c. 284–222 BCE · king of Egypt · builder of the Serapeum
Ptolemy III Euergetes
Πτολεμαῖος Εὐεργέτης
In Alexandria: 246–222 BCE
King from 246 BCE. His bilingual foundation plaques, found by Alan Rowe in 1943–45, prove that he built the Serapeum. Galen tells that he had the books on every ship in the harbour copied and borrowed Athens's official texts of the tragedians, never to return them. He summoned Eratosthenes from Athens.
Their life and work
His queen was Berenice II of Cyrene. Her lock of hair, vowed for his safe return from the Third Syrian War, became a constellation in Callimachus's Lock of Berenice, which survives in papyrus fragments and in Catullus's Latin version (poem 66). In 238 BCE the Egyptian priests, met in synod at Canopus, decreed honours for him and Berenice: the Canopus Decree, whose stones survive in Greek, hieroglyphs and demotic.
Galen's stories of the ship books and of the Athenian texts are told some four centuries after the king, and may have grown in the telling; they agree with what else is known of the dynasty's appetite for books, and the originals he is said to have kept, sending copies back in their place, were exactly the kind of master texts the scholars needed. Known: probable
Our device: Their emblem is a foundation plaque. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
Moments
- c. 246–222 BCE · A story told by Galen: the books from the ships Legend: told story
- c. 246–222 BCE · Ptolemy III builds the Serapeum Known: excavated
- c. 245 BCE · Eratosthenes summoned; he measures the Earth Known: attested
In the show
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Sources (8)
- A. Rowe, Discovery of the Famous Temple and Enclosure of Serapis at Alexandria, Supplément aux Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte, Cahier 2 (Cairo, 1946)
- Galen, Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics III 2.4 (Kühn XVIIa.605–607)
- Suda Eratosthenes, ε 2898 (opens in a new tab)
- Catullus 66
- Callimachus, Aetia fr. 110 Pfeiffer
- Canopus Decree OGIS 56
- R. Pfeiffer (ed.), Callimachus, vol. I: Fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949)
- P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 1:325