year, the task of replacing Auletes on the throne.

This high employment was then sought for both by Lentulus and by Pompey.
The senate at first leaned 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, as his
friend and guest, and would have got orders 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.

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 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 Baiae,
and wrote to Lentulus, the proconsul of Cilicia and Cyprus, strongly
urging him to snatch the glory of replacing Auletes on the throne, and
of being the patron of the King of Egypt. But Lentulus seems not to have
chosen to run the risk of so far breaking the laws of his country.

Auletes then went, with pressing letters from Pompey, to Gabinius, the
proconsul of Syria, and offered him the large bribe of ten thousand
talents, or seven and a half million dollars, if he would lead the Roman
army into Egypt, and replace him on the 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.

While Auletes had been thus pleading his cause at Rome and with the
army, Cleopatra Tryphaena, 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 and of Selene, the sister of Lathyrus, to come
t