years that he spent there in courting and bribing the senators he learned the truth of Cato's advice. Livy, B.C. 57. (54) His younger brother, Ptolemy, who was reigning in Cyprus, was not even so well treated. The Romans passed a law making that wealthy island a Roman Epit. civ. province, no doubt upon the plea of the will of Alexander II. and the king's illegitimacy; and they sent Cato, rather against his wish, to turn Ptolemy out of his kingdom. Cyprus had been joined to Alexandria for two hundred and fifty years, ever since it was conquered by the first Ptolemy. Before that time it had belonged, first to Tyre, as the chief of the Phenician powers, and then, on the fall of the Phenicians, to Nineveh, to Babylon, to Egypt, and to Persia, as each of those great monarchies had the Phenician sailors for their subjects. The language of the island remained Phenician. But Ptolemy Soter governed it by means of Greeks; and so many were the Greeks who settled there, that the language of the towns was very much changed. The Greek sailors took the place of the Phenicians, and whatever of learning, and literature, and art were there, were borrowed from Alexandria. It was at this time the last of the foreign possessions that remained to the family of the Ptolemies. When the Romans claimed it the younger Ptolemy gave up the island to them without Cato being called upon to use force, and in return the Romans made him high priest in the temple of the Paphian Venus; but he soon put himself to death by poison. Canidius Crassus, who had been employed by Cato in this affair, may have had some fighting at sea Plutarch. Vit. Caton. Eckhel, Porphyrius, ap. Scalig. with the Egyptians, as on one of his vol. 161. coins we see on one side a crocodile, and on the other the prow of a ship, as if he had beaten the Egyptian fleet in the mouth of the Nile. (55) On the flight of their king, the rebellious Alexandrians set on the throne the two eldest of his daughters, CLEOPATRA TRYPHÆNA (see Fig. 21) and BERENICE, and sent an embassy, at the head of which was Dion, the academic philosopher, to plead their cause at Rome against the king. But the gold of Auletes had already gained the senate; and Cicero Fig. 21. B.C. 57. de rege sar. pro. Cœlio. spoke, on his behalf, one of his great speeches, now unfortunately lost, in which he rebutted the charge that Cicero, frag. Auletes was at all to be blamed for the death of Alexandr. Alexander, whom he thought justly killed by his Suetonius, guards for the murder of his queen and kinswoman. Cæsar, xi. Cæsar, whose year of consulship was then drawPlutarch. ing to an end, took his part warmly; and Auletes Vit. J. Ca- became in debt to him in the sum of seventeen million drachmæ, or nearly half a million sterling, Cicero either for money lent to bribe the senators, or for bonds then given to Cæsar instead of money. By these means Auletes got his title acknowledged; the door of the senate was shut against the Alexandrian ambassadors; and the philosopher Dion, the head of the embassy, was poisoned in Rome by the slaves of his friend Lucceius, in whose house he was dwelling. But, nevertheless, Auletes was not able to get an army sent to help him against his rebellious subjects and his daughters; nor was Cæsar able to get from the senate, for the employment of his proconsular year, the task of replacing Auletes on the throne. (56) This high employment was then sought for both by Lentulus and by Pompey. The senate at first leaned Epist. ad in favour of the former; and he would perhaps have gained it, if the Roman creditors of Auletes, who were already trembling for their money, had not bribed openly in favour of Pompey, as the more powerful of the two. On Pompey therefore the choice of the senate at last fell. Pompey then took Auletes into his house, Cassius, as his friend and guest, and would have got orders lib. xxxix. to lead him back into his kingdom at the head of a Roman army, had not the tribunes of the people, fearing any addition to Pompey's great power, had recourse to their usual state-engine, the Sibylline books; and the pontifex, at their bidding, publicly declared that it was written in those sacred pages that the king of Egypt should have the friendship of Rome, but should not be helped with an army. Cicero, Fratrem, fi. 2. Dion (57) But though Lentulus and Pompey were each strong enough to stop the other from having this high command, Auletes was not without hopes that some Roman general would be led, by the promise of money, and by the honour, to undertake his cause, though it would be against the laws Cicero, ii. 9. of Rome to do so without orders from the senate. Cicero then took him under his protection, and carried him in a litter of state to his villa at Baiæ, and wrote Epist. ad to Lentulus, the proconsul of Cilicia and Cyprus, Q. Fratrem, strongly urging him to snatch the glory of replacing Auletes on the throne, and of being the patron of Epist. 1. 7. the king of Egypt. But Lentulus seems not to have chosen to run the risk of so far breaking the laws of his country. (58) Auletes then went, with pressing letters from Pompey, to Gabinius, the proconsul of Syria, and offered Dion Cass. him the large bribe of ten thousand talents, or lib. xxxix. fifteen hundred thousand pounds, if he would lead Plutarch. the Roman army into Egypt, and replace him on the Vit. Anton. throne. Most of the officers were against this undertaking; but the letters of Pompey, the advice of Mark Antony, the master of the horse, and perhaps the greatness of the bribe, outweighed those cautious opinions. Porphyrius, ap. Scalig. Strabo, lib. xvii. (59) While Auletes had been thus pleading his cause at Rome and with the army, Cleopatra Tryphæna, the elder of the two queens, had died; and, as no one of the other children of Auletes was old enough to be joined with Berenice on the throne, the Alexandrians sent to Syria for Seleucus, the son of Antiochus Grypus aud of Selene, the sister of Lathyrus, to come to Egypt and marry Berenice. He was low-minded in all his pleasures and tastes, and got the nickname of Cybiosactes, the scullion. He was even said to have stolen the golden sarcophagus in which the body of Alexander was buried; and was so much disliked by his young wife that she had him strangled on the fifth day after their marriage. Berenice then married Archelaus, a son of Mithridates Eupator, king of Pontus; and she had reigned one year with her sister and two years with her husbands, ap. Scalig. when the Roman army brought back her father, B.c. 54. Ptolemy Auletes, into Egypt. Porphyrius, Cicero, pro Rabirio, 5 Maccabees, xl. 18. Plutarch. (60) Gabinius, on marching, gave out as an excuse for quitting the province entrusted to him by the senate, that it was in self-defence; and that Syria was in danger from the Egyptian fleet commanded by Archelaus. He was accompanied by a Jewish army under the command of Antipator, sent by Hyrcanus, whom the Romans had just made governor of Judæa. Vit. Anton. Mark Antony was sent forward with the horse, and he routed the Egyptian army near Pelusium, and then entered the city with Auletes. The king, in the cruelty of his revenge, wished to put the citizens to the sword, and was only stopped by Antony's forbidding it. The Egyptian army Valerius was at this time in the lowest state of discipline; Max. ix. 1. it was the only place where the sovereign was not despotic. The soldiers, who prized the lawlessness of their trade even more than its pay, were a cause of fear only to their fellow-citizens. When Archelaus led them out against the Romans, and ordered them to throw up a trench around their camp, they refused to obey; they said that ditch-making was not work for soldiers, but that it ought to be lib. xvii. done at the cost of the state. Hence, when on this first success Gabinius followed with the body of Cassius, the army, he easily conquered the rest of the country, and put to death Berenice and Archelaus. He then led back the army into his province of Syria, but left behind him a body of troops under Lucius Septimius to guard the throne of Auletes, and to check the risings of the Alexandrians. Strabo, Dion lib. xxxix. Lib. xlii. Cicero, pro Rabirio. (61) Gabinius had refused to undertake this affair, which was the more dangerous because against the laws of Rome, unless the large bribe were first paid down in money. He would take no promises; and Auletes, who in his banishment had no money at his command, had to borrow it of some one who would listen to his large promises of after payment. He found this person in Rabirius Posthumus, who had before lent him money, and who saw that it would be all lost unless Auletes regained the throne. Rabirius, therefore, lent him all he was worth, and borrowed the rest from his friends; and as soon as Auletes was on the throne, he went to Alexandria to claim his money and his reward. While Auletes still stood in need of Roman help, and saw the advantage of keeping faith with his foreign creditors, Rabirius was allowed to hold the office of royal diœcetes, or paymaster-general, which was one of great state and profit, and one by which he could in time have repaid himself his loan. He wore a royal robe; the taxes of Alexandria went through his hands; he was indeed master of the city. But when the king felt safe on his throne, he sent away his troublesome creditor, who returned to Rome with the loss of his money, to stand his trial as a state criminal for having lent it. Rabirius had been for a time mortgagee in possession of the revenues of Egypt; and Auletes had felt more indebted for his crown to a Roman citizen than to the senate. But in the dealings of Rome with foreign kings, which were not unlike those of our East India Company with the Indian nabobs, these evils had often before arisen, and at last been made criminal; and Cicero, while Gabinius was tried for treason, de majestate, ad Fratrem, for leading his army out of his province, Rabirius was tried, under the Lex Julia de pecuniis repetundis, Pro Rafor lending money and taking office under Auletes. iii. 1. birio. Josephus, 5. 2. (62) One of the last acts of Gabinius in Syria was to change the form of the Jewish government into an aristocracy, leaving Hyrcanus as the high priest. Wars 1. viii. The Jews thereon began to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, that had been thrown down by Pompey, Wars 1. viii. four hundred and eighty-three years, or after sixtynine weeks of seven years each, since Cyrus had given them permission to return home from captivity, agreeably to the time mentioned in the book of Daniel. (63) Among the prisoners sent to Rome by Gabinius was Timagenes, the son of the king's banker, who probably lost his liberty as a hostage on Ptolemy's failure to repay the loan. But he was afterwards ransomed from slavery by a son of Sylla; and he remained at Rome Ch. ix. 25. Suidas. teaching Greek eloquence in the schools, and writing Epist. 1, 19, his numerous works. Horace speaks of him as the model of a polite writer and declaimer. 15. Bell. Civ. iii. (64) The climate of Egypt is hardly suited to Europeans, and perhaps at no time did the births in the Greek families equal the deaths. That part of the population was kept up by new comers; and latterly the Romans had been coming over to share in the plunder that was there scattered among the ruling class. For some time past Alex-J. Cæsar, andria had been a favourite place of settlement for such Romans as either through their fault or their misfortune were forced to leave their homes. All who were banished for their crimes or who went away to escape from trial, all runaway slaves, all ruined debtors, found a place of safety in Alexandria; and by enrolling themselves in the Egyptian army they joined in bonds of fellowship with thousands like |