Ptolemy

“ And Ptolemy on one occasion, flouting a grammarian for his ignorance, asked him who was the father of Peleus, and he answered, "I will tell you, if you tell me first who was the father of Lagus." This was a jeer at the obscure birth of the king, and all his courtiers were indignant at it as an unpardonable liberty; but Ptolemy said, "If it is not kingly to take a flout, neither is it kingly to give one." ”

“ When she reached Egypt, as she heard that Ptolemy had received an embassy from Antigonus, and was told that although the Achæans wished to come to terms with him, he had feared on her account to make peace with them without consulting Ptolemy, she wrote to him bidding him act worthily of Sparta, and consult her interests, and not fear to displease Ptolemy because of what he might do to an old woman and an infant. So great a spirit is she said to have shown in her misfortunes. ”

“ Setting aside the Ptolemy, which represents the knowledge of the world at its height in the pre-Christian civilisation, and the Edrisi which represents the Arabic followers of Ptolemy, whose influence upon early Christian geography was very marked, all the maps reproduced belong to the science of the Christian ages and countries. ”

“ The Chaldæans, Genethliacs, and Planetarians, have been always held in disrepute, because they professed to know not only more than they actually did know, but also more than is allowed to man to know. Even Ptolemy, while he employs himself in his present work upon the Doctrine of Nativities, is scarcely free from the charge of superstition and vanity: perhaps, in a Pagan, this may be forgiven; but it is hardly to be tolerated, that persons professing Christianity should be led away by such an empty study, in which there is no solid utility, and the whole pleasure of which is puerile. ”

“ Eleazar the high priest to king Ptolemy, sendeth greeting. If thou and thy queen Arsinoe, 6 and thy children, be well, we are entirely satisfied. When we received thy epistle, we greatly rejoiced at thy intentions; and when the multitude were gathered together, we read it to them, and thereby made them sensible of the piety thou hast towards God. We also showed them the twenty vials of gold, and thirty of silver, and the five large basons, and the table for the shew-bread; as also the hundred talents for the sacrifices, and for the making what shall be needful at the temple ”

“ It is about half a century earlier than the Rosetta Stone, and was set up at Canopus in the ninth year of the reign of Ptolemy III. to record a decree made by the priesthood there assembled in honour of the king. It recites acts similar in their beneficent character to those recounted of Ptolemy V., and decrees what honours shall be paid him and his consort Berenice, whose famous hair, dedicated in the temple of Arsinoë at Zephyrium in gratitude for Ptolemy's safe return from his Syrian expedition, was said to have been metamorphosed into the constellation known as Coma Berenices. ”

“ Ptolemy, an Egyptian philosopher, who flourished 130 years after Christ, supposed that the earth was fixed in the center, and that the sun and the rest of the heavenly bodies moved round it in twenty-four hours, or one natural day, as this seemed to correspond with the sensible appearances of the cœlestial motions. ”

“ The Perugio Latin translation renders it by “cancer.”
[266] Placidus, in treating of the nativity of Lewis, Cardinal Zachia, uses these words: “This example also teaches us what the sentiments of Ptolemy were concerning a violent death; when, in a peremptory place, both the enemies meet together, it is to be understood, that in the nativity the violence is sometimes first pre-ordained from the unfortunate position of the Apheta; at other times quite the contrary. ”

“ At all events, soon after Ptolemy found himself secure in the possession of Egypt, he set himself to work to found a religion that should unite both his Greek and his Egyptian subjects in the bonds of a common faith. At first sight, no two things can seem more dissimilar than the religions of the two nations ”

“ In the nineteenth year of the reign of King Ptolemy, He ordered the elders of the children of Israel to be assembled, in order that they might put into his hands a copy of the law, and that they might each be at hand to explain its meaning. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ptolemies restore temple of, i. 52 Egypt, Greek gods derived from (Herodotus) , i. 16; assigned to Ptolemy on Alexander’s death, i. 28 sqq.; priestly character of religion of, i. 31 sq.; totemistic character of early religion of, i. 37; its influence on its conquerors, i. 51; religion of, degenerates into sorcery, i. 57; inspires Alexandrian views on next world, i. 60; Osiris-worship in, temp. Pharaohs, i. 64 n. 3; daily services in temples, i. 66; early cosmogonies of, i. 73; ii. 36, 175; Ptolemy endows Alexandrian religion in, i. 76; Alexandrian religion in, temp. Julian, i. 83 ”

“ 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. ”

“ From Siwah, Alexander and his company returned to Egypt, according to Ptolemy, by the direct way across the Nitrian desert to Memphis. Aristobulus said he returned as he came by Paraetonium, but Ptolemy is here the better authority. At Memphis, Alexander was busy receiving embassies from the Greek states and reinforcements from Macedonia. The children of the land saw once more the culture of their new masters displayed in a great musical and gymnastic festival, and a sacrifice was offered to Zeus the King, no doubt in Hellenic fashion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ See Heiberg’s discussion of the MSS in the volumes of the above edition which have thus far appeared; his articles on the Latin translations of Ptolemy in Hermes XLV (1910) 57ff, and XLVI (1911) 206ff; but especially Boll, Studien über Claudius Ptolemäus. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie und Astrologie, 1894, in Jahrb. f. Philol. u. Pädagogik, Neue Folge, Suppl. Bd. 21. A recent summary of investigation and bibliography concerning Ptolemy is W. Schmid, Die Nachklassische Periode der Griechischen Litteratur, 1913, pp. 717-24, in the fifth edition of Christ, Gesch. d. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even during Alexander's time, the effective control of the country seems to have been soon gathered into his hands by one man, the Greek, Cleomenes of Naucratis, who had become a citizen of the new Alexandria, and the system as devised by Alexander must have lost reality, if it was not definitely abandoned. When a new system was contrived by Alexander's successors of the house of Ptolemy, it was on other lines. ”

“ Unfortunately the section which he has devoted to a full examination of Ptolemy's India is the least satisfactory portion of his work. His system of identification is based on a wrong principle, and many of the conclusions to which it has led are such as cannot be accepted. His work is notwithstanding, as Yule says, " a precious mine of material for the study of the amcient grography of India." ”

“ About five months later, one of his marshals, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, appeared in Egypt as the satrap appointed by the new Macedonian king, Philip Arrhidaeus. The new king was a feeble-minded half-brother of Alexander's, and the real power was in the hands of the great Macedonian chiefs who had served under Alexander, especially in that of Perdiccas, whose precise office, if it is somewhat obscure to modern scholars, was perhaps already a matter of controversy amongst the great chiefs themselves in the confused struggle of those days which followed the great conqueror's abrupt removal. ”

“ Placidus, in remarking on the nativity of John di Colonna, after stating his opinion that it is an error to suppose that a malign influence to the horoscope, when the horoscope has not the primary signification of life is anæretic, says, that “the order and method which Ptolemy lays down for the election of a prorogator are quite absurd, unless life be at the disposal of a sole prime significator only.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ptolemy's object in composing it was not like that of the ordinary Geographer to describe places, but to correct and reform the map of the world in accordance with the increased knowledge which had been acquired of distant countries and with the improved state of science. He therefore limits his argument to an exposition of the geometrical principles on which Geography should be based, and to a determination of the position of places on the surface of the earth by their latitudes and longitudes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”