c. 367–282 BCE · satrap and king of Egypt · founder of the Mouseion · historian of Alexander
Ptolemy I Soter
Πτολεμαῖος Σωτήρ
In Alexandria: c. 311–283 BCE
Alexander's general and boyhood companion, satrap of Egypt from 323 and king from 305/304 BCE. He brought Alexander's body to Egypt and, by Plutarch's account, gathered the Mouseion; most scholars think he founded it late in his reign and that his son built up the Library. He wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns that Arrian used.
Their life and work
He held Egypt by holding Alexander: the body he brought to Egypt gave his rule its legitimacy, and he moved the seat of government from Memphis to Alexandria. Plutarch's essay That Epicurus Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible (Moralia 1095d) is the earliest surviving text to credit him with the Mouseion. Strabo describes the Mouseion as a part of the palaces without naming its founder (17.1.8). Arrian chose Ptolemy's lost history of the campaigns as one of his two main sources, because a king would be shamed by lying (Anabasis, preface).
Tacitus (Histories 4.83–84) and Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris 28), writing early in the second century CE, some four centuries later, tell that a dream sent him to fetch a god's statue from Sinope. In Tacitus the Egyptian priests cannot explain the dream, and the Athenian Timotheus learns from travellers to Pontus of the god's temple at Sinope; in Plutarch the statue is Pluto's, and once it has arrived Timotheus and Manetho declare it to be Sarapis. Tacitus adds that some put the god's coming under Ptolemy III, from Seleucia in Syria, and others under the same king from Memphis. The cult of Sarapis is real and grew under him; the dream is a story of its beginning. Legend: told story
Our device: Their emblem is a plain diadem ribbon. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Ptolemy I Soter, History of Alexander · c. 300–283 BCE · Lost
Moments
- 321/320 BCE · Ptolemy brings Alexander's body to Egypt Known: attested
- c. 300 BCE · Euclid teaches geometry under Ptolemy I Known: probable
- c. 297 BCE · Demetrius of Phalerum at Ptolemy's court Known: attested
- c. 295–283 BCE · The Mouseion and the Library founded Known: probable
In the show
The show has not yet spoken of Ptolemy I Soter.
Sources (8)
- Plutarch, That Epicurus Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible 13 (Moralia 1095d)
- Diodorus Siculus 18.28.2–6
- P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 1:305–335
- A. Erskine, "Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria", Greece & Rome 42.1 (1995) 38–48
- Arrian, Anabasis preface 1–2
- Strabo, Geography 17.1.8 (opens in a new tab)
- Tacitus, Histories 4.83–84
- Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 28 (Moralia 361f–362a)