The
Pharos was then an island. It was connected with the mainland by a
great mole, furnished with forts and drawbridges. On the ruins of that
mole now stands the greater part of the modern city; the vast site of
the ancient one is a wilderness.
But Alexander was not destined to carry out his own magnificent project.
That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose
personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history
knows few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the
son of an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of
Macedon. There were those who said that he was in reality a son of
Philip himself. However, he rose at court, became a private friend of
young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of
the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, till after his great
master's death he found himself despot of Egypt.
His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most Jove-
like type of Greek beauty. There is a possibility about it, as about
most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and a
contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, which puts one in mind of
Goethe's expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too well
to respect them.
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