hip put the Ptolemaic eagle and
thunderbolt on his coins, to show that he had exercised an act of
sovereignty. Three years later, we again meet with the eagle and
thunderbolt on the consular coins of Aurelius Cotta; and we learn from
Cicero that in that year it was found necessary to send a fleet to
Alexandria to enforce the orders of the senate.

We next find the Roman senate debating whether they should not seize the
kingdom as their inheritance under the wall of Ptolemy Alexander II.,
but, moved by the bribes of Auletes, and perhaps by other reasons which
we are not told, they forbore to grasp the prize. In this difficulty
Auletes was helped by the great Pompey, to whom he had sent an embassy
with a golden crown wrorth four thousand pieces of gold, which met him
at Damascus on his Syrian campaign. He then formed a secret treaty with
Mithridates, King of Pontus, who was engaged in warfare with the Romans,
their common enemy. Auletes was now a widower with six young children,
and Mithridates had two daughters; and accordingly it was agreed that
one daughter should be married to Auletes, and the other to his brother,
the King of Cyprus. But the ruin and death of Mithridates broke off the
marriages; and Auletes was able to conceal from the Romans that he had
ever formed an alliance with their enemy.

In the year which was made famous by the consulship of Cicero, Jerusalem
was taken by the Roman army under Pompey; and Judaea, which had enjoyed
a shortlived freedom of less than one hundred years under the Maccabees,
was then put under a Roman governor. The fortifications of the temple
were destroyed. This was felt by the Jews of Lower Egypt as a heavy
blow, and from this time their sufferings in that country began. While
their brethren had been lords of Judaea, they had held up their heads
with the Greeks in Alexandria, but upon the fall of Jerusalem they sunk
down to the rank of the Egyptians. They thought worse of themselves,
and they were thought worse of by others. The Egyptian Jews were very
closely allied to the people of the Delta. Though they had been again
and again warned by their prophets not to mix with the Egyptians, they
seem not to have listened to the warning. They were in many religious
points less strict than their brethren in Judaea. The living in Egypt,
the building a second temple, and the using a Greek Bible, were all
breaches, if not of the law, at least of the tradition. They surrounded
their synag