As, however, the museums of Europe contain two beautiful cameos cut on sardonyx, one with the heads of Philadelphus and his first wife Arsinoë (see Fig. 220), and the other with the heads of the same king and his second wife Arsinoë, it is not impossible that one or both of them may be the work of Satyrius.

(68) Philadelphus is also said to have listened to the whimsical proposal of Dinochares, the architect, Pliny, lib. xxxiv. to build a vaulted room of loadstone in the 42. temple of Arsinoë, so that an iron statue of the queen should hang in the air between the floor and the roof.

32.

But the death of the king and of the architect took Lib. xxxvii. place before this was tried. He set up there, however, her statue, six feet high, carved out of a most remarkable block of topaz, which had been presented to his mother by Philemon, the prefect of the Troglodytic coast in the last reign.

Diod. Sic.

(69) Philadelphus lived in peace with Ergamenes, king of Meroë, or Upper Ethiopia, who, while seeking lib. iii. 6. for a knowledge of philosophy and the arts of life from his Greek neighbours, seems also to have gained a love of despotism and a dislike of that control with which the priests of Ethiopia and Egypt had always limited the power of their kings. The king of Meroë had hitherto reigned like Amunothph or Thothmosis of old, as the head of the priesthood, supported and controlled by the priestly aristocracy by which he was surrounded. But he longed for the absolute power of Philadelphus. Accordingly, he surrounded the golden temple with a chosen body of troops, and put the whole of the priests to death; and from that time he governed Ethiopia as an autocrat. But with the loss of their liberties the Ethiopians lost the wish to guard the throne; by grasping at more power their sovereign lost what he already possessed; and in the next reign their country was conquered by Egypt.

in Dan. xi.

(70) The wars between Philadelphus and his great neigh bour Antiochus Theos seem not to have been Hieronym. carried on very actively, though they did not wholly cease till Philadelphus offered as a bribe his daughter Berenice, with a large sum of money under the name of a dower. Antiochus was already married to Laodice,

whom he loved dearly, and by whom he had two children, Seleucus and Antiochus; but political ambition had deadened the feelings of his heart, and he agreed to declare this first marriage void and his two sons illegitimate, and that his children, if any should be born to him by Berenice, should inherit the throne of Babylon and the east. Philadelphus, with an equal want of feeling, and disregarding the consequences of such a marriage, led his daughter to Pelusium on her journey to her betrothed husband, and sent with her so large a sum of gold and silver that he was nicknamed the dower-giver."

66

Orat. xi.

(71) The peace between the two countries lasted as long as Philadelphus lived, and was strengthened by kindnesses which each did to the other. Ptolemy, when in Syria, was much struck by the beauty of a statue Libanius, of Diana, and begged it of Antiochus as an ornament for Alexandria. But as soon as the statue reached Egypt, Arsinoë fell dangerously ill, and she dreamed that the goddess came by night, and told her that the illness was sent to her for the wrong done to the statue by her husband; and accordingly it was sent back with many gifts to the temple from which it had been brought.

Polybius,

ap. Athe

næum.

Pliny,

(72) While Berenice and her husband lived at Antioch, Philadelphus kindly sent there from time to time water from the sacred Nile for her use, as the Egyptians believed that none other was so wholesome. Antiochus, when ill, sent to Alexandria for a physician; and Cleombrotus of Cos accordingly went, by command of Ptolemy, to Syria. He was successful in curing the king, and on his return he received from Philadelphus a present of one hundred talents, or fifteen thousand pounds, as a fee for his journey.

lib. vii. 37.

Strabo,

lib. xiii. 5.

(73) Philadelphus was of a weak frame of body, and had delicate health; and, though a lover of learning beyond other kings of his time, he also sur- lib. xvii. passed them in his unmeasured luxury and love Athenæus, of pleasure. He had many mistresses, Egyptian as well as Greek, and the names of some of them Lib. xii. 9. have been handed down to us. He often boasted that he had found out the way to live for ever; but, like other free-livers, he was sometimes, by the gout in his feet, made to acknow

ledge that he was only a man, and indeed to wish that he could change places with the beggar whom he saw from his palace windows, eating the garbage on the banks of the Nile with an appetite which he had long wanted. Elianus, It was during illness that he found most time for V. H. iv. 15. reading, and his mind most open to the truths of philosophy; and he chiefly wooed the Muses when ill health left him at leisure from his other courtships. He Appian. had a fleet of eight hundred state barges, with gilt prows and poops and scarlet awnings upon the decks, which were used in the royal processions and reli

Præfat.

gious shows, and which usually lay in dock at Strabo, Schedia, on the Canopic River, five-and-twenty miles lib. xvii. from Alexandria. He was no doubt in part withheld from war by this luxurious love of ease; but his reign taught the world the new lesson, that an ambitious monarch may gratify his wish for praise, and gain the admiration of surrounding nations, as much by cultivating the blessed arts of peace as by plunging his people into the miseries of

war.

in Dan. xi.

(74) He reigned over Egypt, with the neighbouring parts of Arabia; also over Libya, Phenicia, Cole-Syria, Theocritus, part of Ethiopia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Lycia, Caria, Idyll. xvii. Cyprus, and the isles of the Cyclades. The island of Rhodes, and many of the cities of Greece, were bound to him by the closest ties of friendship, for past help and for the hope of future. The wealthy cities of Tyre and Sidon did homage to him, as before to his father, by putting his crowned head upon their coins. The forces of Egypt Hieronym. reached the very large number of two hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horse, two thousand chariots, four hundred Ethiopian elephants, fifteen hundred ships of war, and one thousand transports. Of this large force, it is not likely that even one fourth should have been Greeks; the rest must have been Egyptians and Syrians, with some Gauls. The body of chariots, though still forming part of the force furnished for military service by the Theban tenants of the crown, was of no use against modern science; and the other Egyptian troops, though now chiefly armed and disciplined like Greeks, were very much below the Macedonian phalanx in real strength. The galleys aiso,

though no doubt under the guidance and skill of Greeks and Phenicians, were in part manned by Egyptians, whose inland habits wholly unfitted them for the sea, and whose religious prejudices made them feel the pressing for the navy as a heavy grievance.

(75) These large forces were maintained by a yearly income equally large, of fourteen thousand eight hundred talents, or two millions and a quarter of pounds sterling, beside the tax on corn, which was taken in kind, of a million and a half of artabas, or about five millions of bushels. To this wealth we may add a mass of gold, silver, and other valuable stores in the treasury, which Appian. were boastfully reckoned at the unheard-of sum of seven hundred and forty thousand talents, or above one hundred million pounds sterling.

Præf. 10.

(76) The trade down the Nile was larger than it had ever been before; the coasting trade on the Mediterranean was new; the people were rich and happy; justice was administered to the Egyptians according to their own laws, and to the Greeks of Alexandria according to the Macedonian laws; the navy commanded the whole of the eastern half of the Mediterranean; the schools and library had risen to a great height upon the wise plans of Ptolemy Soter; in every point of view Alexandria was the chief city in the world. Athens had no poets or other writers during this century equal in merit to those who ennobled the Museum. Philadelphus, by joining to the greatness and good government of his father the costly splendour and pomp of an eastern monarch, so drew the eyes of after ages De Mose. upon his reign that his name passed into a proverb; if any work of art was remarkable for its good taste or costliness, it was called Philadelphian; even history and chronology were set at nought, and we sometimes find poets of a century later counted among the Pleiades of Alexandria in the reign of Philadelphus.

Philo,

(77) It is true that many of these advantages were forced in the hotbed of royal patronage; that the navy was built in the harbours of Phenicia and Asia Minor; and that the men of letters who then drew upon themselves the eyes of the world were only Greek settlers, whose writings could have done little to raise the character of the native Copts. But

the Ptolemies, in raising this building of their own, were not at the same time crushing another. Their splendid monarchy had not been built on the ruins of freedom; and even if the Greek settlers in the Delta had formed themselves into a free state, we can hardly believe that the Egyptians would have been so well treated as they were by this military despotism. From the temples which were built or enlarged in Upper Egypt, and from the beauty of the hieroglyphical inscriptions, we find that even the native arts were more flourishing than they had ever been since the fall of the kings of Thebes; and we may almost look upon the conquest of Egypt by the Greeks, and its remaining under the Ptolemies, as a blessing to the people of Upper Egypt.

He

(78) Philadelphus died in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, and perhaps the sixty-first of his age. Porphyrius left the kingdom as powerful and more wealthy ap. Scalig. than when it came to him from his father; and he had the happiness of having a son who would carry on, even for the third generation, the wise plans of the first Ptolemy.