The orders of Sulla, the Roman dictator, were of course obeyed; and the young Alexander landed at Alexandria, as King of Egypt and the friend of Rome. He married Berenice; and on the nineteenth day of his reign, with a cruelty unfortunately too common in this history, he put her to death. The marriage had been forced upon him by the Romans, who ordered all the political affairs of the kingdom; but, as they took no part in the civil or criminal affairs, he seems to have been at liberty to murder his wife. But Alexander was hated by the people as a king thrust upon them by foreign arms; and Berenice, whatever they might have before thought of her, was regretted as the queen of their choice. Hence his crime met with its reward. His own guards immediately rose upon him; they dragged him from the palace to the gymnasium, and there put him to death. Though the Romans had already seized the smaller kingdom of Cyrene under the will of Ptolemy Apion, they could not agree among themselves upon the wholesale robbery of taking Egypt under the will which Alexander had made in their favour. They seized, however, a paltry sum of money which he had left at Tyre as a place of safety; and it was a matter of debate for many years afterwards in Rome, whether they should not claim the kingdom of Egypt. But the nobles of Rome, who sold their patronage to kings for sums equal to the revenues of provinces, would have lost much by handing the kingdom over to the senate. Hence the Egyptian monarchy was left standing for two reigns longer. On the death of Ptolemy Alexander, the Alexandrians might easily have changed their weak and wicked rulers, and formed a government for themselves, if they had known how. The legitimate male line of the Ptolemies came to an end on the death of the young Alexander II. The two natural sons of Soter II. were then the next in succession; and, as there was no other claimant, the crown fell to the elder. He was young, perhaps even a minor under the age of fourteen. His claims had been wholly overlooked at the death of his father; for though by the Egyptian law every son was held to be equally legitimate, it was not so by the Macedonian law. He took the name of Neus Dionysus, or the young Osiris, as we find it written in the hieroglyphics, though he is usually called Auletes, _the piper_; a name afterwards given him because he was more proud of his skill in playing on the flute than of his very slender knowledge of the art of governing.