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Updated: June 14, 2025
Ptolemy purchases the alliance of Rome. Taxes to raise the money. Revolt at Alexandria. Ptolemy's flight. Berenice. Her marriage with Seleucus. Cleopatra's early life. Ptolemy an object of contempt. Ptolemy's interview with Cato. Character of Cato. Ptolemy's reception. Cato's advice to him. Ptolemy arrives at Rome. His application to Pompey. Action of the Roman senate. Plans for restoring Ptolemy.
This inroad seems to have been meant to draw off the enemy from Coele-Syria; and it had the wished-for effect, for Demetrius, who commanded the forces of his father Antigonus in that quarter, marched northward to the relief of Cilicia, but he did not arrive there till Ptolemy's fleet was already under sail for its return journey to Egypt.
Cleopatra had raised an army in Syria, and was on her way to the frontiers of Egypt to regain possession of what she deemed her rights. Ptolemy's ministers had gone forth to meet her at the head of their own troops, 'Ptolemy himself being also with them. They had reached Pelusium, which is the frontier town between Egypt and Syria on the coast of the Mediterranean.
For though, in general, they were constructed on very imperfect and erroneous notions of the form of the world, and the relative size and situation of different countries, yet occasionally there appeared maps which corrected some long established error, or supplied some new information; and even the errors of the maps, in some cases, not improbably held out inducements or hopes, which would not otherwise have been entertained and realized, as we have already remarked, after D'Anville, that the greatest of Ptolemy's errors proved eventually the efficient cause which led to the greatest discovery of the moderns.
Indeed, the Greeks respected them much; and one of Ptolemy's soldiers tells this story: he says that while travelling in a large company by the Red Sea, he fell in with a very brave strong Jew, called Masollam. Presently the whole company came to a halt.
But Ptolemy's soldiers in other respects were inferior to those of Alexander, and therefore were more fearful of running hazards; but Philostephanus, the camp-master, put great courage into them, and ordered them to pass the river, which was between their camps.
A misinterpretation of Ptolemy's writings led to the idea that Hipparchus, performed his chief labors in Alexandria, but it is now admitted that there is no evidence for this. Delambre doubted, and most subsequent writers follow him here, whether Hipparchus ever so much as visited Alexandria.
Not unfrequently it is the lot of the philosophers to contend against the doctrines of the vulgar, but when it happens, as in the case of Ptolemy's researches, that the doctrines of the vulgar are corroborated by philosophical investigation which bear the stamp of the highest authority, it is not to be wondered at that such doctrines should be deemed well-nigh impregnable.
Gradually philosophic Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste Syntaxis which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, by which it was so long known during the Middle Ages. But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or mystic element in their commentaries.
He had however eight thousand in the first rank, which he styled Hecatontomachi, having shields of brass. Those in the first rank of Ptolemy's soldiers also had shields covered with brass.
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