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.

The wars between Philadelphus and his great neighbour, Antiochus Theos,
seem not to have been carried on very actively, though they did not
wholly cease till Philadelphus offered as a bribe his daughter Berenice,
with a large sum of money under the name of a dower. Antiochus was
already married to Laodice, whom he loved dearly, and by whom he had two
children, Seleucus and Antiochus; but political ambition had deadened
the feelings of his heart, and he agreed to declare this first marriage
void and his two sons illegitimate, and that his children, if