Africanus the younger and two other Roman ambassadors were sent by the senate to see that the kingdom of their ally was peaceably settled.  Euergetes went to meet him with great pomp, and received him with all the honours due to his rank; and the whole city followed him in crowds through the streets, eager to catch a sight of the conqueror of Carthage, of the greatest man who had been seen in Alexandria, of one who by his virtues and his triumphs had added a new glory even to the name of Scipio.  He brought with him, as his friend and companion (in the case of a modern ambassador we should say, as his chaplain), the philosopher, Pansetius, the chief of the Stoics, who had gained a great name for his three books on the “Duty of Man,” which were afterwards copied by Cicero.

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Euergetes showed them over the palace and the treasury; but, though the Romans had already begun to run the down-hill race of luxury, in which the Egyptians were so far ahead of them, yet Scipio, who held to the old fashions and plain manners of the republic, was not dazzled by mere gold and purple.  But the trade of Alexandria, the natural harbour, the forest of masts, and the lighthouse, the only one in the world, surpassed anything that his well-stored mind had looked for.  He went by boat to Memphis, and saw the rich crops on either bank, and the easy navigation of the Nile, in which the boats were sailing up the river by the force of the wind and floating down by the force of the stream.  The villages on the river side were large and thickly set, each in the bosom of its own grove of palm-trees; and the crowded population was well fed and well clothed.  The Roman statesman saw that nothing was wanting but a good government to make Egypt what it used to be, the greatest kingdom in the world.

Scipio went no higher than Memphis; the buildings of Upper Egypt, the oldest and the largest in the world, could not draw him to Thebes, a city whose trade had fallen off, where the deposits of bullion in the temples had lessened, and whose linen manufacture had moved towards the Delta.  Had this great statesman been a Greek he would perhaps have gone on to this city, famous alike in history and in poetry; but, as it was, Scipio and his friends then sailed for Cyprus, Syria, and the other provinces or kingdoms under the power of Rome, to finish this tour of inspection.

For some time past, the Jews, taking advantage of the weakness of Egypt and Syria, had been struggling to make themselves free; and, at the beginning of this reign Simon Maccabaeus, the high priest, sent an embassy to Rome, with a shield of gold weighing one thousand minae, as a present, to get their independence acknowledged by the Romans.  On this the senate made a treaty of alliance with the family of the Maccabees, and, using the high tone of command to which they had for some time past been accustomed, they wrote to Euergetes and the King of Syria, ordering