Ptolemy Soter lived two years after he had withdrawn himself from the cares of government; and the weight of his name was not without its use in adding steadiness to the throne of his successor.  Instead of parcelling out his wide provinces among his sons as so many kingdoms, he had given them all to one son, and that not the eldest; and on his death the jealousy of those who had been disinherited and disappointed broke out in rebellion.

It is with peculiar interest that we hear in this reign for the first time that the bravery and rising power of the Romans had forced themselves into the notice of Philadelphus.  Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus, had been beaten by the Romans, and driven out of Italy; and the King of Egypt thought it not beneath him to send an ambassador to the senate, to wish them joy of their success, and to make a treaty of peace with the republic.  The embassy, as we might suppose, was received in Rome with great joy; and three ambassadors, two of the proud name of Fabius, with Quintus Ogulnius, were sent back to seal the treaty.  Philadelphus gave them some costly gifts, probably those usually given to ambassadors; but Rome was then young, her citizens had not yet made gold the end for which they lived, and the ambassadors returned the gifts, for they could receive nothing beyond the thanks of the senate for having done their duty.  This treaty was never broken; and in the war which broke out in the middle of this reign between Rome and Carthage, usually called the first Punic war, when the Carthaginians sent to Alexandria to beg for a loan of two thousand talents, Philadelphus refused it, saying that he would help them against his enemies, but not against his friends.

From that time forward we find Egypt in alliance with Rome.  But we also find that they were day by day changing place with one another:  Egypt soon began to sink, while Rome was rising in power; Egypt soon received help from her stronger ally, and at last became a province of the Roman empire.

At the time of this embassy, when Greek arts were nearly unknown to the Romans, the ambassadors must have seen much that was new to them, and much that was worth copying; and three years afterwards, when one of them, Quintus Ogulnius, together with Caius Fabius Pictor, were chosen consuls, they coined silver for the first time in Rome.  With them begins the series of consular denarii, which throws such light on Roman life and history.

About the middle of this reign, Berenice, the mother of the king, died, and it was most likely then that Philadelphus began to date from the beginning of his own reign:  he had before gone on like his father, dating from the beginning of his father’s reign.  In the year after her death, the great feast of Osiris, in the month of Mesore, was celebrated at Alexandria with more than usual pomp by the Queen Arsinoe.  Venus, or Isis, had just raised Berenice to heaven; and Arsinoe, in return, showed her gratitude by the