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As we know, Milton who had once met the blind Galileo and always venerated his memory viewed Copernican astronomy with evident sympathy, even in Paradise Lost itself dismissing the Ptolemaic cosmogony with contempt. Yet it is precisely on the basis of that discredited cosmogony that the whole structure of Paradise Lost is built.
The history of Christianity affords a most remarkable record of the continual adjustment of religious belief to secular rationality. The offices of religion have availed no more to justify cruelty, intolerance, and bigotry than to establish the Ptolemaic astronomy or the Scriptural account of creation.
The lake-province of the Fayyûm, which attained such prominence in the days of the XIIth Dynasty, seems to have had little or no history during the whole period of the New Empire, but in Ptolemaic times it revived and again became one of the richest and most important provinces of Egypt.
Demotic was the only writing for practical purposes. We see this fact well illustrated in the inscriptions of the Ptolemaïc temples. The accession of the Ptolemies marked a great increase in the material wealth of Egypt, and foreign conquest again came in fashion.
He argued that he should be allowed to think and speak what he pleased about the stars, since the whole matter was one of opinion, and even the Pope did not know, positively, the final facts of astronomy, and if the Copernican Theory was a hypothesis, so also was the Ptolemaic Theory held by the Church.
Petrie brought to London many beautiful Ptolemaic and Roman portraits, which he had discovered in a vast cemetery near the pyramid which bears the name of King Ahmenemhâît III. The portraits are in an excellent state of preservation, and are invaluable as illustrative of the features, manners, and customs of the Greek and Roman periods in Egyptian history.
The construction is complicated by the mixture of times and persons; and we must remember that it was written in the Ptolemaic period concerning an age long past. It stood to the author much as Tennyson's "Harold" stands to us, referring to an historical age, without too strict a tie to facts and details. Five different acts, as we may call them, succeed one another.
In Cairo I married a Copt. She was a lady of high descent, the tradition in her family being that they were sprung from one of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs, which is possible and even probable enough. Also, she was a Christian, and well educated in her way.
At the same time the celebrations in honor of the Septuagint and of the deliverance from the Ptolemaic persecution are remarkable illustrations of a living Jewish tradition at Alexandria, which attached a religious consecration to the special history of the community.
In the earliest period the names which come before us are chiefly those of compilers such as Augustin, a monk and an Irishman who wrote at Carthage, in Africa, in the seventh century, a Latin treatise on The Wonderful Things of the Sacred Scripture, still extant, in which, in connection with Joshua's miracle, a very full account of the astronomical knowledge of the period, Ptolemaic, but in many ways remarkably accurate, is given.
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