16. The Start of Ptolemaic Decline
When Ptolemy IV passed in 204 BC, his son and heir, Ptolemy V (210 – 181 BC), was too young to rule in his own right. Power was thus supposed to go to the child king’s mother/ aunt, Arsinoe III, who was to rule as regent. However, that arrangement went awry when some of the former king’s courtiers, who had gotten used to dominating the weak-willed Ptolemy IV. They feared that they would lose their influence, and perhaps their lives, if Arsinoe assumed power. So they beat her to the punch, offed her, and took the regency for themselves.
The new regents were themselves eliminated soon thereafter, one of them lynched on the street by an Alexandrian mob. In the aftermath, the Kingdom of Egypt grew increasingly unstable. The other Hellenistic kingdoms took advantage of the chaos along the Nile, and the Seleucids and Macedonians made a pact to divvy up the Ptolemaic Kingdom. The dynasty would have come to an inglorious end, if not for the intervention of a rising power from the other side of the Mediterranean: Rome.
