Valerius Male Dion her success, and to make a treaty of peace with the republic. The embassy, as we might suppose, was received in Rome with great joy; and three ambassadors, two of the proud name of Fabius, with Quintus Ogulnius, were sent back to seal the treaty. Philadelphus gave them some costly gifts, probably those usually given to Cassius, ambassadors; but Rome was then young, Frag. 147. citizens had not yet made gold the end for which they lived, and the ambassadors returned the gifts, for they could receive nothing beyond the thanks of the senate for having done their duty. This treaty was never broken; and in the war which broke out in the middle of Appian this reign between Rome and Carthage, usually called the first Punic war, when the Carthaginians sent to Alexandria to beg for a loan of two thousand talents, Philadelphus refused it, saying that he would help them against his enemies, but not against his friends. Sicul. i. (12) The sea was not then a high road between distant nations, and such was the complete separation which a few leagues of water placed between the Greek and Roman world, that while each was shaken to its foundation, the one by the quarrels between Alexander's successors, and the other by the Punic war, neither felt or joined in the struggles of the other. From that time forward, however, we find Egypt in alliance with Rome. But we also find that they were day by day changing place with one another; Egypt soon began to sink, while Rome was rising in power; Egypt soon received help from her stronger ally, and at last became a province of the Roman empire. B.C. 269. (13) At the time of this embassy, when Greek arts were nearly unknown to the Romans, the ambassadors Pliny, lib. xxxiii. must have seen much that was new to them, and much 13. that was worth copying; and three years afterwards, when one of them, Quintus Ogulnius, together with Caius Fabius Pictor, were chosen consuls, they coined silver for the first time in Rome. With them begins the series of consular denarii, which throws such light on Roman history. (14) About the middle of this reign, Berenice, the mother of the king, died; and it was most likely then that Philadelphus began to date from the beginning of his own reign; he had before gone on like his father, dating B.C. 266. from the beginning of his father's reign. In the year after her death the great feast of Osiris, in the month of Mesore, was celebrated at Alexandria with more idyll. 15. than usual pomp by the Queen Arsinoë. Venus, or Theocritus, Pausanias, lib. i. 7. B.C. 265. Isis, had just raised Berenice to heaven; and Arsinoë, in return, showed her gratitude by the sums of money spent on the feast of Osiris, or Adonis, as he was sometimes called by the Greeks. Theocritus, who was there, wrote a poem on the day, and tells us of the crowds in the streets, of the queen's gifts to the temple, and of the beautiful tapestries, on which were woven the figures of the god and goddess breathing as if alive; and he has given a free translation of the Maneros, the national poem, in which the priests each year consoled the goddess Isis for the death of Osiris, which was sung through the streets of Alexandria by a Greek girl in the procession. (15) One of the chief troubles in the reign of Philadelphus was the revolt of Cyrene. The government of that part of Africa had been entrusted to Magas, the half-brother of the king, a son of Berenice by her former husband. Berenice, who had been successful in setting aside Ceraunus to make room for her son Philadelphus on the throne of Egypt, has even been said to have favoured the rebellious and ungrateful efforts of her elder son Magas to make himself king of Cyrene. Magas, without waiting till the large armies of Egypt were drawn together to crush his little state, marched hastily towards Alexandria, in the hopes of being joined by some of the restless thousands of that crowded city. But he was quickly recalled to Cyrene by the news of the rising of the Marmaridæ, the race of Libyan herdsmen that had been driven back from the coast by the Greek settlers who founded Cyrene. Philadelphus then led his army along the coast against the rebels; but he was, in the same way, stopped by the fear of treachery among his own Gallic mercenaries. (16) More than a century before this time, the Celts, or Gauls, had found their own forests too crowded for their way of life, and moving southward, had overrun the fair plains of the north of Italy, and nearly crushed imperial Rome in the cradle, in the time of Nectanebo I. Other bands of these fierce barbarians had wandered as far as Greece, and tried their wild and unarmed courage against the spears of the Macedonian phalanx. But the large armies which were called out by the quarrels of Alexander's successors could not be raised without the help of barbarians, and in these ranks the Gauls found the pay and plunder for which they had left their own forests. Thus we meet with them in the armies of Egypt, of Macedonia, and of Asia Minor; and in this last country they afterwards settled, and gave their own name to the province of Galatia. Philadelphus had reason to believe that four thousand of these Gauls, who formed part of the army which he was leading against Cyrene, were secretly plotting against him. Therefore, with a measured cruelty which the use of foreign mercenaries could alone have taught him, he led back his army to the marshes of the Delta, and, entrapping the four thousand distrusted Gauls in one of the small islands, he hemmed them in between the water and the spears of the phalanx, and they all died miserably, by famine, by drowning, or by the sword. (17) Magas had married Apime, the daughter of Antiochus Soter, king of Syria; and he sent to his father-in-law to beg him to march upon Cole-Syria and Palestine, to call off the army of Philadelphus from Cyrene. But Philadelphus did not wait for this attack; his armies moved before Antiochus was ready, and, by a successful inroad upon Syria, he prevented any relief being sent to Magas. (18) After the war between the brothers had lasted some years, Magas made an offer of peace, which was lib. xxvi. 3. to be sealed by betrothing his only child Berenice to the son of Philadelphus. To this offer Philadelphus yielded, as by the death of Magas, who was already worn out by luxury and disease, Cyrene would then fall to his own son. Magas, indeed, died before the marriage took place; but, notwithstanding the efforts made by his widow to break the agreement, the treaty was kept, and on this marriage Cyrene again formed part of the kingdom of Egypt. Justinus, B.C. 256. (19) The king's massacre of the four thousand Gauls belongs to a class of crimes which men are sadly little shocked at. Wrong-doing on so large a scale seldom meets with punishment; and therefore we sometimes forget that it deserves it. But the black spot upon the character of Philadelphus, which all the blaze of science and letters by which Pausanias, lib. i. 7. he was surrounded cannot make us overlook, is the death of two of his brothers. A son of Eurydice, who might perhaps have thought that he was robbed of the throne of Egypt by his younger brother, and who was unsuccessful in raising the island of Cyprus in rebellion, and a younger brother, Argæus, who was also charged with joining in a plot, both lost their lives by his orders. Well might the historians believe that the name of Philadelphus, which he took to show his love for a sister, was given him as a reproach for the murder of two brothers and the war of many years against a third. Diod. Sic. (20) It was only in the beginning of this reign, after Egypt had been for more than fifty years under the rule of the Macedonians, that murders and robberies, the crimes which usually follow in the train of war and conquest, were brought to an end. Before this reign no Greek was ever known to have reached Elephantine and Syene since Herodotus made his hasty tour in the Thebaid; lib. i. 37. and during much of the last reign no part of Upper Egypt was safe for a Greek traveller, if he were alone, or if he quitted the high road. The peasants, whose feelings of hatred we can hardly wonder at, waylaid the strag- Theocritus, glers, and, Egyptian-like, as the Greeks said, or Idyll. xv. slave-like, as it would be wiser to say, often put them to death in cold blood. But a long course of good government had at last quieted the whole country and left room for further improvements by Philadelphus. 48. 123. Callima chus, et Scholiast. (21) Among other buildings, Philadelphus raised a temple in Alexandria to the honour of his father and mother, and placed in it their statues, made of Idyll, xvii. ivory and gold, and ordered that they should be worshipped like the gods and other kings of the country. He also built a temple to Ceres and Proserpine, and then the Eleusinian mysteries were taught in Alexandria to the few who were willing and worthy to be admitted, and who could be trusted with the secret rites. The south-east quarter of the city, in which this temple stood, was called the Eleusinis; and here the troop of maidens were to be seen carrying the sacred basket through the streets and singing hymns in honour of the goddess; while they charged all profane persons who met the pro cession to keep their eyes upon the ground, lest they should see the basket and the priestesses, who were too pure for them to look upon. Strabo, Pausanias, (22) In this reign was finished the lighthouse on the island of Pharos, as a guide to ships when entering the lib. vii. harbour of Alexandria by night. It was built by the architect Sostratus, and it was dedicated "to the gods Soteres," as Soter and Berenice were called in all public writings. They were henceforth to be the gods of the port and of its shipping, as Hephæstion had before been by order of Alexander the Great. The building of the royal lib. i. 7. burial-place in Alexandria, which had been begun by Ptolemy Soter, was also finished, and then Philadelphus removed the sacred body of Alexander from Memphis, where it had for the time been left, to this city, which the conqueror had himself planned, and which was now to be made a holy spot by his embalmed remains. Hither pilgrims came to the hero's tomb, and bowed before the golden sarcophagus in which his body was placed. But more active travellers often climbed to the roof of the temple of Pan, in the middle of the city, and there looked round on the space between the Lake Mareotis and the sea. They observed it covered with temples, and houses, and streets, and gardens, they noted the palaces of the Bruchium, the canal bringing barges from the Nile, the lighthouse on the island, and the ships in the harbour, and then could they most truly say they had seen the monument of Alexander the Great. (23) The navigation of the Red Sea, along which the wind blows hard from the north for nine months in the year, was found so dangerous by the little vessels from the south of Arabia, that they always chose the most southerly port in which they could meet the Egyptian buyers. The merchants with their bales of goods found a journey on camels through the desert, where the path is marked only by the skeletons of the animals that have died upon the route, less costly than a coasting voyage. Hence, when Philadelphus had made the whole of Upper Egypt to the cataracts as Pliny quiet and safe as the Delta, he made a new port on lib. vi. 26. the rocky coast of the Red Sea, nearly two hundred miles to the south of Cosseir, and named it Berenice, after his Diod. Sic. lib. i. |
