Ptolemy was going to need his versatility now that he had arrived in Egypt. His new satrapy was a land of strange and powerful religious passions. In his capital city of Memphis, a glittering temple housed a black-and-white bull calf worshipped as a divine being called Apis. Worship of animal deities was peculiar to Egypt and often hard for foreigners to stomach; once a Persian king had brutally stabbed the Apis in the thigh, calling it a silly god worthy of silly people. The beast later contracted sepsis and died. Alexander had taken the opposite approach: upon entering Egypt, he offered sacrifices at Memphis to gods that conspicuously included the Apis bull. Ptolemy had learned much on that occasion about adaptability, tolerance, and openness to change.

Ptolemy was by nature a tolerant person, not charismatic like Alexander, but reasonable and fair-minded. In years to come his benevolence would earn him the epithet Soter, or Savior, by which he has been known ever since. And the Egyptians desperately needed a tolerant ruler, for in the past few years they had once again, as in the days of the Persians, been oppressed by a cruel foreigner—in this case a conniving Greek named Cleomenes.

Appointed by Alexander as finance minister in Egypt, Cleomenes had come to control all the levers of power and had also become spectacularly wealthy. A record survives of the gangland-type schemes by which he amassed his riches. He extorted money by taking away age-old priestly privileges and then selling them back; he manipulated the price of grain, Egypt’s chief export, by cornering the market; he shook down the Egyptians by thuggish bullying. Once, when sailing along the Nile in a region where crocodiles were sacred, Cleomenes lost a slave to an attack by one of these beasts. He promptly declared a roundup and slaughter of crocodiles. The local priests averted this sacrilege only by bringing Cleomenes heaps of gold. He had held their very gods for ransom.

Alexander, while he lived, despised the connivances of Cleomenes but was either unable or unwilling to stop them. Then, in his last year of life, the king bought a favor from Cleomenes at the price of a blanket amnesty. Distraught at the death of his friend Hephaestion, Alexander wrote to Cleomenes requesting that huge memorials be built in the new city then under construction, Alexandria—one in the city itself and another on an island offshore where it would be seen by all passing ships. “If I find,” said Alexander in the letter, “that the temples in Egypt and the shrines of Hephaestion are well built, I will pardon you for any wrong you have done thus far, and if you misbehave in the future, you will meet with no punishment from me.” Cleomenes continued his kleptocracy in Egypt, now with the blessing of the king himself.

In the settlement made at Babylon, Perdiccas had assigned Egypt to Ptolemy on the condition that Cleomenes serve as Ptolemy’s hyparchos, or “lieutenant.” It was a patent attempt to trim Ptolemy’s sails and keep a close watch on his behavior. But Ptolemy nullified this arrangement soon after his arrival, by arranging for Cleomenes himself to be nullified. Finding some legal pretext—a charge of fiscal malfeasance would have been fitting and all too credible—Ptolemy had the grasping Greek tried and executed, thus taking sole power in Egypt. It was a declaration of independence from Perdiccas and the regime of the joint kings.

Probably it was after this overthrow of Cleomenes that Ptolemy wrote to Antipater, asking to marry one of the old man’s daughters. A showdown with Perdiccas was surely coming, and Ptolemy would need help to hold his new seat. Alliance between Ptolemy and Antipater made possible a continental pincer strategy: Europe and Africa, working in tandem, could hold the vast forces of Asia at bay. Antipater, it seems, was happy to take part in this high-stakes triangulation, for he sent his daughter Eurydice to become Ptolemy’s wife. And with her he sent the girl’s cousin Berenice, a lady-in-waiting who, though no one yet knew it, was awaiting great things.

Cleomenes was not the only problem Ptolemy faced during his first year in Egypt. Another bold Greek with big ambitions, a Spartan soldier of fortune named Thibron, had begun an attack on Cyrene, a Greek city on the North African coast. Long independent and wealthy, not yet a part of the Macedonian empire, Cyrene made a tempting prize for a warrior with Thibron’s nerve. Though his plans did not threaten Ptolemy’s domain, they put him right on its borders, and his brashness seemed to endanger the stability of the whole region.

Thibron was among the many talented mercenaries who had become freebooters during Alexander’s last year. He had first shipped with Harpalus, the renegade treasurer of Babylon, as part of the hired army brought to Athens to foment revolt. He had watched as Harpalus’ efforts at Athens failed, not once but twice, and had then sailed with his hapless paymaster to Crete seeking refuge from Alexander’s retribution. There was still a fortune in silver and six thousand armed soldiers aboard Harpalus’ ships, enough cash and force to accomplish some bold mission—but what? Poor, lost Harpalus either didn’t know or didn’t seem likely to succeed. On Crete, Thibron took matters into his own hands by killing Harpalus and seizing command.

He sailed to North Africa and blockaded the harbor of Cyrene. He had the support of some exiles from the city and quickly won a settlement in which the Cyrenaeans agreed to pay him tribute and augment his army. But then things went awry. One of Thibron’s subordinates, a Cretan, rebelled against him, split off the other Cretans in the army, and defected to the Cyrenaeans. Thibron was kicked out of the city itself but still controlled the harbor, using confiscated trade goods to fund his war effort. He established a new base in the nearby town of Taucheira, while the Cyrenaeans, for their part, called in neighboring Libyans and Carthaginians for support. An all-out regional war began to take shape, right on Ptolemy’s western border.

Thibron, indefatigable like many Spartans, suffered dreadful reverses but would not give up. He lost control of the harbor of Cyrene after a successful Cretan raid; his men, forced to forage in open country, were routed by Libyan tribesmen; his ships, deprived of anchorage, were sunk or driven out to sea by a storm. His only remaining resource was his cash reserve, but this was formidable. Sending envoys to Taenaron, the still-crowded depot for unemployed mercenaries, he hired a new force of twenty-five hundred soldiers and attacked Cyrene again. He defeated a Cyrenaean army said to total thirty thousand—further testimony to the devastating effectiveness of trained veterans—and regained control of the city’s surroundings. The seesaw struggle now stabilized into an entrenched, grinding siege, with the fate of much of the region resting on the outcome.

Ptolemy watched this conflagration from the safety of his palace on the Nile. The twists and turns that had created the crisis were truly bewildering. Money that had been collected by the Persians, then captured by Alexander, then stolen by Harpalus and brought to Athens to subsidize a war against Macedonia, had changed hands one last time and landed on North African shores. Like a magnet, it had drawn to the region streams of jobless Greek mercenaries. Surplus cash had combined with free-floating military manpower to form a volatile and explosive mixture. The firestorm it had caused now threatened to spread to Egypt.

But Ptolemy too had a huge cash hoard, thanks to the depredations of his predecessor, Cleomenes. Upon inspecting the Egyptian treasury, he found a handsome sum of eight thousand talents, enough to hire a large army for many years of service, given the going rate of one-tenth of a talent per year per man. Ptolemy put this silver to work hiring a force that could outmatch Thibron’s, and when the opportunity came to intervene in Cyrene, he was ready. Called on for help by some Cyrenaean exiles, Ptolemy dispatched his newly purchased soldiers, under the command of his general Ophellas. Thibron was quickly defeated, captured, and turned over to the cities he had attacked for torture and crucifixion. Ophellas was put in charge of Cyrene, which henceforth became a dependency of Egypt—its fate a monument to the power of money.