Ptolemy succeeded in 180 at the age of about 12 and ruled jointly with his mother, Cleopatra I, until her death in 176 BC. The following year he married his sister, Cleopatra II.
In 170 BC, Antiochus IV began the sixth Syrian War and invaded Egypt twice. He was crowned as its king in 168, but abandoned his claim on the orders of the Roman Senate. From 169-164 Egypt was ruled by a triumvirate consisting of Ptolemy, his sister-queen and his younger brother known as Ptolemy VIII, but in 164 he was driven out by his brother and went to Rome to seek support, which he received from Cato. He was restored the following year by the intervention of the Alexandrians and ruled uneasily, cruelly suppressing frequent rebellions, until he was killed in Syria, fighting against Alexander Balas.
Ptolemy now takes up this question for the planets; he says that "this perfection is of the essence of celestial things, which admit of neither disorder nor inequality," that this planetary theory is one of extreme difficulty, and that no one had yet completely succeeded in it.
Ptolemy, however, was the first writer of Antiquity who showed some conception of the relations between the Tanais or Don (usually considered by the ancients as the boundary between Europe and Asia) and the Rha or Volga, which he correctly described as flowing into the Caspian.
Ptolemy especially devoted himself to the mathematical branch of his subject, and the arrangement of his work, in which his rcsults are presented in a tabular form, instead of being at once embodied in a map, was undoubtedly designed to enable the student to construct his maps for himself.
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