were forced to acknowledge its justice. They constituted their territorial army more and more from native soldiers, to whom they gave increasingly larger lots, while they progressively diminished the size of those held by the foreigners. They ceased to take back the holdings on the death or superannuation of the occupants, thus admitting the right of sons and other male descendants to get, in return for military service, not dry or marsh land, as in the early days, but land already redeemed by their father's capital and labor. Soldiers ceased to be soldiers spending their spare time winning new land from the desert and the swamp for their master's estate; and became farmers to whom service in the army was a nuisance and a loss. The army became thereby hopelessly immobile. The age was generally one of economic decline and not of economic advance; for Egypt had gained more, as the sequel proved, from the vigorous government of the early Ptolemies than it had lost by the expenditure of its surpluses on the empire. In this decadent age the Egyptians gained admission freely to the police and administrative service as well as to the army. Thus elevated in social esteem, they were able to intermarry with their ancient lords; so that a considerable half-breed and bilingual population developed--Greek in the outward things, fellaheen, according to Polybius, in character and culture. Alexandria, he says,[100] "three strata occupy: the Egyptian and the native race, sharp and (un)civilized. Then the mercenary troops, oppressive and numerous and dissolute; for from old custom they kept armed troops who had learned to rule rather than to obey, on account of the worthlessness of the kings. The third stratum was that of the Alexandrians, nor was even this truly a civilized population owing to the same causes, but yet better than the other two, for though of mixed breed, yet they were originally Greeks, with traditions of the general type of the Greeks. But this part of the population having disappeared mainly owing to Ptolemy Euergetes Physkon (145-116 B.C.) in whose reign Polybius visited Alexandria,--for Physkon, when revolted against, over and over again let loose his troops on the population and massacred them,--and such being the state of things, to visit Egypt was a long and thankless journey." Foreign enemies the omnipotent Roman Senate kept off during the second century B.C. But unnerved by the menacing patronage of the great republic, the Ptolemies, now represented by men of vigor and no character or of character and no vigor; by women, who were sprung mostly from adelphic unions, of remarkable ability, beauty, and morals, prefaced with a period of long-continued dynastic and national strife the dramatic epoch of Ptolemy the Piper and Cleopatra the Great. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Mahaffy, J.P. _The Empire of the Ptolemies_ (1895), and _The Ptolemaic Dynasty_ (1899). 2. Beloch, J. _Griechische Geschichte_, III (1904).