In the thirteenth year of this reign (B.C. 68), when the war against the pirates called for the whole naval force of Rome, Pompey sent a fleet under Lentulus Marcellinus to clear the coast and creeks of Egypt from these robbers.  The Egyptian government was too weak to guard its own trade; and Lentulus in his consulship 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 synagogues with sacred groves, which were clearly forbidden by Moses.  Though they were not guilty of worshipping images, yet they did not think it wrong to have portraits and statues of themselves.  In their dislike of