end. In a despotic monarchy, where so much rests upon the good qualities of the king, we can hardly hope to find a longer course of good government than we have seen at Alexandria. The flatterers and pleasures which are brought to the court by the greatness and wealth of each king in his turn must at last poison the heart and turn the head of a son; and thus it was with Philopator.

(35) The first trouble which arose from his loose and vicious habits was an attempt made upon his life by Cleomenes, who found the palace in Alexandria had now become a prison. The Spartan took advantage of the king's being at Canopus to escape from his guards, and to raise a riot in Alexandria; but not being able to gain the citadel, and seeing that disgrace and death must follow upon the failure of this mad undertaking, he stabbed himself with his own dagger.

Polyænus,

lib. iv. 15.

(36) The kingdom of Syria, after being humbled by Ptolemy Euergetes, had risen lately under the able rule of Antiochus, son of Seleucus Callinicus. His energy and courage soon recovered from Egypt the provinces that Syria had before lost, and afterwards gained for him the name of Antiochus the Great. He made himself master of the city of Damascus by a stratagem. When Strategem. encamped near this place he invited the neighbouring chiefs to a sumptuous entertainment, which threw off his guard Dinon, the general who held the city for Ptolemy. The danger of an attack did not seem very threatening while the king was feasting with his friends. But while the guests were eating and drinking, the troops were getting under arms; and the young Antiochus left the supper to storm the walls of Damascus. He carried the place that night by assault.

lib. v,

(37) Soon after this, Seleucia, the capital, on the Orontes, twelve miles from Antioch, which had been taken by Euergetes, was retaken by Antiochus, or rather Polybius, given up to him by the treachery of the garrison. Theodotus also, the Alexandrian governor of Cole-Syria, delivered up to him that province; and Antiochus marched southward, and had taken Tyre and Ptolemais before the Egyptian army could be brought into the field. There he gained forty ships of war, of which twenty were decked

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vessels with four banks of oars, and the others smaller. then marched towards Egypt, and on his way learned that Ptolemy was at Memphis. On his arrival at Pelusium he found that the place was strongly guarded, and that the garrison had opened the flood-gates from the neighbouring lake, and thereby spoiled the fresh water of all the neighbourhood; he therefore did not lay siege to that city, but seized many of the open towns on the east side of the Nile.

(38) On this, Philopator roused himself from his idleness, and got together his forces against the coming danger. He had a royal guard of three thousand men under Eurylochus of Magnesia; two thousand peltastæ under Socrates of Boeotia ; the phalanx of twenty-five thousand men under Andromachus and Ptolemy, the son of Thaseas; eight thousand mercenaries under Phoxidas; the horse of the royal guard, the African horse, and the Egyptian horse, in all three thousand men, under Polycrates; the Greek and foreign horse, who were two thousand highly disciplined men, under Echecrates of Thessaly; three thousand Cretans under Cnopias of Alorus; three thousand Africans, armed like Macedonians, under Ammonius of Barce; the Egyptian phalanx of twenty thousand men under Sosibius the king's chief adviser; and lastly, four thousand Gauls and Thracians under Dionysius of Thrace. There were in all seventy-three thousand men and seventy-three elephants, or one elephant to every thousand men, which was the number usually allowed to the armies about this time. But before this army reached Pelusium, Antiochus had led back his forces to winter in Seleucia.

(39) The next spring Antiochus again marched towards Egypt with an army of seventy-two thousand foot, six thousand horse, and one hundred and two elephants. Philopator led his whole forces to the frontier to oppose his march, and met the Syrian army near the village of Raphia, a hundred miles to the east of Pelusium, the border town between Egypt and Palestine. Arsinoë, his queen and sister, rode with him on horseback through the ranks, and called upon the soldiers to fight for their wives and children. At first the Egyptians seemed in danger of being beaten. As the armies approached one another the Ethiopian elephants

trembled at the very smell of the Indian elephants, and shrunk from engaging with beasts so much larger than themselves. On the charge the left wing of each army was routed, as was often the case among the Greeks, when, from too great a trust in the shield, every soldier kept moving to the right, and thus left the left wing uncovered. But before the end of the day the invading army was defeated; and though some of the Egyptian officers treacherously left their posts, and carried their troops over to Antiochus, yet the Syrian army was wholly routed, and Arsinoë enjoyed the knowledge and the praise of having been the chief cause of her husband's success. The king in gratitude sacrificed to the gods the unusual offering of four Solert. elephants.

Plutarch.

Animal.

lib. iii.

(40) By this victory Philopator regained Cole-Syria, and there he spent three months; he then made a hasty, and, if we judge his reasons rightly, we must add, a disgraceful treaty with the enemy, that he might the Maccabees, sooner get back to his life of ease. The slothful vices of the king saved the nation from the evils of war. Before going home he passed through Jerusalem, where he gave thanks and sacrificed to God in the Temple of the Jews; and, being struck with the beauty of the building, asked to be shown into the inner room, in which were kept the ark of the covenant, Aaron's rod that budded, and the golden pot of manna, with the tables of the covenant. The priests told him of their law, by which every stranger, every Jew, and every priest but the high priest, was forbidden to pass beyond the second veil; but Philopator roughly answered that he was not bound by the Jewish laws, and ordered them to lead him into the holy of holies. The city was thrown into alarm by this unheard-of wickedness; the streets were filled with men and women in despair; the air was rent with shrieks and cries, and the priests prayed to Jehovah to guard His own temple from the stain. The king's mind, however, was not to be changed; the refusal of the priests only strengthened his wish, and all struggle was useless while the court of the Temple was filled with Greek soldiers. But the prayer of the priests was heard; the king, says the Jewish historian, fell to the ground in a fit, like a reed broken by the wind, and was carried out speechless by his friends and generals.

Ho

(41) On his return to Egypt, he showed his hatred of the nation by his treatment of the Jews in Alexandria. made a law, that they should lose the rank of Macedonians, and be enrolled among the class of Egyptians. He ordered them to have their bodies marked with pricks, in the form of an ivy-leaf, in honour of Bacchus; and those who refused to have this done were outlawed, or forbidden to enter the courts of justice. The king himself had an ivy-leaf Etymologicon marked with pricks upon his forehead, from which Magnum. he received the nickname of Gallus. This custom of marking the body had been forbidden in the Levitical law; it was not known among the Copts, Lane's but must always have been in use among the Lower Egypt. Egyptians. It was used by the Arab prisoners of Rameses, and is used by the Egyptian Arabs of the present day.

Levit. xix. 28.

(42) He ordered the Jews to sacrifice on the pagan altars, and many of them were sent up to Alexandria to be Maccabees, punished for rebelling against his decree. Their resolution, however, or, as their historian asserts, a miracle from heaven, changed the king's mind. They expected to be trampled to death in the hippodrome by furious elephants; but after some delay they were released unhurt. The history of their escape, however, is more melancholy than the history of their danger. We read with painful interest, not without some satisfaction, the account of brave men suffering for conscience sake. But when these persecuted Jews become persecutors in their turn, our feelings towards them are wholly changed. No sooner did the persecution cease than they turned with pharisaical cruelty against their weaker brethren who had yielded to the storm; and they put to death three hundred of their countrymen, who in the hour of danger had yielded to the threats of punishment, and complied with the idolatrous ceremonies required of them.

(43) The Egyptians, who, when the Persians were conquered by Alexander, could neither help nor hinder the Greek army, and who, when they formed part of the troops under the first Ptolemy, were uncounted and unvalued, had by this time been armed and disciplined like Greeks; and in the battle of Raphia the Egyptian phalanx had shown

lib. v.

itself not an unworthy rival of the Macedonians. By this success in war, and by their hatred of their vicious and cruel king, the Egyptians were now for the Polybius, first time encouraged to take arms against the Greek government. The Egyptian phalanx murmured against their Greek officers, and claimed their right to be under an Egyptian general. But history has told us nothing more of the rebellion than that it was successfully put down; much as the Greeks were lowered in warlike courage by the wealth and luxury of Egypt, much as the Egyptians were raised by the Macedonian arms, the Greeks were still by far the better soldiers.

(44) The ships built by Philopator do not raise his navy in our opinion, for they were more remarkable for their huge unwieldy size, their luxurious and costly furniture, than for their fitness for war. One was four hundred andTM

twenty feet long and fifty-seven feet wide, with forty Athenæus, banks of oars. The longest oars were fifty-seven feet long, and weighted with lead at the handles that they might be the more easily moved. This huge ship was to be rowed by four thousand rowers, its sails were to be shifted by four hundred sailors, and three thousand soldiers were to stand in ranks upon deck. There were seven beaks in front, by which it was to strike and sink the ships of the enemy. The royal barge in which the king and court moved on the quiet waters of the Nile, was nearly as large as this ship of war. It was three hundred and thirty feet long, and fortyfive feet wide; it was fitted up with state rooms and private rooms, and was nearly sixty feet high to the top of the royal awning. A third ship, which even surpassed these in its fittings and ornaments, was given to Philopator by Hiero, king of Syracuse. It was built under the care of Archimedes, and its timbers would have made sixty triremes. Beside baths, and rooms for pleasures of all kinds, it had a library, and astronomical instruments, not only for navigation, as in modern ships, but for study, as in an observatory. It was a ship of war, and had eight towers, from each of which stones were to be thrown at the enemy by six men. Its machines, like modern cannons, could throw stones of three hundred pounds weight, and arrows of eighteen feet in length. It had four anchors of wood, and eight of

Lib. v. 10.