Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
Probably it was just this consideration thatinduced Caesar not to declare the land formally a province, but to leave the harmless Lagids there; and certainly for this reason the legions stationed in Egypt were not entrusted to a man belonging to the senate or, in other words, to the former government, but this command was, just like the posts of tax-receivers, treated as a menial office.
The citizens of Alexandria had meanwhile placed the crown on the head of Berenice the eldest daughter of the ejected king, and given to her a husband in the person of one of the spiritual princes of Roman Asia, Archelaus the high-priest of Comana, who possessed ambition enough to hazard his secure and respectable position in the hope of mounting the throne of the Lagids.
It is true that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685, and that the Ptolemies, gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so, as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs of the extinct house of the Lagids.
The family of the Seleucids was by no means so enervated as that of the Lagids for instance, and individuals among them were not deficient in valour and ability; they reduced, it may be, one or another of those numerous rebels, pretenders, and intermeddlers to due bounds; but their dominion was so lacking in a firm foundation, that they were unable to impose even a temporary check on anarchy.
The Kingdom of Egypt It still remains that we should glance at the kingdom of Egypt along with the last dependency that remained to it of the extensive acquisitions of the Lagids, the fair island of Cyprus.
Left to depend on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged from the former seats of the Muses by the extinction of the dynasties of Pergamus , Cyrene , Bithynia , and Syria and by the waning splendour of the court of the Lagids moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great, necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes towards Rome.
It is true that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685, and that the Ptolemies, gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so, as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs of the extinct house of the Lagids.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking