The state of breathless excitement, in which the revolution kept the Roman government by perpetually renewing the alarm of fire and the cry to quench it, made them lose sight of provincial matters generally; and that most of all in the case of the Asiatic lands, whose remote and unwarlike nations did not thrust themselves so directly on the attention of the government as Africa, Spain, and its Transalpine neighbours.  After the annexation of the kingdom of Attalus, which took place contemporaneously with the outbreak of the revolution, for a whole generation there is hardly any evidence of Rome taking a serious part in Oriental affairs—­with the exception of the establishment of the province of Cilicia in 652,(1) to which the Romans were driven by the boundless audacity of the Cilician pirates, and which was in reality nothing more than the institution of a permanent station for a small division of the Roman army and fleet in the eastern waters.  It was not till the downfall of Marius in 654 had in some measure consolidated the government of the restoration, that the Roman authorities began anew to bestow some attention on the events in the east

Cyrene Romans

In many respects matters still stood as they had done thirty years ago.  The kingdom of Egypt with its two appendages of Cyrene and Cyprus was broken up, partly de jure, partly de facto, on the death of Euergetes ii (637).  Cyrene went to his natural son, Ptolemaeus Apion, and was for ever separated from Egypt.  The sovereignty of the latter formed a subject of contention between the widow of the last king Cleopatra (665), and his two sons Soter ii Lathyrus (673) and Alexander I (666); which gave occasion to Cyprus also to separate itself for a considerable period from Egypt.  The Romans did not interfere in these complications; in fact, when the Cyrenaean kingdom fell to them in 658 by the testament of the childless king Apion, while not directly rejecting the acquisition, they left the country in substance to itself by declaring the Greek towns of the kingdom, Cyrene, Ptolemais, and Berenice, free cities and even handing over to them the use of the royal domains.  The supervision of the governor of Africa over this territory was from its remoteness merely nominal, far more so than that of the governor of Macedonia over the Hellenic free cities.  The consequences of this measure—­which beyond doubt originated not in Philhellenism, but simply in the weakness and negligence of the Roman government—­ were substantially similar to those which had occurred under the like circumstances in Hellas; civil wars and usurpations so rent the land that, when a Roman officer of rank accidentally made his appearance there in 668, the inhabitants urgently besought him to regulate their affairs and to establish a permanent government among them.