Two Notes on Ptolemaic History

Abstract

Ptolemy I, son of Lagos and Arsinoe, is usually supposed to have belonged, through his mother, to a cadet branch of the Argead house and to have been a third cousin of Alexander. But a fragment of Euphantus, so far unexplained, leads up to the conclusion that his mother was not of the blood royal and that he had no connexion with the royal house at all. Hellenistic literature was full of fictitious relationships, which often found their way into history as facts; and we seem to have here another case of the same sort.Euphantus is contemporary evidence for the period during which Ptolemy I was king. He was a pupil of Eubulides and the first philosophic teacher of Antigonus Gonatas; supposing he went to him when Antigonus was thirteen, as Aristotle did to Alexander, he was a known man in 307 or 306, while Ptolemy took the crown in 305. As he wrote a treatise on Kingship for Antigonus he was alive in or after 276, after Ptolemy's death; he wrote a history of his own time, and died of old age.