. Judas Maccabaeus had raised his countrymen in rebellion against the foreigners; he had defeated the Syrian forces in several battles; and was at last able to purify the temple and re-establish the service there as of old. He therefore sent to the Jews of Egypt to ask them to join their Hebrew brethren in celebrating the feast of tabernacles on that great occasion.



The unhappy quarrels between the Egyptian kings soon broke out again; and, as the party of Euergetes was the stronger, Philometor was driven from his kingdom, and he fled to Rome for safety and for help. He entered the city privately, and took up his lodgings in the house of one of his own subjects, a painter of Alexandria. His pride led him to refuse the offers of better entertainment which were made to him by Demetrius, the nephew of Antiochus, who, like himself, was hoping to regain his kingdom by the help of the Romans. The Kings of Egypt and Syria, the two greatest kingdoms in the world, were at the same time asking to be heard at the bar of the Roman senate, and were claiming the thrones of their fathers at the hands of men who could make and unmake kings at their pleasure.

As soon as the senate heard that Philometor was in Rome, they lodged him at the cost of the state in a manner becoming his high rank, and soon sent him back to Egypt, with orders that Euergetes should reign in Cyrene, and that the rest of the kingdom should belong to Philometor. This happened in the seventeenth year of Philometor and the sixth of Euergetes, which was the last year that was named after the two kings. Cassius Longinus, who was next year consul at Rome, was most likely among the ambassadors who replaced Philometor on the throne; for he put the Ptolemaic eagle and thunderbolt on his coins, as though to claim the sovereignty of Egypt for the senate.

To these orders Euergetes was forced to yield; but the next year he went himself to Rome to complain to the senate that they had made a very unfair division of the kingdom, and to beg that they would add the island of Cyprus to his share. After hearing the ambassadors from Philometor, who were sent to plead on the other side, the senate granted the prayer of Euergetes, and sent ambassadors to Cyprus, with orders to hand that island over to Euergetes, and to make use of the fleets and armies of the republic if these orders were disobeyed.

Euergetes, during his stay in Rome, if we may believe Plutarch, made an offer of marriage to Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi; but this offer of a throne could not make the high-minded matron quit her children and her country. He left Italy with the Roman ambassadors, and, in passing through Greece, he raised a large body of mercenaries to help him to wrest Cyprus from his brother, as it would seem that the governor, faithful to his charge, would not listen to the commands of Rome. But the ambassadors had been told to conquer Cyprus, if necessary, with the arms of the republic only, and they therefore made Euergetes disband his levies. They sailed for Alexandria to enforce their orders upon Philometor, and sent Euergetes home to Cyrene. Philometor received the Roman ambassadors with all due honours; he sometimes gave them fair promises, and sometimes put them off till another day; and tried to spin out the time without saying either yes or no to the message from the senate. Euergetes sent to Alexandria to ask if they had gained their point; but though they threatened to return to Rome if they were not at once obeyed, Philometor, by his kind treatment and still kinder words, kept them more than forty days longer at Alexandria.

At last the Roman ambassadors left Egypt, and on their way home they went to Cyrene, to let Euergetes know that his brother had disobeyed the orders of the senate, and would not give up Cyprus; and Euergetes then sent two ambassadors to Rome to beg them to revenge their affronted dignity and to enforce their orders by arms. The senate of course declared the peace with Egypt at an end, and ordered the ambassadors from Philometor to quit Rome within five days, and sent their own ambassadors to Cyrene to tell Euergetes of their decree.

But while this was going on, the state of Cyrene had risen in arms against Euergetes; his vices and cruelty had made him hated, they had gained for him the nicknames of Kakergetes, or mischief-maker, and Physcon, or bloated; and while wishing to gain Cyprus he was in danger of losing his own kingdom. When he marched against the rebels, he was beaten and wounded, either in the battle or by an attack upon his life afterwards, and his success was for some time doubtful. When he had at last put down this rising, he sailed for Rome, to urge his complaints against Philometor, upon whom he laid the blame of the late rebellion, and to ask for help. The senate, after hearing both sides, sent a small fleet with Euergetes, not large enough to put him on the throne of Cyprus, but gave him, what they had before refused, leave to levy an army of his own, and to enlist their allies in Greece and Asia as mercenaries under his standard.

The Roman troops seem not to have helped Euergetes; but he landed in Cyprus with his own mercenaries, and was there met by Philometor, who had brought over the Egyptian army in person. Euergetes, however, was beaten in several battles, he was soon forced to shut himself up in the city of Lapitho, and at last to lay down his arms before his elder brother.

If Philometor had upon this put his brother to death, the deed would have seemed almost blameless after the family murders already related in this history. But, with a goodness of heart, he a second time forgave his brother all that had passed, replaced him on the throne of Cyrene, and promised to give him his daughter in marriage.



We are not told whether the firmness and forgiving mildness of Philometor had turned the Roman senate in his favour, but their troops seemed wanted in other quarters; at any rate they left off trying to enforce their decree; Philometor kept Cyprus, and sent Euergetes a yearly gift of grain from Alexandria.

During the wars in Syria between Philometor and Antiochus Epiphanes, at the beginning of this reign, the Jews were divided into two parties, one favouring the Egyptians and one the Syrians. At last the Syrian party drove their enemies out of Jerusalem; and Onias, the high priest, with a large body of Jews, fled to Egypt. There they were well received by Philometor, who allowed them to dwell in the neighbourhood of Heliopolis; and he gave them leave to build a temple and ordain priests for themselves. Onias built his temple at On or Onion, a city about twenty-three miles from Memphis, once the capital of the district of Heliopolis. It was on the site of an old Egyptian temple of the goddess Pasht, which had fallen into disuse and decay, and was built after the model of the temple of Jerusalem. Though by the Jewish law there was to be no second temple, yet Onias defended himself by quoting, as if meant for his own times, the words of Isaiah, who says that in that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt. The building of this temple, and the celebrating the Jewish feasts there, as in rivalry to the temple of Jerusalem, were a never-failing cause of quarrel between the Hebrew and the Greek Jews. They each altered the words of the Bible to make it speak their own opinions. The Hebrew Bible now says that the new temple was in the City of Destruction, and the Greek Bible says that it was in the City of Righteousness; whereas, from the Arabic version and some early commentaries, it seems that Isaiah was speaking of the city of Heliopolis, where there had been of old an altar to the Lord. The leaders of the Greek party wished the Jews to throw aside the character of strangers and foreign traders; to be at home and to become owners of the soil. "Hate not laborious work," says the son of Sirach; "neither husbandry, which the Most High hath ordained."

About the same time the Jews brought before Ptolemy, as a judge, their quarrel with the Samaritans, as to whether, according to the law of Moses, the temple ought to have been built at Jerusalem, or on the green and fertile Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritans built their temple, or on the barren white crags of Mount Ebal, where the Hebrew Bible says that it should be built; and as to which nation had altered their copies of the Bible in the twenty-seventh chapter of Deuteronomy and eighth chapter of Joshua. This dispute had lately been the cause of riots and rebellion. Ptolemy seems to have decided the question for political reasons, and to please his own subjects, the Alexandrian Jews; and without listening to the arguments as to what the law ordered, he was content with the proof that the temple had stood at Jerusalem for about eight hundred years, and he put to death the two Samaritan pleaders, who had probably been guilty of some outrage against the Jews in zeal for Mount Gerizim, and for which they might then have been on their trial.

Onias, the high priest, was much esteemed by Philometor, and bore high offices in the government; as also did Dositheus, another Jew, who had been very useful in helping the king to crush a rebellion. Dositheus called himself a priest and a Levite, though his title to that honour seems to have been doubted by his countrymen. He had brought with him into Egypt the book of Esther, written in Greek, which he said had been translated out of the Hebrew in Jerusalem by Lysimachus. It contained some additions for which the Hebrew has never been brought forward, and which are now placed among the uncanonical books in the Apocrypha.

Since the Ptolemies had found themselves too weak to hold Ethiopia, they had placed a body of soldiers on the border of the two countries, to guard Egypt from the inroads of the enemy. This station, twelve miles to the south of Syene, had by degrees grown into a city, and was called Parembole, or The Camp; and, as most of the soldiers were Greek mercenaries, it was natural that the temple which Philometor built there should be dedicated in the Greek language. Of the temples hitherto built by the Ptolemies, in the Egyptian cities, every one seems to have had the king's name and titles, and its dedication to the gods, carved on its massive portico in hieroglyphics; but this was in a Greek city, and it was dedicated to Isis and Serapis, on behalf of Philometor and his queen, in a Greek inscription.



Philometor also built a temple at Antseopolis to Antaeus, a god of whom we know little, but that he gave his name to the city; and another to Aroeris at Ombos; and in the same way he carved the dedications on the porticoes in the Greek language. This custom became common after that time, and proves both the lessened weight which the native Egyptians bore in the state, and that the kings had forgotten the wise rules of Ptolemy Soter, in regard to the religious feelings of the people. They must have been greatly shocked by this use of foreign writing in the place of the old characters of the country, which, from having been used in the temples, even for ages beyond the reach of history, had at last been called sacred. In the temple at Antoopolis we note a marked change in the style of building. The screen in front of the great portico is almost removed by having a doorway made in it between every pair of columns.

It is to this reign, also, that we seem to owe the great temple at Apollinopolis Magna, although it was not finished till one or two reigns later. It is one of the largest and least ruined of the Egyptian temples. Its front is formed of two huge square towers, with sloping sides, between which is the narrow doorway, the only opening in its massive walls. Through this the worshipper entered a spacious courtyard or cloister, where he found shade from the sun under a covered walk on either side. In front is the lofty portico with six large columns, the entrance to the body of the building. This last is flat-roofed, and far lower than the grand portico which hid it from the eyes of the crowd in the courtyard. The staircases in the towers are narrow. The sacred rooms within were small and dark, with only a glimmering flame here and there before an altar, except when lighted up with a blaze of lamps on a feast-day. As a castle it must have had great strength; from the top and loopholes of the two towers, stones and darts might be hurled at the enemy; and as it was in the hands of the Egyptians, it is the strongest proof that they were either not distrusted or not feared by their Greek rulers. The city of Apollinopolis stands on a grand and lofty situation, overlooking the river and the valley; and this proud temple, rising over all, can only have been planned by military skill as a fortress to command the whole.

At this time the Greeks in Egypt were beginning to follow the custom of their Egyptian brethren, to take upon themselves monastic vows, and to shut themselves up in the temples in religious idleness. But these foreigners were looked upon with jealousy by the Egyptian monks as intruders on their endowments, and we meet with a petition addressed to Philometor by Ptolemy, the son of Glaucias, a monk in the temple of Serapis at Memphis, who styles himself a Macedonian, complaining that his cell had been violently entered and himself ill-treated because he was a Greek; and reminding the king that last year, when the king visited the Serapium, he had addressed the same petition to him through the bars of his window. The priests in temples of Egypt were maintained, partly by their own estates, and partly by the offerings of the pious; and we still possess a deed of sale made in this reign by the Theban priests, of one-half of a third of their collections for the dead who had been buried in Thynabunum, the Libyan suburb of Thebes. This sixth share of the collections consisted of seven or eight families of slaves; the price of it was four hundred pieces of brass; the bargain was made in the presence of sixteen witnesses, whose names are given; and the deed was registered and signed by a public notary in the city of Thebes. The custom of giving offerings to the priests for the good of the dead would seem to have been a cause of some wealth to the temples. It was one among the many Egyptian customs forbidden by the law of Moses.

From this deed of sale we also gain some knowledge of the state of slavery in Egypt. The names of the slaves and of their fathers are Koptic, and in some cases borrowed from the names of the gods; hence the slaves were probably of the same religion, and spoke nearly the same language as their masters. They sunk into that low state rather by their own want of mind than by their masters' power. In each case the slave was joined in the same lot with his children; and the low price of four hundred pieces of brass, perhaps about thirty-eight dollars for eight families, or even if it be meant for the half of eight families, proves that they were of the nature of serfs, and that the master, either by law or custom, could have had no power of cruelly overworking them. On the other hand, in the reign of Philadelphus, the prisoners taken in battle, who might be treated with greater severity, were ransomed at fifteen dollars each. We see by the monuments that there were also a few negroes in the same unhappy state of slavery. They were probably not treated much worse than the lowest class of those born on the soil, but they were much more valuable. Other slaves of the Berber race were brought in coasting vessels from Opone on the incense coast, near to the island of Dioscorides.

Aristarchus, who had been the tutor of Euergetes II., and of a son of Philometor, was one of the ornaments of this reign. He had been a pupil of Aristophanes, the grammarian, and had then studied under Crates at Pergamus, the rival school to Alexandria. He died at Cyprus, whither he probably withdrew on the death of Philometor. He was chiefly known for his critical writings, in which his opinions of poetry were thought so just that few dared to disagree with them; and his name soon became proverbial for a critic. Aristarchus had also the good fortune to be listened to in his lecture-room by one whose name is far more known than those of his two royal pupils. Moschus of Syracuse, the pastoral poet, was one of his hearers; but his fame must not be claimed for Alexandria; he can hardly have learned from the critic that just taste by which he joined softness and sweetness to the rude plainness of the Doric muse. Indeed in this he only followed his young friend Bion, whose death he so beautifully bewails, and from whose poems he generously owns that he learned so much. It may be as well to add that the lines in which he says that Theocritus, who had been dead above one hundred years, joined with him in his sorrow for the death of Bion are later additions not found in the early manuscripts of his poems.

From our slight acquaintance with Bion's life, we are left in doubt whether he accompanied his friend Moschus to the court of Alexandria; but it is probable that he did. In his beautiful lamentation for the death of Adonis, we have an imitation of the melancholy chant of the Egyptians, named maneros, which they sang through the streets in the procession on the feast of Isis, when the crowd joined in the chorus, "Ah, hapless Isis, Osiris is no more." The tale has been a good deal changed by the Sicilian muse of Bion, but in the boar which killed Adonis, we have the wicked Typhon as carved on the monuments; we have also the wound in the thigh, and the consolations of the priests, who every year ended their mournful song with advising the goddess to reserve her sorrow for another year, when on the return of the festival the same lament would be again celebrated. The whole poem has a depth and earnestness of feeling which is truly Egyptian, but which was very little known in Alexandria.

To the Alexandrian grammarians, and more particularly to Aristophanes, Aristarchus, and their pupil, Ammonius, we are indebted for our present copies of Homer. These critics acted like modern editors, each publishing an edition, or rather writing out a copy, which was then re-copied in the museum as often as called for by the demands of the purchasers of books. Aristophanes left perhaps only one such copy or edition, while Aristarchus, in his efforts to correct the text of the great epic poet, made several such copies. These were in the hands of the later scholiasts, who appealed to them as their authority, and ventured to make no further alterations; we therefore now read the Iliad and Odyssey nearly as left by these Alexandrian critics. They no doubt took some liberties in altering the spelling and smoothing the lines; and, though we should value most highly a copy in the rougher form in which it came into their hands, yet, on the whole, we must be great gainers by their labours. They divided the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books each, and corrected the faulty metres; but one of their chief tasks was to set aside, or put a mark against, those more modern lines which had crept into the ancient poems. It had been usual to call every old verse Homer's or Homeric, and these it was the business of the critic to mark as not genuine. Aristarchus was jocosely said to have called every line spurious which he did not like; but everything that we can learn of him leads us to believe that he executed his task with judgment. From these men sprang the school of Alexandrian grammarians, who for several centuries continued their minute and often unprofitable studies in verbal criticism.



These were the palmy days of criticism. Never before or since have critics held so high a place in literature. The world was called upon to worship and do honour to the poet, but chiefly that it might admire the skill of the critic who could name the several sources of his beauties. The critic now ranked higher than a priest at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Homer was lifted to the skies that the critic might stand on a raised pedestal among the Muses. Such seems to be the meaning of the figures on the upper part of the well-known sculpture called the Apotheosis of Homer. It was made in this reign; and at the foot Ptolemy and his mother, in the characters of Time and the World, are crowning the statue of the poet, in the presence of ten worshippers who represent the literary excellences which shine forth in his poems. The figures of the Iliad and Odyssey kneel beside his seat, and the Frogs and Mice creep under his footstool, showing that the latter mock-heroic poem was already written and called the work of Homer.

Other celebrities who flourished under the fifth Ptolemy were Pamphilius, an Alexandrian physician who wrote on medical plants; Meander, a poet and physician who studied poisons, and the great Hipparchus, the founder of mathematical astronomy. Hero, also, in this reign, invented a kind of primitive steam-engine.



These men and their contemporaries were in the habit of writing their scientific observations in the form of poetry, but it was verse without earnestness and feeling, and such of it as survives is valued not for its literary qualities or charms of diction, but for the side-lights it throws upon the manners and education of the age.

The portrait of the king is known from those coins which bear the name of "King Ptolemy the mother-loving god." The eagle on the other side of the coins has a phoenix or palm-branch on its wing or by its side, which may be supposed to mean that they were struck in Phoenicia. We have not before met with the title of "god," on the coins of the Ptolemies; but, as every one of them had been so named in the hieroglyphical inscriptions, it can scarcely be called new.

When Philometor quitted the island of Cyprus after beating his brother in battle, he left Archias as governor, who entered into a plot to give it up to Demetrius, King of Syria, for the sum of five hundred talents. But the plot was found out, and the traitor then put an end to his own life, to escape from punishment and self-reproach. By this treachery of Demetrius, Philometor was made his enemy, and he joined Attalus, King of Pergamus, and Ariarathes, King of Cappadocia, in setting up Alexander Balas as a pretender to the throne of Syria, who beat Demetrius in battle, and put him to death. Philometor two years afterwards gave his elder daughter, Cleopatra, in marriage to Alexander, and led her himself to Ptolemais, or Acre, where the marriage was celebrated with great pomp.

But even in Ptolemais, the city in which Alexander had been so covered with favours, Philometor was near falling under the treachery of his new son-in-law. He learned that a plot had been formed against his life by Ammonius, and he wrote to Alexander to beg that the traitor might be given up to justice. But Alexander acknowledged the plot as his own, and refused to give up his servant. On this, Philometor recalled his daughter, and turned against Alexander the forces which he had led into Syria to uphold him. He then sent to the young Demetrius, afterwards called Nicator, the son of his late enemy, to offer him the throne and wife which he had lately given to Alexander Balas. Demetrius was equally pleased with the two offers. Philometor then entered Antioch at the head of his army, and there he was proclaimed by the citizens King of Asia and Egypt; but with a forbearance then very uncommon, he called together the council of the people, and refused the crown, and persuaded them to receive Demetrius as their king.



It is interesting to note that Alexander Balas and Demetrius Nicator each in his turn acknowledged his debt to the King of Egypt by putting the Ptolemaic eagle on his coins, and adjusting them to the Egyptian standard of weight: and in this they were afterwards followed by Antiochus, the son of Demetrius. The Romans, on the other hand, sometimes used the same eagle in boast of their power over Egypt; but we cannot be mistaken in what was meant by these Syrian kings, who none of them, when their coins were struck, were seated safely on the throne. With them, as with some of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, the use of the Egyptian eagle on the coins was an act of homage.

Philometor and Demetrius, as soon as the latter was acknowledged king at Antioch, then marched against Alexander, routed his army, and drove him into Arabia. But in this battle Philometor's horse was frightened by the braying of an elephant, and threw the king into the ranks of the enemy, and he was taken up covered with wounds. He lay speechless for five days, and the surgeons then endeavoured to cut out a piece of the broken bone from his skull. He died under the operation: but not before the head of Alexander had been brought to him as the proof of his victory.

Thus fell Ptolemy Philometor in the forty-second year of his age. His reign began in trouble; before he reached the years of manhood the country had been overrun by foreigners, and torn to pieces by civil war; but he left the kingdom stronger than he found it, a praise which he alone can share with Ptolemy Soter. He was alike brave and mild; he was the only one of the race who fell in battle, and the only one whose hands were unstained with civil blood. At an age and in a country when poison and the dagger were too often the means by which the king's authority was upheld, when goodness was little valued, and when conquests were thought the only measure of greatness, he spared the life of a brother taken in battle, he refused the crown of Syria when offered to him; and not only no one of his friends or kinsmen, but no citizen of Alexandria, was put to death during the whole of his reign. We find grateful inscriptions to his honour at the city of Citium in Cyprus, in the island of Therse, and at Methone in Argolis.

Philometor had reigned thirty-five years in all; eleven years alone, partly while under age, then six years jointly with his brother, Euergetes II., and eighteen more alone while his brother reigned in Cyrene. He married his sister Cleopatra, and left her a widow, with two daughters, each named Cleopatra. The elder daughter we have seen offered to Euergetes, then married to Alexander Balas, and lastly to Demetrius. The younger daughter, afterwards known by the name of Cleopatra Cocce, was still in the care of her mother. He had most likely had three sons. One perhaps had been the pupil of Aristarchus, and died before his father; as the little elegy by Antipator of Sidon, which is addressed to the dead child, on the grief of his father and mother, would seem to be meant for a son of Philometor. A second son was murdered, and a third lived in Syria.

On the death of Philometor, his widow, Cleopatra, and some of the chief men of Alexandria proclaimed his young son king, most likely under the name of Ptolemy Eupator; but Euergetes, whose claim was favoured by the mob, marched from Cyrene to Alexandria to seize the crown of Egypt. Onias the Jew defended the city for Cleopatra; but a peace was soon made by the help of Thermus, the Roman ambassador, and on this the gates of Alexandria were opened. It was agreed that Euergetes should be king, and marry Cleopatra, his sister and his brother's widow. We may take it for granted that one article of the treaty was that her son should reign on the death of his uncle; but Euergetes, forgetting that he owed his own life to Philometor, and also disregarding the Romans who were a party to the treaty, had the boy put to death on the day of the marriage.

The Alexandrians, after the vices and murders of former kings, could not have been much struck by the behaviour of Euergetes towards his family; but he was not less cruel towards his people. Alexandria, which he had entered peaceably, was handed over to the unbridled cruelty of the mercenaries, and blood flowed in every street. The anger of Euergetes fell more particularly on the Jews for the help which they had given to Cleopatra, and he threatened them with utter destruction. The threat was not carried into execution; but such was the Jews' alarm, that they celebrated a yearly festival in Alexandria for several hundred years, in thankfulness for their escape from it. The population of the city, who looked upon it less as a home than as a place of trade in which they could follow their callings with the greatest gain, seemed to quit Alexandria as easily as they had come there under Ptolemy Soter; and Euergetes, who was afraid that he should soon be left to reign over a wilderness, made new laws in favour of trade and of strangers who would settle there.

In the lifetime of Philometor he had never laid aside his claim to the throne of Egypt, but had only yielded to the commands of Rome and to his brother's forces, and he now numbered the years of his reign from his former seizing of Alexandria. He had reigned six years with his brother, and then eighteen years in Cyrene, and he therefore called the first year of his real reign the twenty-fifth.

In the next year he went to Memphis to be crowned; and, while the pomps and rites were there being performed, his queen and sister bore him a son, whom, from the place and to please the people, he named Memphites. But his queen was already in disgrace; and some of those very friends who on his brother's death had marched with him against Alexandria were publicly put to death for speaking ill of his mistress Irene. He soon afterwards put away his wife and married her younger daughter, his niece, Cleopatra Cocce. The divorced Cleopatra was allowed to keep her title; and, as she was the widow of the late king, she held a rank in the state before the wife of the reigning king. Thus, the small temple of Hathor in the island of Philae was dedicated to the goddess in the name of King Ptolemy and Queen Cleopatra his sister, and Queen Cleopatra his wife, designated as the gods Euergetae.



The Roman senate, however, felt its authority slighted by this murder of the young Eupator, and divorce of Cleopatra, both of whom were living under its protection. The late ambassador, Thermus, by whose treachery or folly Euergetes had been enabled to crush his rivals and gain the sovereign power, was on his return to Rome called to account for his conduct. Cato the Censor, in one of his great speeches, accused him of having been seduced from his duty by the love of Egyptian gold, and of having betrayed the queen to the bribes of Euergetes. In the meanwhile Scipio Africanus the younger and two other Roman ambassadors were sent by the senate to see that the kingdom of their ally was peaceably settled. Euergetes went to meet him with great pomp, and received him with all the honours due to his rank; and the whole city followed him in crowds through the streets, eager to catch a sight of the conqueror of Carthage, of the greatest man who had been seen in Alexandria, of one who by his virtues and his triumphs had added a new glory even to the name of Scipio. He brought with him, as his friend and companion (in the case of a modern ambassador we should say, as his chaplain), the philosopher, Pansetius, the chief of the Stoics, who had gained a great name for his three books on the "Duty of Man," which were afterwards copied by Cicero.



Euergetes showed them over the palace and the treasury; but, though the Romans had already begun to run the down-hill race of luxury, in which the Egyptians were so far ahead of them, yet Scipio, who held to the old fashions and plain manners of the republic, was not dazzled by mere gold and purple. But the trade of Alexandria, the natural harbour, the forest of masts, and the lighthouse, the only one in the world, surpassed anything that his well-stored mind had looked for. He went by boat to Memphis, and saw the rich crops on either bank, and the easy navigation of the Nile, in which the boats were sailing up the river by the force of the wind and floating down by the force of the stream. The villages on the river side were large and thickly set, each in the bosom of its own grove of palm-trees; and the crowded population was well fed and well clothed. The Roman statesman saw that nothing was wanting but a good government to make Egypt what it used to be, the greatest kingdom in the world.

Scipio went no higher than Memphis; the buildings of Upper Egypt, the oldest and the largest in the world, could not draw him to Thebes, a city whose trade had fallen off, where the deposits of bullion in the temples had lessened, and whose linen manufacture had moved towards the Delta. Had this great statesman been a Greek he would perhaps have gone on to this city, famous alike in history and in poetry; but, as it was, Scipio and his friends then sailed for Cyprus, Syria, and the other provinces or kingdoms under the power of Rome, to finish this tour of inspection.

For some time past, the Jews, taking advantage of the weakness of Egypt and Syria, had been struggling to make themselves free; and, at the beginning of this reign Simon Maccabaeus, the high priest, sent an embassy to Rome, with a shield of gold weighing one thousand minae, as a present, to get their independence acknowledged by the Romans. On this the senate made a treaty of alliance with the family of the Maccabees, and, using the high tone of command to which they had for some time past been accustomed, they wrote to Euergetes and the King of Syria, ordering them not to make war upon their friends, the Jews. But in an after decree the Romans recognise the close friendship and the trading intercourse between Egypt and Judaea; and when they declared that they would protect the Jews in their right to levy custom-house duties, they made an exception in favour of the Egyptian trade. The people of Judaea in these struggles were glad to forget the jealousy which had separated them from their brethren in Egypt, and the old quarrel between the Hebrews and the Hellenists; the Sanhedrim of Jerusalem wrote to the Sanhedrim of Alexandria, telling them that they were going to keep the Feast of the Tabernacles in solemn thanksgiving to the Almighty for their deliverance, and begging for the benefit of their prayers.

The Jews, however, of Judaea, on their gaining their former place as a nation, did not, as before, carry forward the chain of history in their sacred books. While they had been under the yoke of the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Syrians, their language had undergone some changes; and when the Hebrew of the Old Testament was no longer the spoken language, they perhaps thought it unworthy of them to write in any other. At any rate, it is to their Greek brethren in Egypt that we are indebted for the history of the bravery of the Maccabees. Jason of Cyrene wrote the history of the Maccabees, and of the Jewish wars against Antiochus Epiphanes and his son, Antiochus Eupator. This work, which was in five books, is lost, and we now read only the short history which was drawn from it by some unknown Greek writer, which, with the letter from the Jews of Judaaa to their brethren of Egypt, forms the second book of Maccabees.

In the list of Alexandrian authors, we must not forget to mention Jesus, the son of Sirach, who came into Egypt in this reign, and translated into Greek the Hebrew work of his grandfather Jesus, which is named the Book of Wisdom, or Ecclesiasticus. It is written in imitation of the Proverbs of Solomon; and though its pithy sayings fall far short of the deep wisdom and lofty thoughts which crowd every line of that wonderful work, yet it will always be read with profit and pleasure. In this book we see the earliest example that we now possess of a Jewish writer borrowing from the Greek philosophers; though how far the Greek thoughts were part of the original Hebrew may be doubted, because the work was left unfinished by Jesus the grandfather, and completed by the Alexandrian translator, his grandson. Hereafter we shall see the Alexandrian Jews engrafting on the Jewish theology more and more of the Platonic philosophy, which very well suited the serious earnestness of their character, and which had a most remarkable effect in making their writings and opinions more fitted to spread into the ancient schools.

This and other writings of the Alexandrian Jews were by them added to the list of sacred books which together made their Greek Bible; but they were never acknowledged at Jerusalem. The Hebrew books of the law and the prophets were first gathered together by Nehemiah after the return of the Hebrews from Babylon; but his library had been broken up during the Syrian wars. These Hebrew books, with some few which had since been written, were again got together by Judas Maccabaeus; and after his time nothing more seems to have been added to them, though the Alexandrian Jews continued to add new books to their Greek Bible, while cultivating the Platonic philosophy with a success which made a change in their religious opinions. It was in Alexandria, and very much by the help of the Jews, that Eastern and Western opinions now met. Each made some change in the other, and, on the union of the two, Alexandria gave to the world a new form of philosophy. The vices and cruelty of Euergetes called for more than usual skill in the minister to keep down the angry feelings of the people. This skill was found in the general Hierax, who was one of those men whose popular manners, habits of business, and knowledge of war, make them rise over every difficulty in times of trouble. On him rested the whole weight of the government; his wise measures in part made up for the vices of his master; and, when the treasure of the state had been turned to the king's pleasures, and the soldiers were murmuring for want of pay, Hierax brought forward his own money to quiet the rebellion. But at last the people could bear their grievances no longer; the soldiers without pay, instead of guarding the throne, were its greatest enemies, and the mob rose in Alexandria, set fire to the palace, and Euergetes was forced to leave the city and withdraw to Cyprus.

The Alexandrians, when free from their tyrant, sent for Cleopatra, his sister and divorced queen, and set her upon the throne. Her son by Philometor, in whose name she had before claimed the throne, had been put to death by Euergetes; Memphites, one of her sons by Euergetes, was with his father in the island of Cyprus; and Euergetes, fearing that his first wife Cleopatra and her advisers might make use of his son's name to strengthen her throne, had the child at once put to death. The birthday of Cleopatra was at hand, and it was to be celebrated in Alexandria with the usual pomp; and Euergetes, putting the head, hands, and feet of his son Memphites into a box, sent it to Alexandria by a messenger, who had orders to deliver it to Cleopatra in the midst of the feast, when the nobles and ambassadors were making their accustomed gifts. The grief of Cleopatra was only equalled by the anger of the Alexandrians, who the more readily armed themselves under Marsyas to defend the queen against the invasion for which Euergetes was then making preparations.

The queen's forces shortly marched against the army of Euergetes that was entering Egypt under the command of Hegelochus; but the Egyptian army was beaten on the Syrian frontier. Marsyas was sent prisoner to Euergetes; and the king then showed the only act of mercy which can be mentioned to his praise, and spared the life of a prisoner whom he thought he could make use of. Cleopatra then sent to Syria, to her son-in-law Demetrius, to ask for help, which was at first readily granted, but Demetrius was soon called home again by a rising in Antioch. But great indeed must be the cruelty which a people will not bear from their own king rather than call in a foreign master to relieve them.



The return of the hated and revengeful Euergetes was not dreaded so much by the Alexandrians as the being made a province of Syria. Cleopatra received no help from Demetrius, but she lost the love of her people by asking for it, and she was soon forced to fly from Alexandria. She put her treasures on board a ship, and joined her son Ptolemy and her son-in-law Demetrius in Syria, while Euergetes regained his throne. As soon as Euergetes was again master of Egypt, it was his turn to be revenged upon Demetrius; and he brought forward Zabbineus, a young Egyptian, the son of Protarchus, a merchant, and sent him into Syria with an army to claim the throne under the name of Alexander, the adopted son of Antiochus. Alexander easily conquered and then put to death Demetrius, but, when he found that he really was King of Syria, he would no longer receive orders from Egypt; and Euergetes found that the same plots and forces were then wanted to put down this puppet, which he had before used to set him up. He began by making peace with his sister Cleopatra, who was again allowed to return to Egypt; and we find her name joined with those of Euergetes and his second queen in one of the public acts of the priests. He then sent an army and his daughter Tryphaena in marriage to Antiochus Grypus, one of the sons of Demetrius, who gladly received his help, and conquered Alexander and gained the throne of his father.

We possess a curious inscription upon an obelisk that once stood in the island of Philae, recording, as one of the grievances that the villagers smarted under, the necessity of finding supplies for the troops on their marches, and also for all the government messengers and public servants, or those who claimed to travel as such. The cost of this grievance was probably greater at Philae than in other places, because the traveller was there stopped in his voyage by the cataracts on the Nile, and he had to be supplied with labourers to carry his luggage where the navigation was interrupted. Accordingly the priests at Philae petitioned the king that their temple might be relieved from this heavy and vexatious charge, which they said lessened their power of rightly performing their appointed sacrifices; and they further begged to be allowed to set up a monument to record the grant which they hoped for. Euergetes granted the priests' prayer, and accordingly they set up a small obelisk; and the petition and the king's answer were carved on the base of this monument.

The gold mines near the Nubian or Golden Berenice, though not so rich as they used to be, were worked with full activity by the unhappy prisoners, criminals, and slaves, who were there condemned to labour in gangs under the lash of their taskmasters. Men and women alike, even old men and children, each at such work as his overstretched strength was equal to, were imprisoned in these caverns tunnelled under the sea or into the side of the mountain; and there by torchlight they suffered the cruel tortures of their overseers without having power to make their groans heard above ground. No lot upon earth could be more wretched than that of these unhappy men; to all of them death would have been thought a boon.

The survey of the coast of the Red Sea, which was undertaken in this or the last reign, did not reach beyond the northern half of that sea. It was made by Agatharcides, who, when the philosopher Heracleides Lembus filled the office of secretary to the government under Philometor, had been his scribe and reader. Agatharcides gives a curious account of the half-savage people on these coasts, and of the more remarkable animals and products of the country. He was a most judicious historian, and gave a better guess than many at the true cause of why there was most water in the Nile in the dry est season of the year; which was a subject of never-ceasing inquiry with the travellers and writers on physics. Thaies said that its waters were held back at its mouths by the Etesian winds, which blow from the north during the summer months; and Democritus of Abdera said that these winds carried heavy rain-clouds to Ethiopia; whereas the north winds do not begin to blow till the Nile has risen, and the river has returned to its usual size before the winds cease. Anaxagoras, who was followed by Euripides, the poet, thought that the large supply of water came from the melting of snow in Ethiopia. Ephorus thought that there were deep springs in the river's bed, which gushed forth with greater force in summer than in winter. Herodotus and OEnopides both thought that the river was in its natural state when the country was overflowed; and the former said that its waters were lessened in winter by the attraction of the sun, then over Southern Ethiopia; and the latter said that, as the earth grew cool, the waters were sucked into its pores. The sources of the Nile were hidden by the barbarism of the tribes on its banks; but by this time travellers had reached the region of tropical rains; and Agatharcides said that the overflow in Egypt arose from the rains in Upper Ethiopia. But the Abyssinian rains begin to fall at midsummer, too late to cause the inundation in Egypt; and therefore the truth seemed after all to lie with the priests of Memphis, who said the Nile rises on the other side of the equator, and the rain falling in what was winter on that side of the globe made the Nile overflow in the Egyptian summer.

From the very earliest times, says Ebers, the Pharaohs had understood the necessity of measuring exactly the amount or deficiency of the inundations of the Nile, and Nilometers are preserved which were erected high up the river in Nubia by kings of the Old Empire, by princes, that is to say, who reigned before the invasion of the Hyksos. Herodotus tells us that the river must rise sixteen ells for the inundation to be considered a favourable one. If it remained below this mark, the higher fields failed in obtaining a due supply of water, and a dearth was the result. If it greatly exceeded it, it broke down the dykes, damaged the villages, and had not retired into its bed by the time for sowing the seed. Thus the peasant, who could expect no rain, and was threatened neither by frosts nor storms, could have his prospects of a good or bad harvest read off by the priests with perfect certainty by the scale of the Nilometer, and not by the servants of the divinities only, but by the officers of the realm, who calculated the amount of taxes to be paid to them in proportion to the rising of the river.



The standard was protected by the magic power of unapproachable sanctity, and the husbandman has been strictly interdicted from the earliest time to this very day from casting a glance at it during the time when the river is rising; for what sovereign could bear to disclose without reserve the decrees of Providence as to the most important of his rights, that of estimating the amount of taxes to be imposed? In the time of the Pharaohs it was the priesthood that declared to the king and to the people their estimate of the inundations, and at the present day, the sheik, who is sworn to secrecy, is under the control of the police of Cairo, and has his own Nilometer, the zero point of which is said to be somewhat below that of the ancient standard. The engineers of the French expedition first detected the fraud, by means of which the government endeavoured every year to secure the full amount of taxes.

When the Nile has reached a height of a little over fifteen old Arabic ells, it exceeds its lowest level by more than eight ells, and has reached the height requisite to enable it to irrigate the highest fields. This happy event is announced to the people, who await it with breathless anxiety, and the opening of the dykes may be proceeded with. A festival to celebrate this occasion has been held from the remotest times. At the present time customs prevail which can, it is alleged, be traced by direct descent to the times of the Pharaohs, and yet during the dominion of Christianity in Egypt, and later again under sovereigns governing a nation wholly converted to Islam, the old worship of the Nile, with all its splendour, its display, and its strange ceremonies, was extirpated with the utmost rigour. But some portion of every discarded religion becomes merged in the new one that has supplanted it as a fresh form of superstition, and thus we discover from a Christian document dating from the sixth century, that the rising of the Nile "in its time" was no longer attributed to Osiris, but to a certain Saint Orion, and, as the priest of antiquity taught that a tear of Isis led to the overflowing of the Nile, so we hear the Egyptians of the present day say that "a divine tear" has fallen into the stream and caused the flood.

The trade of the Egyptians had given them very little knowledge of geography. Indeed the whole trade of the ancients was carried on by buying goods from their nearest neighbours on one side, and selling them to those on the other side of them. Long voyages were unknown; and, though the trading wealth of Egypt had mainly arisen from carrying the merchandise of India and Arabia Felix from the ports on the Red Sea to the ports on the Mediterranean, the Egyptians seem to have gained no knowledge of the countries from which these goods came.



They bought them of the Arab traders, who came to Cosseir and the Troglodytic Berenice from the opposite coast; the Arabs had probably bought them from the caravans that had carried them across the desert from the Persian Gulf; and that these land journeys across the desert were both easier and cheaper than a coasting voyage, we have before learned, from Phila-delphus thinking it worth while to build watering and resting-houses in the desert between Koptos and Berenice, to save the voyage between Berenice and Cosseir. India seems to have been only known to the Greeks as a country that by sea was to be reached by the way of the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf; and though Scylax had, by the orders of Darius, dropped down the river Indus, coasted Arabia, and thence reached the Red Sea, this voyage was either forgotten or disbelieved, and in the time of the Ptolemies it seems probable that nobody thought that India could be reached by sea from Egypt. Arrian indeed thought that the difficulty of carrying water in their small ships, with large crews of rowers, was alone great enough to stop a voyage of such a length along a desert coast that could not supply them with fresh water.

The long voyages of Solomon and Necho had been limited to coasting Africa; the voyage of Alexander the Great had been from the Indus to the Persian Gulf; hence it was that the court of Euergetes was startled by the strange news that the Arabian guards on the coast of the Red Sea had found a man in a boat by himself, who could not speak Koptic, but who they afterwards found was an Indian, who had sailed straight from India, and had lost his shipmates. He was willing to show any one the route by which he had sailed; and Eudoxus of Cyzicus in Asia Minor came to Alexandria to persuade Euergetes to give him the command of a vessel for this voyage of discovery. A vessel was given him; and, though he was but badly fitted out, he reached a country, which he called India, by sea, and brought back a cargo of spices and precious stones. He wrote an account of the coasts which he visited, and it was made use of by Pliny. But it is more than probable the unknown country called India, which Eudoxus visited, was on the west coast of Africa. Abyssinia was often called India by the ancients.

In these attempts at maritime discovery, and efforts after a cheaper means of obtaining the Indian products, the Greek sailors of Euergetes made a settlement in the island of Dioscorides, now called Socotara, in the Indian Ocean, forty leagues eastward of the coast of Africa; and there they met the trading vessels from India and Ceylon. This little island continued a Greek colony for upwards of seven centuries, and Greek was the only language spoken there till it fell under the Arabs in the twilight of history, when all the European possessions in Africa were overthrown. But the art of navigation was so far unknown that but little use was made of this voyage; the goods of India, which were all costly and of small weight, were still for the most part carried across the desert on camels' backs, and we may remark that at a later period hardly more than twenty small vessels ever went to India in one year during the reigns of the Ptolemies, and that it was not till Egypt was a province of Rome that the trade-winds across the Arabian Sea were found out by Hippalus, a pilot in the Indian trade. The voyage was little known in the time of Pliny; even the learned Propertius seems to have thought that silk was a product of Arabia; and Palmyra and Petra, the two chief cities in the desert, whose whole wealth rested and whose very being hung upon their being watering-places for these caravans, were still wealthy cities in the second century of our era, when the voyage by the Arabian Sea became for the first time easier and cheaper than the journeys across the desert.

Euergetes had been a pupil of Aristobolus, a learned Jew, a writer of the peripatetic sect of philosophers, one who had made his learning respected by the pagans from his success in cultivating their philosophy; and also of Aristarchus, the grammarian, the editor of Homer; and, though the king had given himself up to the lowest pleasures, yet he held with his crown that love of letters and of learning which had ennobled his forefathers. He was himself an author, and wrote, like Ptolemy Soter, his Memorabilia, or an account of what he had seen most remarkable in his lifetime. We may suppose that his writings were not of a very high order; they were quoted by Athengeus, who wrote in the reign of Marcus Aurelius; but we learn little else from them than the names of the mistresses of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and that a flock of pheasants was kept in the palace of Alexandria. He also wrote a commentary on Homer, of which we know nothing. When busy upon literature, he would allow his companions to argue with him till midnight on a point of history or a verse of poetry; but not one of them ever uttered a word against his tyranny, or argued in favour of a less cruel treatment of his enemies.

In this reign the schools of Alexandria, though not holding the rank which they had gained under Philadelphus, were still highly thought of. The king still gave public salaries to the professors; and Panaretus, who had been a pupil of the philosopher Arcesilaus, received the very large sum of twelve talents, or ten thousand dollars a year. Sositheus and his rival, the younger Homer, the tragic poets of this reign, have even been called two of the Pleiades of Alexandria; but that was a title given to many authors of very different times, and to some of very little merit. Such indeed was the want of merit among the poets of Alexandria that many of their names would have been unknown to posterity had they not been saved in the pages of the critics and grammarians, and pieced together by the skill of nineteenth century investigators.



But, unfortunately, the larger number of the men of letters had in the late wars taken part with Philome-tor against the cruel and luxurious Euergetes. Hence, when the streets of Alexandria were flowing with the blood of those whom he called his enemies, crowds of learned men left Egypt, and were driven to earn a livelihood by teaching in the cities to which they then fled. They were all Greeks, and few of them had been born in Alexandria. They had been brought there by the wealth of the country and the favour of the sovereign; and they now withdrew when these advantages were taken away from them. The isles and coasts of the Mediterranean were so filled with grammarians, philosophers, geometers, musicians, schoolmasters, painters, and physicians from Alexandria that the cruelty of Euergetes II., like the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, may be said to have spread learning by the ill-treatment of its professors.

The city which was then rising highest in arts and letters was Pergamus in Asia Minor, which, under Eumenes and Attalus, was almost taking the place which Alexandria had before held. Its library already held two hundred thousand volumes, and raised a jealousy in the mind of Euergetes. Not content with buying books and adding to the size of his own library, he wished to lessen the libraries of his rivals; and, nettled at the number of volumes which Eumenes had got together at Pergamus, he made a law, forbidding the export of the Egyptian papyrus on which they were written. On this the copiers employed by Eumenes wrote their books upon sheepskins, which were called charta pergamena, or parchment, from the name of the city in which they were written. Thus our own two words, parchment from Pergamus, and paper from papyrus, remain as monuments of the rivalry in book-collecting between the two kings.

Euergetes was so bloated with disease that his body was nearly six feet round, and he was made weak and slothful by this weight of flesh. He walked with a crutch, and wore a loose robe like a woman's, which reached to his feet and hands. He gave himself up very much to eating and drinking, and on the year that he was chosen priest of Apollo by the Cyrenians, he showed his pleasure at the honour by a memorable feast which he gave in a costly manner to all those who had before filled that office. He had reigned six years with his brother, then eighteen years in Cyrene, and lastly twenty-nine years after the death of his brother, and he died in the fifty-fourth year of his reign, and perhaps the sixty-ninth of his age. He left a widow, Cleopatra Cocce; two sons, Ptolemy and Ptolemy Alexander; and three daughters, Cleopatra, married to her elder brother; Tryphsena, married to Antiochus Grypus; and Selene unmarried; and also a natural son, Ptolemy Apion, to whom by will he left the kingdom of Cyrene; while he left the kingdom of Egypt to his widow and one of his sons, giving her the power of choosing which should be her colleague. The first Euergetes earned and deserved the name, which was sadly disgraced by the second; but such was the fame of Egypt's greatness that the titles of its kings were copied in nearly every Greek kingdom. We meet with the flattering names of Soter, Philadelphus, Euergetes, and the rest, on the coins of Syria, Parthia, Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Pon-tus, Bactria, and Bithynia; while that of Euergetes, the benefactor, was at last used as another name for a tyrant.



CHAPTER VI—THE GROWTH OF ROMAN INFLUENCE IN EGYPT

The weakness of the Ptolemies: Egypt bequeathed to Rome: Pompey, Caesar, and Antony befriend Egypt.

On the death of Ptolemy Euergetes II., his widow, Cleopatra Cocce, would have chosen her younger son, Ptolemy Alexander, then a child, for her partner on the throne, most likely because it would have been longer in the course of years before he would have claimed his share of power; but she was forced, by a threatened rising of the Alexandrians, to make her elder son king. Before, however, she would do this she made a treaty with him, which would strongly prove, if anything were still wanting, the vice and meanness of the Egyptian court. It was, that, although married to his sister Cleopatra, of whom he was very fond, he should put her away, and marry his younger sister Selene; because the mother hoped that Selene would be false to her husband's cause, and weaken his party in the state by her treachery.

Ptolemy took the name of Soter II., though he is more often called Lathyrus, from a stain upon his face in the form of an ivy-leaf, pricked into his skin in honour of Osiris. He was also called Philometor; and we learn from an inscription on a temple at Apollinopolis Parva, that both these names formed part of the style in which the public acts ran in this reign; it is dedicated by "the Queen Cleopatra and King Ptolemy, gods Philometores, Soteres, and his children," without mentioning his wife. Here, as in Persia and Judaaa, the king's mother often held rank above his wife. The name of Philometor was given to him by his mother, because, though he had reached the years of manhood, she wished to act as his guardian; but her unkindness to him was so remarkable that historians have thought that it was a nickname. The mother and the son were jointly styled sovereigns of Egypt; but they lived apart, and in distrust of one another, each surrounded by personal friends; while Cleopatra's stronger mind and greater skill in kingcraft gained for her the larger share of power, and the effective control of Egypt.

Cleopatra, the daughter, put away by her husband at the command of her mother, soon made a treaty of marriage with Antiochus Cyzicenus, the friend of her late husband, who was struggling for the throne of Syria with his brother, Antiochus Grypus, the husband of her sister Tryphaana; and on her way to Syria she stopped at Cyprus, where she raised a large army and took it with her as her dower, to help her new husband against his brother and her sister.

With this addition to his army Cyzicenus thought his forces equal to those of his brother; he marched against him and gave him battle. But he was beaten, and he fled with his wife Cleopatra; and they shut themselves up in the city of Antioch. Grypus and Tryphaana then laid siege to the city, and the astute Tryphaana soon took her revenge on her sister for coming into Syria to marry the brother and rival of her husband. The city was taken; and Tryphaana ordered her sister to be torn from the temple into which she had fled, and to be put to death. In vain Grypus urged that he did not wish his victory to be stained by the death of a sister; that Cleopatra was by marriage his sister as well as hers; that she was the aunt of their children; and that the gods would punish them if they dragged her from the altar. But Tryphaana was merciless and unmoved; she gave her own orders to the soldiers, and Cleopatra was killed as she clung with her arms to the statue of the goddess. This cruelty, however, was soon overtaken by punishment: in the next battle Cyzicenus was the conqueror, and he put Tryphaana to death, to quiet, as was said, the ghost of her murdered sister.

In the third year of her reign Cleopatra Cocce gave the island of Cyprus to her younger son, Alexander, as an independent kingdom, thinking that he would be of more use to her there, in upholding her power against his brother Lathyrus, than he could be at Alexandria.

In the last reign Eudoxus had been entrusted by Euergetes with a vessel and a cargo for a trading voyage of discovery towards India; and in this reign he was again sent by Cleopatra down the Red Sea to trade with the unknown countries in the east. How far he went may be doubted, but he brought back with him from the coast of Africa the prow of a ship ornamented with a horse's head, the usual figurehead of the Carthaginian ships. This he showed to the Alexandrian pilots, who knew it as belonging to one of the Phoenician ships of Cadiz or Gibraltar. Eudoxus justly argued that this prow proved that it was possible to sail round Africa and to reach India by sea from Alexandria. The government, however, would not fit him out for a third voyage; but his reasons were strong enough to lead many to join him, and others to help him with money, and he thereby fitted out three vessels on this attempt to sail round Africa by the westward voyage. He passed the Pillars of Hercules, or Straits of Gibraltar, and then turned southward. He even reached that part of Africa where the coast turns eastward. Here he was stopped by his ships wanting repair. The only knowledge that he brought back for us is, that the natives of that western coast were of nearly the same race as the Ethiopians on the eastern coast. He was able to sail only part of the way back, and he reached Mauritania with difficulty by land. He thence returned home, where he met with the fate not unusual to early travellers. His whole story was doubted; and the geographers at home did not believe that he had ever visited the countries that he attempted to describe.

The people of Lower Egypt were, as we have seen, of several races; and, as each of the surrounding nations was in its turn powerful, that race of men was uppermost in Lower Egypt. Before the fall of Thebes the Kopts ruled in the Delta; when the free states of Greece held the first rank in the world, even before the time of Alexander's conquests, the Greeks of Lower Egypt were masters of their fellow-countrymen; and now that Judaea, under the bravery of the Maccabees, had gained among nations a rank far higher than what its size entitled it to, the Egyptian Jews found that they had in the same way gained weight in Alexandria. Cleopatra had given the command of her army to two Jews, Chelcias and Ananias, the sons of Onias, the priest of Heliopolis; and hence, when the civil war broke out between the Jews and Samaritans, Cleopatra helped the Jews, and perhaps for that reason Lathyrus helped the Samaritans. He sent six thousand men to his friend, Antiochus Cyzicenus, to be led against the Jews, but this force was beaten by the two sons of Hyrcanus, the high priest.

By this act Lathyrus must have lost the good-will of the Jews of Lower Egypt, and hence Cleopatra again ventured to choose her own partner on the throne. She raised a riot in Alexandria against him, in the tenth year of their reign, on his putting to death some of her friends, or more likely, as Pausanias says, by showing to the people some of her eunuchs covered with blood, who she said were wounded by him; and she forced him to fly from Egypt. She took from him his wife, Selene, whom she had before thrust upon him, and who had borne him two children; and she allowed him to withdraw to the kingdom of Cyprus, from which place she recalled her favourite son, Alexander, to reign with her in Egypt.



During these years the building was going forward of the beautiful temple at the city, afterwards named by the Romans Contra-Latopolis, on the other side of the Nile from Latopolis or Esne. Little now remains of it but its massive portico, upheld by two rows of four columns each, having the globe with outstretched wings carved on the overhanging eaves. The earliest names found among the hieroglyphics with which its walls are covered are those of Cleopatra Cocce and her son, Ptolemy Soter, while the latest name is that of the Emperor Commodus. Even under Cleopatra Cocce, who was nearly the worst of the family, the building of these great temples did not cease.

The two sons were so far puppets in the hands of their clever mother, that on the recall of Alexander no change was seen in the government beyond that of the names which were placed at the head of the public acts. The former year was called the tenth of Cleopatra and Ptolemy Soter, and this year was called the eleventh of Cleopatra and eighth of Ptolemy Alexander; as Alexander counted his years from the time when he was sent with the title of king to Cyprus. As he was, like his brother, under the guidance of his mother, he was like him in the hieroglyphical inscriptions called mother-loving.

While the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria were alike weakened by civil wars and by the vices of their kings, Judaea, as we have seen, had risen under the wise government of the Maccabees to the rank of an independent state; and latterly Aristobulus, the eldest son of Hyr-canus, and afterwards Alexander Jannseus, his second son, had made themselves kings. But Gaza, Ptolemais, and some other cities, bravely refused to part with their liberty, and sent to Lathyrus, then King of Cyprus, for help. This was not, however, done without many misgivings; for some were wise enough to see that, if Lathyrus helped them, Cleopatra would, on the other hand, help their king, Jannasus; and when Lathyrus landed at Sicaminos with thirty thousand men, the citizens of Ptolemais refused even to listen to a message from him.

The city of Gaza then eagerly sent for the help which the city of Ptolemais refused. Lathyrus drove back Jannasus, and marched upon Asochis, a city of Galilee, where he scaled the walls on the Sabbath Day, and took ten thousand prisoners and a large booty. He then sat down before the city of Saphoris, but left it on hearing that Jannasus was marching against him on the other side of the Jordan, at the head of a force larger than his own. He crossed the river in face of the Jewish army, and routed it with great slaughter. The Jewish historian adds, that between thirty and fifty thousand men were slain upon the field of battle, and that the women and children of the neighbouring villages were cruelly put to death.

Cleopatra now began to fear that her son Lathyrus would soon make himself too powerful, if not checked in his career of success, and that he might be able to march upon Egypt. She therefore mustered her forces, and put them under the command of Chelcias and Ananias, her Jewish generals. She sent her treasure, her will, and the children of Alexander, to the island of Cos, as a place of safety, and then marched with the army into Palestine, having sent forward her son Alexander with the fleet. By this movement Lathyrus was unable to keep his ground in Coele-Syria, and he took the bold step of marching towards Egypt. But he was quickly followed by Chelcias, and his army was routed, though Chelcias lost his life in the battle. Cleopatra, after taking Ptolemais, sent part of her army to help that which had been led by Chelcias; and Lathyrus was forced to shut himself up in Gaza. Soon after this the campaign ended, by Lathyrus returning to Cyprus, and Cleopatra to Egypt.

On this success, Cleopatra was advised to seize upon the throne of Jannseus, and again to add to Egypt the provinces of Palestine and Coele-Syria, which had so long made part of the kingdom of her forefathers. She yielded, however, to the reasons of her general Ananias, for the Jews of Lower Egypt were too strong to be treated with slight. It was by the help of the Jews that Cleopatra had driven her son Lathyrus out of Egypt; they formed a large part of the Egyptian armies, which were no longer even commanded by Greeks; and it must have been by these clear and unanswerable reasons that Ananias was able to turn the queen from the thoughts of this conquest, and to renew the league between Egypt and Judaea.

Cleopatra, however, was still afraid that Lathyrus would be helped by his friend Antiochus Cyzicenus to conquer Egypt, and she therefore kept up the quarrel between the brothers by again sending troops to help Antiochus Grypus; and lastly, she gave him in marriage her daughter Selene, whom she had before forced upon Lathyrus. She then sent an army against Cyprus; and Lathyrus was beaten and forced to fly from the island.

In the middle of this reign died Ptolemy Apion, King of Cyrene. He was the half-brother of Lathyrus and Alexander, and, having been made King of Cyrene by his father Euergetes II., he had there reigned quietly for twenty years. Being between Egypt and Carthage, then called the Roman province of Africa, and having no army which he could lead against the Roman legions, he had placed himself under the guardianship of Rome; he had bought a truce during his lifetime, by making the Roman people his heirs in his will, so that on his death they were to have his kingdom. Cyrene had been part of Egypt for above two hundred years, and was usually governed by a younger son or brother of the king. But on the death of Ptolemy Apion, the Roman senate, who had latterly been grasping at everything within their reach, claimed his kingdom as their inheritance, and in the flattering language of their decree by which the country was enslaved, they declared Cyrene free. From that time forward it was practically a province of Rome.