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Updated: May 26, 2025
The successive sovereigns began soon to live and to reign solely for the gratification of their own sensual propensities and passions. Sensuality begins sometimes with kindness, but it ends always in the most reckless and intolerable cruelty. The Ptolemies became, in the end, the most abominable and terrible tyrants that the principle of absolute and irresponsible power ever produced.
Pontius inspected every portion of the door-way with a keen eye and then, with the prefect, went into the first court of the palace, in which, in the time of the Ptolemies, the tents had stood for ambassadors, secretaries, and the officers in waiting on the king.
As sagacious as the Ptolemies, the Caesars knew that by flattering the religious prejudices of their Egyptian subjects they consolidated their own rule in the valley of the Nile. At an enormous cost, they restored and rebuilt the temples of the national gods, working after the old plans and in the old spirit of Pharaonic times.
In their time the whole was cultivated and filled with inhabitants. Here was a populous and important part of the Colhuan kingdom of “Xibalba,” which, after a long existence, was broken up by the Toltecs, and which had a relation, in time, to the Aztec dominion of Montezuma, much like that of the old monarchy of Egypt to the kingdom of the Ptolemies.
The Marquis de Sénanges, in the days of the triumph of the great Revolution, was fortunate enough to be out of France, and wise enough to remain away from that country, though he persisted, long after the old régime was as dead as the Ptolemies, in believing it merely suspended, and the Revolution a lamentable accident of vulgar complexion, but happily temporary duration.
A like inclination was displayed by his successors, Lathyrus and Auletes, the name of the latter indicating his proficiency in music. The surnames under which all these Ptolemies pass were nicknames, or titles of derision imposed upon them by their giddy and satirical Alexandrian subjects. The political state of Alexandria was significantly said to be a tyranny tempered by ridicule.
He was a native of Nice in Bithynia, but spent the greater part of his life at the court of one of the Ptolemies.
Pharaoh, in the Egyptian tongue, signifies a king but I suppose they made use of other names from their childhood; but when they were made kings, they changed them into the name which in their own tongue denoted their authority; for thus it was also that the kings of Alexandria, who were called formerly by other names, when they took the kingdom, were named Ptolemies, from their first king.
The palaces of the Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the Seleucids came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife of a Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every gladiator's butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with Placidia on a Gothic ox- waggon, to pass into an Arab seraglio at Seville; and then, perhaps, back from Sultan to Sultan again to its native India, to figure in the peacock- throne of the Great Mogul, and be bought at last by some Armenian for a few rupees from an English soldier, and come hither and whither next?
This legendary personage is really the Egyptian god Thoth, who was identified with Hermes in the time of the Ptolemies. He was honored as the Lord of the highest wisdom and it was a favorite practice to assign to him the authorship of philosophical and especially of theological works. Hermes’ congregations were formed to practice the cult, and they had their special Hermes literature.
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