ABSTRACT
Queen Berenice was left by her father's death sole sovereign in Egypt, a woman now well on in life. Cicero, a contemporary, says that she was much beloved by the Alexandrines. The Egyptian coronation of Ptolemy X. did not take place, for some reason, till March 76, and then, strangely enough, not at Memphis, but in Alexandria. A Ptolemy had only one legal wife at a time, and Mahaffy argued from the plural that concubines only were meant, and that Auletes had therefore probably still no legal wife in 76 BC Pshereni-ptah the worldliness which had marked this great family of pontiffs seems to have reached its culmination. Although, according to the law of the Egyptian priesthood, priests should be strictly monogamous, Pshereni-ptah boasts of his "goodly harem". The accession of Ptolemy the Bastard meant a delicate situation between Alexandria and Rome. Rome refused to recognize the new king.
