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. So far as the Alexandrines and Egyptians were concerned, there would probably have been no objection to her continuing to rule as queen, without any associated king, though even Cleopatra III. had been compelled to associate one or other of her sons with herself on the throne. The only legitimate male representative of the royal house was, as we have seen, the young Ptolemy Alexander. He was now no longer in the hands of Mithridates. After a residence at the Pontic court, where the king, his cousin, had given him an education fitting a Hellenistic prince, he had escaped to the camp of Sulla, and gone with Sulla to Rome. When Soter II. died (80) Sulla was Dictator and master of the Roman world. Sulla, thinking it no doubt good policy to establish a protege of his own upon the Egyptian throne, dispatched Ptolemy Alexander, with the authority of Rome to back him, to Alexandria. It was arranged that Ptolemy X. (Alexander II.) should marry his elderly widowed cousin, queen Berenice. She was not likely, as the wife of a boy, to give up the power to which she had become accustomed after twenty years. Within three weeks the young man found his situation intolerable and took the course, obvious to any young king who understood his business, of having Berenice assassinated. But he had miscalculated. The Alexandrines were exceedingly angry at having their queen taken in this way from them. So angry were they that they dragged the young Ptolemy then and there to the great Gymnasium and killed him. But then they were faced by an awkward situation. There were no more legitimate descendants of Ptolemy, son of Lagus, except Selene and the Seleucid princes who had Ptolemaic blood.
