By his advice the lunar year was abolished, the civil year regulated entirely by the sun, and the Julian calendar introduced.
The Macedonian rulers of Egypt have been blamed for the manner in which they dealt with the religious sentiment of their time.

They prostituted it to the purpose of state-craft, finding in it a means of governing their lower classes.

To the intelligent they gave philosophy.
POLICY OF THE PTOLEMIES.

But doubtless they defended this policy by the experience gathered in those great campaigns which had made the Greeks the foremost nation of the world.

They had seen the mythological conceptions of their ancestral country dwindle into fables; the wonders with which the old poets adorned the Mediterranean had been discovered to be baseless illusions.