Thus successful beyond his utmost expectations, Herod returned to Jerusalem. But the secret orders entrusted to the guardian of Mariamne had been again disclosed, and she met his greeting with coldness and aversion, and reproached him bitterly with the murder of her grandfather Hyrcanus. Herod’s anger was deeply roused, but for the present other and more public duties demanded his attention. Bent on the invasion and conquest of Egypt, Octavius passed through Syria and arrived at Ptolemais. Thither Herod went to meet him, presented him with 800 talents, and supplied provisions in great abundance for his troops. This still further conciliated the Roman’s favour, and on his return from Egypt, where the suicide of Antony and Cleopatra removed all obstructions to the reduction of the country to a Roman province, he not only conferred upon him the territory around Jericho, which had been ceded to the late Egyptian queen, but reannexed to his dominions the cities of Gadara, Hippo, and Samaria, together with the maritime towns Gaza, Joppa, and Strato’s Tower[100], B.C. 30. But these successes did little towards compensating the Jewish king for the loss of the affections of Mariamne, who persisted in rejecting his caresses, and reproaching him with his cruelty towards her family. At this juncture the envious Salome suborned the royal cupbearer to accuse the queen of having bribed him to poison his master. This new accusation filled Herod with such rage that he ordered Mariamne’s favourite eunuch to be put to the rack. The wretched man denied all knowledge of the plot, but confessed that the secret orders given to Soemus had excited the queen’s hatred and disgust. Furious at what he deemed a second proof of her infidelity, Herod directed that Soemus should be instantly executed, and arraigned Mariamne before a tribunal of judges on a charge of adultery. The judges, too terrified to do any thing but obey his bidding, pronounced her guilty, and sentenced her to death. But though he had procured her condemnation, the tyrant shrunk from proceeding to her execution. His mother and sister, however, suffered him to have no rest, and so worked upon his feelings that at length he signed the fatal order for her execution, and Mariamne was led forth to die, B.C. 29.