332 PLiirr's natueal HisxoEr. [Book XXXVL 



reigning at the time of the capture of Troy, erected one, a 

 hundred and forty cubits high. Having quitted the spot 

 where the pahice of Mnevis^* stood, this monarch erected 

 another obelisk, ^^ one hundred and twenty cubits in height, 

 but of prodigious thickness, the sides being no less than 

 eleven cubits in breadth. (9,) It is said that one hundred 

 and twenty thousand men were employed upon this work f^ 

 and that the king, when it was on the point of being elevated, 

 being apprehensive that the machinery employed might not 

 prove strong enough for the weight, with the view of increas- 

 ing the peril that might be entailed by due want of precaution 

 on the part of the workmen, had his own son fastened to the 

 summit ; in order that the safety of the prince might at the 

 same time ensure the safety of the mass of stone. It was in his 

 admiration of this work, that, when King Cambyses took the 

 city by storm, and the conflagration had already reached the 

 very foot of the obelisk, he ordered the fire to be extinguished ; 

 he entertaining a respect for this stupendous erection which 

 he had not entertained for the city itself. 



There are also two other obelisks, one of them erected by 

 Zmarres,^^ and the other by Phius;^^ both of them without 

 inscriptions, and forty-eight cubits in height. Ptolemseus 

 Philadelphus had one erected at Alexandria, eighty cubits 

 high, which had been prepared by order of King IS'ecthebis :^ 

 it was without any inscription, and cost far more trouble in 

 its carriage and elevation, than had been originally expended 

 in quarrying it. Some writers inform us that it was con- 

 veyed on a raft, under the inspection of the architect Satyrus ; 

 but Callixenus^^ gives the name of Phoenix. Por this pur- 



9* The name of the bull divinity worshipped by the people of On, or 

 Heliopolis ; while by the people of Memphis it was known as Apis. 



9^ This, Hardouin says, was the same obelisk that was afterwards erect- 

 ed hy Constantius, son of Constantine the Great, in the Circus Maximus 

 at Eome ; whence it was removed by Pope iSextus V., in the year 1588, 

 to the Basilica of the Lateran. 



^^ This name is probably mutilated : there are about twenty different 

 readings of it. 



^■^ This name is also very doubtful. One reading is "Eraph," and Har- 

 douin attempts to identify him with the Pharaoh Hophra of Jeremiah, xliv. 

 30, the Ouafres of the Chronicle of Eusebius, and the Aprics of Herodotus. 



^^ The Nectanabis, probably, of Plutarch, in his Life of Agesilaiis, and 

 the Nectanebus of Nepos, in the Life of Chabrias. 



'"^ Callixenus of Ehodes was a contemporary of Ptolemy Philadelphus, 



