The foreigners brought with them into Egypt their native religions, and, when they were not monotheists like the Jews, they came easily into sympathy with the myriad cults of the natives. A religious _rapprochement_ was thus established and a bi-religious _milieu_ created, by which a new half-Greek, half-Egyptian god, Sarapis, whom Ptolemy I introduced from Sinope, prospered. Before long this Janus-like deity, who was endowed with a sanctity and miraculous power which hoary Egypt could alone give, and with a plastic beauty peculiarly Greek, became distinctively _the_ great god of Egypt, and, in conjunction with Isis, Anubis, and Harpocrates, the most active religious force in the whole world of the Ptolemaic empire. Sarapis-Osiris, the monarch, judge, and savior of the world of the dead: Ptolemy-Pharaoh, the monarch, judge, and savior of the world of the living;--these two and these two alone received the divine homage of Greeks and Egyptians alike. The early Ptolemies willed the impossible; to accept the native deities, cults, creeds, and hierarchies as the active element in the fused Græco-Egyptian religion; to let the two civilizations represented in their realm coalesce in so far as their religious ideas, practices, aspirations, and hopes were concerned; and at the same time to keep them apart in other respects: to preserve in other matters the unapproachable superiority of the invaders. * * * * * Certainly, success in this attempt to graft the ancient religion which he as Pharaoh was bound to accept and preserve on the new stock of Hellenism without corrupting the fine flavor of the fruit hitherto borne by it in Greece, depended on making the Greek cities, Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais, and the Græco-Macedonian military colonies simply the Egyptian portion of a Græco-Macedonian realm reaching over the seas to the head of the Ægean. This necessary support to his position in Egypt the third Ptolemy jeopardized when he neglected to replace the great fleet after 242 B.C. For twenty long years, moreover, he left his army at work farming in Egypt, with the inevitable result that it became immobile. Such a neglect of military matters seemed warranted by the impotence of his two great rivals. For during this entire period Asia was rent by a dynastic struggle and Macedon was paralyzed by a general insurrection in Greece. His weak and indolent son paid the penalty for his father's neglect. By strengthening his army with 26,000 natives, whom he armed and drilled in the Macedonian fashion (221-217 B.C.), he saved the empire for seventeen years, when it fell before the combined attack of Macedon and Syria (202-200 B.C.); but he tempted the Egyptians to lay claim with the sword to partnership with the foreigners in the government. Thus presented, their claim was rejected, as was natural; but once the empire was lost and the flow of immigration into Egypt ceased, the Ptolemies of the "domestic" period