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 to Egypt and marry Berenice.  He was low-minded in all his pleasures and tastes, and got the nickname of Cybiosactes, the scullion.  He was even said to have stolen the golden sarcophagus in which the body of Alexander was buried; and was so much disliked by his young wife that she had him strangled on the fifth day after their marriage.  Berenice then married Archelaus, a son of Mithridates Eupator, King of Pontus; and she had reigned one year with her sister and two years with her husbands when the Roman army brought back her father, Ptolemy Auletes, into Egypt.

Gabinius, on marching, gave out as an excuse for quitting the province entrusted to him by the senate, that it was in self-defence; and that Syria was in danger from the Egyptian fleet commanded by Archelaus.  He was accompanied by a Jewish army under the command of Antipator, sent by Hyrcanus, whom the Romans had just made governor of Judaea.  Mark Antony was sent forward with the horse, and routed the Egyptian army near Pelusium, and then entered the city with Auletes.  The king, in the cruelty of his revenge, wished to put the citizens to the sword, and was only stopped by Antony’s forbidding it.  The Egyptian army was at this time in the lowest state of discipline; it was the only place where the sovereign was not despotic.  The soldiers, who prized the lawlessness of their trade even more than its pay, were a cause of fear only to their fellow-citizens.  When Archelaus led them out against the Romans, and ordered them to throw up a trench around their camp, they refused to obey; they said that ditch-making was not work for soldiers, but that it ought to be done at the cost of the state.  Hence, when on this first success Gabinius followed with the body of the army, he easily conquered the rest of the country and put to death Berenice and Archelaus.  He then led back the army into his province of Syria, but left behind him a body of troops under Lucius Septimius to guard the throne of Auletes and to check the risings of the Alexandrians.