Pascal[80] says: _Le nez de Cléopâtre: s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé._ But Pascal speaks as a philosopher. He probably did not know that Cleopatra had a prominent nose. He was certainly ignorant that her death made little or no difference in the constitutional position of Egypt. In a sense Augustus was simply the executor of the great queen's policy; for, after his reorganization of the Roman empire was completed, "it is," as Mommsen[81] says, "quite as correct to say that the kings of Egypt ruled in Rome as that the prince of the Roman people reigned in the valley of the Nile." Be that as it may, the empire of the Ptolemies could not have been recalled from the past even by the magic of a woman's beauty; for, as we shall see when we come to look at the second period of its history, the death it had died was a natural one. It had but experienced the fate to which its constitution made it prone. It was beset from its birth with incurable weaknesses. None the less it made a brave show during the first century of its existence; and during the reign of its second monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), its capital, Alexandria, was the London of the ancient world. Its only rival in trade and commerce was its neighbor to the west, Carthage. The golden age of the Ptolemies coincides with the one epoch in the history of the world in which Africa was the leader in business enterprise, in money power, in naval strength, in luxury, in science, and, till the real test came, in political prestige and influence. The commercial aristocracy of Carthage and the enlightened despots of Alexandria had the Mediterranean divided between them. West of Sicily lay a Carthaginian lake, into which foreign ships entered at their own peril; east of it, the chief harbors in the whole circuit from Cyrene to Corcyra, as well as the islands which lay in the area thus inclosed, the Ptolemies aimed to secure. Possession of the sea between Egypt and the Græco-Macedonian world and of the coasts which it washed and the islands which it surrounded, was the main object of the foreign policy of the early Ptolemies. The founder of the dynasty was a brave soldier, but a cautious general. Again and again he withdrew from Asia before a land attack and put his main reliance upon the natural defenses of Egypt. He was no sailor at all; yet he became an admiral, and as the result of three great maritime expeditions (308-306, 295-294, 288-287 B.C.), he handed over to his unwarlike son the essential body of the possessions of the family outside of Egypt. The founder of the dynasty was at the same time the founder of the empire. The Solomon of the Ptolemies, Philadelphus, is addressed by Theocritus,[82] a Sicilian poet who had recently come to Alexandria looking for a patron, in the following adulatory strains:--