elders (gerontes). The city was located in hostile territory surrounded by inhospitable tribes, and had a turbulent history. The Greek historian Thucydides mentions a siege of the city in 414 BC. by Libyan tribes who were probably the Nasamones. Euesperides was saved by the chance arrival of Spartan general Gylippus and his fleet, who were blown to Libya by contrary winds on their way to Sicily. Another important event in the city's history was the assassination of the Cyrenean king Arcesilaus IV. The King used his chariot victory at the Pythian Games of 462 BC. to attract new settlers to Euesperides, where Arcesilaus hoped to create a safe refuge for himself against the resentment of his own people in Cyrene. This proved totally ineffective, since when the King fled to Euesperides during the anticipated revolution (around 440 BC), he was assassinated, thus terminating the almost two hundred year rule of the Battiad dynasty. Cyrenaica was a supporter of Alexander the Great and subsequently became part of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Later in the 4th century BC, during the unsettling period which followed Alexander's death, the Euesperides backed the losing side in a revolt led by the Spartan adventurer Thibron; he was trying to create an empire for himself, but was defeated by the Cyreneans and their Libyan allies. After the marriage of Ptolemy III to Berenice, daughter of the Cyrenean Governor Magas, around the middle of the 3rd century, many Cyrenaican cities were renamed to mark the occasion. Euesperides became Berenice and the change of name also involved a relocation. Its desertion was probably due to the silting up of the lagoons; Berenice, the place they moved to, lies underneath Benghazi's modern city centre. The Greek colony had lasted from the 6th to the mid-3rd centuries BC. The remains of this settlement were discovered in the early 1950s by Mr. Frank Jowett. Roman settlement Cyrenaica became a Roman province when it was bequeathed to Rome by Ptolemy Apion on his death in 96 BC. At first, the Romans gave Berenice and the other cities of the Pentapolis their freedom. By 78 BC however, Cyrenaica was formally organised as one administrative province together with Crete. It became a senatorial province in 20 BC, like its far more prominent western neighbour Africa proconsularis. The Tetrarchy reforms of Diocletian in 296 changed the administrative structure and Cyrenaica was split into two provinces: Libya Inferior