armies of so mighty an empire, we shall perhaps not find any one more remarkable than that of the same island, when, seventeen hundred years afterwards, it again drew upon itself the eyes of the world, while it beat off the forces of the Ottoman empire under Mahomet II.; and, standing like a rock in front of Christendom, it rolled back for years the tide of war, till its walls were at last crumbled to a heap of ruins by Suleiman the Great, after a siege of many months.

The next of Ptolemy’s conquests was Coele-Syria; and soon after this the wars between these successors of Alexander were put an end to by the death of Antigonus, whose overtowering ambition was among the chief causes of quarrel.  This happened at the great battle of Ipsus in Phrygia, where they all met, with more than eighty thousand men in each army.  Antigonus, King of Asia Minor, was accompanied by his son Demetrius, and by Pyrrhus, King of Epirus; and he was defeated by Ptolemy, King of Egypt, Seleucus, King of Babylon, Lysimachus, King of Thrace, and Cassander, King of Macedonia; and the old man lost his life fighting bravely.  After the battle Demetrius fled to Cyprus, and yielded to the terms of peace which were imposed on him by the four allied sovereigns.  He sent his friend Pyrrhus as a hostage to Alexandria; and there this young King of Epirus soon gained the friendship of Ptolemy and afterwards his stepdaughter in marriage.  Ptolemy was thus left master of the whole of the southern coast of Asia Minor and Syria, indeed of the whole coast of the eastern end of the Mediterranean, from the island of Cos on the north to Cyrene on the south.

During these formidable wars with Antigonus, Ptolemy had never been troubled with any serious rising of the conquered Egyptians; and perhaps the wars may not have been without their use in strengthening his throne.  The first danger to a successful conqueror is from the avarice and disappointment of his followers, who usually claim the kingdom as their booty, and who think themselves wronged and their past services forgotten if any limit is placed to their tyranny over the conquered.  But these foreign wars may have taught the Alexandrians that Ptolemy was not strong enough to ill-treat the Egyptians, and may thus have saved him from the indiscretion of his friends and from their reproaches for ingratitude.

In the late war, the little Dorian island of Cos on the coast of Asia Minor fell, as we have seen, under the power of Ptolemy.  This island was remarkable as being the first spot in Europe into which the manufacture of silk was introduced, which it probably gained when under the power of Persia before the overthrow of Darius.  The luxury of the Egyptian ladies, who affected to be overheated by any clothing that could conceal their limbs, had long ago introduced a tight, thin dress which neither our climate nor notions of modesty would allow, and for this dress, silk, when it could be obtained, was much valued; and Pamphila of Cos had the glory of having woven webs so transparent that the Egyptian women were enabled to display their fair forms yet more openly by means of this clothing.