passions. Sensuality begins sometimes with kindness, but it ends always
in the most reckless and intolerable cruelty. The Ptolemies became, in
the end, the most abominable and terrible tyrants that the principle of
absolute and irresponsible power ever produced. There was one vice in
particular, a vice which they seem to have adopted from the Asiatic
nations of the Persian empire, that resulted in the most awful
consequences. This vice was incest.

The law of God, proclaimed not only in the Scriptures, but in the native
instincts of the human soul, forbids intermarriages among those
connected by close ties of consanguinity. The necessity for such a law
rests on considerations which can not here be fully explained. They are
considerations, however, which arise from causes inherent in the very
nature of man as a social being, and which are of universal, perpetual,
and insurmountable force. To guard his creatures against the deplorable
consequences, both physical and moral, which result from the practice of
such marriages, the great Author of Nature has implanted in every mind
an instinctive sense of their criminality, powerful enough to give
effectual warning of the danger, and so universal as to cause a distinct
condemnation of them to be recorded in almost every code of written law
that has ever been promulgated among mankind. The Persian sovereigns
were, however, above all law, and every species of incestuous marriage
was practiced by them without shame. The Ptolemies followed their
example.

One of the most striking exhibitions of the nature of incestuous
domestic life which is afforded by the whole dismal panorama of pagan
vice and crime, is presented in the history of the great-grandfather of
the Cleopatra who is the principal subject of this narrative. He was
Ptolemy Physcon, the seventh in the line. It is necessary to give some