Another act for which Cleomenes was blamed was not so certainly wrong.  One summer, when the harvest had been less plentiful than usual, he forbade the export of grain, which was a large part of the trade of Egypt, thereby lowering the price to the poor so far as they could afford to purchase such costly food, but injuring the landowners.  On this, the heads of the provinces sent to him in alarm, to say that they should not be able to get in the usual amount of tribute; he therefore allowed the export as usual, but raised the duty; and he was reproached for receiving a larger revenue while the landowners were suffering from a smaller crop.

[Illustration:  027.jpg lighthouse at Alexandria]

At Ecbatana, the capital of Media, Alexander lost his friend Hephaestion, and in grief for his death he sent to Egypt to enquire of the oracle at the temple of Kneph in the oasis of Ammon, what honours he might pay to the deceased.  The messengers brought him an answer, that he might declare Hephaestion a demigod, and order that he should be worshipped.  Accordingly, Alexander then sent an express command to Cleomenes that he should build a temple to his lost favourite in his new city of Alexandria, and that the lighthouse which was to be built on the island of Pharos should be named after him; and as modern insurances against risks by sea usually begin with the words “In the name of God; Amen;” so all contracts between merchants in the port of Alexandria were to be written solemnly “In the name of Hephaestion.”  Feeling diffident of enforcing obedience at the mouth of the Nile, while he was himself writing from the sources of the Indus, he added that if, when he came to Egypt he found his wish carried into effect, he would pardon Cleomenes for those acts of misgovernment of which he had been accused, and for any others which might then come to his ears.

A somatophylax in the Macedonian army was no doubt at first, as the word means, one of the officers who had to answer for the king’s safety; perhaps in modern language a colonel in the body-guards or household troops; but as, in unmixed monarchies, the faithful officer who was nearest the king’s person, to whose watchfulness he trusted in the hour of danger, often found himself the adviser in matters of state, so, in the time of Alexander, the title of somatophylax was given to those generals on whose wisdom the king chiefly leaned, and by whose advice he was usually guided.  Among these, and foremost in Alexander’s love and esteem, was Ptolemy, the son of Lagus.  Philip, the father of Alexander, had given Arsinoe, one of his relations, in marriage to Lagus; and her eldest son Ptolemy, born soon after the marriage, was always thought to be the king’s son, though never so acknowledged.  As he grew up, he was put into the highest offices by Philip, without raising in the young Alexander’s mind the distrust which might have been felt if Ptolemy could have boasted that he was the elder brother.  He earned the good opinion of Alexander by his military successes in Asia, and gained his gratitude by saving his life when he was in danger among the Oxydracae, near the river Indus; and moreover, Alexander looked up to him as the historian whose literary powers and knowledge of military tactics were to hand down to the wonder of future ages those conquests which he witnessed.