things, of much persecution, were the fashionable deities of the Roman
world. Surely this Ptolemy was a man of genius!

But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making gods. He had
to make men; for he had few or none ready made among his old veterans
from Issus and Arbela. He had no hereditary aristocracy: and he wanted
none. No aristocracy of wealth; that might grow of itself, only too
fast for his despotic power. But as a despot, he must have a knot of
men round him who would do his work. And here came out his deep insight
into fact. It had not escaped that man, what was the secret of Greek
supremacy. How had he come there? How had his great master conquered
half the world? How had the little semi-barbarous mountain tribe up
there in Pella, risen under Philip to be the master-race of the globe?
How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of
Salamis and Marathon, held out triumphantly century after century,
against the vast weight of the barbarian? The simple answer was:
Because the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere brute force. Because
mind is the lord of matter; because the Greek being the cultivated man,
is the only true man; the rest are [Greek text: barbaroi], mere things,
clods, tools for the wise Greeks' use, in spite of all their material
phantom-strength of elephants, and treasures, and tributaries by the
million. Mind was the secret of Greek power; and for that Ptolemy would
work. He would have an aristocracy of intellect; he would gather round
him the wise men of the world (glad enough most of them to leave that
miserable Greece, where every man's life was in his hand from hour to
hour), and he would develop to its highest the conception of Philip,
when he made Aristotle the tutor of his son Alexander. The consequences
of that attempt were written in letters of blood, over half the world;
Ptolemy would attempt it once more, with gentler results. For though he
fought long, and often, and well, as Despot of Egypt, no less than as