"Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise, Three thousand, yea three myriad; and o'er all He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy. Claims half Phoenicia, and half Araby, Syria and Libya, and the Æthiops murk; Sways the Pamphylian and Cilician braves, The Lycian and the Carian trained to war, And all the isles; for never fleet like his Rode upon ocean: land and sea alike And sounding rivers hail King Ptolemy." The hero of these lines had just brought a war against his brother in Cyrene and his rival in Asia to a successful termination (273 B.C.); and, except for a probable interval of four years (253-249 B.C.), the invincible fleet which he then possessed ruled the sea till his death. But he was anything but a warrior king. During his whole life he never commanded an army or a fleet in person. Like Augustus Cæsar, with whom he has been compared, he had a delicate constitution which unfitted him for the rough and tumble of war. He had a lively intelligence, which was carefully cultivated, and, like the Emperor Hadrian, an insatiable thirst for novelties. A new book, an old painting, a strange animal, a useful invention, alike aroused his curiosity. One amazing woman--his own sister--swept him from his self-indulgent moorings. She made herself his wife--as any Egyptian woman might do with her brother--and, though she was his queen for six years at most (275-270 B.C.), when she was over forty and he over thirty-two, he followed her policy and cherished her memory for many long years. That her _acta_ might not be invalid he had her deified after her death, and that he might still be her consort, he had himself elevated at the same time to her side as the first self-constituted god-king since Alexander. A sensualist by instinct, he surrounded himself in Alexandria with everything that appealed to his variegated lusts.[83] The women whom he took into his harem after his sister's death were given palaces and race-horses, public statues,--in costumes which were not always modest,--and even divine honors. Splendid new quarters were laid out in Alexandria, and public works erected there and elsewhere in his realm. The capital thronged with scientific, literary, and musical celebrities, attracted by the endowments and collections of the Museum, the richness of the library, the profusion of festivals, and the liberality of the king, who wished Alexandria to become to the new world what Athens had been to the old. Yet despite all these manifold gratifications, life palled on the much-experienced monarch. He turned from the doctors to the quacks, and, shrinking from pain and death, experimented with draughts that were alleged to confer immortality: a strange act for one who was already a god! While suffering agony from the gout, he envied the lot of the fellahs, whom he saw from his window stretched out on the sand in the sun eating their simple meal. "Ye poor," he is said to have once exclaimed, "would that I had been one of you."