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Now, with the avarice of love in her eyes, with wishfulness and defeat making their sorry signs on her face, she was a creature that even the humblest would have longed to help. Philadelphus sat opposite her in the ivory chair which was hers by right.
"So she refrains from furnishing John with my two hundred talents, I shall not quarrel with her. You have your own difficulties to adjust, and mine, only in so far as they concern you." His voice had lost none of its smoothness, but it had become hard and purposeful. "I have come to that point, Philadelphus, where my difficulties and not yours concern me," she replied.
The former was called the parent library, and the latter, being, as it were, the offspring of the first, was called the daughter. Ptolemy Philadelphus, who interested himself very greatly in collecting this library, wished to make it a complete collection of all the books in the world.
Nothing occurred to Julian at that moment but to impersonate the Maccabee until it was possible to get possession of the two hundred talents from those friends in Jerusalem who were interested in his cousin's welfare. No one in Jerusalem knew Philadelphus Maccabaeus. Aquila, as fellow-conspirator, would not dare to expose him if Julian appeared as his cousin.
With them begins the series of consular denarii, which throws such light on Roman life and history. About the middle of this reign, Berenicê, the mother of the king, died, and it was most likely then that Philadelphus began to date from the beginning of his own reign: he had before gone on like his father, dating from the beginning of his father's reign.
He was acknowledged both at home and abroad to be the first king of his age; Greece and its philosophers looked up to him as a friend and patron; and though as a man he must take rank far below his father, by whose wisdom the eminence on which he stood was raised, yet in all the gold and glitter of a king Philadelphus was the greatest of his family.
When Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton, 'Mon mouton c'est un lion, it was the same instinct at work, though working from an opposite point. It made itself felt no less in the bitter irony which gave to the second of the Ptolemies, the brother-murdering king, the title of Philadelphus.
"I am that servant of Amaryllis," he said courteously. "But show me yet another sign." The Ephesian drew from his bosom the Maccabaean signet and flashed its blue fires at the Greek. The servant stepped hastily between the soldiers and the new-comer. "Thy name?" he asked in a whisper. "I am Philadelphus Maccabaeus." The servant bent and taking the hem of the woolen tunic pressed it to his lips.
It is related that when Ptolemy Philadelphus about 260 years before Christ, resolved to have the Hebrew Scriptures translated into Greek, for the purpose of placing them in his far-famed library, he despatched messengers to Eleazar, the High Priest of the Jews, requiring him to send scribes and interpreters learned in the Jewish law to his court at Alexandria.
Philadelphus, by joining to the greatness and good government of his father the costly splendour and pomp of an eastern monarch, so drew the eyes of after ages upon his reign that his name passed into a proverb: if any work of art was remarkable for its good taste or costliness, it was called Philadelphian; even history and chronology were set at nought, and we sometimes find poets of a century later counted among the Pleiades of Alexandria in the reign of Philadelphus.
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