kings have been made to stand in the place of justice and mildness, but under Philadelphus it only threw a light upon his good government.  He was acknowledged both at home and abroad to be the first king of his age; Greece and its philosophers looked up to him as a friend and patron; and though as a man he must take rank far below his father, by whose wisdom the eminence on which he stood was raised, yet in all the gold and glitter of a king Philadelphus was the greatest of his family.

The Egyptians had been treated with kindness by both of these Greek kings.  As far as they had been able or willing to copy the arts of Greece they had been raised to a level with the Macedonians.  The Egyptian worship and temples had been upheld, as if in obedience to the oft-repeated answer of the Delphic oracle, that the gods should everywhere be worshipped according to the laws of the country.  But Euergetes was much more of an Egyptian, and while he was bringing back the ancient splendour to the temples, the priests must have regained something of their former rank.  But they had no hold on the minds of the soldiers.  Had the mercenaries, upon whom the power of the king rested, been worshippers in the Egyptian temples, the priests might, as in the earlier times, like a body of nobles, have checked his power when too great, and at other times upheld it.  But it was not so; and upon the whole, little seems to have been gained by the court becoming more Egyptian, while the army must have lost something of its Greek discipline and plainness of manners.

But in the next reign the fruits of this change were seen to be most unfortunate.  Philopator was an Eastern despot, surrounded by eunuchs, and drowned in pleasures.  The country was governed by his women and vicious favourites.  The army, which at the beginning of his reign amounted to seventy-three thousand men, beside the garrisons, was at first weakened by rebellion, and before the end of his reign it fell to pieces.  Nothing, however, happened to prove his weakness to surrounding nations; Egypt was still the greatest of kingdoms, though Rome on the conquest of Carthage, and Syria under Antiochus the Great, were fast gaining ground upon it; but he left to his infant son a throne shaken to the very foundations.

The ministers of Epiphanes, the infant autocrat, found the government without a head and without an army, the treasury without money, and the people without virtue or courage; and they placed the kingdom under the hands of the Romans to save it from being shared between the kings of Syria and Macedonia.  Thus passed the first five reigns, the first one hundred and fifty years, the first half of the three centuries that the kingdom of the Ptolemies lasted.  It was then rotten at the core with vice and luxury.  Its population was lessening, its trade falling off, its treasury empty, its revenue too small for the wasteful expenses of the government; but, nevertheless, in the eyes of surrounding nations, its trade and wealth seemed boundless.