e 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 was the chief city
in the world. Athens had no poets or other writers during this century
equal in merit to those who ennobled the museum. Philadelphus, by
joining to the greatness and good government of his father the costly
splendour and pomp of an eastern monarch, so drew the eyes of after ages
upon his reign that his name passed into a proverb: if any work of
art was remarkable for its good taste or costliness, it was called
Philadelphian; even history and chronology were set at nought, and we
sometimes find poets of a century later counted among the Pleiades of
Alexandria in the reign of Philadelphus. It is true that many of these
advantages were forced in the hotbed of royal patronage; that the navy
was built in the harbours of Phoenicia and Asia Minor; and that the men
of letters who then drew upon themselves the eyes of the world were
only Greek settlers, whose writings could have done little to raise
the character of the native Kopts. But the Ptolemies, in raising this
building of their own, were not at the same time crushing another. Their
splendid monarchy had not been built on the ruins of freedom; and even
if the Greek settlers in the Delta had formed themselves into a free
state, we can hardly believe that the Egyptians would have been so well
treated as they were by this military despotism. From the temples
which were built or enlarged in Upper Egypt, and from the beauty of the
hieroglyphical inscriptions, we find that even the native arts were
more flourishing than they had ever been since the fall of the kings of
Thebes; and we may almost look upon the Greek conquest as a blessing to
Upper Egypt.

Philadelphus, though weak in body, was well suited by his
keen-sightedness and intelligence for the tasks which the state of
affairs at that time demanded from an Egyptian king. He was a diplomat
rather than a warrior, and that was exactly what Egypt needed.

A curious anecdote about Ptolemy Philadelphus is related by Niebuhr. He
had reached