But, though much of the trade of the country was lost, though many of the royal works had ceased, though the manufacture of the finer linen had left the country, the digging in the gold mines, the favourite source of wealth to a despot, never ceased. Night and day in the mines near the Golden Berenicê did slaves, criminals, and prisoners of war work without pause, chained together in gangs, and guarded by soldiers, who were carefully chosen for their not being able to speak the language of these unhappy workmen.
The rock which held the gold was broken up into small pieces; when hard it was first made brittle in the fire; the broken stone was then washed to separate the waste from the heavier grains which held the gold; and, lastly, the valuable parts when separated were kept heated in a furnace for five days, at the end of which time the pure gold was found melted into a button at the bottom. But the mines were nearly worn out; and the value of the gold was a very small part of the thirty-five million dollars which they are said to have yielded every year in the reign of Ramses II.
As Auletes felt himself hardly safe upon the throne, his first wish was to get himself acknowledged as king by the Roman senate. For this end he sent to Rome a large sum of money to buy the votes of the senators, and he borrowed a further sum of Rabirius Posthumus, one of the richest farmers of the Roman taxes, which he spent on the same object. But though the Romans never tried to turn him out of his kingdom, he did not get the wished-for decree before he went to Rome in the twenty-fourth year of his reign. But we know nothing of the first years of his reign. A nation must be in a very demoralised state when its history disproves the saying, that the people are happy while their annals are short. There was more virtue and happiness, and perhaps even less bloodshed, with the stir of mind while Ptolemy Soter was at war with Antigonus than during this dull, un-warlike, and vicious time. The king gave himself up to his natural bent for pleasure and debauchery. At times when virtue is uncopied and unrewarded it is usually praised and let alone; but in this reign sobriety was a crime in the eyes of the king, a quiet behaviour was thought a reproach against his irregularities. The Platonic philosopher Demetrius was in danger of being put to death because it was told to the king that he never drank wine, and had been seen at the feast of Bacchus in his usual dress, while every other man was in the dress of a woman. But the philosopher was allowed to disprove the charge of sobriety, or at least to make amends for his fault; and, on the king sending for him the next day, he made himself drunk publicly in the sight of all the court, and danced with cymbals in a loose dress of Tarentine gauze. But so few are the deeds worth mentioning in the falling state that we are pleased even to be told that, in the one hundred and seventy-eighth Olympiad, Strato of Alexandria conquered in the Olympic games and was crowned in the same day for wrestling, and for pancratium, or wrestling and boxing joined, these sports being considered among the most honourable in which athletes could contend.
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 Judæa, 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 Judæa, 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 Judæa. 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 pork, in their washings, and in other Eastern customs, they were like the Egyptians; and hence the Greeks, who thought them both barbarians, very grudgingly yielded to them the privileges of choosing their own magistrates, of having their own courts of justice, and the other rights of citizenship which the policy of the Ptolemies had granted. The Jews, on the other hand, in whose eyes religion was everything, saw the Greeks and Egyptians worshipping the same gods and the same sacred animals, and felt themselves as far above the Greeks in those branches of philosophy which arise out of religion as they were below them in that rank which is gained by success in war. Hence it was with many heartburnings, and not without struggles which shed blood in the streets of Alexandria, that they found themselves, in the years which ushered in the Christian era, sinking down to the level of the Egyptians, and losing one by one the rights of Macedonian citizenship.
During these years Auletes had been losing his friends and weakening his government, and, at last, when he refused to quarrel with the senate about the island of Cyprus, the Egyptians rose against him in arms, and he was forced to fly from Alexandria. He took ship for Rome, and in his way there he met Cato, who was at Rhodes on his voyage to Cyprus. He sent to Cato to let him know that he was in the city, and that he wished to see him. But the Roman sent word back that he was unwell, and that if the king wanted to speak to him he must come himself. This was not a time for Auletes to quarrel with a senator, when he was on his way to Rome to beg for help against his subjects; so he was forced to go to Cato’s lodgings, who did not even rise from his seat when the king entered the room. But this treatment was not quite new to Auletes; in his flight from Alexandria, in disguise and without a servant, he had had to eat brown bread in the cottage of a peasant; and he now learned how much more irksome it was to wait upon the pleasure of a Roman senator. Cato gave him the best advice; that, instead of going to Rome, where he would find that all the wealth of Egypt would be thought a bribe too small for the greediness of the senators whose votes he wanted, he would do better to return to Alexandria, and make peace with his rebellious subjects. 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. The Romans passed a law making that wealthy island a Roman province, no doubt upon the plea of the will of Alexander II. and the king’s illegitimacy; and they sent Cato, rather against his will, to turn Ptolemy out of his kingdom. Ptolemy gave up the island without Cato being called upon to use force, and in return the Romans made him high priest in the temple of the Paphian Venus; but he soon put himself to death by poison. Canidius Crassus, who had been employed by Cato in this affair, may have had some fighting at sea with the Egyptians, as on one of his coins we see on one side a crocodile, and on the other the prow of a ship, as if he had beaten the Egyptian fleet in the mouth of the Nile.