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mathematician and mechanic. He has left a work which treats upon several branches of mechanics; on making warlike machines for throwing stones and arrows; and on automatons, or figures which were made to move, as if alive, by machinery under the floor. His chief work is on pneumatics, on making forcing pumps and fountains by the force of the air. Among other clever toys he made birds which sang, or at least uttered one note, by the air being driven

by water out of a close vessel through small pipes. Other playthings were moved by the force of air rarified by heat; and one to which the modern discovery of the steam-engine has given a value which it was by no means worthy of, was moved by the force of steam (see Fig. 256). The steam was raised by a fire placed under one vessel, and thence driven into a second vessel through a hole in the axis on which it was to turn, and rushed out of it through two holes in the line of its tangents; so that the force of the steam made the second vessel turn round in the opposite direction. (45) The portrait of the king is known from those coins which bear the name of "King Ptolemy, the motherVisconti, loving god" (see Fig. 257). The eagle on the other side of the coins has a palm branch on its wing or by its side, which may be supposed to mean that they

Icon. Grec.

Fig. 256.

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were struck in the island of Cyprus. We have not before met with the title of "god," on the coins of the Ptolemies; but, LS every one of them had been so named in the hiero

glyphical inscriptions, it can scarcely be called new. The word among the pagans never had the high and awful meaning that it bears among those who worship the one Ruler of the world; and it was further lowered by being given not only to departed heroes, but to living priests, and even kings far worse than Philometor.

xxxi.

lib. xxxv. 1.

(46) When Philometor quitted the island of Cyprus after beating his brother in battle, he left Archias as Polybius, governor, who entered into a plot to give it up to De Virtut. 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, Justinus, 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.

1 Maccabees, ch. x.

8.

(47) But even in Ptolemais, the city in which Alexander had been so covered with favours, Philometor was Josephus, near falling under the treachery of his new son-in- Antiq. xiil. 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; and 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.

(48) 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 Numismata them to the Egyptian standard of weight; and in Pembroch. 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.

(49) 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. Livy, He lay speechless for five days, and the surgeons Epit. lii. then endeavoured to cut out a piece of the broken Josephus, bone from his skull. He died under the operation; Antiq. xiii.

8. but not before the head of Alexander had been brought to him as the proof of his victory.

of

(50) Thus fell Ptolemy Philometor, the last of the Ptolemies to whom history can point with pleasure. He Polybius, De Virtut. was in the forty-second year of his age. His reign xxxi. began in trouble; before he reached the years 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 Letronne, offered to him; and not only no one of his friends Recherches. or kinsmen, but no citizen of Alexandria was put to death during the whole of his reign. We find grateful

Inscript.

inscriptions to his honour at the city of Citium in Cyprus, in the island of There, and at Methone in Argolis.

(51) 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 Porphyrius, ap. Scalig. 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; Graca, iii. 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 we shall see murdered by his uncle, and find a third living in Syria with his brother-in-law Demetrius.

Anthologia

7.

Justin. lib.

xxxviii. 8.

B.C. 145.

MS. of Anastasy,

ap. Young.

8.

(52) 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 Josephus, was soon made by the help of Thermus, the Roman in Apion. ii. ambassador, who was thought to have been bribed Justinus, by Euergetes, and on this the gates of Alexandria lib. xxxvii. were opened; and 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, or perhaps jointly with him; but Euergetes, forgetting that he owed his own life to Philometor, and disregarding the Romans, who were a party to the treaty, had the boy put to death in the day of the marriage. We find an inscription in the island of Cyprus in Soc. Lit. honour of this young king the god Eupator, the son of the gods Philometores, showing that in that important

Trans. R.

2nd Ser.

part of the kingdom his claim to the throne had been at once acknowledged.

(53) 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 Josephus, Jews for the help which they had given to Cleoin Apion. ii. patra, 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, which was made up of Jews, and Greeks of all nations, 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. (54) In his brother's lifetime, Euergetes had never laid aside his claim to the throne of Egypt, but had Porphyrius, only yielded to the commands of Rome and to his ap. Scalig. brother's forces; and he now numbered the years of his reign from his former seizing of Alexandria. 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.

Diod. Sic.

354.

He

(55) In the next year he went to Memphis to be crowned; and, while the pomps and rites were there being De Virtut. 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. Justinus, lib. xxxviii. He soon afterwards put away his wife and married her younger daughter, his niece Cleopatra Cocce; and for this and other acts against his familly and his

8.

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