343 CHAPTER IX. PTOLEMY EUERGETES, PTOLEMY PHILOPATOR, AND PTOLEMY EPIPHANES. B.C. 246-180. (1) PTOLEMY, the eldest son of Philadelphus (see Fig. 235), succeeded his father on the throne of Egypt, and Justinus, * after a short time took the lib. xxvii. 1 name of EUERGETES. He began B.C. 246. his reign with a Syrian war; for no sooner was Philadelphus dead, than Antiochus, who had married Berenice only because it was one of the articles of the treaty with Egypt, sent her away, together with her young son. Antiochus then recalled his first wife Laodice, and she, distrusting her changeable husband, had him at once murdered to secure the throne to her own children. Seleucus, the eldest, seized the throne of Syria; and, urged on by his mother, sent a body of men after Berenice, with orders to put her to death, together with her son, who by the articles of marriage had been made heir to the throne. Fig. 235. (2) The cities of Asia Minor hastily sent help to the queen and her son, while Ptolemy Euergetes, her brother, who had just come to the throne of Egypt, marched without loss of time into Syria. But it was too late to save them ; they were both put to death by the soldiers of Seleucus. Many of the cities, moved by hatred of their king's cruelty, opened their gates to the army of Euergetes; and, had he not been recalled to Egypt by troubles at home, he would soon have been master of the whole of the Hieronym. in Dan. xi. kingdom of Seleucus. As it was he had marched beyond the Euphrates, had left an Egyptian army in Seleucia, the capital of Syria, and had gained a large part of Asia Minor. On his march homeward, he laid his gifts upon the altar in the Temple of Jerusalem, and Josephus, there returned thanks to Heaven for his victories. He had been taught to bow the knee to the crowds of in Apion. il. Greek and Egyptian gods; and, as Palestine was part of his kingdom, it seemed quite natural to add the God of the Jews to the list. Eutropius, (3) From the middle of the reign of Philadelphus till the fifth year of this reign, for twenty-two years, the Romans had been struggling with the Carthaginians for their very being, in the first Punic war, which they had just brought lib. iii. 1. to a close; and on hearing of Ptolemy's war in Syria B.C. 238. they sent to Egypt with friendly offers of help. But their ambassadors did not reach Alexandria before peace was made, and they were sent home with many thanks. Callima (4) It was while the king was with the army upon this Assyrian war that his Queen Berenice in Egypt, chus, ap. sacrificing a bull to the gods, vowed that if they Catullum. brought her husband safe home she would cut off her beautiful tresses, and hang them up in the temple as a thank-offering. Euergetes soon after returned a conqueror, and the queen's locks were yielded up to the knife, while the whole court praised her heroism. Conon, the astronomer, was then busy in noting the places of the fixed stars; and grouping together into a constellation a cluster which the earlier astronomers had left unnamed, between the Bear, the Lion, the Virgin and Boötes, he marked it out on his globe, and gave it to the world as the new constellation of the Hair of Berenice. Callimachus took the hint from the courtly astronomer, and, in a poem which we know only in the translation by Catullus, he makes the hair swear by the head from which it was cut off, that it was against its will that it left the queen, and was raised to the skies; but what could it do against the force of steel? The poet and the astronomer have here been of use to one another; the constellation of Coma Berenices is known to hundreds who have not read Callimachus or Catullus, but it is from the poet that we learn why the queen's locks were set among the stars. Berenice 55. was still young, and she may have been beautiful; Epigram. at any rate the poets said she was. Callimachus, in one of his epigrams, adds her as a fourth to the number of the Graces, and moreover tells us that In Berenice's form and face Another courtly poet, perhaps Posidippus, mistakes This statue's a Venus;-Oh, no; Anthologla Græca, iv. 3. (5) No sooner had Euergetes reached home than Seleucus in his turn marched upon Egypt, and sent for his lib. xxvii. 2. brother, Antiochus Hierax, to bring up his forces Justinus, and to join him. But before Antiochus could come up the army of Seleucus was already beaten; and Antiochus, instead of helping his brother in his distress, strove to rob him of his crown. Instead of leading his army against Euergetes, he marched upon Seleucus, and by the help of his Gallic mercenaries beat him in battle. But the traitor was himself soon afterwards beaten by Eumenes, king of Bithynia, who had entered Syria in the hope that it would fall an easy prey into his hands after being torn to pieces by a civil war. Antiochus, after the rout of his army, fled to Egypt, believing that he should meet with kinder treatment from Euergetes, his enemy, than after his late treachery he could hope for from his own brother. But he was ordered by Euergetes to be closely guarded, and when he afterwards. made his escape he lost his life in his flight by unknown hands. Hieronym. in Dan. xi. (6) The king, in his late attack upon Seleucus, had carried off a large booty of forty thousand talents of silver, and, what he seems to have valued even more than that treasure, two thousand five hundred vases and statues of the gods, many of which either really were, or were said to be, those carried away from Egypt by Cambyses nearly three hundred years before. These were replaced in the temples of Upper Egypt with great pomp; and the priests, in gratitude for the care which he had thus shown for the religion and temples of the country, then gave him the name of Euergetes, or the benefactor, by which we havo been already calling him. In Alexander the Egyptians had seen a deliverer from the Persian yoke, and a humane conqueror, who left them their customs and their religion. In Ptolemy Soter they had a brave and just king, who kept war at a distance, and by his wise laws laid the foundation of the future greatness of his family, of Alexandria, and of his kingdom. In Philadelphus they had also a Greek king whose love of learning and of show dazzled the eyes of the people, and whose court at Alexandria had carried away from Athens the honour of being the favoured seat of the Muses. But Euergetes was born in Egypt, and though perhaps the least of these great kings, in the eyes of the priests he must have ranked at their head. He seems to have thought more of conquering Ethiopia than Assyria; and he was the only one of the Ptolemies who is known to have honoured the once great city of Thebes with a visit. He enriched the temples, and sacrificed to the gods of the country, not through Stone. policy but through choice; and when during the Rosetta minority of his grandson, the priests and temples were again flourishing, they showed their gratitude by saying that the young king acted in obedience to the will of the god Euergetes. (7) In the ninth year of this reign Ptolemy and his wife lost a daughter, who had been named after her mother Berenice. Her death happened at the time that the priests were assembled at Canopus from all parts of Egypt on their yearly visit to the king; and they at once decreed that the young princess should be made a goddess, and that the usual divine honours should be paid to her in the temples as to the other gods of the country. And at the same time, with a view to paying divine honours more worthily to the king and queen, the gods Euergetæ, they separated a number of priests from the four existing orders, and made a fifth order of priests, who were to be named the priests of the Euergetæ, and were to be employed in celebrating their festivals. The priests then assembled further ordered that the decree to this effect should be carved on a tablet in hieroglyphics, in common Egyptian writing, and in Greek, and should be set up in all the principal temples in Egypt. One very complete copy of this decree in hieroglyphics and in Greek has lately been found in the neighbourhood of Tanis; and it would have furnished us with the wished-for key to reading the hieroglyphics, had we not already gained that key from the Rosetta Stone, a decree in three characters written in the reign of this king's grandson. At this time the city of Canopus, situated on the coast about fifteen miles from Alexandria, was the religious capital of the country, at least so far as the priesthood looked to the king for support. The priestly senators, when meeting there, must have been more under Greek influence than if they met at Thebes or Memphis. And accordingly Burton's we learn from this decree of Canopus, compared Excerpt. with a second imperfect copy of the same, that the Hierogl. Greek is the original and the hieroglyphics the translation. Moreover Greek discoveries in science could not have been unknown in Canopus; and Timocharis, who in the last reign measured the longitude of the stars from the equinoctial point, cannot but have given exactness to the belief, that had long floated unsteadily in the popular mind, that the Egyptian civil year of three hundred and sixty-five days was too short, and that the natural year was about a quarter of a day longer than the civil year then in use. This correction the priests at Canopus now proposed to introduce into the religious calendar, so that the summer festivals should not get moved into the winter, nor the winter festivals into the summer, as had formerly been the case. On the ninth year of the reign the first of Payni fell on our 18th of July, when the Dogstar rose heliacally and the Nile began to rise, and the priests decreed, that whereas the civil first of Payni would every fourth year fall one day earlier in the natural year, yet the religious first of Payni should remain fixed to the rising of the Dogstar, and thus each of the feasts be always celebrated in its own season. This great improvement of adding an intercalary day every fourth year was at this time limited to the priestly calendar, by which the religious festivals were regulated; it was not yet introduced into the civil calendar, and thus Euergetes lost the honour which the priests proposed for him, of having amended and made perfect what they called the " arrangement of the seasons and the disposition of the pole." Thebes. (8) Euergetes enlarged the great temple at Thebes, which is now called the temple of Karnak, on the walls of which we see him handing an offering to his father Wilkinson, and mother, the brother-gods. In one place he is in a Greek dress, which is not common on the Ptolemaic buildings, as most of the Greek kings are carved upon the walls in the dress of the country. The early kings had ofteu |
