Ptolemy I Soter

“ During the wars of the Diadochi, all the powers who at any time found themselves Ptolemy’s pawns in the mighty war game then played on a board stretching from India to Thrace, thought to curry favour with their rich ally by giving countenance to his new religion. An association of Sarapiasts or worshippers of Serapis held their meetings in the Piraeus not long after the institution of the Alexandrian cult [162] ; and before the death of Ptolemy Soter, a Serapeum was built in Athens over against the Acropolis itself [163] . ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Oserapis" is called down upon a man by whom she had had a daughter. [36] That scrap of papyrus, destined to be an object of interest for alien eyes, centuries later, in the Imperial Library at Vienna, may have been laid by Artemisia, fresh-written, at the feet of the god before ever there was a king Ptolemy in Egypt, in the days of Alexander the Great. It is a proof that, even before Ptolemy I established a cult of Sarapis at Alexandria, the Osir-Hapi of the Memphis Serapeum was already a deity of prestige for Greeks resident in Egypt. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Egyptian gold which first tempted the Greeks into the country, and then helped their energies to raise the monarchy, afterwards undermined those same energies, and became one of the principal causes of its final overthrow.
In Ptolemy Soter we see plain manners, careful plans, untiring activity, and a wise choice of friends. By him talents were highly paid wherever they were found; no service left unrewarded; the people trusted and taught the use of arms; their love gained by wise laws and even-handed justice ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here are the facts,—the legend at least; for at such a distance, and in such a twilight, history is legendary:—
There was a king of Egypt, named Ptolemy Euergetes, brother-in-law to Antiochus the god.
Let us mention it en passant, all these people were gods:—gods Soters, gods Euergetes, gods Epiphanes, gods Philometors, gods Philadelphi, gods Philopators. Translation: Gods saviours, gods beneficent, gods illustrious, gods loving their mother, gods loving their brothers, gods loving their father. Cleopatra was goddess Soter. The priests and priestesses of Ptolemy Soter were at Ptolemais. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Through the forty years of struggle which followed between the great Macedonian chiefs — the men who had learnt war under Alexander — Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, remained in his African province, safe as a tortoise in his shell, while armies marched to and fro across Asia and rival fleets battled in the Aegean. To some extent, indeed, he stretched forth out of his shell to mingle in the mellay, for the power ruling Egypt was now one of Hellenistic character, having various connexions, political, economic, cultural, with the other states of the Greek world. ”

“ Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of Ptolemy Soter, succeeded to the throne of Egypt in 282 B. C. when his father retired from it in his favor, and reigned until 246 B. C. "Alexandria, founded by the great conqueror, increased and beautified by Ptolemy Soter, was now far the greatest city of Alexander's Empire. It was the first of those new foundations which are a marked feature in Hellenism; there were many others of great size and importance—above all, Antioch, then Seleucia on the Tigris, then Nicomedia, Nicæa, Apamea, which lasted ”

“ All the Ptolemies, too, seem to have spent 52very considerable sums on the restoration and keeping-up of the temples in Egypt dedicated to such thoroughly native gods as Amon of Thebes and Horus of Edfu, besides those at Philae and elsewhere raised not to the Alexandrian but to the Egyptian Osiris and his cycle. What truth there is in the statement of Macrobius that Ptolemy Soter compelled by “tyranny” the Egyptians to take Serapis into their temples, it is impossible to say ”

“ 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. ”

“ Completion of the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Scriptures, called "the Alexandrian."
The length of the solar year first accurately determined by Dionysius, in the astronomical canon.
283. Death of Ptolemy Lagi (Ptolemy Soter) ; Ptolemy Philadelphus (jointly on the throne with his father since 295) succeeds him as King of Egypt. He further encourages the immigration of the Jews, who flourish exceedingly.
282. The Tarentines attack a Roman fleet and insult the ambassadors, who demand satisfaction. Rome prepares for war; the Tarentines engage Pyrrhus to assist them. ”

“ There were plenty of men, it is true, in Egypt, but these were not the right kind of men, the men out of which one could make armies able to stand against armies of Macedonian and Greek soldiers such as Antigonus or Seleucus could put into the field. Ptolemy must have his sure supply of Macedonians, too. He could remember how the nucleus of the army, which under Alexander had conquered half the world, had been drawn from the man-power of old Macedonia, the horse-riding aristocracy, the stout pike-men who were farmers or field-labourers of the Balkan countryside in peace time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 only portrait of Ptolemy Sotor is on the coins, coinage being introduced into Egypt under the Ptolemies. Here he appears, like other members of the family with a full, rounded face, a forehead not high but fleshy over the eyes, arched brows, a nose rather too short and with wide nostrils, a firm mouth and a prominent chin. Not so handsome as Alexander, the Ptolemies, especially the earlier ones, must yet have had considerable claim to good looks. ”

“ In the Demotic inscriptions, too, the first Soters are designated by nehem, and in the singular, by the Greek word p.suter.
Although it is not to be doubted that the Soters, who, according to the Demotic papyrus, had a peculiar cultus with the rest of the Ptolemies, not only in Alexandria and Ptolemais, but also in Thebes, were looked upon as the chiefs of the Ptolemaic dynasty, it is more remarkable that till now no building has been discovered which was erected under Ptolemæus Soter as king, although he continued twenty years in this capacity. ”