But the Greeks, in their accounts of Egypt, have sadly puzzled us by their careless alteration of names from similarity of sound.  To Miamun Ramses, they gave the common Greek name Memnon; and the city of Hahiroth they called Heroopolis, as if it meant the city of heroes.  The capital of Upper Egypt, which was called The City, as a capital is often called, or in Koptic, Tape or Thabou, they named Thebes, and in their mythology they confounded it with Thebes in Bootia.  The city of the god Kneph they called Canopus, and said it was so named after the pilot of Menelaus.  The hill of Toorah opposite Memphis they called the Trojan mountain.  One of the oldest cities in Egypt, This, or with the prefix for city, Abouthis, they called Abydos, and then said that it was colonised by Milesians from Abydos in Asia.  In the same careless way have the Greeks given us an account of the Egyptian gods.  They thought them the same as their own, though with new faces; and, instead of describing their qualities, they have in the main contented themselves with translating their names.

If Ptolemy did not make his government as much feared by the half-armed Ethiopians as it was by the well-disciplined Europeans, it must have been because the Thebans wished to guard their own frontier rather than because his troops were always wanted against a more powerful enemy; but the inroads of the Ethiopians were so far from being checked that the country to the south of Thebes was unsafe for travellers, and no Greek was able to reach Syene and the lower cataracts during his reign.  The trade through Ethiopia was wholly stopped, and the caravans went from Thebes to Cosseir to meet the ships which brought the goods of Arabia and India from the opposite coast of the Red Sea.

In the wars between Egypt and Asia Minor, in which Palestine had the misfortune to be the prize struggled for and the debatable land on which the battles were fought, the Jews were often made to smart under the stern pride of Antigonus, and to rejoice at the milder temper of Ptolemy.  The Egyptians of the Delta and the Jews had always been friends; and hence, when Ptolemy promised to treat the Jews with the same kindness as the Greeks, and more than the Egyptians, and held out all the rights of Macedonian citizenship to those who would settle in his rising city of Alexandria, he was followed by crowds of industrious traders, manufacturers, and men of letters.  They chose to live in Egypt in peace and wealth, rather than to stay in Palestine in the daily fear of having their houses sacked and burnt at every fresh quarrel between Ptolemy and Antigonus.  In Alexandria, a suburb by the sea, on the east side of the city, was allotted for their use, which was afterwards included within the fortifications, and thus made a fifth ward of the Lagid metropolis.

No sooner was the peace agreed upon between the four generals, who were the most powerful kings in the known world, than Cassander, who held Macedonia, put to death both the Queen Roxana and her son, the young Alexander AEgus, then thirteen years old, in whose name these generals had each governed his kingdom with unlimited sway, and who was then of an age that the soldiers, the givers of all power, were already planning to make him the real King of Macedonia and of his father’s wide conquests.