Prelude

It is most appropriate to begin the study of Ptolemaic Egypt with the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 bc, thus bringing to an end the Second Persian Period, the passing of which was lamented by no one. Before Alexander resumed his conquests in 331 bc, he was obliged to address the problem of how to administer his new province.

The foundation of Alexandria was clearly an innovation intended to create a new base for governing the country, but in other respects Egypt’s ancient ways prevailed. If we can trust the Alexander Romance (a semi-mythicizing biography written anonymously under the pseudonym of Callisthenes in about the second century ad or earlier), Alexander had himself crowned in the temple of Ptah at Memphis,

Thereby firmly asserting that he was assuming the mantle of an Egyptian pharaoh, but there is no doubt at all that he was conceptualized in those terms by the Egyptians, who gave him a standard royal titulary, and that he showed great respect for Egyptian religious susceptibilities. Keenly aware of the intrinsic strategic dangers latent in Egypt’s wealth and geographical position, he evidently fought shy of concentration of power; the administration of the country was committed to an Egyptian called Doloaspis; the collection of tribute was entrusted to Kleomenes of Naukratis; the army was placed under the command of two officers, Peukestas and Balakros; and the navy was allotted a separate commander in the form of Polemon. Kleomenes was subsequently appointed governor of the entire province, which he administered with a high degree of corruption.

On Alexander’s death in Babylon in June 323 bc, his mentally unpredictable half-brother Arrhidaeus (323-317 BC) was declared king, with Perdiccas as regent, on the understanding that, if the child yet to be bom to Alexander’s Bactrian wife Roxane were male, that child should be joint king. Major sections of the empire were at this point allocated by Perdiccas to Alexander’s marshals, and in this division Ptolemy, son of Lagos, acquired Egypt, Libya, and ‘those parts of Arabia that lie close to Egypt’ with Kleomenes as his second in command.

’The settlement of Perdiccas could not hold. It merely set the scene for the Wars of the Successors, which inevitably broke out to determine whether Alexander’s empire would survive intact. ’This complex series of operations falls into two phases: the first, which ran from 321 to 301 BC, was fought out between the ‘Unitarians’ (above all Perdiccas himself, Antigonus ‘the one-eyed’, and his son Demetrius ‘the besieger’), who attempted to preserve the unity of the empire, and the ‘separatists’ (pre-eminently Ptolemy, Seleucos, and Lysimachos), who were determined to carve out their own kingdoms. Ptolemy’s ambition speedily brought him to the fore as the major headache for the Unitarians, who paid him the compliment of two invasions of Egypt, the first by Perdiccas in 321 BC and the second by Antigonus in 306 bc, both of which were defeated by Egypt’s geography rather than by Ptolemy himself. The unity issue was resolved by the defeat and death of Antigonus at Ipsus in 301 bc, which decided this phase of the conflict in favour of the separatists. By that time all the major protagonists, including Ptolemy, had already anticipated this outcome by declaring themselves kings.