Long before all this happened, many changes had fallen upon Egypt. Philomêtor died in B.C. 145. He had been weak enough to forgive his rebellious and ungrateful brother twice when he had had him in his power. Once he had been compelled to go to Rome to plead his cause before the senate, and there be indebted to an Alexandrine painter for food and lodging; on the second occasion Physkôn had endeavoured to rob him of Cyprus by a combination of mean treachery and intrigue. The reward of his brotherly forbearance was the murder by Physkôn of Philomêtor’s young son Ptolemy Philopator II. immediately after his death. Onias, the Jewish high-priest, held Alexandria for Philopator, but his uncle Physkôn was favoured by the Romans, whose word was now law. Physkôn accordingly began his long reign of vice and cruelty, interrupted only by temporary banishment to Cyprus. Then followed his widow, Cleopatra Kokkê, a woman stained with every possible and impossible crime. She held her own, however, against all opponents, including her own son Ptolemy Lathyrus, thanks to her two Jewish generals, Khelkias and Ananias, the sons of the high-priest Onias. Palestine and Syria again became a battle-field where the fate of Egypt was decided, and while Cleopatra was aided by the Jews, Lathyrus found his allies among the Samaritans. It was in the midst of these wars and rumours of wars, when men had lost faith in one another and themselves, and when the Jews after struggling for bare existence were beginning to treat on equal terms with the great monarchies of the world, that that curious Apocalypse, the Book of Enoch, seems to have been composed, at all events in its original form. It is a vision of the end of all things and the judgment of mankind, and it embodies the fully developed doctrine of the angelic hierarchy to which reference is made in the Book of Daniel.