to the temples, the priests must have regained
something of their former rank. But they had no hold on the minds of the
soldiers. Had the mercenaries, upon whom the power of the king rested,
been worshippers in the Egyptian temples, the priests might, as in the
earlier times, like a body of nobles, have checked his power when too
great, and at other times upheld it. But it was not so; and upon the
whole, little seems to have been gained by the court becoming more
Egyptian, while the army must have lost something of its Greek
discipline and plainness of manners.

But in the next reign the fruits of this change were seen to be most
unfortunate. Philopator was an Eastern despot, surrounded by eunuchs,
and drowned in pleasures. The country was governed by his women and
vicious favourites. The army, which at the beginning of his reign
amounted to seventy-three thousand men, beside the garrisons, was at
first weakened by rebellion, and before the end of his reign it fell to
pieces. Nothing, however, happened to prove his weakness to surrounding
nations; Egypt was still the greatest of kingdoms, though Rome on the
conquest of Carthage, and Syria under Antiochus the Great, were fast
gaining ground upon it; but he left to his infant son a throne shaken to
the very foundations.

The ministers of Epiphanes, the infant autocrat, found the government
without a head and without an army, the treasury without money, and the
people without virtue or courage; and they placed the kingdom under the
hands of the Romans to save it from being shared between the kings of
Syria and Macedonia. Thus passed the first five reigns, the first one
hundred and fifty years, the first half of the three centuries that the
kingdom of the Ptolemies lasted. It was then rotten at the core with
vice and luxury. Its population was lessening, its trade falling off,
its treasury empty, its revenue too small for the wasteful expenses of
the government; but, nevertheless, in the eyes of surrounding nations,
its trade and wealth seemed boundless.

[Illustration: 362.jpg Cleopatra's needle.]

Taste, genius, and poetry had passed away; but mathematics, surgery, and
grammar still graced the museum. The decline of art is shown upon the
coins, and even in the shape of the letters upon the coins. On those
of Cleopatra the engraver followed the fashion of the penman; the S is
written like our C, the E has a round back, and the long O is formed
like an M reversed.

D