Family Background and Early Life
Magas was the first born son of the noblewoman Berenice and her first husband Philip. He had two younger sisters: Antigone and Theoxena. His father, Philip was the son Amyntas by an unnamed mother. Based on the implying of Plutarch (Pyrrhus 4.4), his father was previously married and had children, including daughters born to him. Phillip served as a military officer in the service of the Greek King Alexander the Great and was known in commanding one division of the Phalanx in Alexander’s wars.
His mother Berenice was a noblewoman from Eordeaea. She was the daughter of local obscure nobleman Magas and noblewoman Antigone. Berenice’s mother was the niece of the powerful Regent Antipater and was a distant collateral relative to the Argead dynasty. He was the namesake of his maternal grandfather.
About 318 BC, his father died of natural causes. After the death of Magas’ father, Magas’ mother took him and his siblings to Egypt where they were a part of the entourage of his mother’s second maternal cousin Eurydice. Eurydice was then the wife of Ptolemy I Soter, the first Greek Pharaoh and founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
By 317 BC, Ptolemy I fell in love with Berenice and divorced Eurydice to marry her. His mother through her marriage to Ptolemy I, was an Egyptian Queen and the Queen mother of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Through his mother’s marriage to Ptolemy I, Magas was a stepson to Ptolemy I; became an Egyptian Prince living in his stepfather’s court and was a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty. His mother bore Ptolemy I three children: two daughters, Arsinoe II, Philotera and the future Pharaoh Ptolemy II Philadelphus.
Read more about this topic: Magas Of Cyrene
Famous quotes containing the words family, background, early and/or life:
“For every family had one cat at least in the bag.”
—Christopher Smart (1722–1771)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America.... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)