enemy,
and he was taken up covered with wounds. He lay speechless for five
days, and the surgeons then endeavoured to cut out a piece of the broken
bone from his skull. He died under the operation: but not before the
head of Alexander had been brought to him as the proof of his victory.

Thus fell Ptolemy Philometor in the forty-second year of his age. His
reign began in trouble; before he reached the years of manhood the
country had been overrun by foreigners, and torn to pieces by civil war;
but he left the kingdom stronger than he found it, a praise which he
alone can share with Ptolemy Soter. He was alike brave and mild; he
was the only one of the race who fell in battle, and the only one whose
hands were unstained with civil blood. At an age and in a country when
poison and the dagger were too often the means by which the king's
authority was upheld, when goodness was little valued, and when
conquests were thought the only measure of greatness, he spared the life
of a brother taken in battle, he refused the crown of Syria when offered
to him; and not only no one of his friends or kinsmen, but no citizen
of Alexandria, was put to death during the whole of his reign. We find
grateful inscriptions to his honour at the city of Citium in Cyprus, in
the island of Therse, and at Methone in Argolis.

Philometor had reigned thirty-five years in all; eleven years alone,
partly while under age, then six years jointly with his brother,
Euergetes II., and eighteen more alone while his brother reigned in
Cyrene. He married his sister Cleopatra, and left her a widow, with two
daughters, each named Cleopatra. The elder daughter we have seen offered
to Euergetes, then married to Alexander Balas, and lastly to Demetrius.
The younger daughter, afterwards known by the name of Cleopatra Cocce,
was still in the care of her mother. He had most likely had three sons.
One perhaps had been the pupil of Aristarchus, and died before his
father; as the little elegy by Antipator of Sidon, which is addressed to
the dead child, on the grief of his father and mother, would seem to be
meant for a son of Philometor. A second son was murdered, and a third
lived in Syria.

On the death of Philometor, his widow, Cleopatra, and some of the chief
men of Alexandria proclaimed his young son king, most likely under the
name of Ptolemy Eupator; but Euergetes, whose claim was favoured by
the mob, marched from Cyrene to Alexandria to seize the crown of Egypt