Crete and Cyrenaica Crete and Cyrenaica Crete and Cyrenaica () was a senatorial province of the Roman Empire, established in 67 BCE. It comprised the island of Crete and the region of Cyrenaica in present-day Libya. Ptolemy Apion, the last king of the Hellenistic Kingdom of Cyrenaica left his kingdom to the Roman Republic when he died childless in 96 BCE. Rome readily accepted this inheritance from Ptolemy Apion but preferred to leave the administration to local rulers, rather than enforcing direct control. However, by the 70s BCE, civil uprisings by Jewish settlers began to destabilise the province and the Senate was forced
Tripoli passed into the hands of the rulers of Cyrenaica (a Greek colony on the North African shore, east of Tripoli, halfway to Egypt), although the Carthaginians later wrested it from the Greeks. By the latter half of the 2nd century BC it belonged to the Romans, who included it in their province of Africa, and gave it the name of "Regio Syrtica". Around the beginning of the 3rd century AD, it became known as the Regio Tripolitana, meaning "region of the three cities", namely Oea ("i.e.", modern Tripoli), Sabratha and Leptis Magna. It was probably raised to the rank of