ABSTRACT
The young man of twenty-five who became sole king of Egypt in 283 or 282 BC is known in history as Ptolemy "Philadelphus". This surname he never bore in his own lifetime. He was known to his contemporaries simply as "Ptolemy the son of Ptolemy". The name Ptolemy did not yet sound in their ears as the dynastic name of a long line of kings. The ambition of the house of Ptolemy to extend its dominion outside Egypt over certain regions of Asia, to be the strongest sea-power and intervene effectively in the politics of the Greek world, made it impossible for them to avoid foreign entanglements. The Chremonidaean War was a miserable exhibition of incapacity or timidity or dilettantism on Ptolemy's part. In the great days of old Egypt the Pharaohs had carried their arms far south beyond the first cataract into the region which the Greeks called Ethiopia and which we know to-day as the Sudan.
