reless way have the Greeks given us an account of the
Egyptian gods. They thought them the same as their own, though with new
faces; and, instead of describing their qualities, they have in the main
contented themselves with translating their names.

If Ptolemy did not make his government as much feared by the half-armed
Ethiopians as it was by the well-disciplined Europeans, it must have
been because the Thebans wished to guard their own frontier rather than
because his troops were always wanted against a more powerful enemy; but
the inroads of the Ethiopians were so far from being checked that the
country to the south of Thebes was unsafe for travellers, and no Greek
was able to reach Syene and the lower cataracts during his reign. The
trade through Ethiopia was wholly stopped, and the caravans went from
Thebes to Cosseir to meet the ships which brought the goods of Arabia
and India from the opposite coast of the Red Sea.

In the wars between Egypt and Asia Minor, in which Palestine had the
misfortune to be the prize struggled for and the debatable land on which
the battles were fought, the Jews were often made to smart under
the stern pride of Antigonus, and to rejoice at the milder temper
of Ptolemy. The Egyptians of the Delta and the Jews had always been
friends; and hence, when Ptolemy promised to treat the Jews with the
same kindness as the Greeks, and more than the Egyptians, and held out
all the rights of Macedonian citizenship to those who would settle in
his rising city of Alexandria, he was followed by crowds of industrious
traders, manufacturers, and men of letters. They chose to live in Egypt
in peace and wealth, rather than to stay in Palestine in the daily fear
of having their houses sacked and burnt at every fresh quarrel between
Ptolemy and Antigonus. In Alexandria, a suburb by the sea, on the east
side of the city, was allotted for their use, which was afterwards
included within the fortifications, and thus made a fifth ward of the
Lagid metropolis.

No sooner was the peace agreed upon between the four generals, who were
the most powerful kings in the known world, than Cassander, who held
Macedonia, put to death both the Queen Roxana and her son, the young
Alexander AEgus, then thirteen years old, in whose name these generals
had each governed his kingdom with unlimited sway, and who was then of
an age that the soldiers, the givers of all power, were already
planning to make him the real King of Mac