Syria, Aulus Gabinius,
now obtained orders from those in power to take the necessary steps
immediately for bringing back the king. 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,(29) who possessed ambition enough
to hazard his secure and respectable position in the hope of mounting
the throne of the Lagids. His attempts to gain the Roman regents
to his interests remained without success; but he did not recoil
before the idea of being obliged to maintain his new kingdom
with arms in hand even against the Romans.

And Brought Back by Gabinius
A Roman Garrison Remains in Alexandria

Gabinius, without ostensible powers to undertake war against Egypt
but directed to do so by the regents, made a pretext out of
the alleged furtherance of piracy by the Egyptians and the building
of a fleet by Archelaus, and started without delay for the Egyptian
frontier (699). The march through the sandy desert between Gaza
and Pelusium, in which so many invasions previously directed
against Egypt had broken down, was on this occasion successfully
accomplished--a result especially due to the quick and skilful
leader of the cavalry Marcus Antonius. The frontier fortress
of Pelusium also was surrendered without resistance by the Jewish
garrison stationed there. In front of this city the Romans met
the Egyptians, defeated them--on which occasion Antonius again
distinguished himself--and arrived, as the first Roman army,
at the Nile. Here the fleet and army of the Egyptians were drawn up
for the last decisive struggle; but the Romans once more conquered,
and Archelaus himself with many of his followers perished
in the combat. Immediately after this battle the capital surrendered,
and therewith all resistance was at an end. The unhappy land
was handed over to its legitimate oppressor; the hanging and beheading,
with which, but for the intervention of the chivalrous Antonius,
Ptolemaeus would have already in Pelusium begun to celebrate
the restoration of the legitimate government, now took its course
unhindered, and first of all the innocent daughter was sent
by her father to the scaffold. The payment of the reward agreed
upon with the regents broke down through the absolute impossibility
of exacting from the exhausted land the enormous su