The Ptolemies, Rise of a Dynasty: Ptolemaic Egypt 330–246 BC

By John D. Grainger

“Thoroughly ‘reader friendly’ in organization and presentation . . . an ideal introduction to the creation and rise of the Ptolemaic era of Egypt.” —Midwest Book Review 
 
In this first volume of his trilogy on the Ptolemies, John Grainger explains how Ptolemy I established the dynasty’s power in Egypt in the wake of Alexander the Great’s death. Egypt had been independent for most of the fourth century BC, but was reconquered by the Persian Empire in the 340s. This is essential background for Ptolemaic history, since it meant that Alexander was welcomed as a liberator and, after the tyranny of Kleomenes, so was Ptolemy.
 
This was the essential basis of Ptolemy’s power. He conciliated the Egyptians, but reinforced his military strength with Greek settlers, mainly retired or available soldiers. He built the city of Alexandria, but to his own requirements, not those planned by Alexander. The empire outside Egypt was acquired, perhaps for defense, perhaps by sheer greed. Ptolemy took over Cyrenaica (with difficulty), Cyprus, and Syria/Palestine. These had to be defended against his rivals, hence the development of his navy, and the Syrian Wars.
 
The succession was carefully managed, but not directly hereditary (Ptolemy II wasn’t the eldest son), and the new king was very different. He fought repeated wars in Syria, built up his navy in the Aegean to the greatest seen in the ancient world, and extended his empire into the lands of the Red Sea, Sudan, and Ethiopia. He taxed the Egyptians mercilessly to fund all these activities. Yet few of his wars were successful, and he stored up trouble for his successors. This volume by a historian of the period delves into these events in a clear, compelling style.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399090230

John D. Grainger

John D. Grainger is a former teacher turned professional historian. He has over thirty books to his name, divided between classical history and modern British political and military history. His previous books for Pen & Sword are Hellenistic and Roman Naval Wars; Wars of the Maccabees; Traditional Enemies: Britain’s War with Vichy France 1940-42; Roman Conquests: Egypt and Judaea; Rome, Parthia and India: The Violent Emergence of a New World Order: 150-140 BC; a three-volume history of the Seleukid Empire and British Campaigns in the South Atlantic 1805-1807.

Book preview

Introduction

The kingdom of Egypt as ruled by the dynasty descended from Ptolemy I existed for three centuries. It was the longest-lived dynasty of the Hellenistic period, and one of the longest dynastic regimes ever to rule the country. In effect the kingdom also continued after the death of the last Ptolemy (Kleopatra VII) under Roman rule until the Arab Muslim conquest in the 640s AD, and even then the regime did not basically change until the modern period.

Of course, one may not insist that the Ptolemaic regime was new. It is very largely a continuation of the preceding pharaonic system, with a cap of Hellenized rulers on top. There were certainly some significant changes brought about as a result of the immigration of Greeks, Macedonians, and others into the country, but the changes the Ptolemies brought about were neither significant nor fundamental, but additional. Such changes as were imposed were geographically distinct as well as societally different, and were concentrated in Alexandria, the army, the Fayum, the administration, and the Red Sea lands. So most of the country was only minimally affected by the changes; the Greek immigrants moved to a Greek city or concentrated in Greek-style rural areas, and continued living amongst other Greeks.

Assimilation did take place, but it was not such as to turn a Greek into an Egyptian, or Egyptians into Greeks. Languages remained Greek and Egyptian, and the scripts used remained distinct, and mutually incomprehensible. Most Greeks could not read or speak Egyptian, and vice versa, though many Egyptians did learn to speak Greek, this being the only way to communicate with the administration. Historians tend to look for signs of assimilation, but it has to be said they have not been very successful.

The burden of the argument here, therefore, is that a book on the kingdom of the Ptolemies must largely deal with the Greek element of the regime. And that is reasonable. The Egyptian population was mainly restrained in its production of historical records, while the Greeks were voluble. It was Greeks who became rich, Greeks who fought the wars and Greeks who operated the government system, at least above the level of the village headman.

The three books of which this is the introduction, therefore, concentrate very largely and inevitably on the activities of the Greek population in Egypt, and on the political history of the kingdom. The life of the native Egyptians, largely unchanged, is more a subject for sociological description than history. The Egyptians do rise up to the surface every now and again, sometimes literally by mounting a rebellion, but their lives scarcely changed from the earlier pharaonic period as far back as the Old Kingdom 3,000 years before, right through to the changes wrought by Muhammad Ali and the British conquest in the nineteenth century. A history of the Ptolemies therefore is largely a history of the Greeks in Egypt and their adventures.

Chapter 1

Ptolemy’s First Years

Ptolemy I and the Arrival of the Macedonians

When Ptolemy son of Lagos arrived in Egypt in early 322 BC he already knew something of the country of which he had been appointed satrap. He had, for a start, already been there eight years before as an officer in Alexander of Macedon’s army of conquest.¹ It is usually assumed that it was as a result of this visit that he was inspired to choose Egypt as his province at the meeting in Babylon after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, where the senior Macedonians distributed the conquered Persian provinces to each other.² But there was certainly more to it than the memory of a fairly brief visit ten years before.

The condition of Egypt had been a matter of interest to all Greeks (and Macedonians) with any interest in affairs beyond their homeland for at least three centuries. Greeks had visited the country, worked there, settled there, and had traded with its merchants since the seventh century BC. A Greek city, Naukratis, had been founded in the Delta area in the sixth century BC by a coalition of a dozen Greek trading cities mainly on the Asian coast and the nearby Aegean islands, whose homes will have had plenty of information about the city and the kingdom;³ Greeks had worked as mercenary soldiers in the country for as long, and some had left graffiti of their names on Egyptian monuments. More than one Greek expeditionary army had fought in Egypt, usually, but not always, against the Persian forces and in support of an independent Egypt. In the previous fifty years, major Greek forces had fought in Egypt under Iphikrates (20,000 men) on behalf of the Persians in 388 BC, another under Chabrias a little later in support of the Egyptian rulers; one fought on behalf of the Egyptians again under King Teos in 361 BC, and Artaxerxes III deliberately recruited Greeks for his successful conquests in the 340s. Many of these men returned to Greece, some of them enriched, after the wars.⁴ That is, for any Greek or Macedonian it was possible to learn a great deal about Egypt simply by following the news and talking to Greeks who had been there. Reading Herodotos’ History could help as well, so long as his tall stories and his incredibility was understood. For concerned statesmen the Persian reconquest of Egypt was threatening, since the country was a source of sea power, and could be a threat to Greece.

For a man like Ptolemy, who took control of the country as its satrap in 322 BC, some knowledge of the recent history of Egypt was particularly useful and some would soon become all too relevant. It was necessary to understand the geography of the country as well, for these two, geography and history, were unusually well intertwined in Egypt; indeed they were mutually dependent – and were wholly different from other Mediterranean lands.

The country, as an organized and civilized state, was immeasurably old. Its age was liable to overwhelm a visitor when confronted with its great monuments, some of them quite clearly thousands of years old, but for Ptolemy the relevant part of its history was the last century or so, and the relevant knowledge of its geography was that the country, as Herodotos had said, was ‘the gift of the Nile’, though this was a gift only to be grasped and made valuable by a lot of very hard work.⁵ In addition, the country’s neighbours to west, south, and north had also to be understood.

The geography which he had to take note of was not only that of Egypt, and the Nile’s regime of flood and decline. The immediate neighbours were Syria to the northeast and Cyrenaica to the west of Egypt. Syria’s strength will have become clear as Ptolemy made his way from Babylon and the meeting of the Macedonian magnates to take up his post in Egypt. Syria was dotted with cities along its coast, and the south in particular (Palestine) was well populated, but the preliminary approach march ten years before will perhaps have impressed him even more forcefully. On that first visit he was with Alexander and the Macedonian army, and they had fought a difficult battle in the north of Syria, at Issos,⁶ and then had marched south through Syria, to find that they were faced with unusually obdurate opposition from the Syrians, perhaps to their surprise, since they believed they were fighting Persians.⁷

The Macedonians at first found their advance relatively easy. The country was a mixture of cities along the coast and these Phoenician cities had repeatedly produced fleets of warships for the Persians for the last two centuries. There were a few cities inland, but otherwise the country was a mixture of mountains and valleys, of the form familiar to them from their own Mediterranean homeland. The difference was that the land shaded off to the east into desert, not a congenial landscape for Greeks. Local power lay especially with the Phoenician cities, all of which were fortified, but they were divided amongst themselves; some were loyal to Persia, others not, some were ruled by local kings, others by governors. All had to be captured or negotiated with separately. Some surrendered without fuss, but Tyre resisted fiercely in a seven-month siege. In the process it emerged that some of the rural and mountain communities were either militantly loyal to Persia, or very willing to intervene in events for their own profit and advantage. Having conquered and destroyed Tyre, with the assistance of the Phoenician city of Sidon (itself earlier destroyed by the Persians in a rebellion⁸), the Macedonian advance southwards towards Egypt was then blocked by the resistance of Gaza, where a Persian eunuch in command led a defence which delayed the Macedonians for the next two months.⁹ Alexander vented his frustration at the delays this caused by a wholesale massacre of the defenders and crucifixion for any survivors. The fight for Gaza emphasized that it was a fortress-city whose control gave its ruler the ability to allow or deny entry to Egypt; the city was the door into Egypt and whoever controlled it also controlled that entry.

Here, therefore, was a powerful object lesson in the capability of Syria for defensive warfare, which Ptolemy will have recalled later. And when Alexander finally reached Egypt he found another complex situation, so much so that he spent several months in the country investigating and organizing, though he was also waiting for information about the readiness of King Dareios III to fight again. Eventually he left in place a weird governing system which fell apart into one man’s control within a couple of years. Whatever his eventual intentions were towards Egypt, he never returned to improve matters.

All this was information which Ptolemy could see and find for himself, and no doubt was reminded of when he set out years later to establish himself as satrap. He was clearly taking on an awkward and independent-minded country, one which was wealthy, if not quite so obviously at the time, but which at least had great potential for producing wealth. When he reached his satrapy he would no doubt learn a lot more about the country, knowledge he would need if he was to govern it successfully.

Alexander in Egypt

When he reached Egypt, Alexander found that there was a Persian satrap, Mazakes, theoretically in charge. But Mazakes had only been deputy to the official satrap, who had died at Issos having gone to the battle taking most of the Persian forces in Egypt with him. Mazakes had thus been in charge for less than a year and was in a weak position. In that time he had faced a minor invasion by an anti-Alexander group of Greek mercenaries, commanded by Amyntas of Macedon, a personal enemy of Alexander; they had escaped from the battle of Issos, and had sailed to Egypt. There were also other Greek mercenaries employed by Mazakes himself in the country. And the Egyptians were intensely anti-Persian.

Mazakes had seen the suppression by the Great King Dareios III of the latest Egyptian uprising against Persian rule; this had happened before Alexander’s invasion. The Egyptians were led by a man called Khababash, recognized as pharaoh by the Egyptians, though he does not seem to have ever controlled all the country; he was commemorated at both Memphis and Thebes.¹⁰ Dareios’ reconquest in 335 BC had been the second successful Persian invasion in recent years, but it had been preceded by three unsuccessful invasions; Persia and Egypt had been at war in fact for the previous seventy years, since the successful Egyptian War of Independence in 405–401 BC.¹¹ This repeated warfare had shown that Egypt was very largely ungovernable by the Persians; any conquest achieved by the Persians was all too soon followed by a revolt. The constant fighting, especially in the last years before Alexander’s arrival, had caused much damage, governmental deterioration, and much immiseration, but the determination of the Egyptians to be independent was a warning.

The fighting and its result had been a major factor in the surprisingly enthusiastic reception of the Macedonian invasion by the Egyptian population, beginning at Peluseion, where a great crowd waited to welcome the army.¹² Mazakes at Memphis surrendered fairly quickly once Alexander reached the city. He had defeated Amyntas and his dissident Macedonians earlier, largely because the Macedonians were careless and undisciplined. This was useful, since Alexander now did not have to fight his own people.¹³ This again was a matter Ptolemy would no doubt recall later, for it was an essential element in his decision to go beyond being a satrap appointed by a cabal of generals in Babylon and to move into independence.

Egypt before Alexander

The preceding history was relevant to Ptolemy’s actions in Egypt, and there is some indication that he paid attention to it. Above all, there was the country’s repeated fight for independence, which was clearly a possible threat to any foreign ruler.

Persian relations with Egypt were over two centuries old by the time of Alexander’s arrival. The Great King Kambyses (530–522 BC) had conquered the Nile country in 525 BC, suppressing and executing the king of the native ‘Saite’ dynasty which had ruled for the previous century. Tales of Persian brutality were told and elaborated, an obvious indication of Egyptian antipathy. The first period of Persian rule had lasted a little over a century, but was interrupted at irregular intervals by rebellions, usually occasioned by the news of the death of a Persian king, as at the death of Kambyses in 522 BC; that of Dareios I in 487–485 BC; that of Xerxes in 464 BC (when the revolt lasted nearly ten years, 462–454 BC); and on other occasions, not connected with a royal death, in 451, 410, and 405 BC.

These risings were sometimes assisted by Greek expeditions, as by the Athenian fleet and army in the 450s. In a rebellion it was normal that the Egyptian leader would take the office of pharaoh, and in the rebellion of 405 BC, at last, the leader established an independent rule which survived for several decades. He was assisted by an internal Persian rebellion by the Great King’s brother Kyros, which delayed the Persian counterattack; then it was further delayed by a war against Sparta in Asia Minor. By the time that attack finally happened, in 390 BC, after fifteen years of Egyptian independence, the defence had had time to become organized, notably by the extensive fortification of Peluseion and the area around it, which the Persians did not even attempt to attack, so powerful was it, and forts at every Nile estuary.¹⁴ The invasion attempt failed.

In the generation before Alexander’s army arrived in Egypt a new Persian assault had been commanded by Artaxerxes III. He led the first of his invasions while still Crown Prince to his father Artaxerxes II, in 359 BC. This was a brief attempt, which failed, and when his father died later that year, he inherited the throne but faced the usual revolt. Eight years later he tried again, in 351 BC, and again failed.

By then the Egyptians had struck back twice. First in 361 BC, Teos, king from 362 to 360 BC, had led an invasion of Syria, clearly in part in an attempt to take advantage of a series of problems in the Persian Empire, revolts and desertions which disrupted Persian attempts to recover Egypt. Teos marched his army north as far of Sidon, which joined him. The result was an Egyptian failure, which was followed, in Artaxerxes’ final successful attack, by the siege, sack, and destruction of Sidon by the Persians (assisted by Tyre).¹⁵ The city was largely burned, and survivors were transported to Babylon.¹⁶ (It may be that some were rescued by Tyrians, as they themselves were helped by Sidonians later.) But Teos, who had financed his offensive by stripping temples of some of their wealth, so annoying the priests, was then deposed. His successor, Nektanebo II, reverted to the traditional policy of respecting temple property, but as a result was then unable to meet Artaxerxes’ final invasion, in 343 BC, after the capture of Sidon, which had been Egypt’s forward defence as Tyre was in Alexander’s invasion.

Sidon’s destruction and depopulation is implied by Diodoros to have been total, but by Alexander’s arrival, a quarter of a century later, it was again a busy and relatively powerful city. It is probable that the implication of complete destruction is exaggerated; similarly the supposition that the population was either killed or deported, leaving the city depopulated, seems unlikely. Either way, the city revived quickly, probably because a large part of the population had escaped, only to return to the ruins and rebuild.

All this later fighting in Egypt and Syria happened in Ptolemy’s lifetime, for he was born about 365 BC, and if as a young man he took note of foreign affairs, he would be able to remember accounts of these events. (He had been educated alongside Alexander, by Aristotle; there can be no doubt he had heard of all this.) On the journeys through Syria in 332–331 and 322 BC he would pass the places which had featured in the earlier accounts, just as he could see the results of Alexander’s campaign – Sidon, Tyre, Gaza, cities which all had been wrecked in defence of Egypt; Tripolis founded co-operatively by the Phoenician cities in about 360 BC – there are plenty of indications that the Phoenicians helped each other, despite being trade rivals.

It was clear that Egypt itself had undergone a series of highly unpleasant experiences, rebellions, invasions, internal disputes, destruction and depopulation. As the Macedonians invaded Asia Minor in 336 BC , a new Egyptian rebellion against Persian rule began, and Khababash emerged to rule at least part of the country for some time, before Dareios III invaded the country and suppressed him (in 335 BC). Then, within three years, the victorious Persians were themselves defeated and expelled by the Macedonian invaders. Mazakes, clearly seeing no possibility of a successful resistance, had surrendered at once. He will presumably have grounded his hopes in resistance in Syria, and the recovery of the Persian army being gathered by Dareios in Babylonia and Iran. But the second did not arrive, and the first progressively failed.

The sequence was not lost on Ptolemy. The defence of Egypt depended in part on controlling the nearby successive ‘doors’ at Gaza and Peluseion, but preferably also on holding as much of Syria as could be easily held and controlled from Egypt, leaving Gaza as the last-but-one defence – an enemy had still to cross the Sinai Desert, and then get past Peluseion and its forts. The Syrian population had to be watched, as did that of Egypt, for neither group was entranced by the prospect of foreign rule. The Egyptians might welcome Alexander and the Macedonians, but they did so because they were removing the Persians; the Syrians fought for the Persians, so it was likely that they would be hostile to the Macedonians as well. Governing large populations who were hostile was a major challenge, and not one the Macedonians had experience of. Ptolemy and his successors were to face these dilemmas for three centuries and would never solve them. And on top of that there came the enmity of other Macedonians.

Alexander’s Influence

Alexander set the pattern for a Macedonian to be king in Egypt. He inherited a government system which was successful in extracting a great tax revenue from the population, and he mollified the powerful priesthoods who ran the temples and their estates. They had much local influence; it was the priests who had compelled the deposition of Pharaoh Teos. A generally docile peasant population was also helpful. Alexander had also indulged in a number of personal initiatives which in several ways had to be followed by his successors. He inevitably used Memphis as his government centre, thus placing himself as a pharaoh in Egyptian eyes. He carried out a series of ceremonies which in Egypt only the king could do, so, although he did not submit to an elaborate coronation ceremony, which could have delayed him for an awkward length of time, there could be no doubt that he acted as, and was accepted as, the king.¹⁷

This was the foundation of his other activities. He visited the oracle of Zeus-Ammon at Siwah, in the Western Desert, where he put questions and received answers which fortified him in what had now become his mission of world conquest. (Ptolemy probably accompanied Alexander on this expedition.)¹⁸ The second of his major actions was to found a new city which became Alexandria. He took part in defining the city’s boundaries and streets, and indicated where the agora and the temples should be; it was, however, to be less an Egyptian city than a Greco-Macedonian power base from which the Egyptian government could communicate swiftly with Greece and Macedon, and receive early news of troubles there – there was war in Greece at the time.¹⁹ And before he left, after a stay in Egypt of just a few months, Alexander set up an elaborate, and eventually unworkable, governing system, which seems to have been designed to distribute power among several equal authorities who would be jealous of each other and so could not combine to use the wealth of Egypt for their individual or collective advantage, though this rendered it easy for one of them to do so. The history of Egypt’s frequently successful defiance of control from the Asian power of Persia was perhaps at the basis of Alexander’s attempt to hobble the government he set up, and prevent the various elements coalescing into a bid for independence.

Future rulers of Egypt, whoever they were (and Alexander’s lack of an heir in the next years made the issue one of increasing concern) would need to follow his example in much of this. A visit to the temple at Siwah would not perhaps be necessary, since this had been a personal matter for Alexander himself, but the other initiatives had been crucial to his assumption of local power. The religious ceremonies, mainly in Memphis, but also at Heliopolis (a temple of the sun god) were in essence a part of the coronation ceremonial, and to carry them out would locate royal power in that successor. He is commemorated in carvings and reliefs in more than one temple even in parts he did not go to, such as Thebes, depicted often in the guise of the appropriate god.²⁰ This was crucial for the Egyptians, who could thus assume that they had a king in harmony with the gods and who would rule rightly and protect them in disasters. For the Greeks and Macedonians who formed an increasing element in the population from Alexander’s visit onwards, there were positions in the government and army and administration, and in the new city of Alexandria by Egypt, a great Greek city of unique size and renown, and there were lands to be allocated to them.

Kleomenes of Naukratis

The system of government Alexander put in place when he left Egypt in the spring of 331 BC divided authority among several men. The aim was clearly to prevent any one of them from controlling the country and its resources. One of Alexander’s necessary obsessions was the danger of revolt against him and his rule, and in 331 BC King Agis of Sparta launched a war in Greece against Macedonian power,²¹ while in Asia Minor Alexander’s governors were fighting to maintain his conquests against a major Persian counterattack, and, of course, Dareios III was building his new army out of the copious military manpower of the Persian eastern provinces, from Babylonia to Iran, an army which proved to include a large force of Greek mercenaries.²²

Alexander’s legacy of administration for Egypt was amateurish and unsuccessful. He divided financial from administrative functions, and both from the military; then he divided the administration and the military into geographical sections. But he did not divide up responsibility for finance, probably because he required an efficient process of collection and the regular delivery of treasure to him to finance the Asian campaign to come. So Kleomenes of Naukratis, whose Greek-Egyptian origin may have persuaded Alexander that he was familiar with the Egyptian financial system, was to receive the tax receipts which were collected by the ninety or so nomarchs who were in charge of subdivisions of the country. He was also to disperse this money, partly to his colleagues for their needs, partly to the military to pay the soldiers, and partly, or perhaps mainly, to Alexander on his unpredictable travels to subsidize further conquests.²³

The military was divided between a whole series of commands: men in command of the royal fortresses at Memphis and Peluseion; men in command of two parts of the field army, in Upper and Lower Egypt; a man in command of the Greek mercenaries; and a man in command of the navy, which consisted of thirty triremes (and their crews). This is all reasonable in military terms, for one expects a dispersed force to have separate commanders, but it was also separated from the administration of the country, and there seems to have been no commander-in-chief, unless the governor was expected to act as such. The governor of Egypt was an Egyptian of Iranian descent, Doloapsis. It had been intended that there should be two civil governors, as with the geographical divisions of the army, one for Upper and one for Lower Egypt, but one of the men to be appointed, an Egyptian, Peteisis, refused the post; Doloapsis therefore took both posts, but his origin would be unlikely to allow him to effectively command the Macedonian forces, nor perhaps excite the respect of the Egyptians. In addition there were two further administrative-cum-military posts, located on the eastern and western frontiers and named for the lands they faced, Arabia and Libya. It is not clear exactly what these posts involved, but it seems likely that being on the frontier the men in command had administrative, military, and financial functions, not least in the form of collecting customs duties.

This is a superficially well-thought-out scheme, at least on paper, dividing responsibilities and establishing checks and balances, but in fact it was mainly a bright idea with little or no substance to it. As the refusal of Peteisis to serve suggests, none of the men in command had any certainty of permanence, little authority to wield, and even Alexander, the originator of the scheme, did not apply it rigorously even at the start. (Petiesis was not replaced, and the frontier men had responsibility for all the various civil and military functions in their areas.) Several of the men named to these various posts disappeared in the next years. We hear no more of the garrison commanders in the fortresses, no more of the generals of the armies, Peukestas and Balakros (who seem to have moved on), no more of Doloapsis, no more of Lykidas the Aitolian, the commander of the mercenaries. By the end of Alexander’s reign there was only one man left, Kleomenes. He had been given two posts originally, as commander of the Arabian frontier post, and as financial officer for the whole country (another deviation by Alexander from the planned system). This gave Kleomenes immediate power, with a small military force, a territorial base, and masses of money.

It was his control of the financial operation which permitted Kleomenes to emerge as the satrap, and controller of all Egypt by the end of Alexander’s life. That Alexander should have missed this is partly due to his focus on the Macedonians in his train as a more important threat, partly due to Kleomenes’ low birth and mercantile background (Alexander was a snob) and partly down to Alexander’s lack of imagination. He also wanted a large share of the Egyptian tax revenue to be sent to him on campaign, and Kleomenes was likely to be able to collect it. It is really quite astounding that Alexander should have missed the implications of his concentration of financial power in one man, when he subdivided every other function. But Alexander was not good at administration, nor at choosing good commanders and satraps. What he required, above all, and above efficiency, was loyalty. Kleomenes may or may not have been loyal to him – it seems unlikely that he was – but he knew how to keep on his right side, which was to send regular supplies of money, and to perform acts of sycophancy such as erecting memorials to Hephaisteion when Alexander was in mourning for his friend.

Kleomenes has an evil reputation in ancient sources, and this is reflected in modern accounts. He is regularly condemned for a variety of offences (recorded in anecdotes in Pseudo-Aristotle, Oikonomikos). He elbowed aside the other administrators in Egypt, he profited greatly from the drought which hit Greece from 330 to 326 by holding back supplies until the price was high, and he gathered a treasury of 8,000 talents during his financial administration. None of this, however, is particularly heinous, neither unlikely nor unusual. There is no reason to feel sorry for the discarded Macedonians and Egyptians of the administration in Egypt if they could not survive the bureaucratic infighting at which Kleomenes evidently excelled. Drought in Greece was hardly a novel circumstance; sympathy might go to Greece but rarely to any other sufferer of climatic problems in the ancient world; historians have a soft spot for Greeks generally, unless it be Kleomenes, of course; had he profited at Asian expense no doubt he would have been praised as a clever manipulator.

We do not know the normal taxation product of Egypt under previous regimes, but 8,000 talents does not seem unusually large – Ptolemy is said to have enjoyed an annual revenue of 12,000 talents, not a treasure collected over several years – and it was from such a treasury that Kleomenes was paying the wages of the Egyptian garrison, and subsidizing Alexander’s distant campaigns with regular deliveries. Having collected this moderately large sum, the implication is that he had expropriated it to his own use, but that is not the accusation. When Ptolemy arrived, that treasure became his, as the satrapy’s treasury, which it presumably was all along. It was certainly a large sum in the eyes of the Macedonian commanders, who universally displayed greed and extravagance in the loot they acquired in the Persian campaign. Alexander was grateful for the cash and for the memorials to Hephaisteion, and he knew perfectly well that Kleomenes, as an Egyptian-Greek merchant, was absolutely no danger to the king personally or professionally. Some might call it loyalty; it is more likely that it was fear on Kleomenes’ part; Alexander was really quite ruthless, executing men only on suspicion. If Kleomenes was too powerful, it was basically Alexander’s fault.²⁴

Alexandria

The place chosen by Alexander for his new city was one which was reasonably well known already to the Greeks. It was a minor port, with a wooden jetty for mooring and unloading merchant ships, and there was a village, Rhakotis – Rakote in Egyptian – on the adjacent mainland. It was 20 kilometres or so from the western distributary of the Nile, on which was the old Greek commercial town of Naukratis; merchants and sailors heading for or leaving Naukratis were probably familiar with the site of Alexandria. It was sheltered by an offshore elongated island, Pharos, which formed the harbour of the new city, and which was dotted with islands and reefs, those reefs extending both east and west from the island.

Alexander is said to have received advice on the site and on its development from a group of men which included Kleomenes of Naukratis (described as an engineer, which suggested he had some practical advice to impart) and Deinokrates of Rhodes, a well-known architect nominated to be in charge. How far Alexander went in laying out the plan for the city is not clear, though the plan of any new Greek city would be fairly straightforward to draw up after two centuries of building them on a similar pattern. He is said to have marked out the line of the walls with barley meal, which was reputedly swiftly consumed by the local birds, which he turned into a prophecy of prosperity; this was not a difficult decision, since the line of the walls, appearing to include an unusually large city, was dictated by the geography. The city was laid out to occupy an elongated area between the sea and the marshy Lake Mareotis, with the walls delimiting it to east and west, enclosing an area of about thousand hectares.

In strategic terms the city was at the furthest northwest corner of Egypt, on the edge of the desert, the last place watered by the Nile by a narrow channel, to which were added a canal and some canalized streams to provide fresh water. That is, the new city was not purely aimed at controlling or dominating Egypt – Memphis was sufficient for that task – but faced towards Greece. Its harbour could be a sheltered base for a large fleet of warships, which could reach the Aegean in two or three days’ voyage. Greece was involved in a war at the time Alexander was at the site; one wonders if he would have chosen it if Greece had been at peace. The decision to found the city was perhaps only a momentary whim of Alexander’s.

The building of the main constructions was not completed until the reign of Ptolemy II, but some work was done in Alexander’s reign, when Kleomenes was satrap, and much more under Ptolemy I. The line of the walls was perhaps one of the first constructions, and the layout of the grid of streets (attributed to Alexander) was certainly decided on, probably in Alexander’s time. It is unlikely that Kleomenes was able to make much progress in the construction if Alexander was removing surplus Egyptian tax revenues on a regular basis. Ptolemy I did not move permanently to the city until 313 BC, which rather implies that the palace, at least, was not habitable until then. It was he who began the construction of several of the notable buildings – the Heptastadion, the Pharos lighthouse, the temples of Serapis and several other gods – but none of these were finished in his reign. That is, the work went slowly, and the restriction was no doubt financial. One must assume that other buildings – private houses, shops, warehouses, workshops – being smaller, might have taken place more speedily, since these facilities were clearly required by the men working on the larger public buildings. One of the priorities for the government would be harbour facilities – warehouses, jetties, workshops, shipsheds for the warships, chandlers’ stores, customs offices – and if these were built first, this helps explain the slowness of other building, of less importance to the government – except the palace of course, which would clearly have the ultimate priority.

The Crisis of the Death of Alexander

Alexander died in Babylon on 11 June 323 BC.²⁵ Finding and choosing a royal successor was difficult. The empire, it was decided,