beside eighty talents of silver.  Lucullus, however, would take nothing beyond his expenses, and returned the gifts, which were meant as a civil refusal of the fleet; and, having failed in his embassy, he sailed hastily for Cyprus, leaving the wonders of Egypt unvisited.  Lathyrus sent a fleet of honour to accompany him on his voyage, and gave him his portrait cut in an emerald.  Mithridates was soon afterwards conquered by the Romans; and it was only by skilful embassies and well-timed bribes that Lathyrus was able to keep off the punishment which seemed to await him for having thus disobeyed the orders of Sulla.  Egypt was then the only kingdom, to the west of Persia, that had not yet bowed its neck under the Roman yoke.

The coins of Lathyrus are not easily or certainly known from those of the other Ptolemies; but those of his second wife bear her head on the one side, with the name of “Queen Selene,” and on the other side the eagle, with the name of “King Ptolemy.”

[Illustration:  280.jpg COIN OF Ptolemy Lathyrus AND SELENE.]

He had before reigned ten years with his mother, and after his brother’s death he reigned six years and a half more, but, as he counted the years that he had reigned in Cyprus, he died in the thirty-seventh year of his reign.  He left a daughter named Berenice, and two natural sons, each named Ptolemy, one of whom reigned in Cyprus, and the other, nicknamed Auletes, the piper, afterwards gained the throne of Egypt.

On the death of Lathyrus, or Ptolemy Soter II., his daughter Cleopatra Berenice, the widow of Ptolemy Alexander, mounted the throne of Egypt in B.C. 80; but it was also claimed by her stepson, the young Alexander, who was then living in Rome.  Alexander had been sent to the island of Cos, as a place of safety, when his grandmother Cleopatra Cocce followed her army into Coele-Syria.  But, as the Egyptians had lost the command of the sea, the royal treasure in Cos was no longer out of danger, and the island was soon afterwards taken by Mithridates, King of Pontus, who had conquered Asia Minor.  Among the treasures in that island the Alexandrians lost one of the sacred relics of the kingdom, the chlamys or war-cloak which had belonged to Alexander the Great, and which they had kept with religious care as the safeguard of the empire.  It then fell into the hands of Mithridates, and on his overthrow it became the prize of Pompey, who wore it in his triumph at the end of the Mithridatic war.  With this chlamys, as had always been foretold by the believers in wonders, Egypt lost its rank among nations, and the command of the world passed to the Romans, who now possessed this time-worn symbol of sovereignty.