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Ptolemy Soter was an historian of no mean talent, and his son Philadelphus, as a pupil of the poet Philetas and the philosopher Strabo, was a man of great learning. Ptolemy III. was a mathematician, and Ptolemy Philopator, who had erected and dedicated a temple to Homer, was the writer of a tragedy.
The figures of a Dionysiac procession, forming the frieze, looked down upon the feasters a fine relievo that had been designed and modelled for Ptolemy Soter by the sculptor Bryaxis, and then executed in ivory and gold.
Though trade and agriculture still enriched the country, though arts and letters did not quit Alexandria, we have from this time forward to mark the growth only of vice and luxury, and to measure the wisdom of Ptolemy Soter by the length of time that his laws and institutions were able to bear up against the misrule and folly of his descendants.
Ptolemy took the name of Soter II., though he is more often called Lathyrus, from a stain upon his face in the form of an ivy-leaf, pricked into his skin in honour of Osiris.
When one day, a Persian conqueror Cyrus entered the precincts of E-Sagila, his first step was to acknowledge Marduk and Nabu as the supreme powers in the world; and the successors of Alexander continue to glory in the title 'adorner of E-Sagila and E-Zida. With the same zeal that distinguishes a good Babylonian, Antiochus Soter hastens to connect his reign with the two temples by busying himself with their enlargement and beautification.
The trade down the Nile was larger than it had ever been before; the coasting trade on the Mediterranean was new; the people were rich and happy; justice was administered to the Egyptians according to their own laws, and to the Greeks of Alexandria according to the Macedonian laws: the navy commanded the whole of the eastern half of the Mediterranean; the schools and library had risen to a great height upon the wise plans of Ptolemy Soter; in every point of view Alexandria was the chief city in the world.
The civilization was that of people not exclusively Greek in blood. Alexandria was its chief seat. Poetry languished. It was prose and prose in the form of learned inquiries, criticism, and science that flourished. The path was the same as that marked out by Aristotle. Euclid, under Ptolemy Soter, systemized geometry.
When, after the three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of the Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents and readings with the true odium gammaticum, and kings plunged deeper and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty, till the flood came, and swept them all away.
As Seleucus stopped to sacrifice at a celebrated altar near Lysimachia in Thrace, Ptolemy treacherously assassinated him by stabbing him in the back . After this base and cowardly act, Ptolemy Ceraunus, who gave himself out as the avenger of Lysimachus, was, by one of those movements wholly inexplicable to our modern notions, saluted king by the army; but the Asiatic dominions of Seleucus fell to his son Antiochus, surnamed Soter.
When Ptolemy Soter first created the Museum in Alexandria the works of the greatest period could receive no additions in the form of modern writings of the highest class; but he set us children of man, gathering the drops the task of collecting and of sifting them, of eliminating errors in them and I think we have proved ourselves equal to this task.
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