Ptolemy III Euergetes
Ptolemy III took an army to Babylon to avenge his sister and came back with the largest empire any Ptolemy held. His sister Berenice had been married to the Seleucid king as part of a peace settlement, and on that king's death she and her infant son were murdered by the previous wife's faction. Ptolemy invaded within months of his own accession, took Antioch and Seleucia, and by his own account reached Babylon and the borders of Bactria. He returned because of trouble at home rather than defeat, and he kept the Syrian coast, Cilicia and positions in Thrace and the Aegean. He brought back Egyptian cult statues carried off by the Persians three centuries earlier, which is why the priests gave him the title Euergetes, benefactor. That was policy rather than piety: the decree issued at Canopus in 238 by a synod of priests granted him honours in exchange for tax concessions, and it was inscribed in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek - the same device as the later Rosetta decree, and the first surviving example of it. The Canopus decree also tried to fix the calendar by adding a day every fourth year. The priests ignored it and Egypt kept its drifting year for another two centuries, until Augustus imposed the same reform by conquest. Alexandria was at its height under him. He made Eratosthenes head of the Library - the man who measured the circumference of the earth from the angle of shadows at two Egyptian towns and got it right to within a few per cent - and is said to have borrowed the official Athenian texts of the tragedians against a large deposit, copied them, and forfeited the money rather than return the originals.
- Lived: 284 BCE – 222 BCE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
