"From behind the rich curtains of his palace," as his stout adversary, Antigonus of Macedon,[84] phrased it, Ptolemy Philadelphus played cautiously and adroitly the great game of international politics. His emissaries, laden with gifts and money, were to be found at every capital from the Ganges to the Tiber. "Mighty kings" and "great cities," Theocritus tells us,[85] were in his pay; and in the harbor of Alexandria many great battleships lay ready to give emphasis to diplomacy, to support the agents whom his gold had brought into action. By these means, too, he kept open the roads which led across the sea from all directions to Alexandria; shut off, by a fringe of Egyptian possessions, the great continental empire of the Seleucids from access to the Mediterranean; and kept Greece so persistently in insurrection against its suzerain, Macedon, that he was able to ward off all danger from that quarter. He enlarged his inherited empire by seizing Ionia when Eumenes I of Pergamum threw off the suzerainty of the Seleucids and shattered their authority in Asia Minor (263-261 B.C.); but the gains he then made he had to abandon during the upheaval which accompanied the revolt of his "son" in Ephesus (259-255 B.C.), and he suffered still further losses in Asia during the war he waged thereafter (253-249 B.C.), with Macedon and Syria combined. These, however, his son, Euergetes, at the opening of his reign (246-242 B.C.), regained, and he acquired districts in Ionia and the Hellespont besides; and the position which he thereby secured he held till his death twenty years later. On the sea, however, he showed himself less persistent than his father. Philadelphus had lost control of the Ægean when beaten at Cos in 253 B.C. by Antigonus of Macedon, but had not rested till he had regained it four years later, when the league of the Islanders, which was the immediate bone of contention, came again under the authority of his admirals. Euergetes suffered a crushing naval defeat in 242 B.C. off the island of Andros at the hands of the "veteran" Antigonus; whereupon he let the Cyclades go altogether. That was not the only sequel, however; for in consequence of the large outlay for little gain entailed in building and keeping in readiness the huge battleships then employed, and perhaps also in consequence of the failure of the Carthaginians, despite great naval expense and preparations, to hold the sea against the improvised fleets of Rome in the First Punic War (which had just ended), the third Ptolemy, like the Barcid government in Carthage, abandoned the policy of maintaining a fleet strong enough to drive all enemies from their respective parts of the Mediterranean. It was a great mistake in each case. When at the end of the third century B.C. Macedon and Syria, the traditional and long-suffering enemies of Egypt, were in a position to renew their joint struggle with the Ptolemies, the far-spread Ptolemaic empire fell together like a house of cards,