ure. The world was called upon to
worship and do honour to the poet, but chiefly that it might admire the
skill of the critic who could name the several sources of his beauties.
The critic now ranked higher than a priest at the foot of Mount
Parnassus. Homer was lifted to the skies that the critic might stand on
a raised pedestal among the Muses. Such seems to be the meaning of
the figures on the upper part of the well-known sculpture called the
Apotheosis of Homer. It was made in this reign; and at the foot Ptolemy
and his mother, in the characters of Time and the World, are crowning
the statue of the poet, in the presence of ten worshippers who represent
the literary excellences which shine forth in his poems. The figures
of the Iliad and Odyssey kneel beside his seat, and the Frogs and Mice
creep under his footstool, showing that the latter mock-heroic poem was
already written and called the work of Homer.

Other celebrities who flourished under the fifth Ptolemy were
Pamphilius, an Alexandrian physician who wrote on medical plants;
Meander, a poet and physician who studied poisons, and the great
Hipparchus, the founder of mathematical astronomy. Hero, also, in this
reign, invented a kind of primitive steam-engine.

[Illustration: 235.jpg HERO'S ROTATING STEAM ENGINE]

These men and their contemporaries were in the habit of writing their
scientific observations in the form of poetry, but it was verse without
earnestness and feeling, and such of it as survives is valued not for
its literary qualities or charms of diction, but for the side-lights it
throws upon the manners and education of the age.

The portrait of the king is known from those coins which bear the name
of "_King Ptolemy the mother-loving god_." The eagle on the other side
of the coins has a phoenix or palm-branch on its wing or by its side,
which may be supposed to mean that they were struck in Phoenicia.
We have not before met with the title of "god," on the coins of
the Ptolemies; but, as every one of them had been so named in the
hieroglyphical inscriptions, it can scarcely be called new.

When Philometor quitted the island of Cyprus after beating his brother
in battle, he left Archias as governor, who entered into a plot to give
it up to Demetrius, King of Syria, for the sum of five hundred talents.
But the plot was found out, and the traitor then put an end to his own
life, to escape from punishment and self-reproach. By this treachery of
Dem