Ptolemy IX is omitted from this list; he was probably a dead son of Ptolemy VII and Cleopatra II, whom they inserted posthumously in the annals as “Neos Philopator.” He desired neither to Hellenise the world nor to harmonise it. But he was no cynic either. He respected mental as well as material activity. He had been present at the foundation of Alexandria, and had evidently decided that the place would suit him, and now, taking up his abode in the unfinished city, he began to adorn her with architecture and scholarship and song. Rival generals, especially in Asia Minor and Macedonia, occupied much of his energy. At the very beginning of his rule he was involved in a curious war for the possession of the corpse of Alexander, which he had kidnapped as it was on its way from Persia to the Oasis of Ammon. Ptolemy annexed the corpse and much else. Before he died he had assumed the titles of King and of Soter (saviour), and had added to his kingdom Cyrene, Palestine, Cyprus, and parts of the Asia Minor coast. Of this substantial domain Alexandria was the capital, and also the geographic centre. Then, as now, she belonged not so much to Egypt as to the Mediterranean, and the Ptolemies realised this. Up in Egypt they played the Pharaoh, and built solemn archaistic temples like Edfu and Kom Ombo. Down in Alexandria they were Hellenistic. The second Ptolemy, Philadelphus, (Friend of his Sister), was a more pretentious person than his father. He is famous through the praises of the poets whom he patronised and of the Jews whom he invited, but his personal achievements were slight. Indeed the chief event of his reign is domestic rather than military—in 277 he married his sister Arsinoe. This was as startling to Greek feelings as it is to Christian, but in Egypt he had a prototype in the god Osiris who had married his sister Isis, and he justified the union on the highest sacerdotal grounds. He and Arsinoe were deified as the “Adelphian Gods,” in whose equal veins flowed the uncontaminated blood of their divine father, the general, and their example was followed, when possible, by their successors. It was the pride of race carried to an extreme degree. The royalties of to-day, for fear of debasing their stock, marry first cousins; the Ptolemies, more logical, tried to propagate within even narrower limits. In flesh, as in spirit, the dynasty claimed to be apart from common men, and to appear as successive emanations of the Deity, in pairs of male and female. Arsinoe—to come back to earth—was a domineering and sinister woman. She was seven years older than her brother, and when they married he had already a wife, whom she drove from Alexandria by her intrigues. However, he liked her and when, a martyr to indigestion, she died, he was so far inconsolable that he did not marry again.