Alexander’s character as a triumphant general gains little from this easy conquest of an unwarlike country, and the overthrow of a crumbling monarchy.  But as the founder of a new Macedonian state, and for reuniting the scattered elements of society in Lower Egypt after the Persian conquest, in the only form in which a government could be made to stand, he deserves to be placed among the least mischievous of conquerors.  We trace his march, not by the ruin, misery, and anarchy which usually follow in the rear of an army, but by the building of new cities, the more certain administration of justice, the revival of trade, and the growth of learning.  On reaching Memphis, his first care was to prove to the Egyptians that he was come to re-establish their ancient monarchy.  He went in state to the temple of Apis, and sacrificed to the sacred bull, as the native kings had done at their coronations; and gamed the good-will of the crowd by games and music, Performed by skilful Greeks for their amusement.

[Illustration:  021.jpg Phtah the god of Memphis]

But though the temple of Phtah at Memphis, in which the state ceremonies were performed, had risen in beauty and importance by the repeated additions of the later kings, who had fixed the seat of government in Lower Egypt, yet the Sun, or Amon-Ra, or Kneph-Ra, the god of Thebes, or Jupiter-Amnion, as he was called by the Greeks, was the god under whose spreading wings Egypt had seen its proudest days.  Every Egyptian king had called himself “the son of the Sun;” those who had reigned at Thebes had boasted that they were “beloved by Amon-Ra;” and when Alexander ordered the ancient titles to be used towards himself, he wished to lay his offerings in the temple of this god, and to be acknowledged by the priests as his son.  As a reader of Homer, and the pupil of Aristotle, he must have wished to see the wonders of “Egyptian Thebes,” the proper place for this ceremony; and it could only have been because, as a general, he had not time for a march of five hundred miles, that he chose the nearer and less known temple of Kneph-Ra, in the oasis of Ammon, one hundred and eighty miles from the coast.

Accordingly, he floated down the river from Memphis to the sea, taking with him the light-armed troops and the royal band of knights-companions.  When he reached Canopus, he sailed westward along the coast, and landed at Rhacotis, a small village on the spot where Alexandria now stands.  Here he made no stay; but, as he passed through it, he must have seen at a glance, for he was never there a second time, that the place was formed by nature to be a great harbour, and that with a little help from art it would be the port of all Egypt.  The mouths of the Nile were too shallow for the ever increasing size of the merchant vessels which were then being built; and the engineers found the deeper water which was wanted, between the village of Rhacotis and the little island of pharos.