That winter Lucullus left his army at Nisibis and, taking a small, but apparently highly mobile, escort, journeyed to Syria in an attempt to permanently exclude Tigranes from all his southern possessions. Syria had been an Armenian province since 83 BC. About a decade later the dispossessed Seleucid princes had spent two years in Rome (one of them probably during Lucullus's consulship in 74 BC) lobbying the Senate and Roman aristocracy to make them (as legitimate Seleucids with a Ptolemaic mother) kings of Egypt in place of the illegitimate Ptolemy XII Auletes. Though these brothers left Rome empty handed in about 72 BC, their plight was not forgotten and Lucullus now elevated one of them as king of Syria: Antiochus XIII, known as "Asiaticus" owing to the time he had spent living in Roman Asia province. Lucullus' old friend Antiochus of Ascalon accompanied him on this journey and died at Antioch.