THE HISTORY OF EGYPT.

CHAPTER XI.

CLEOPATRA COCCE AND PTOLEMY SOTER II.; CLEOPATRA COCCE AND PTOLEMY ALEXANDER; PTOLEMY SOTER II.; CLEOPATRA BERENICE; PTOLEMY ALEXANDER II.; PTOLEMY NEUS DIONYSUS. B.C. 116-51.

3.

B.C. 116.

(1) ON the death of Ptolemy Euergetes II., his widow Cleopatra Cocce would have chosen her younger son, Justinus, Ptolemy Alexander, then a child, for her partner lib. xxxix. on the throne, most likely because it would have been longer in the course of years before he would have claimed his share of power; but she was forced, by a threatened rising of the Alexandrians, to make her elder son king. Before, however, she would do this, she made a treaty with him, which would strongly prove, if anything were still wanting, the vice and meanness of the Egyptian court. It was, that, although married to his sister Cleopatra, of whom he was very fond, he should put her away, and marry his younger sister Selene; because the mother hoped that Selene would be false to her husband's cause, and weaken his party in the state by her treachery: she planned the unhappiness of two children and the guilt of a third. Perhaps history can hardly show another marriage so wicked and unnatural, or a reign so little likely to end without a civil war.

(2) PTOLEMY took the name of SOTER II., though he is more often called LATHYRUS, from a stain upon his face in the form of a leaf, pricked into his skin in honour of Osiris (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, two forms of his name). He was also called Philometor; and we learn from an inscription on

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a temple at Apollinopolis Parva, that both these names Pausanias, formed part of the style in which the public acts ran in this reign; it is dedi

lib. i. 9.

Inscript.

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Letronne, cated by "the Queen Cleopatra Recherches. and King Ptolemy, gods Philometores, Soteres, and his children," without mentioning his wife. Here, as in Persia and Judæa, the king's mother often held rank above his wife. The name of Philometor was given to him by his mother, because, though he had reached the years of manhood, she wished to act as his guardian; but her unkindness to him was so remarkable that historians have thought that it was a nickname. The mother and the son were jointly styled sovereigns of Egypt; but they lived apart, and in distrust of one another, each surrounded by his own friends; while Cleopatra's stronger mind and greater skill in kingcraft gained for her the larger share of power. Can we wonder that under such heads the monarchy was tottering to its fall?

Justinus,

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

(3) Cleopatra the daughter, who gained our pity for being put away by her husband at the command of her lib. xxxix. mother, soon forfeited it by the steps which she 3. then took. She made a treaty of marriage with Antiochus Cyzicenus, the friend of her late husband, who was struggling in unnatural warfare for the throne of Syria with his brother Antiochus Grypus, the husband of her sister Tryphæna; and in her way to Syria she stopped at Cyprus, where she raised a large army and took it with her as her dower, to help her new husband against his brother and her sister.

(4) With this addition to his army Cyzicenus thought his forces equal to those of his brother; he marched against him and gave him battle. But he was beaten, and he fled with his wife Cleopatra; and they shut themselves up in the city of Antioch. Grypus and Tryphæna then laid siege to the city, and Tryphæna soon took her revenge on her sister for coming into Syria to marry the brother and rival of her husband. The city was taken; and Tryphæna ordered her

sister to be torn from the temple into which she had filed, and to be put to death. In vain Grypus urged that he did not wish his victory to be stained by the death of a sister; that Cleopatra was by marriage his sister as well as hers; that she was the aunt of their children; and that the gods would punish them if they dragged her from the altar. But Tryphæna was merciless and unmoved; she gave her own orders to the soldiers; and Cleopatra was killed as she clung with her arms to the statue of the goddess. This unnatural cruelty, however, was soon overtaken by punishment; in the next battle Cyzicenus was the conqueror, and he put Tryphæna to death, to quiet the ghost of her murdered sister.

Porphyrius,

B.C. 114.

(5) In the third year of her reign Cleopatra Cocce gave the island of Cyprus to her younger son Alex- ap. Scalig. ander, as an independent kingdom, thinking that he would be of more use to her there, in upholding her power against his brother Lathyrus, than he could be at Alexandria.

Pausanias,

lib. i. 9.

Strabo,

lib. ii.

(6) In the last reign Eudoxus had been intrusted by Euergetes with a vessel and a cargo for a trading voyage of discovery towards India; and in this reign he was again sent by Cleopatra down the Red Sea to trade with the unknown countries in the east. How far he went may be doubted, but he brought back with him from the coast of Africa the prow of a ship ornamented with a horse's head, the usual figure-head of the Carthaginian ships. This he showed to the Alexandrian pilots, who knew it as belonging to one of the Phenician ships of Cadiz or Gibraltar. Eudoxus justly argued that this prow proved that it was possible to sail round Africa, and to reach India by sea from Alexandria. The government, however, would not fit him out for a third voyage; but his reasons were strong enough to lead many to join him, and others to help him with money, and he thereby fitted out three vessels on this attempt to sail round Africa by the westward voyage. He passed the Pillars of Hercules, or Straits of Gibraltar, and then turned southward. He even reached that part of Africa where the coast turns eastward. Here he was stopped by his ships wanting repair. The only knowledge that he brought back for us is, that the natives of that western coast

were of nearly the same race as the Ethiopians on the eastern coast. He was able to sail only part of the way back, and he reached Mauritania with difficulty by land. He thence returned home, where he met with the fate not unusual to early travellers. His whole story was doubted; and the geographers at home did not believe that he had ever visited the countries that he attempted to describe.

(7) The people of Lower Egypt were, as we have seen, of several races; and, as each of the surrounding nations was in its turn powerful, that race of men was uppermost in Lower Egypt. Before the fall of Thebes the Copts ruled in the Delta; when the free states of Greece held the first rank in the world, even before the time of Alexander's conquests, the Greeks of Lower Egypt were masters of their fellow-countrymen; and now that Judæa, under the bravery of the Maccabees, had gained among nations a rank far higher than what its size entitled it to, the Egyptian Jews found that they had in the same way gained weight in Alexandria. Cleopatra had given the command of Antiq. her army to two Jews, Chelcias and Ananias, the xiii. 18. sons of Onias, the priest of Heliopolis; and hence, when the civil war broke out between the Jews and Samaritans, Cleopatra helped the Jews, and perhaps for that same reason Lathyrus helped the Samaritans. He sent six thousand men to his friend Antiochus Cyzicenus to be led against the Jews, but this force was beaten by the two sons of Hyrcanus the high priest.

Josephus,

(8) By this act Lathyrus must have lost the good-will of the Jews of Lower Egypt, and hence Cleopatra again ventured to choose her own partner on the throne. She raised a riot in Alexandria against him, in the tenth year of their Porphyrius, reign, on his putting to death some of her friends, ap. Scalig. or more likely, as Pausanias says, by showing to the people some of her eunuchs covered with blood, who she said were wounded by him; and she forced him to fly from Egypt. She took from him his wife Selene, whom lib. xxxix. she had before thrust upon him, and who had borne 4. him two children; and allowed him to withdraw to the kingdom of Cyprus, from which she recalled her favourite scn Alexander to reign with her in Egypt (see Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, Cleopatra and Alexander).

Justinus,