d thrice her illness rendered their preparation
vain. At last the father determined to consult the oracle at Delphi,
which revealed to him the facts and ordered him no longer to thwart the
lovers. Acontius arrives at Athens. The young couple are married, and
the tale ends with an explicit description of their happiness."

Though there were in Alexandrian literature shocking stories of
unnatural passion, as found later in Ovid, among Roman poets, yet the
type of the Acontius and Cydippe tale fascinated the age and held its
ground, and its moral elevation in contrast to the prevailing corruption
shows how the men and women of the times prized "the original purity of
the maiden, and the importance of its preservation until the happy
conclusion of marriage."

The son and successor of Philadelphus, the young King Ptolemy III.,
Euergetes, continued the literary traditions of the parental court. Soon
after his father's death, he married the Princess Berenice II. of
Cyrene, a young lady of beauty and spirit, who had already experienced
the corruption of the court life of the day. Demetrius the Fair had been
sent from Macedon to obtain her kingdom with her hand, but, while she
was waiting to be of marriageable age, he had beguiled himself by
intriguing with her mother. Berenice, in consequence, had him put to
death. Doubtless her marriage with the young King of Egypt was a
political alliance, but it was based also on mutual liking and appears
to have turned out well. This reign of Euergetes and Berenice is, in
fact, the one reign of the Ptolemies in which neither rival wives nor
mistresses agitated the court. Information concerning this important
period is meagre; we know, however, that no sooner had the bride entered
upon her new happiness than the bridegroom was called away to Syria to
avenge the horrid murder of his sister, also named Berenice, who had
been wedded to the old King Antiochus Theos on condition that the latter
repudiated his former wife Laodice and her children. But Laodice got the
aged king again into her power; and she forthwith poisoned him and had
her son proclaimed king. Her party in Antioch at once rose up against
the new Egyptian queen and murdered her and her infant child.

Queen Berenice, upon the departure of her husband, consecrated a lock of
her hair in the temple of Aphrodite, with a prayer for his safe return.
The lock mysteriously disappeared, and the philosopher Conon, happening
just at that ti