Ptolemy I Soter, a shrewd and cautious ruler, has emerged at the end of forty years of war with a compact and well-ordered realm.
The Ptolemaic kingdom is ethnically diverse.
During this initial period of Macedonian rule, Greek troops under Ptolemy have been given land grants and brought their families, encouraging tens of thousands of Greeks to settle the country making themselves the new ruling class.
These early Greek settlers have done little to hide their disdain for the Egyptian population that surrounds them, people they think to be barbaric.
Ptolemy is eighty-four in the winter of 283/282, when he dies in bed, the only one of Alexander's successors to do so.
He leaves a history of Alexander's campaigns that has not survived—it is to be a principal source for the surviving account by Arrian of Nicomedia.
Ptolemy's provision for the Egyptian succession, which is based on examples from the time of the pharaohs, makes possible a peaceful transition.
Certain classes of people had proclaimed Ptolemy a deity several times during his life, and after his death, all the Egyptians raise him to the level of a god.
Ptolemy II Philadelphus, now sole ruler of Egypt, purges his family of possible rivals.
Arsinoe, daughter of King Lysimachus of Thrace, is married in about 282 to Ptolemy as part of the alliance between Thrace and Egypt against Syria.
