c. 182–116 BCE · king of Egypt
Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (Physcon)
Πτολεμαῖος Εὐεργέτης Β′
In Alexandria: 145–116 BCE
Called Physcon, "Potbelly", and by the Alexandrians Kakergetes, "Malefactor". On taking Alexandria in 145 BCE he drove out the grammarians, philosophers, physicians and artists who had backed his rivals, and the exiles became the teachers of the Greek world. Aristarchus died in exile; a soldier was put in charge of the Library.
Their life and work
He reigned first jointly with his brother Ptolemy VI and their sister Cleopatra II, briefly alone after driving his brother out in 164 BCE, then in Cyrene, and from 145 BCE in Alexandria, where his long war with Cleopatra II divided the city. Athenaeus cites two historians, Menecles of Barca and Andron of Alexandria, for the purge: the men he exiled filled the islands and cities with teachers, so that he made the Greeks learned. P.Oxy. 1241 names the man put in charge of the Library after Aristarchus as Cydas, 'of the spearmen'. The Library went on; its great age of scholars did not.
Our device: Their emblem is a sealed decree. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
Moments
- 145 BCE · Ptolemy VIII drives out the scholars Known: attested
In the show
The show has not yet spoken of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (Physcon).
Sources (4)
- Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 4.184b–c (citing Menecles of Barca and Andron of Alexandria)
- P.Oxy. X 1241 (ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri X, London 1914) col. ii (opens in a new tab)
- P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)
- R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)