Hieroglyphic Name:
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| Hieroglyphic name of Ptolemy I |
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| Ptolemy I Soter |
Ptolemy (360-284 B.C.) was son of the Macedonian nobleman Lagus and one of the only circle of Alexander's commandants and advisors. He fought with preeminence in India and wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns which was an serious source for Arrian's Anabasis. After Alexander's death he was appointed governor of Egypt and discovered to maintain his in-dependency of the central agency of Perdiccas. One of his first actions to this end was to divert to Egypt the cortege taking the body of
Alexander, which the army had intended to be buried in Macedonia. Ptolemy justified his acquisition of this precious relic, which was first interred with great magnificence at
Memphis and afterwards at Alexandria, on the grounds that Alexander had bid to be buried at the oracle of
Amun. In 322 he allied himself with Antipater against Perdiccas and the treaty was heavy by his marriage to Antipater's daughter Eurydice. In 316 he connected rams with Cassander, Seleucus, and Lysimachus to resist Antigonus' ambition to reconstitute the whole of the Macedonia empire under his rule. But in 306 Ptolemy's fleet was almost gone at the battle of Salamis in Cyprus, by Antigonus' son Demetrius. Yet Antigonus' and Demetrius' subsequent endeavour to invade Egypt was defeated by bad conditions. Ptolemy took no part in the battle of Ipsus, and thus taken little in the later division of the spoils, but he placed dynastic bonds by marrying his daughters, Arsinoe to Lysimachus and Lysandra to Cassander's son Alexander, and his step-daughter Antigone to Pyrrhus of Epirus. More prosperous as a statesman than as a soldier, he left behind him a kingdom which was to prove the most running of the Macedonian monarchies after Alexander the Great. He founded the library of Alexandria and was one of the a few Macedonian generals of his generation to patronize literature and arts.
Ptolemy I is the break of the Macedonian Ptolemic dynasty which ruled Egypt for over 3 centuries, until the death of the last related Cleopatra in 30 B.C.
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