used in the royal processions and religious shows, and which usually lay in dock at Schedia, on the Canopic River, five and twenty miles from Alexandria.  He was no doubt in part withheld from war by this luxurious love of ease; but his reign taught the world the new lesson, that an ambitious monarch may gratify his wish for praise and gain the admiration of surrounding nations, as much by cultivating the blessed arts of peace as by plunging his people into the miseries of war.

He reigned over Egypt, with the neighbouring parts of Arabia; also over Libya, Phoenicia, Cole-Syria, part of Ethiopia, Pamphylia, Cilicia, Lycia, Caria, Cyprus, and the isles of the Cyclades.  The island of Rhodes and many of the cities of Greece were bound to him by the closest ties of friendship, for past help and for the hope of future.  The wealthy cities of Tyre and Sidon did homage to him, as before to his father, by putting his crowned head upon their coins.  The forces of Egypt reached the very large number of two hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horse, two thousand chariots, four hundred Ethiopian elephants, fifteen hundred ships of war and one thousand transports.  Of this large force, it is not likely that even one-fourth should have been Greeks; the rest must have been Egyptians and Syrians, with some Gauls.  The body of chariots, though still forming part of the force furnished for military service by the Theban tenants of the crown, was of no use against modern science; and the other Egyptian troops, though now chiefly armed and disciplined like Greeks, were very much below the Macedonian phalanx in real strength.  The galleys also, though no doubt under the guidance and skill of Greeks and Phoenicians, were in part manned by Egyptians, whose inland habits wholly unfitted them for the sea, and whose religious prejudices made them feel the conscription for the navy as a heavy grievance.

These large forces were maintained by a yearly income equally large, of fourteen thousand eight hundred talents, or twelve million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, beside the tax on grain, which was taken in kind, of a million and a half of artabas, or about five millions of bushels.  To this we may add a mass of gold, silver, and other valuable stores in the treasury, which were boastfully reckoned at the unheard-of sum of seven hundred and forty thousand talents, or above five hundred million dollars.

[Illustration:  149.jpg A TYPICAL NILE PILOT]

The trade down the Nile was larger than it had ever been before; the coasting trade on the Mediterranean was new; the people were rich and happy; justice was administered to the Egyptians according to their own laws, and to the Greeks of Alexandria according to the Macedonian laws:  the navy commanded the whole of the eastern half of the Mediterranean; the schools and library had risen to a great height upon the wise plans of Ptolemy Soter; in every point of view Alexandria