Ptolemy Neus Dionysus had by his will left his kingdom to Cleopatra and Ptolemy, his elder daughter and elder son, who, agreeably to the custom of the country, were to marry one another and reign with equal power.  He had sent one copy of his will to Rome, to be lodged in the public treasury, and in it he called upon the Roman people, by all the gods and by the treaties by which they were bound, to see that it was obeyed.  He had also begged them to undertake the guardianship of his son.  The senate voted Pompey tutor to the young king, or governor of Egypt; and the Alexandrians in the third year of his reign sent sixty ships of war to help the great Pompey in his struggle against Julius Caesar for the chief power in Rome.  But Pompey’s power was by that time drawing to an end, and the votes of the senate could give no strength to the weak:  hence the eunuch Pothinus, who had the care of the elder Ptolemy, was governor of Egypt, and his first act was to declare his young pupil king, and to set at nought the will of Auletes, by which Cleopatra was joined with him on the throne.

Cleopatra fled into Syria, and, with a manly spirit which showed what she was afterwards to be, raised an army and marched back to the borders of Egypt, to claim her rights by force of arms.  It was in the fourth year of her reign, when the Egyptian troops were moved to Pelusium to meet her, and the two armies were within a few leagues of one another, that Pompey, who had been the friend of Auletes when the king wanted a friend, landed on the shores of Egypt in distress, and almost alone.  His army had just been beaten at Pharsalia, and he was flying from Caesar, and he hoped to receive from the son the kindness which he had shown to the father.  But gratitude is a virtue little known in palaces, and Ptolemy had been cradled in princely selfishness.  In this civil war between Pompey and Caesar, the Alexandrians would have been glad to be the friends of both, but that was now out of the question; Pompey’s coming made it necessary for them to choose which they should join, and Ptolemy’s council, like cowards, only wished to side with the strong.

[Illustration:  317.jpg PILLAR OF POMPEY AT ALEXANDRIA]

Pothinus the eunuch, Achilles the general, who was a native Egyptian, and Theodotus of Chios, who was the prince’s tutor in rhetoric, were the men by whom the fate of this great Roman was decided.  “By putting him to death,” said Theodotus, “you will oblige Caesar, and have nothing to fear from Pompey;” and he added with a smile, “Dead men do not bite.”  So Achilles and Lucius Septimius, the head of the Roman troops in the Egyptian army, were sent down to the seaside to welcome him, to receive him as a friend, and to murder him.  They handed him out of his galley into their boat, and put him to death on his landing.  They then cut off from his lifeless trunk the head which had been three times crowned with laurels in the capitol; and in that disfigured state the young Ptolemy saw for the first time, and without regret, the face of his father’s best friend.