Edwyn Robert Bevan

“ For the Greeks of Egypt, Alexander the Great had been a god from the beginning. The kings and queens of the house of Ptolemy soon came to be gods and goddesses as well. Educated Greeks no doubt regarded the official cult as merely a symbolic form. It had become so easy in those days to call a man a god without meaning very much by it.
The worship of a dead man was much more in accordance with the ancestral religion of the Greeks than the newfangled worship of men still living. ”

“ He had beside him, as advisers, Timotheus the Athenian, a member of the priestly Eumolpid family, an authority on Greek religious practice, and the Egyptian priest, Manetho, who would speak with knowledge about Egyptian religion. And here it appeared that there was one Egyptian god, the Memphian Osiris-Apis, who was already invoked by the Greeks in Egypt under the name of Sarapis. Ptolemy laid hold of this as the nucleus of his new religion. ”

“ Certain arms in an army of the period were almost always furnished, not by Macedonian regulars, but by mercenaries from some particular region — archers from Crete, javelineers from Thrace. Of the Cretans, Thracians, Athenians, Spartans, Boeotians, Sicilians, who came in this way to Egypt, many apparently stayed there. Ptolemy seems to have exerted himself to be known all over the Greek world as the kind of genial, free-handed, valiant gentleman whom any young man inclined to the life of a soldier might cross the sea to serve. ”

“ The soul of a dead man has any way passed into a mysterious world, and from quite early times Greeks had believed that the soul of a great personality might act for good or evil upon the living, very much as a god did. ”

“ The reign of Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, in Egypt was marked by one new creation, destined to have a future in the Greek world — the creation of a new cult. A deity whose name had hitherto been unknown to the Greeks outside Egypt became one of the great gods of later Paganism — Sarapis. The origin of Sarapis-worship has been the subject of a good deal of learned controversy, but the question has been brought into clearer light by Wilcken's great edition of the Ptolemaic papyri now in process of coming out. ”

“ He conceived the idea of creating a new artificial Macedonia in this strange and incongruous land of Egypt — a stratum of Macedonian and Greek farmers, thousands of them, to be spread over Egypt, men who in peace time would grow corn or breed cattle in their plots of land irrigated by the Nile, but could be called up, whenever there was need, to take sarissa in hand or mount their war-horses, to form phalanx or ile, and march with Ptolemy or one of his generals into Palestine or to Cyrene. ”

“ The Sarapis worshipped at Alexandria was, he thinks, understood to be identical with the god of the lower world worshipped in the temple over the tombs of the mummied bulls near Memphis: to that extent Sarapis was a really Egyptian god. There can, however, be no question that the sculptured type of Sarapis at Alexandria was Greek, not Egyptian — a bearded god, resembling Zeus or Hades or Asklepios, seated on a throne with the three-headed Cerberus, the dog of the lower world, beside his feet, and wearing on his head a tall head-dress called from its appearance a kalathos, "basket." ”

“ If Egypt, in the new days of world politics and world commerce, was to be a strong and prosperous state, it could not be altogether self-enclosed and self-sufficing. Large timber, for instance, for shipbuilding was not to be found in the country of the Nile, but was furnished by the Lebanon and the hills of Cyprus. The line of commercial traffic which went along the Nile, to and from Alexandria, had a rival in the line which went from the Persian Gulf across Arabia to Gaza, and it was to the advantage of the ruler of Egypt to control both. ”

“ Ptolemy had no legitimate wives in Egypt beside Eurydice and Berenice. Whether he divorced Eurydice before he married Berenice, or whether after 315 he had two wives concurrently, our sources do not say. The later kings of the dynasty are never found with more than one legitimate wife at the same time, according to the universal practice of the Greek world. But the Macedonian kings before Alexander were apparently polygamous, and amongst Alexander's successors Demetrius and Pyrrhus were polygamous; hence it is possible that the first Ptolemy was in this respect rather Macedonian than Greek. ”

“ When Sarapis had once been established by Ptolemy at Alexandria as a chief god for the Egyptian Greeks, and had been presented to them in the visible likeness of a Greek god, he came to receive attributes analogous to one or other of the ancestral Greek gods. He became especially assimilated to Asklepios as a god of healing. Sick men might sleep in his temple and receive instructions by dream regarding their case. ”

“ After Ptolemy's loss of all his external possessions in 306, fortune turned once more against Antigonus. His arms encountered two severe checks during the two years which followed. First he was imprudent enough, having despoiled Ptolemy of Palestine and Cyprus, to renew the attempt of Perdiccas, and attack Egypt itself. He did not do so without forming a large force, military and naval, which he hoped would enable him to triumph over the well-known obstacles — the desert between Palestine and Egypt, the Nile, Egypt's "immortal wall." ”

“ We only once hear of a Ptolemy having a native Egyptian woman even among his mistresses. [53]
Ptolemy at the age of eighty-two wished to pass his power on to his successor, less, probably, because he desired rest than because he wanted to see his favourite son securely established upon the throne before he died. He had loved Berenice more than Eurydice, and although Eurydice's son Ptolemy was the elder of the two, it was Berenice's son Ptolemy whom his father determined to make king. [54] Possibly Eurydice had made herself odious, when her waiting-woman, Berenice, was exalted into her place. ”

“ Worship of a kind slightly differing from the worship offered to gods had been offered to many powerful spirits of dead men under the name of heroes. A Greek city especially would often carry on a ritual worship or "tendence" of its founder as a hero. It was therefore something quite according to traditional Greek practice that the city of Alexandria should worship Alexander, [44] the step from worshipping a dead man as a hero to worshipping him as a god being a slight one. ”

“ Looking at this period of the history of Egypt as a whole, we can see its main characteristic to be that Egypt has now, instead of the comparatively homogeneous native population which it had under the old Pharaohs, two strata of population living together within its borders — the upper stratum constituted by a European ruling race and the lower stratum constituted by the great subject mass of Egyptians. ”

“ Sarapis and Isis are the only two deities singled out by name. But that from the very beginning, from the time when Ptolemy was only satrap of Egypt, the court at Alexandria showed special interest in the cult of the new god, can be shown by the inscription put up by Arsinoe at Halicarnassus: "With good fortune for Ptolemy the Saviour and God, Arsinoe erected the shrine to Sarapis and Isis." ”

“ The living Apis bull was kept at Memphis in an Apieum adjoining the great temple of Ptah, in the cultivated land, four miles away. The bull during his lifetime was ordinarily regarded as an embodiment of the divinity of the Nile, sometimes it was identified with Ptah. [34] Just, however, as a man at death became an Osiris, so the dead bull became Osiris-Apis (Osir-Hapi) . According to a view, prevalent in Roman times, if not earlier, the sacred animal's deity began with its death. Its funeral was an event for the whole of Egypt. ”

“ Macrobius says that the Egyptians accepted the worship of Sarapis only under compulsion: one might observe, he says, that the temples of Sarapis in the case, not indeed of Alexandria, but of native Egyptian towns, were always outside the walls. Probably, as Wilcken contends, the idea that the Egyptians had resisted Sarapis-worship was simply a false inference from the fact noticed by Macrobius, or by some earlier Greek author, that the Serapeums in Egypt were usually outside the cities, on the edge of the desert. ”

“ A person of youthful vigour was he, strong in his two arms, wise in spirit, mighty among the people, of stout courage, of firm foot, resisting the furious, not turning his back, striking his adversaries in the face in the midst of the battle. ”

“ Seleucus, the satrap of Babylonia, had fled to Egypt, and a new league of chiefs was constituted against Antigonus. Ptolemy, by his occupation of Coele-Syria, had obviously given a ground of complaint to any one who aspired to be master of the whole Empire. In 315 Antigonus invaded Coele-Syria, and Ptolemy prudently withdrew before him — the tortoise shrinking into his shell. Antigonus occupied the cities of the Syrian coast as far as Gaza. But Ptolemy's navy, under the command of Seleucus, was meanwhile carrying on the war against Antigonus at sea. Ptolemy threw a force into Cyprus. ”

“ Then there spake to him he who was at his side, and the elders of the land of Lower Egypt, saying:
" 'The sea-land, the land of Patanut is its name, was granted by the king, the son of the Sun, Khabbash [21] living for ever, to the gods of Pe and Tep, after his Holiness had gone to Pe and Tep to examine all the sea-land in their territory, to go into the interior of the marshes, to examine every arm of the Nile which goes into the Great Sea, to keep off the fleet of Asia from Egypt. ”

“ We are told that when Demetrius captured an army of Ptolemy's in Cyprus in 306, large numbers of men, instead of accepting service under Demetrius, tried to make their way back to Egypt, where they had left their families and chattels. [33]
Besides bodies of soldiers brought en masse into Egypt, many men from the Greek world may have individually entered the service of Ptolemy as mercenaries, and then accepted the offer of a permanent settlement in the country. The armies which could be formed from Macedonians domiciled in Egypt were not by themselves adequate. ”

“ Sarapis was not the only new deity whom the Macedonians and Greeks of Ptolemaic Egypt worshipped in addition to the gods of their fathers. The deification of men recently dead or still living was a feature of the Greek world after Alexander. ”

“ Even in fifth-century Athens the idea of offering divine honours to men, as the expression of enthusiastic reverence or gratitude, occurs as a figure of speech, [43] and in days when rationalism was corroding the old religious awe, when theories were abroad which explained the traditional gods as men of an earlier age deified by imagination, it was easy to go from idea to practice, and use the forms of religious worship as a mode of flattery addressed to eminent men of the time. ”

“ It was a state of things not altogether unlike that which is found in certain countries the‐day, for the civilization of the ruling race in Ptolemaic Egypt was precisely that same Greek civilization which is the parent of the modern civilization of Europe, and their feeling of superiority to the people of the land was not unlike the feeling which "white men" have to‐day towards "natives." ”

“ He desired, too, to possess Cyprus, as Aahmes had done in the 6th century B.C., and beyond that to extend the sphere of his control over the Greeks of the Aegean islands, over places on the coast of Asia Minor, and even places in the old Greece itself. ”

“ He may have brought others with him from Babylon. When one of the Macedonian chiefs in those days defeated another in battle, the troops of the defeated side were often ready to pass over in numbers to the service of the victor. If they were Macedonians, the victor also was after all one of their national chiefs. Part of the defeated army of Perdiccas in 321 may have found a new home under Ptolemy in Egypt. Diodorus tells us that after the battle of Gaza in 312 Ptolemy sent more than 8000 soldiers of the defeated army to Egypt to be distributed in certain regions of the country. ”

“ A Ptolemaic force was defeated in 311 by Demetrius in Northern Syria, and Antigonus came marching down into Palestine from the north. For the second time Ptolemy withdrew from Palestine into his shell. Simultaneously Cyrene again revolted, not against Ophellas this time, but under the leadership of Ophellas. It was a bad moment for Ptolemy. In 311 he and the other Macedonian chiefs, his allies — Cassander, the ruler of Macedonia, and Lysimachus, the ruler of Thrace — made a peace with Antigonus, by which Ptolemy abandoned Coele-Syria. ”

“ Demetrius, having besieged Rhodes for some fifteen months, 305‐304, failed in the end to take it, and had to consent to a compromised peace. The successful defence of Rhodes had been largely due to the provisions and reinforcements which Ptolemy contrived from time to time to throw into the besieged city.
In 303‐302 a new league was conformed of Cassander, Lysimachus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus against Antigonus. Seleucus was in the depths of the East, conquering the farther provinces of the Empire as far as India. ”

“ Diodorus gives its numbers as over 80,000 foot, 8000 horse, and 83 Indian elephants, whilst it was accompanied by a fleet of 150 vessels of war and 100 transports under the command of Demetrius. (Not much trust, as Mahaffy pointed out, can be put in the figures of ancient historians in such connexions.) At Gaza, before crossing the desert, the army was furnished with rations for ten days, and a body of Bedouin on camels was procured to escort it with 130,000 medimni of corno and fodder for the beasts. ”

“ He could use it as a naval basis against Antigonus, who now had command of the Phoenician ports on the Syrian coast. In 313 Ptolemy, having lost Coele-Syria, temporarily lost Cyrene as well. The city, after nine years' subjection to a foreign Macedonian ruler, broke into revolt and besieged the Ptolemaic garrison in the citadel. Ptolemy, however, could spare a new expeditionary force which beat down this revolt and brought Cyrene again under the hand of his governor Ophellas. During the same year Ptolemy went to Cyprus in person and completed the conquest of the island. ”