t easily have
changed their weak and wicked rulers, and formed a government for
themselves, if they had known how. The legitimate male line of the
Ptolemies came to an end on the death of the young Alexander II. The
two natural sons of Soter II. were then the next in succession; and, as
there was no other claimant, the crown fell to the elder. He was young,
perhaps even a minor under the age of fourteen. His claims had been
wholly overlooked at the death of his father; for though by the Egyptian
law every son was held to be equally legitimate, it was not so by the
Macedonian law. He took the name of Neus Dionysus, or the young Osiris,
as we find it written in the hieroglyphics, though he is usually called
Auletes, _the piper_; a name afterwards given him because he was more
proud of his skill in playing on the flute than of his very slender
knowledge of the art of governing.

It was in this reign that the historian Diodorus Siculus travelled in
Egypt, and wrote his account of the manners and religion of the people.
What he tells us of the early Egyptian history is of little value when
compared with the history by Manetho, who was a native of the country
and could read the hieroglyphic records, or even with that by Herodotus;
but nevertheless he deserves great praise, and our warmest thanks, for
being nearly the first Greek writer when Egyptian learning could no
longer be thought valuable; when the religion, though looked down upon,
might at any rate be studied with ease--for being nearly the first
writer who thought the manners of this ancient people, after they
had almost passed off the page of history, worth the notice of a
philosopher.

Diodorus never quotes Manetho, but follows Herodotus in making one
great hero for the chief actions of antiquity, whom he calls Sesoosis or
Sesonchosis. To him he assigns every great work of which the author was
unknown, the canals in the Delta, the statue of Amenhothes III., the
obelisks of Ramses II., the distant navigation under Necho, the mounds
and trenches dug against Assyrian and Persian invasion, and even the
great ship of Ptolemy Philopator; and not knowing that Southern Arabia
and even Ethiopia had by the Alexandrians been sometimes called India,
he says that this hero conquered even India beyond the Ganges. On the
other hand, the fabulous conquest of the great serpent, the enemy of the
human race, which we see sculptured on the sarcophagus of Oimenepthah,
he describes as