Antiphilus, who was born in Egypt and had studied painting under Ctesidemus, rose to high rank as a painter in Alexandria.  Among his best-known pictures were the bearded Bacchus, the young Alexander, and Hip-polytus, or rather his chariot-horses, frightened by the bull.  His boy, blowing up a fire with his mouth, was much praised for the mouth of the boy, and for the light and shade of the room.  His Ptolemy hunting was also highly thought of.  Antiphilus showed a mean jealousy of Apelles, and accused him of joining in a plot against the king, for which the painter narrowly escaped punishment; but Ptolemy, finding that the charge was not true, sent Apelles a gift of one hundred talents to make amends.  The angry feelings of Apelles were by no means cooled by this gift, but they boiled over in his great picture of Calumny.  On the right of the picture sat Ptolemy, holding out his hand to Calumny, who was coming up to him.  On each side of the king stood a woman who seemed meant for Ignorance and Suspicion.  Calumny was a beautiful maiden, but with angry and deep-rooted malice in her face:  in her left hand was a lighted torch, and with her right she was dragging along by the hair a young man, who was stretching forth his hands to heaven, and calling upon the gods to bear witness that he was guiltless.  Before her walked Envy, a pale, hollow-eyed, diseased man, perhaps a portrait of the accuser; and behind were two women, Craft and Deceit, who were encouraging and supporting her.  At a distance stood Repentance, in the ragged, black garb of mourning, who was turning away her face for shame as Truth came up to her.

Ptolemy Soter was plain in his manners, and scarcely surpassed his own generals in the costliness of his way of life.  He often dined and slept at the houses of his friends; and his own house had so little of the palace, that he borrowed dishes and tables of his friends when he asked any number of them to dine with him in return, saying that it was the part of a king to enrich others rather than to be rich himself.  Before he took the title of king, he styled himself, and was styled by friendly states, by the simple name of Ptolemy the Macedonian; and during the whole of his reign he was as far from being overbearing in his behaviour as from being kinglike in his dress and household.  Once when he wished to laugh at a boasting antiquary, he asked him, what he knew could not be answered, who was the father of Peleus; and the other let his wit so far get the better of his prudence as in return to ask the king, who had perhaps never heard the name of his own grandfather, if he knew who was the father of Lagus.  But Ptolemy took no further notice of this than to remark that if a king cannot bear rude answers he ought not to ask rude questions.

An answer which Ptolemy once made to a soothsayer might almost be taken as the proverb which had guided him through life.  When his soldiers met with an anchor in one of their marches, and were disheartened on being told by the soothsayer that it was a proof that they ought to stop where they then were, the king restored their courage by remarking, that an anchor was an omen of safety, not of delay.