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Updated: June 11, 2025
Besides Cleopatra and Ptolemy, there were two other children of Ptolemy Auletes in the royal family at this time. One was a girl, named Arsinoë. The other, a boy, was, singularly enough, named, like his brother, Ptolemy.
Pompey had befriended Auletes, and Gabinius, when Proconsul in Syria, had succeeded in restoring the king to his throne no doubt in obedience to Pompey, though not in obedience to the Senate. Auletes, when in Rome, had required large sums of money suppliant kings when in the city needed money to buy venal Senators and Rabirius had supplied him.
Auletes, however, went on to Italy, and he arrived at Rome in the twenty-fourth year of his reign; and in the three years that he spent there in courting and bribing the senators, he learned the truth of Cato's statements, and the value of his advice. His brother Ptolemy, who was reigning in Cyprus, was not even so well treated.
Not long after, in 58 B.C., he fled to Greece, to escape the importunity of his creditors; and at length, after a short time spent in attendance on the philosophers at Athens, found an occasion for displaying some of the better features of his character, in the wars that were being carried on by Gabinius against Aristobulus in Palestine, and in support of Ptolemy Auletes in Egypt.
But the gold of Auletes had already gained the senate; and Cicero spoke, on his behalf, one of his great speeches, now unfortunately lost, in which he rebutted the charge that Auletes was at all to be blamed for the death of Alexander, whom he thought justly killed by his guards for the murder of his queen and kinswoman.
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.
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 Berenicê 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.
Caesar adjudged the kingdom of Egypt, agreeably to the testament of Auletes, to the intermarried brother and sister Cleopatra and Ptolemaeus Dionysus, and further gave unasked the kingdom of Cyprus cancelling the earlier act of annexation as the appanageof the second-born of Egypt to the younger children of Auletes, Arsinoe and Ptolemaeus the younger. Insurrection in Alexandria
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.
Some of them were Roman soldiers, men who had come with the army of Mark Antony from Syria when Ptolemy Auletes, Cleopatra's father, was reinstated on the throne, and had been left in Egypt, in Ptolemy's service, when Antony returned to Rome. Some were native Egyptians.
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