iladelphus, when young, had married Arsinoe, the daughter of
Lysimachus of Thrace, by whom he had three children, Ptolemy, who
succeeded him, Lysimachus, and Berenice; but, having found that his
wife was intriguing with Amyntas, and with his physician Chrysippus
of Rhodes, he put these two to death and banished the Queen Arsinoe to
Koptos in the Thebaid.

He then took Arsinoe, his own sister, as the partner of his throne. She
had married first the old Lysimachus, King of Thrace, and then Ceraunus,
her half-brother, when he was King of Macedonia. As they were not
children of the same mother, this second marriage was neither illegal
nor improper in Macedonia; but her third marriage with Philadelphus
could only be justified by the laws of Egypt, their adopted country.
They were both past the middle age, and whether Philadelphus looked
upon her as his wife or not, at any rate they had no children. Her
own children by Lysimachus had been put to death by Ceraunus, and she
readily adopted those of her brother with all the kindness of a mother.
She was a woman of an enlarged mind; her husband and her stepchildren
alike valued her; and Eratosthenes showed his opinion of her learning
and strong sense by giving the name of Arsinoe to one of his works,
which perhaps a modern writer would have named Table-talk.

[Illustration: 141.jpg Coin with the heads of Soter and Philadelphus and
Arsinoe]

This seeming marriage, however, between brother and sister did not
escape blame with the Greeks of Alexandria. The poet Sotades, whose
verses were as licentious as his life, wrote some coarse lines against
the queen, for which he was forced to fly from Egypt, and, being
overtaken at sea, he was wrapped up in lead and thrown overboard.

In the Egyptian inscriptions Ptolemy and Arsinoe are always called the
brother-gods; on the coins they are called Adelphi, the brothers; and
afterwards the king took the name of Philadelphus, or sister-loving,
by which he is now usually known. In the first half of his reign
Philadelphus dated his coins from the year that his father came to the
throne; and it was not till the nineteenth year of his reign, soon after
the death of his mother, that he made an era of his own, and dated his
coins by the year of his own reign. The wealth of the country is well
shown by the great size of those most in use, which were, in gold the
tetra-stater or piece of eight drachms, and in silver the tetra-drachma,
or piece of fo