In the last reign Eudoxus had been entrusted 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 figurehead of the Carthaginian ships.  This he showed to the Alexandrian pilots, who knew it as belonging to one of the Phoenician 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.

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 Kopts 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 Judaea, 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 her army to two Jews, Chelcias and Ananias, the 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 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.