held
two hundred thousand volumes, and raised a jealousy in the mind of
Euergetes. Not content with buying books and adding to the size of
his own library, he wished to lessen the libraries of his rivals; and,
nettled at the number of volumes which Eumenes had got together at
Pergamus, he made a law, forbidding the export of the Egyptian papyrus
on which they were written. On this the copiers employed by Eumenes
wrote their books upon sheepskins, which were called _charta pergamena_,
or parchment, from the name of the city in which they were written. Thus
our own two words, parchment from _Pergamus_, and paper from _papyrus_,
remain as monuments of the rivalry in book-collecting between the two
kings.

Euergetes was so bloated with disease that his body was nearly six feet
round, and he was made weak and slothful by this weight of flesh.
He walked with a crutch, and wore a loose robe like a woman's, which
reached to his feet and hands. He gave himself up very much to eating
and drinking, and on the year that he was chosen priest of Apollo by
the Cyrenians, he showed his pleasure at the honour by a memorable feast
which he gave in a costly manner to all those who had before filled that
office. He had reigned six years with his brother, then eighteen years
in Cyrene, and lastly twenty-nine years after the death of his brother,
and he died in the fifty-fourth year of his reign, and perhaps the
sixty-ninth of his age. He left a widow, Cleopatra Cocce; two sons,
Ptolemy and Ptolemy Alexander; and three daughters, Cleopatra, married
to her elder brother; Tryphsena, married to Antiochus Grypus; and Selene
unmarried; and also a natural son, Ptolemy Apion, to whom by will he
left the kingdom of Cyrene; while he left the kingdom of Egypt to his
widow and one of his sons, giving her the power of choosing which should
be her colleague. The first Euergetes earned and deserved the name,
which was sadly disgraced by the second; but such was the fame of
Egypt's greatness that the titles of its kings were copied in nearly
every Greek kingdom. We meet with the flattering names of Soter,
Philadelphus, Euergetes, and the rest, on the coins of Syria, Parthia,
Cappadocia, Paphlagonia, Pon-tus, Bactria, and Bithynia; while that
of Euergetes, _the benefactor_, was at last used as another name for a
tyrant.

CHAPTER VI--THE GROWTH OF ROMAN INFLUENCE IN EGYPT

_The weakness of the Ptolemies: Egypt bequeathed to Rome: Pompey, Caesar,