Satyrus, the architect, had the charge of moving it.  He dug a canal to it as it lay upon the ground, and moved two heavily laden barges under it.  The burdens were then taken out of the barges, and as they floated higher they raised the obelisk off the ground.  He then found it a task as great or greater to set it up in its place; and this Greek engineer must surely have looked back with wonder on the labour and knowledge of mechanics which must have been used in setting up the obelisks, colossal statues, and pyramids, which he saw scattered over the country.  This obelisk now ornaments the cathedral of the Popes on the Vatican hill at Rome.  Satyrus wrote a treatise on precious stones, and he also carved on them with great skill; but his works are known only in the following lines, which were written by Diodorus on his portrait of Arsinoe cut in crystal: 

     E’en Zeuxis had been proud to trace
     The lines within this pebble seen;
     Satyrus here hath carved the face
     Of fair Arsinoe, Egypt’s queen;
     But such her beauty, sweetness, grace,
     The copy falls far short, I ween.

Two beautiful cameos cut on sardonyx are extant, one with the heads of Philadelphus and his first wife, Arsinoe, and the other with the heads of the same king and his second wife, Arsinoe.  It is not impossible that one or both of them may be the work of Satyrus.

Philadelphus is also said to have listened to the whimsical proposal of Dinochares, the architect, to build a room of loadstone in Arsinoe’s tomb, so that an iron statue of the queen should hang in the air between the floor and the roof.  But the death of the king and of the architect took place before this was tried.  He set up there, however, her statue six feet high, carved out of a most remarkable block of topaz, which had been presented to his mother by Philemon, the prefect of the Troglodytic coast in the last reign.

Philadelphus lived in peace with Ergamenes, King of Meroe or Upper Ethiopia, who, while seeking for a knowledge of philosophy and the arts of life from his Greek neighbours, seems also to have gained a love of despotism, and a dislike of that control with which the priests of Ethiopia and Egypt had always limited the power of their kings.  The King of Meroe had hitherto reigned like Amenothes or Thutmosis of old, as the head of the priesthood, supported and controlled by the priestly aristocracy by which he was surrounded.  But he longed for the absolute power of Philadelphus.  Accordingly he surrounded the golden temple with a chosen body of troops, and put the whole of the priests to death; and from that time he governed Ethiopia as an autocrat.  But, with the loss of their liberties, the Ethiopians lost the wish to guard the throne; by grasping at more power, their sovereign lost what he already possessed; and in the next reign their country was conquered by Egypt.