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Rh now assumed the title of kings; Ptolemy, as well as Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus, answered this challenge by doing the same. In the winter (306-5) Antigonus tried to follow up the victory of Cyprus by invading Egypt, but here Ptolemy was strong, and held the frontier successfully against him. Ptolemy led no further expedition against Antigonus overseas. To the Rhodians, besieged by Demetrius (305-4), he sent such help as won him divine honours in Rhodes and the surname of Sotér (“ saviour ”). 'When the coalition was renewed against Antigonus in 302, Ptolemy joined it, and invaded Palestine a third time, whilst Antigonus was engaged with Lysimachus in Asia Minor. On a report that Antigonus had won a decisive victory, for a third time'he evacuated the country. But when news came that Antigonus had been defeated and slain at Ipsus (301) by Lysimachus and Seleucus, Ptolemy occupied Palestine for the fourth time. The other members of the coalition had assigned Palestine to Seleucus after what they regarded as Ptolemy's desertion, and for the next hundred years the question of its ownership becomes the standing ground of enmity between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties. Henceforth, Ptolemy seems to have mingled as little as possible in the broils of Asia Minor and Greece; his possessions in Greece he did not retain, but Cyprus he reconquered in 295-4. Cyrene, after a series of rebellions, was finally subjugated about 300 and placed under his stepson Magas (Beloch, Griech. Gesch. III. [ii.], p. 134 seq.). In 285 he abdicated in favour of one of his younger sons by Berenice (q.v.), who bore his father's name of Ptolemy; his eldest (legitimate) son, Ptolemy Ceraunus, whose mother, Eurydice, the daughter of Antipater, had been repudiated, lied to the court of Lysimachus. Ptolemy I. Soter died in 283 at the age of 84. Shrewd and cautious, he had a compact and well-ordered realrn to show at the end of fifty years of wars. His name for bonhomie and liberality attached the floating soldier-class of Macedonians and Greeks to his service. Nor did he neglect conciliation of the natives. He was a ready patron of letters, and the great library, which was Alexandria's glory, owed to him its inception. He wrote himself a history of Alexander's campaigns, distinguished by its straightforward honesty and sobriety.

PTOLEMY II. Philadelphus (3o9~246), was of a delicate constitution, no Macedonian warrior-chief of the old style. His brother Ptolemy Ceraunus found compensation by becoming king in Macedonia in 281, and perished in the Gallic invasion of 280-79 (see BRENNUS). Ptolemy II. maintained a splendid court in Alexandria. Not that Egypt held aloof from wars. Magas of Cyrene opened war on his half-brother (274), and Antiochus I., the son of Seleucus, desiring Palestine, attacked soon after. Two or three years of war left Egypt the dominant naval power of the eastern Mediterranean; the Ptolemaic sphere of power extended over the Cyclades to Samothrace, and the harbours and coast towns of Cilicia Trachea (“ Rough Cilicia ”), Pamphylia, Lycia and Caria were largely in Ptolemy's hands (Theoc. Idyll. xvii. 86 seq.). The victory won by Antigonus, king of Macedonia, over his fleet at Cos (between 2 58-56; see Beloch, III. [ii.], p. 428 seq.) did not long interrupt his command of the Aegean. In a second war with the Seleucid kingdom, under Antiochus II. (after 260), Ptolemy sustained losses on the seaboard of Asia Minor and agreed to a peace by which Antiochus married his daughter Berenice (250?). Ptolemy's first wife, Arsinoé (I.), daughter of Lysimachus, was the mother of his legitimate children. After her repudiation he married, probably for political reasons, his full-sister Arsinoé (II.), the widow of Lysimachus, by an Egyptian custom abhorrent to Greek morality. The material and literary splendour of the Alexandrian court was at its height under Ptolemy II. Pomps and gay religions flourished. Ptolemy deified his parents as the Heal ¢i.5e7¢»of, and his sister-wife, after her death (270), as Philadelphus. This surname was used in later generations to distinguish Ptolemy II. himself, but properly if belongs to Arsinoié only, not to the king. Callimachus, made keeper of the library, Theocritus, and a host of lesser poets, glorified the Ptolemaic family. Ptolemy himself was eager to increase the library and to patronize scientific research. ' He had the strange beasts of faroff lands sent to Alexandria. But, an enthusiast for Hellenic culture, he seems to have shown but little interest in the native religion. The tradition which connects the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament into Greek with his name is not historical. Ptolemy had many brilliant mistresses, and his court, magnificent and dissolute, intellectual and artificial, has been justly compared with the Versailles of Louis XIV. PTOLEMY III. Euergetes I. (reigned 246-°22I), son of Ptolemy II. and Arsinoé I. At the beginning of his reign he reunited the Cyrenaica to Egypt by marrying Berenice the daughter and successor of Magas (who had died about 2 50). At the same time he was obliged to open' war on the Seleucid kingdom, where Antiochus II. was dead and his sister Berenice had been murdered, together with her infant son, by Antiochus's former wife, Laodice, who claimed the kingdom for her son Seleucus II. Ptolemy marched triumphantly into the heart of the Seleucid realm, as far at any rate as Babylonia, and received the formal submission of the provinces of Iran, while his fleets in the Aegean recovered what his father had lost upon the seaboard, and made fresh conquests as far as Thrace. This moment marks the zenith of the Ptolemaic power. After Ptolemy returned home, indeed, Seleucus regained northern Syria and the eastern provinces, but the naval predominance of Egypt in the Aegean remained, although there are traces of its being replaced locally, towards the end of Euergetes' reign, by that of Macedonia-in Amorgos, Naxos, Syros, Nisyros, Cos and parts of Crete (see Beloch, III. [ii.], p. 463). After his final peace with Seleucus, Ptolemy no longer engaged actively in war, although his forces might occasionally mingle in the broils of Asia Minor, and he supported the enemies of Macedonia in Greece. It 'seems probable that his internal policy differed from his father's in patronizing the native religion more liberally; he has left larger traces at any rate among the monuments that are known to-day. PTOLEMY IV. Philopator (reigned 2'2I-204), son of the preceding, was a wretched debauchee under whom the decline of the Ptolemaic kingdom began. His reign was inaugurated by the murder of his mother, and he was always under the dominion of favourites, male and female, who indulged his vices and conducted the government as they pleased. Self-interest led his ministers to make serious preparations to meet the attacks of Antiochus III. (the Great) on Palestine, and the great Egyptian victory of Raphia (217), at which Ptolemy himself was present, secured the province till the next reign. The arming of Egyptians in this campaign had a disturbing effect upon the native population of Egypt, so that rebellions were continuous for the next thirty years. Philopator was devoted to orgiastic forms of religion and literary dilettantism. He built a temple to Homer and composed a tragedy, to which his vile favourite Agathocles added a commentary. He married (about 215) his sister Arsinoé (III.), but continued.to be ruled by his mistress Agathoclea, sister of Agathocles.

PTOLEMY V. Epiphanes reigned 2o4~18I), son of Philopator and Arsinoé, was not more than<nve years old when he came to the throne, and under a series of regents the kingdom was paralysed. Antiochus III. and Philip V. of Macedonia made a compact to divide the Ptolemaic possessions overseas. Philip seized several islands and places in Caria and Thrace, whilst the battle of Panium (198) definitely transferred Palestine from the Ptolemies to, the Seleucids. Antiochus after this concluded peace, giving his own daughter Cleopatra to Epiphanes to wife (19 3-192). Nevertheless, when war broke out between Antiochus and Rome Egypt ranged itself with the latter power. Epiphanes in manhood was chiefly remarkable as a passionate sportsman; he excelled in athletic exercises and the chase. Great cruelty and perfidy were displayed in the suppression of the native rebellion, and some accounts represent him as personally tyrannical.

The elder of his two sons, PTOLEMY VI. Philometor (181-14 5), succeeded as an infant under the regency of his mother Cleopatra. Her death was followed by a rupture between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid courts, on the old question of Palestine.