ria, where he
overthrew the last of the Seleucian kings, Antiochus, and gave him the
little kingdom of Commagene to spend the remainder of his life in, while
Syria and Phoenicia were made into a great Roman province.

Under the Maccabees, Palestine had struggled into being independent of
Syria, but only by the help of the Romans, who, as usual, tried to ally
themselves with small states in order to make an excuse for making war
on large ones. There was now a great quarrel between two brothers of the
Maccabean family, and one of them, Hyrcanus, came to ask the aid of
Pompeius. The Roman army marched into the Holy Land, and, after seizing
the whole country, was three months besieging Jerusalem, which, after
all, it only took by an attack when the Jews were resting on the Sabbath
day. Pompeius insisted on forcing his way into the Holy of Holies, and
was very much disappointed to find it empty and dark. He did not
plunder the treasury of the Temple, but the Jews remarked that, from the
time of this daring entrance, his prosperity seemed to fail him. Before
he left the East, however, old Mithridates, who had taken refuge in the
Crimea, had been attacked by his own favorite son, and, finding that his
power was gone, had taken poison; but, as his constitution was so
fortified by antidotes that it took no effect, he caused one of his
slaves to kill him.

The son submitted to the Romans, and was allowed to reign on the
Bosphorus; but Pompeius had extended the Roman Empire as far as the
Euphrates; for though a few small kings still remained, it was only by
suffrance from the Romans, who had gained thirty-nine great cities.
Egypt, the Parthian kingdom on the Tigris, and Armenia in the mountains,
alone remained free.

While all this was going on in the East, there was a very dangerous plot
contrived at Rome by a man named Lucius Sergius Catilina, and seven
other good-for-nothing nobles, for arming the mob, even the slaves and
gladiators, overthrowing the government, seizing all the offices of
state, and murdering all their opponents, after the example first set by
Marius and Cinna.

[Illustration: MOUNTAINS OF ARMENIA.]

Happily such secrets are seldom kept; one of the plotters told the
woman he was in love with, and she told one of the consuls, Marcus
Tullius Cicero. Cicero was one of the wisest and best men in Rome, and
the one whom we really know the best, for he left a great number of
letters to his friends, which show us