[2] The date and circumstances of his acquiring of the royal title are unknown; after his capture of Sidon in 332 BC Alexander the Great installed one Abdalonymos as king, but nothing further is known of him.
[3] Philocles however first appears much earlier, in a list of benefactors who donated money to rebuild the city of Thebes, which had been razed by Alexander.
Since the list dates to the last decades of the 4th century—the reconstruction of Thebes was decreed by Cassander in 316 BC—and Sidon was under the control of Antigonus I Monophthalmus at the time, it has been suggested that Philocles was in Antigonid service originally, but his later career as a high-ranking and evidently trusted Ptolemaic official seems to argue against this.
His donation of such a large amount of money to Thebes would then have to be considered as part of his role as a Ptolemaic agent, trying to curry favour with the Greek city-states.
[4] In his collection of stratagems, the 2nd-century author Polyaenus records that "Philocles, general of Ptolemy" took the city of Kaunos by treachery.