CHAPTER IV

PTOLEMAIC EGYPT

I.

THE CONDITIONS CONFRONTING THE PTOLEMIES

 

THE political history of Egypt as one of the new Hellenistic monarchies is set forth elsewhere. The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the administration, the economic, social and religious life of Egypt during the three centuries which separate the appointment of Ptolemy son of Lagus as satrap (upon the death of Alexander) from the annexation by Augustus. This task is easier than the corresponding study of the Seleucid Empire, for Egypt is comparatively rich in literary, epigraphic, papyrological and archaeological material; but it must not be forgotten that even for Egypt our sources are not really abundant and are most unequally distributed. Literary data are as haphazard as for the rest of the Hellenistic world and are almost confined to the third century BC; inscriptions, whether Greek or Egyptian, are poorer both in number and content than in other contemporary countries in which the Greek city-state prevailed as the mould of social life; of the towns and villages of Hellenistic Egypt not one has been systematically excavated—in Alexandria such excavation is impossible—and therefore archaeological material is scanty and scattered; finally, the papyri, whether Greek or demotic, are comparatively few for the Ptolemaic period and the light they throw upon the several centuries and the several sides of life is most uneven. After the reigns of Ptolemy II and III, of which they tell us most, there is a comparative lack of evidence until Ptolemy VIII, and then the light fails us again. Moreover,most of the papyri come from the villages in the Fayum and reflect the life of Egypt as a whole no more than that of England would be reflected in the official documents and letters of a group of villages in Kent or Somerset. The reader must therefore bear in mind that the generalizations in this chapter are, of necessity, based upon hypothesis and reconstruction. There is no single detail of Egyptian life of which we can claim exact and final knowledge.Every new publication of papyri, every new inscription raises new problems and sheds light upon the old, every important aspect of Egyptian life is still, and will long be, under discussion.

The problem which faced the Ptolemies in Egypt was no easy one. A country with strong traditions reaching back thousands of years with a fixed and systematic civilization regulating administration, religion, social and economic life had to be reorganized upon new principles and to new purposes. These new principles and purposes were due to new conditions which prevailed in the fourth century. The political collapse of the Greek-polis had made Greeks ready to go anywhere and to do anything, to live outside ;the setting of a city-state. They were willing to go to Egypt and Egypt was ready to receive them. Even in the Saite period, and still more in the sixty years of independence between the two Persian dominations, Egypt had begun to adapt itself to a new order. The effort to secure its independence compelled it to enter the concert of fourth-century powers and link itself closely with the Greek world, which meant a recasting of its internal life, in fact ;an incipient hellenization. In this direction, foreshadowing the policy of the Ptolemies, the Pharaohs of the Twenty-eighth to the Thirtieth Dynasties went far. They admitted into Egypt both Greek mercenaries and Greek traders to meet emergencies which had evoked a strong nationalist sentiment, but they failed to solve the problem how to establish an acceptable modus vivendi for the immigrants and the native Egyptians while reserving for the latter political and social superiority.

A second fact which conditioned Ptolemaic policy was that Egypt was part of the short-lived empire of Alexander. For twenty years the first Ptolemy ruled it not in his own name as king but as satrap in the name of the central authority. During that period of chaos and struggle between the claimants for Alexander’s heritage, Ptolemy was pre-occupied with the confirmation of his own position in Egypt and the creation of an army and fleet strong enough to secure to him not only independence but also his due share in the affairs of the empire. For him therefore a strong army and fleet was a matter of life and death. And so it remained even in later times when, after the battle of Ipsus (301 BC), a so-called balance of power was established in the Hellenistic world, that is, a political order in which the only guarantee of independence was military power and military preparedness. The only army on which Ptolemy could safely rely was an army of Macedonians and Greek mercenaries with a staff of officers schooled in the ancient military tradition of Greece. The technical superiority of such an army had been proved by the campaigns both of Alexander and of the Successors. Contingents of orientals were neither sufficiently trained nor sufficiently loyal for any monarch to use them as the main support of his power or as a counterpoise to Macedonians and Greeks, still less to rely upon them entirely and discard the Greeks. It might have been possible for Alexander, unchallenged master of a world-empire, to educate Persians in the Macedonian art of war, to overcome the resistance of Macedonians and Greeks and to bring about a fusion of races and civilizations. But Alexander was dead, and the Successors, hurried into conflicts, dared not face the long and hazardous experiment of attempting to create an army out of native levies. They were forced to rely upon their Graeco-Macedonian armies and to ensure faithful service and a supply of recruits by giving to their soldiers a position of privilege secured to them as a right.

Besides troops they needed money, and the vast sums demanded by their warlike policies could not be obtained from countries which in the main had not advanced beyond natural economy. The necessary economic reorganization could be directed by none but Greeks and was only made possible by the entry of Greek capital and Greek men of business. These were not in the least likely to be satisfied with a modest position and rights on the same level as the native population. Thus Ptolemy Soter in Egypt and Seleucus in the East, and likewise their successors, were forced to open wide the doors of their empires to the Macedonians and Greeks, both soldiers and civilians, to secure to them in various ways the possibility of living in the new country after the Greek fashion and to guarantee to them privilege and dominance.

The new capital, Alexandria, was the centre of the new social influences that poured into the country. Here dwelt the king with his court, his guards, his general staff and his ministers. In the Museum and the Library the leading intellects of Greece, philosophers, scholars, writers, worked together to lay the foundations of a new epoch. Splendid commercial possibilities attracted a host of Greek traders and manufacturers, while the growth of the city as the economic centre of Egypt created a numerous lower middle class, petty traders, artisans and the like and an international proletariate mostly Greek. But in opening their doors to Greeks and Macedonians the Ptolemies did not exclude other peoples. There arose in Alexandria communities of immigrants from the East—Syrians, Anatolians, and above all Jews—in social structure not greatly unlike those of the Greeks and Macedonians. Add to these an ever-increasing native Egyptian element and laves captured in war or imported from Asia or Africa and it will be seen how heterogeneous was the capital of the Ptolemaic kingdom.

Not less mixed was the population of the ‘country’. Ever since Saite times Greeks had been domiciled in Egypt partly in the Greek cities Naucratis and perhaps Paraetonium, partly in the larger Egyptian towns such as Memphis and perhaps Thebes. Anatolians, Jews and Syrians entered in growing numbers after the Persian conquest together with many so-called ‘Persians,’ soldiers, officials, tax-farmers and the like. With the coming of Alexander the influx of foreigners increased. Graeco-Macedonian garrisons were posted at the chief strategic points. In southern Egypt Ptolemy Soter founded Ptolemais to be a counterpoise to the ancient Thebes as Alexandria was the counterpoise to Memphis. Throughout all Egypt, as will be seen, soldiers were settled on plots of land, and everywhere appeared Greek and Macedonian officials, while in the quasi-cities and villages of Egypt there settled Greek and Oriental traders, artisans and husbandmen.

All this foreign population was of course a mere superstructure. The foundation was still, as it had ever been, the Egyptians. Of the fate of the native aristocracy after Alexander our documents have hardly anything to say. But the temples continued to be the centres of religious life, with their numerous priesthood and its stable organization, with their traditional mode of life going back thousands of years. The land was in the occupation of millions of peasants dwelling in thousands of villages. Handicrafts and trades in the towns and villages remained in the hands of hundreds of guilds of artisans and traders. Although we have no definite statistics there can be no doubt that the native population numbered millions, the immigrants thousands, that the natives had a firmly settled tradition of life, while the immigrants, torn from their own environment, could only slowly and gradually build up a new system under new conditions.

The fundamental problem of Ptolemy I, as of Seleucus in his Empire, and of Ptolemy’s successors was to reorganize their Oriental states upon new principles, taking into account the strength and stubbornness of local traditions, the feelings and dispositions of their new subjects, while always remembering that the chief bulwark of their rule and the agents of their policy were not the native elements but the new ruling class in their states, the Greeks, Macedonians and other foreigners.

 

II.

 THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PTOLEMIES’ POWER IN RIGHT AND PRACTICE

 

The Ptolemies’ title to Egypt was the right of conquest. It was their ‘land won by the spear’; economically, their private estate; and it was entirely within their power to concede their right of ownership either temporarily or permanently to particular persons or groups and corporations. But if their power was to be permanent, they must be sure of the active support or at least of the passive acquiescence of the population. Apart from the fact of conquest and inheritance from Alexander their power needed a legitimate basis and recognition on the part of the army, the Greeks and the Egyptians. As to the army, the Ptolemies were in supreme command of it; the troops were bound to obey them within the limits set by military discipline. Further, as the army was essentially a paid force, the bond was not only military but economic. How strong and permanent the bond, whether military or economic, actually was, is nard to say, for we know scarcely anything of the internal constitution of the army, the rights and obligations of the soldiers and officers, its military discipline, its religion. Officially the regular army claimed, as we shall see later, to be the Macedonian army under the command of the Macedonian king. It was natural that from time to time it should show a disposition to follow Macedonian tradition in taking an active part in the political life of the country, particularly in settling the succession to the throne. Whether this right was at all times enjoyed by the army, or only occasionally in times of trouble and disorder, we cannot tell. This at any rate is beyond doubt, that the army’s loyalty rested mainly upon two supports: its economic dependence upon the king and its privileged position in the life of the country.

The same factors secured to the Ptolemies the loyal support of the non-Egyptian immigrant population. The outer expression of this loyalty was the cult of the kings. This cult was founded upon the cult of Alexander, recognized even in the time of Ptolemy Soter as the official cult not only of Alexandria but of the whole Greek population of Egypt, and upon the divine honours rendered unofficially to Ptolemy I and his successors both by their Greek allies and by their Greek subjects.

But these material and religious bonds between themselves and the Greek population were not enough for the Ptolemies. Like their Macedonian and Syrian rivals they endeavoured to provide ;their power with a philosophical basis. It is due to no mere chance that just at this time there appear one after another treatises upon kingship. Each in their own version, Peripatetics, Stoics and Neopythagoreans, repeat the same theory of the power of one man—the best; and of the rights and, to a much larger degree, of the duties of the best man towards the population. This idea was adopted completely by the Ptolemies. In their own eyes, as in the eyes of the Greek population, they were ‘ Saviours ’ and ‘ Benefactors,’ devoting their cares to the good of their country, promoters of justice, patrons of the sciences and arts, generous employers and paymasters of the Hellenes and especially of their soldiers, sturdy defenders of their country against enemies, courteous and civil in their daily intercourse with other citizens, devoted worshippers of the immortals—in a word, true kings and no tyrants. Demetrius of Phalerum insistently counselled Ptolemy I to steep himself in such ideas by the careful study of philosophical treatises on the ‘ kingly power,’ and there is no doubt that this was what Ptolemy Soter and all his successors gave out as their attitude. We have definite evidence of this in the idylls of Theocritus, in a lately discovered political treatise of the third century BC, in the ethico-political discussion at the banquet of Greeks and Jews described in the Epistle of the so-called Aristeas, and in many phrases and expressions that occur in the Ptolemies’ orders and instructions to their officials.

More difficult was it for the Ptolemies to find a formula for their power acceptable to Egypt, its priests and its millions of common people. Officially, the Ptolemies were a new dynasty of Pharaohs. The cult of them as gods and sons of the gods became part of the official cult as practised in thousands of great and small temples throughout Egypt. Philadelphus, the second Ptolemy, already adopted in full the ritual style of Pharaoh.

Philadelphus and all his successors did their best to give to these ancient forms a real content, so as to become in the consciousness of the natives the successors of the Pharaohs. History does not concern itself with what the Ptolemies as men thought of this deification of their personalities—whether they smiled when on the walls of the temples they saw themselves in the Egyptian ritual garb with the Double Crown upon their heads. As kings they took this deification seriously. Who can tell whether even they did not feel the glamour of their new subjects’ ancient and enthusiastic religiosity; whether they, or at least some of them, did not almost come to believe that some deep esoteric meaning was enshrined in the ancient and mysterious religion of Egypt? However this may be, the important thing is that officially they accepted the Egyptian religion in all its entirety and never attempted to hellenize or modify it in the least. If some hellenizing of certain forms in Egyptian religiosity did occur, it came about of itself as many non-Egyptians became enthusiastic adherents of the Egyptian gods and created for themselves a hellenized version of their cult and hellenized forms for their representations.

The bond between the State and religion that had existed in Egypt from the beginning the Ptolemies did nothing to break; they even strengthened it, ever seeking to be on the best of terms with the hierarchy. But, when all was done, the Egyptian population never in its heart identified them with the real Pharaohs and never recognized Alexandria as the true capital of Egypt. They continued to regard the Ptolemies as foreigners and to dream of a national king with Memphis as his capital. Under Ptolemy III the prophecy of the ‘Potter’ (as a matter of fact the god Khnum) speaks undisguisedly of the ‘coast town’ yielding its pre-eminence to Memphis and of the return thither of the Good Genius, the Agathos Daimon. Under Philopator the so-called Demotic chronicle speaks of a ‘Heracleopolite who should bear rule after the foreigners and Ionians.’ It was not for nothing that the appearance of these prophecies coincided with active opposition on the part of the native population and with insurrections, of which we shall speak later. All this shows that the Egyptians never recognized the Ptolemies as their national kings and never settled down to be their loyal subjects. Too great was the contrast between theory and actuality: between the theoretical Pharaohs and the actual foreign lord, the chief of the intrusive masters who behaved in Egypt as in their spear-won land.

Ptolemies and Seleucids may have thought that in course of time fusion by hellenization would come of itself. But in this they were mistaken. No such fusion occurred. The Greek population proved unable to hellenize the spirit of the East. Hellenization of certain forms of life and administration was attained; but in spirit the new immigrants were gradually assimilated by the ancient oriental civilization: their general psychology under new conditions assumed a new character neither purely Eastern nor yet purely Greek.

 

III.

ADMINISTRATION: EGYPT

 

In the actual administration of Egypt the Ptolemies never created such a strict and elaborate system as the Romans did later. The king is the owner of Egypt. His chief assistants in the task of administration are for the most part literally the members of his own household with whom again are closely connected their own households and their agents. To draw a definite line between the public and private activities of one of these members of the Ptolemies’ household is occasionally no easy matter. Gradually the Ptolemies’ household develops into their court, organized partly on the model of the Macedonian court, partly on that of the Persian and Egyptian courts with a whole series of titles, the king’s ‘kinsmen’ (and the men who were reckoned their equals, isotimoi), his ‘first friends’ (and their isotimoi), his ‘senior bodyguard,’ and the merely ‘friends of the king’: further there are the so-called ‘successors’ (diadochoi) and the purely court officials, carvers, butlers, grooms and such like with an establishment of ‘royal pages,’ and so on. The same change into ‘courts’ also gradually happens to the ‘households’ of the king’s nearest assistants and friends. An admirable example is furnished by the complicated organization of the ‘household’ or ‘court’ of Apollonius, Minister of finance to Ptolemy Philadelphus, well known to us from the correspondence of his closest assistant Zeno. The court of Apollonius with the secretary and his office, the treasurer, the manager of the household, the managers of the estates, the physicians, the managers of the shipping, the managers of the palaestra, dozens of agents without definite titles, hundreds of servants, free and slaves, among them musicians and dancing girls, all together gives some idea of what the household and court of Ptolemy Philadelphus himself were like; of this some details may be found also in the ;Epistle of the so-called Aristeas. Such ‘courts’ dependent on the courts of the Ptolemies were numbered probably at least by dozens.

The chief posts at the Ptolemies’ court were naturally held by the men who in the king’s name commanded the army and fleet or managed the economic and financial administration. We hear of officers who commanded in war, but the permanent hierarchy of generals and admirals escapes our knowledge; except the existence of a War Minister, the ‘Secretary for armed forces,’ who dealt with the enrolment and pay of soldiers and the allotment to them of lands. We know more of the organization of the army itself, especially in the reigns of Philadelphus, Euergetes I and Philopator. The Royal Guards stationed in or near Alexandria consisted mainly of Macedonians, and the heavy infantry of the line was drilled on the Macedonian model. It was divided into battalions—chiliarchies, numbered first, second, third, and so on. The light infantry consisted of peltasts and hypaspists. There were also separate formations of Cretans, Thracians and Galatians with their national armament and tactics. The cavalry was organized in the same way. There are numbered hipparchies of heavy horse and light cavalry units named after the peoples from whom they were recruited. We hear of Thracians, Thessalians, Medes and Persians. These forces made up the standing army, predominantly Macedonian and Greek in training and tradition.

The one addition which the Wars of the Successors had introduced was the use of squadrons of elephants protected by armour. Most of these elephants were African, and the catching and training of them was organized on a great scale by the Ptolemies, especially by Philadelphus. Side by side with the standing army, forces of mere mercenaries were sometimes taken into service. The native Egyptian militia—the machimoi—a survival from the Pharaohs, was in ordinary campaigns relegated to the service of transport. In critical moments they might be used as a reserve, but they were definitely regarded as of inferior value, and, as we have seen, they were not permanently trusted as part of the military machine.

It was therefore the task of the Ptolemies to attract to Egypt and to maintain there a supply of Greeks and Macedonians, bound to themselves by a firm bond of loyalty and interest. In time of war the soldiers of the regular army received pay and rations; what was needed was a retaining fee in times of peace. This was provided by making to them allotments of land (kleroi), near which lodgings(stathmoi) were provided for themselves and their families, either separate houses or permanent billets on the native population. In peace they followed their own occupations on the land, in wartime they were mobilized and reported in full equipment to their several units. Military service naturally became hereditary; this was encouraged by the Ptolemies, and possibly was made a condition of the assignment of lands. Soldiers of the younger generation were technically called epigonoi, ‘cadets,’ and usually were trained in garrisons. After this, according to the theory which the writer regards as the most probable (the question is far from settled), they passed into the ‘cadet’ class (epigone) and waited for vacancies to enable them to become regular soldiers. A soldier’s son might become himself a soldier during his father’s lifetime and so become co-tenant of his father’s allotment; or he might succeed to his father both as soldier and land-holder. There thus arose a class of soldier-husbandmen (klerouchoi, later katoikoi) who held the same plot of land from generation to generation. The allotments varied in size according to the arm to which the soldier belonged and to the rank of the soldier, and similar though smaller allotments were assigned to the native militia.

This system secured to the Ptolemies the cadres of a standing army of trained soldiers, the immense majority Greek or Macedonian in origin, or sufficiently hellenized. They were broken in to military discipline from their childhood, and it was assumed that with their mothers’ milk they imbibed the deepest devotion to the dynasty to which they owed their prosperity and their privileged position. The Greeks despised the Egyptians, whose military value was assessed by their smaller holdings, but in a very short time this army of klerouchoi, as always happens to soldiers settled on the land, lost their fine fighting quality and caught the spirit of its despised colleagues, the Egyptian machimoi. Nor did they remain sufficiently numerous, for as the supply of tilled or untilled land for allotment was exhausted, the size of the allotments was perforce reduced, and it became impossible to attract recruits from abroad. Mercenaries became scarcer and scarcer in the second-century market, and the only resource left to the Ptolemies was to accept for their army more and more of the native populations whose loyalty, as well as their fighting quality, was more than doubtful.

Of the fleet we know less even than of the army. To judge by recently discovered evidence, there was a king’s fleet as a nucleus, supplemented by hired ships or squadrons, perhaps Egyptian ships with hired Greek crews. Part of the nucleus fleet was built at the king’s expense, and sailors and rowers who served on these were Egyptian fellahin and galley-slaves, the marines apparently Egyptian machimoi. The remainder of the king’s fleet was supplied by the rich men of Alexandria and of Greek and Phoenician cities on the principle of the Greek trierarchy which Alexander had applied during his time in India. We may assume that the trierarchs found crews for these ships, both marines, sailors and oarsmen. Service in the fleet, whether on the men-of-war or the merchantmen, whether on the sea or on the Nile, was hard labour in the worst sense for the people of Egypt. It is true that in the second century we find naval klerouchoi, but there were also regular press-gangs for the naval service as well as to provide the men sent to catch elephants in the jungles of Central Africa.

Besides organizing both an army and a fleet, the Ptolemies devoted themselves to building up a smooth-working and efficient administration of the country1. Of this, as of the army and fleet, the king was head. His power, being doubly divine, was unbounded. His commands had the force of law and he was the one and only authority which issued laws binding upon the whole population of Egypt. In the last resort it was from the king that proceeded those constitutions and city-laws which authorized the few Greek cities of Egypt and the national associations of non-Egyptian communities outside the cities to enjoy a certain amount of self-government. The legislative and regulating activity of the king was quite unlimited. Such petty matters as the enrolment of a young Macedonian in the garrison of a different town from that to which he had been assigned, or the payment of arrears of salary to inferior priests, any trifle just out of the normal, might sometimes come directly up to the king and be settled by his rescript. There was also much use made of personal audiences granted by the king either at Alexandria or on his numerous progresses through the country. In attendance upon the king, both to keep a register of his orders and decisions and to carry on his voluminous diplomatic and general correspondence, there were of course special secretaries with large staffs under them: we can judge how big the secretariate was by the number of secretaries who followed the journeys of Apollonius, Minister of Finance to Ptolemy Philadelphus. We can see from a document in Zeno’s correspondence that the secretariate worked by night as well as day. All the king’s acts were registered after Alexander’s tradition in a special palace journal; a special secretary (hypomnematographos) looked after it. Another secretary (epistolographos) directed the king’s correspondence. His closest assistant in the administration of justice was the Chief Justice (archidikastes), whose duties are not at all clear to us. He probably appointed, with the king’s assent, the king’s justices on circuit who decided matters according to Greek law (chrematistai), and the members of the royal courts of justice in various localities, who settled the affairs of the native population (laokritai). He also, very likely, prepared for the king the cases decided by him as the final court of appeal.

The organization of justice was a most complicated matter in Ptolemaic Egypt. The principle which governed its application was that the law in any given case was not determined by the domicile of the person concerned but by the section of the population to which he belonged. There were special courts and judges, special civil and criminal law for the Greek cities, for the Jewish community, for the Greeks who lived outside the cities, and for the native population. We are ill-informed both as to the organization of these courts and as to their relation to the royal courts of the chrematistai and laokritai. Nor is it clear how matters were settled when the interests of a member of one section clashed with those of a member of another. At one time the rule was in force that the language of the documents upon which a civil case was founded determined whether it should go before the king’s Greek or Egyptian judges and be decided according to one or the other legal system. It was natural that the population should prefer to have its matters decided by the nearest official rather than submit to the complicated procedure of the courts. It is also natural that the one regulating force to which all courts and officials must conform resided in the king’s decrees, on the basis of which there gradually grew up something like a unified law.

A most important position both at court and in the general life of Egypt was that of the official in whose hands was the financial administration of the Egyptian state. He had the direction of its economic life and the care of the state-treasury, with its vast revenues both in money and in kind. This great complex of institutions and offices all came under the rather vague name of ‘the Royalty’ (tò Basilikon), for, as we have seen, king and state coincided, and there was and could be no distinction between what belonged to the one and what belonged to the other. The man who directed the whole complicated machine of the economic and financial life of the country—and how complicated it was we shall see from what follows—bore the modest title of manager (dioiketes). About one of these managers, Apollonius, under Philadelphus, we are well informed: and we know something of the life of one or two of his successors. But it is not easy to distinguish the personal affairs of the dioiketes from his official activity. His assistants, his court and his secretariate are equally concerned with the one and the other. Like the king he has a large and complicated secretariate, his own hypomnematographos, his own epistolographos. Closely mixed up with his work is that of another high official, the so-called ‘accountant,’ eklogistes, who combined in his one person the functions of Controller of Finance and Secretary to the Treasury. He had his agents throughout the country, apparently bearing the Athenian title of antigrapheus, controller. Finally, in late Ptolemaic times, yet another high official comes into view, who manages the ‘Privy account’ (idios logos), his business was to keep an account of all the royal income which did not fall under the regular heads, particularly income from fines, confiscations, escheats and such like.

The administration of the country was conditioned by the presence of a ruling and privileged class of foreigners. From the legal and administrative point of view Egypt was divided into the territory of the Greek cities on the one hand, and on the other the so-called ‘country’, in its turn cut up into nomes (nomoi) or departments, each of which was an independent administrative unit. The Greek cities in Egypt were few. The Ptolemies in their settlement policy did not follow Alexander. They did not urbanize Egypt and did not try to do so, evidently recognizing that to urbanize the country would only make its administration more complicated and lessen its financial and military strength. Of Greek cities there were those which existed before Alexander, Naucratis and perhaps Paraetonium. These continued to exist, but we do not know how their life was organized. In Upper Egypt Ptolemy Soter founded Ptolemai's but this city, owing to its position, played no great part in Egyptian life. It was Alexander’s city Alexandria which under Soter became the capital of the country, though it did not really become part of it but remained Alexandria-next-Egypt. This was the city of the future. With dizzy rapidity it became the largest of Greek cities, larger than Athens, Corinth or Syracuse, at least as large as the Seleucid capitals, Antioch on the Orontes and Seleuceia on the Tigris.

From its earliest days its constitution was as complicated as its population was heterogeneous. The basis was the group of citizens of Alexandria who constituted the Greek city (polis) of Alexandria. As usual in a Greek city the citizens were divided into tribes and demes. To what degree this part of Alexandria was really governed after the fashion of regular Greek towns we cannot be sure, but many facts tend to show indirectly that the citizen community in Alexandria lived much the life of an ordinary Greek polis, as laid down by the city’s constitution and a set of city-laws, of which we have some miserable fragments. Alexandria had its own popular assembly, its own council (boule) and its own magistrates. Among these latter the exegetes and the gymnasiarch came in more recent times to have most importance. To what degree the council of the Alexandrians ruled the life of the whole town we do not know. Most probably its authority was confined to the affairs of the citizen-community, while the town as a whole was managed by a governor (strategos) appointed by the king. This is the natural consequence of the fact that in Alexandria the Alexandrian citizens were a minority. Outside their authority stood the king’s palace and everything that went with it, harbour, lighthouse, royal magazines, and probably the bigger temples such as the Sarapeum. Outside their community stood also the royal army and the so-called Macedonians and many of the royal officers and, finally, sundry communities inhabiting Alexandria but not possessing its citizenship; various Greeks, so-called Persians, Anatolians, Syrians, especially Jews and Egyptians. Each of these groups probably formed a miniature community: of the Jews at any rate this is quite certain. Under these conditions no decree of the popular assembly and council of the Alexandrian citizens could be binding upon the whole population unless of course it were made so by a special act of the king’s. The institutions of the city, for instance the gymnasium, might and probably did own landed property on advantageous terms: it is possible that the Alexandrians had special rights with regard to owning land in a particular piece of Egypt adjacent to the city, but, as a city, Alexandria had no territory of which it was the independent owner.

What degree of self-government was enjoyed by the group of non-Egyptians scattered all through Egypt in the so-called cities (metropoleis) and in the villages, we do not know. Ptolemais was a city and as such had Greek self-government and even a certain shadow of being a sovereign state (in the third century we find ‘ambassadors of the king’ at Ptolemais). But we cannot tell how much self-government was allowed for instance to the inhabitants of the former capital Memphis or of the new Graeco-Egyptian village of Philadelphia in the Fayum. Nor do we know what exactly was meant by the so-called politeumata of the Cretans, Boeotians, Lycians, Idumeans, Phrygians and Helleno-memphites. Their military character is in most cases beyond a doubt: they seem to have been in some way military societies of men from the same district with their own local cults and some little power to manage their own affairs; but the military element certainly did not survive in all its purity.

Apart from these few islands of non-Egyptian population the ‘country’ was divided up into nomes, toparchies and villages (komai), and was administered by the king’s officials. Legally these derived their full powers directly from the king but in practice they were appointed by the higher officials of the Ptolemaic bureaucracy. To draw lines exactly separating the authority of each official from the next is difficult, not only because of the scantiness of our information and the difficulty of following the historical evolution of each office, but because it is probable that no strict and exact distinction of the functions of the different officials had ever been laid down. They were the agents of the king and worked both by the ancient pre-Ptolemaic tradition and on the directions and instructions that reached them from their own superiors or from the king. These instructions (entolai), so far as we know, were never codified, but were promulgated one after the other without any definite system and undoubtedly often contradicted each other. The officials also guided their conduct by the directions of more general character that emanated from the king and bore the name of ‘laws’ (nomoi). How complicated was the administrative system of Ptolemaic Egypt may be seen from the story how the young cadet Apollonius was in the days of Ptolemy Philometor given leave to transfer to Memphis. We see how Apollonius in order to establish his position and get his due pay, though he can show an authorization from the king himself, has to run round from one official authority to another, the war office, the treasury, the local authority, while his dossier grows like a snowball. The same complicated procedure may be observed in the practice of the judicial branch.

The composition and functions of the staff that administered the different nomes were never permanently settled. We see them changing before our very eyes, though we cannot always discover what was the reason and purpose of these changes. Under Ptolemy Soter, as it seems, there was still preserved the ordinary system of administration which had prevailed in former times and had not been changed in any essential by Alexander the Great. As of old, the head of the nome was the governor, the nomarch, sometimes an Egyptian, in old days almost a feudal grand seigneur. In the time of Philadelphus things have changed entirely. Feudal survivals have vanished once and for all. The administration of the nome has been split up and is entrusted to all sorts of officials, all subordinate to the king and his ministers but not to each other. Military business is in the hands of a strategos, and he has some judicial authority especially in criminal matters. Under his orders, but not exclusively, is the military police of the nome, its commanders, the epistatai and archiphylakitai, and the rank and file, the phylakitai. Side by side with him is the financial governor of the nome, the oikonomos, with unusually wide and varied functions in economics and finance, and alongside with him local dioiketai and hypodioiketai. With him works the controller, antigrapheus, a colleague rather than a subordinate. Nomarchs still exist, but they are no longer anything like governors nor are they supreme, but yet they are not subordinate to the oikonomos. The boundaries of their authority are often not the same as those of the nome. Sometimes in one nome, for example, the Arsinoite, there are several. Their functions are miscellaneous and hard to define. Their chief business seems to be connected with the development of the government land in the nome, and yet this is not altogether outside the competence of the oikonomos. All work concerned with statistics, keeping an account of the population, of how the sharing out of land and other real property stands, of the obligations of the population to the state (taxes and forced labour), and the making out of notices as to the taxes due—in a word, all the secretarial and statistical work of the nome, toparchy and village, lies on the shoulders of a series of clerks, the most typical officials of ancient Egypt; the ‘royal clerk’ (basilikos grammateus) established in the chief town of the nome, the topogrammateus in the toparchy and the komogrammateus for each village.

The collection, transport and storage of the produce paid as taxes and rents was the business of the toparchs and komarchs in each district and village, the elected or nominated representatives of the native Egyptian population. They worked in conjunction with the heads of the government stores (thesauroi), who were called ‘corncollectors’ (sitologoi), and the directors of the local branches of the treasury (trapezitai), half-officials, half tax-farmers, who carried out at their own expense various banking operations. Special collectors (logeutai) and exactors (praktores) co-operated with the above-mentioned officials and also with an array of tax-farmers, middle-men between the state and the tax-payers, peasants, artisans, manufacturers or tradesmen. Special functions in connection with the branches of the revenue that were farmed and with other special branches of the economic life of the state were entrusted to the ‘curators’ (epimeletai). The administration of the nome was in touch with the temples through the epistatai who managed the temples and were responsible for the fulfilment of their obligations to the state, being the representatives before the state of the numerous, firmly organized and admirably disciplined Egyptian clergy. On its side the state had a whole series of officials to deal with temple affairs, sometimes these were appointed for a particular purpose: the details unfortunately still escape us.

Finally, on the lowest rung of the administrative ladder stood in hundreds or thousands the guardians of various kinds who had care of dams and canals, of roads, sown crops, vineyards, stores, pastures, cattle and so on; these obligations fell upon the villages, who bore them without enthusiasm as a heavy and hateful burden.

The officials of the Ptolemaic period were not a separate class, they had no professional instruction, received no special education: they were mostly new Greek immigrants (save for the lowest officials, and the police officers, komarchs, komogrammateis and phylakitai, who might be natives), creatures of some big official, often his fellow-townsmen. They went into the service for the sake of the pay offered by the state and because an adroit and able man might get rich and rise high. In the many fawning petitions addressed by the people to officials they wish them a brilliant career, which was altogether a matter of the king’s favour. But the lower offices about the villages were nothing but a burden of heavy responsibility which gave no access either to wealth or a brilliant career..

This sketch of the administration of Egypt is more or less correct only for the third century BC. At the end of the third and in the second century many changes were introduced but we know very little what they were. The general tendency was towards greater centralization and to a concentration of local power in the hands of the strategos, who sometimes also held in his own hands the functions of the financial governor who had taken the place of the oikonomos, an office which had fallen to the second rank. Another novelty in the last two centuries BC was the gradual admission to administrative office of the richer and more civilized elements in the native population now superficially hellenized. At the end of the first century BC the two tendencies bring about in the person of Egyptian strategoi a revival of the old semi-feudal nomarchs of pre-Ptolemaic times. Posts are more and more given to the richer elements in the population. As an official was responsible to the king both with his person and his property it was to the interest of the state to recruit its officials and tax-farmers from the richer class regardless of their origin. Office was not yet a burden but it was getting very near it. Finally, under pressure of necessity, in view of the constant growth of dissatisfaction in the south and the repeated risings, the king was forced to unite all Upper Egypt under one governor-general (the epistrategos). 

 

IV.

ADMINISTRATION. PROVINCES

 

During the century after Alexander, the period of her greatest prosperity, Egypt under Ptolemy Soter, Philadelphus and Euergetes I, acquired and kept a number of external possessions, what the Romans would have called provinces. The more important and the more permanently connected with Egypt were Cyprus, Cyrene and the Cyrenaica, and the so-called Coele-Syria with Phoenicia and Palestine. Lycia with its valuable forests, Caria with its trade and manufactures (including part of Ionia with Miletus and Ephesus) and a league of Aegean Islands, of which the most loyal were Thera and parts of Crete, for many years formed part of the Ptolemaic Empire; finally, Egypt held for a while part of Thrace with the Chersonese, and Samothrace and for a short time even had a footing in the Peloponnese. The acquisition and loss of these provinces, depending as they did on the international situation and the military successes of the Ptolemies, have been dealt with elsewhere; here must be described, so far as may be, the system applied by the Ptolemies to the administration of their provinces.

Our information is fullest about the government of Cyprus. We know from inscriptions that Cyprus was under a military governor (strategos) commanding considerable forces stationed in the various cities of Cyprus and organized in the Egyptian fashion: these were certainly taken from the king’s regular Egyptian army. By the second century the Governor has his own powerful fleet probably supplied and equipped by the big coast-towns of Cyprus: and bears the additional title of nauarchos. In view of the special economic and political part played by the great and rich temples of Cyprus in the life of the island, the governor bears the third title of archiereus, that is head of the priesthood in the Cyprian temples. At certain times, perhaps permanently, a special governor, probably with full military authority (antistrategos) has charge of the valuable mines of Cyprus, all of which probably belonged to the state and were worked by it. The cities of Cyprus had never enjoyed the Greek autonomy, so the question of the relations between the cities and the central power did not assume much importance there. The practical masters of the cities were the. commanders of the garrisons who gave their orders to the native elected organs of government. The revenues which the Ptolemies drew from Cyprus were undoubtedly enormous. Hence came the copper that Egypt needed so much; here, too, probably were built many ships for the Egyptian navy and mercantile fleet. Of the financial and economic organization of Cyprus we know little. The revenues, at least in the later period, were, according to Polybius, collected by the strategos and passed on to the Alexandrian dioiketes. There is, however, reason to think that what Polybius says is only true of the second century. Formerly in Cyprus as in the other provinces the dioiketes had had his agents, oikonomoi, grammateis, who had charge of the revenues .

As to the organization of the Cyrenaica during the rule of the Ptolemies we know hardly anything. Here the great problem was to establish a modus vivendi with the ancient Greek city of Cyrene. This modus vivendi was laid down by the newly discovered diagramma which is to be placed in the time of Ptolemy Soter(322 or 308 BC) In it the king confirms and modifies the constitution of the Cyrenaic league. In the main it is the ancient constitution of Cyrene slightly modified and with certain definite provisions inserted by Ptolemy to secure control of Cyrenaic affairs. Ptolemy reserves to himself certain rights and privileges which naturally follow from his being sovereign over the city: (1) the right to enrol in the tribes certain new citizens, perhaps klerouchoi of the Ptolemaic army; (2) the right to insist on the restoration to their rights of exiles who had been Ptolemy’s adherents; (3) the appointment of members of the Gerusia; (4) the handing over to Ptolemy of the office of strategos; (5) his right ;to interfere in judicial affairs concerning the former exiles; (6) certain privileges touching the granting of citizenship. Some of these privileges, as that concerning the exiles, were merely temporary, but the right to nominate members of the Gerusia and the right to be perpetual strategos were evidently permanent provisions comparable to the rights of the Pergamene kings over the city of Pergamum, and to the constitution of Ptolemais in Upper Egypt.

The social structure of Cyrene and the Cyrenaica as described by Strabo closely resembles that of Alexandria and Egypt. The city has a large non-Greek population, mainly Jewish; side by side with the full citizens and those with limited rights there is a mass of foreigners (metoecs) who are not citizens at all, in part, probably, native Libyans; the population of the ‘country’ consists of ‘husbandmen’ (georgoi) tilling the land belonging either to the city or to the king; these were also most likely soldiers settled as klerouchoi.

The fundamental problem which faced the Ptolemies in the Cyrenaica faced them also in all their provinces where the leading part in the life of the country was played by the Greek cities; in  the League of Islanders, the separate Greek islands, Caria, Ionia, Lycia and to some extent in Thrace. To judge by the scanty data available, the Ptolemies showed little respect for the cities’ autonomy. Their suzerainty is expressed most clearly by the fact that all the official documents of the Greek cities in the Ptolemies’ dominions begin not with the names of the city, its people, council and magistrates, but with the name of the king. Most consideration was shown by the Ptolemies in their treatment of the League of Islanders, a considerable power and well organized, which claimed respect. But even here the Ptolemaic nesiarch is really the dictator of the League: he summons meetings of its deputies, executes the decisions of such meetings, commands the military forces of the League, keeps the seas clear of pirates, collects payments from the members and appoints arbitrators to settle disputes. On the other hand, the Ptolemies during the short time of their supremacy were careful not to interfere in the internal affairs of these island states.

It was quite otherwise with the Greek towns in the mainland provinces. Although their institutions, popular assembly, council and magistrates, continued in being they could decide no single important question without the preliminary consent of the king, that is, of his officials. Besides this the administration was continually interfering with the petty affairs of city life either directly by definite injunctions or indirectly by private letters and instructions. Halicarnassus cannot build a gymnasium without the king’s permission. At Samothrace it is for the king and his governor to allow or to forbid the importation of wheat into the island: and the governor has the deciding voice in the question of sharing out the land among the citizens. At Miletus the king assigns land, though apparently not the city’s land, at his own good pleasure. Particularly instructive are two letters found among Zeno’s papers, speaking of Calynda in Caria. In one, in order to secure a small payment from the city, one of the citizens appeals to Apollonius the dioiketes to put pressure upon the military governor and financial officer of the province and through them and also directly upon the assembly and council of the city. The other letter is even more interesting. At Calynda, as in other cities in their provinces, the Ptolemies kept a garrison. The soldiers were billeted upon the citizens and certain landowners were bound to supply fodder for the horses of particular cavalrymen. Evidently this burden was exceedingly unwelcome to the citizens. One of them, a kinsman of Zeno, obtained through him exemption, but on his death his family had to submit to the old exactions. The letter makes an appeal to Zeno who forwards it to Apollonius, asking him to restore the rights which had been taken away from his relations. No protest against this reign of force and continual interference was possible for the cities were at the mercy of the Ptolemaic garrison and its commander. In word the Ptolemies claimed to bring freedom to the Greek cities, in fact they were much less liberal than the Seleucids or even the Antigonids of Macedonia.

The most oppressive side of Ptolemaic rule, however, was the consistent and systematic adjustment of taxation to the interests of the central power. Before they passed under one of the Hellenistic monarchies the cities had possessed their own systems of taxation, customs dues, possibly monopolies. It is probable that these systems remained in force with slight alterations, but a part of the city’s income was taken for the king’s treasury while royal officials controlled the expenditure even of the rest. This supposition agrees entirely with the evidence of lately published papyri and inscriptions. One of these papyri, which contains extracts from letters addressed by the dioiketes probably to the oikonomoi of the several Ptolemaic provinces, gives us a general picture of the taxes which on the whole agrees with what we know both of the general character of the royal financial system and of the practice in the several cities. Land-taxes (phoroi) and, distinct from them, rents from public property are paid partly in money, partly in kind. The customs are turned to account by the central government and monopolies, for instance in purple and scented oils, are introduced. The same picture is given by an inscription from Telmessus in Lycia. This city was granted by Euergetes to his vassal Ptolemaeus, son of Lysimachus, and the new ruler found his subjects so impoverished by taxation that he was compelled to remit some imposts and lighten others, particularly those on agriculture and cattle-keeping. The tax on gardens and the payment for the right of pasturage are abolished; in the duty on vegetable produce the Ptolemaic system gives place to the less oppressive Seleucid tithe, and various other duties of the same kind are cancelled.

The system by which these various taxes were collected was in principle Greek—the farming method. The tax-farmers were local people, but the taxes were put up to auction not locally but at Alexandria. This is proved by various documents in the Zeno letters which show that the picture of an auction of provincial taxes drawn by Josephus in his wonderful story of the farmer of tribute from Coele-Syria is on the whole accurate. We see how, when the taxes are being put up to auction for a new term, all the best known and richest men of the place go up to Alexandria and with any amount of bribery and intrigue compete against each other at the auction at which the tribute and taxes of the towns are being put up. To judge by the sums quoted in the papyrus just mentioned, the revenues received by the state from the provinces were enormous. The revenues of the Ptolemies in gold and silver were as much the profits of their external trade as of their exploitation of the provinces. Particularly productive were the customs and commercial duties in the coast towns of Coele-Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine (particularly Gaza) and those of Alexandria and Pelusium from goods which came from Syria and Palestine, as we can see from Zeno’s correspondence.

The local tax-farmers worked under the constant control of the Ptolemaic officials, agents of the dioiketes at Alexandria, backed by the garrisons. Their names recur constantly in the correspondence of Zeno, who was himself such an agent in Syria and Palestine. We find them also mentioned in the letters to and from his native region of Caria, Caunus, Calynda and Halicarnassus. One letter is all about supporting some candidate at Alexandria: probably he wants to get the farming of the taxes: and we can see what a network of intrigues, bribes and lobbying this means. As in Egypt, the agents of the dioiketes probably bore the humble title of oikonomos, their assistants were termed clerks. But most of his agents are not given a title; a man is just called ‘Apollonius’ man’: this shows us very clearly how the provinces, like Egypt, were regarded as the personal possessions of the several Ptolemies. Parallel with their government work, the agents of the dioiketes also carry on his personal commercial business, and they manage to find time for trafficking on their own account: they buy up olive oil, wine, scents, horses, slaves; they make loans to local people; they try to smuggle in their goods without paying the proper duty or getting the proper licences—just the same sort of thing that we find later in the provinces of the Roman Empire.

 

V.

ECONOMIC CONDITIONS. THE RESOURCES OF EGYPT AND THEIR APPLICATION

 

It has already been pointed out that the permanence of the Ptolemies’ power in Egypt and in the provinces, and also of their international position, had as its basis the efficient and systematic utilization of the economic resources of Egypt and the provinces, and the development of their economic life in accordance with new social conditions within Egypt and that country’s new position among other nations.

The economic resources of Egypt were indeed very great, but Egypt was far from being economically self-sufficient. Accordingly the development of its economic life was as much a matter of systematically and intensively exploiting its national wealth and arranging for due export of its products as of an unceasing and efficient regulation of its enormous imports. Egypt had always been mainly agricultural, and so it remained under the Ptolemies. A vast quantity of various crops could be produced if the annual Nile floods were skilfully and systematically regulated and the embankments and canals carefully kept up and wisely extended. This regulation, these labours of irrigation and drainage, determined the area which could bear cereals and the amount of the yearly crop. In all this the Ptolemies did a great deal for Egypt, by combining the age-old experience of Egypt with the achievements of Greek skill. It is characteristic that the main direction was in the hands of Greek engineers, with the Egyptian experts working under them. For the Ptolemies the increase in the area of cultivated land and greater regularity in the harvests was a matter of life and death. But for it they could not have found in Egypt space for the new Greek agricultural population without ruining their authority in the eyes of the natives and lessening their economic prosperity. The Ptolemies were thus able not only to assign a share of land to the soldiers and other new settlers, but to offer work and certain subsistence to the ever-growing native population. The risings of the Egyptians in the last three centuries BC certainly had economic as well as political and religious causes, as the area of land under cultivation first ceased to grow because every acre was being used that the level of ancient skill enabled them to use, and then began to decrease just because the insurrections and the disorder that went with them brought about a deterioration in the system of irrigation works.

The new lands and new cultivators introduced into Egyptian farming new methods and new branches of agriculture. From time immemorial Egypt had not only produced cereals and fodder for cattle, oil-bearing plants, vegetables, flax and hemp, but had grown many fruit trees, the date palms and vines. The Ptolemaic period increased the area of those plantations, especially vineyards. The Greeks had always been used to growing vines, and on the lands which did not suit crops well and which they accordingly got cheaply, they planted vines. Their experience and skill certainly improved the quality of the wine and brought it within the reach of everybody side by side with the national drink of beer. An attempt was also made to grow the olive. In some places in the Fayum this attempt was successful, but still Egyptian olive oil remained of second-rate quality, unprofitable to produce, in spite of some protective measures taken by the Ptolemies. The correspondence of Zeno who, in the second half of his life, became the manager of Apollonius’s great estate at Philadelphia in the Fayum, shows that the Ptolemies and their ministers and assistants not only took their share in helping the natural development of agriculture and horticulture in Egypt but did their best to stimulate it in every way, introducing new sorts of fruit trees, berries, vines and vegetables. In this they followed the example both of the more enlightened Pharaohs and of tyrants in Greek states. It was thus that the Fayum quickly changed from marshes and desert into a wide expanse of corn land beyond which, as at the present day, there stretched orchards, vineyards, olive and date groves and vegetable gardens. Nor can we doubt that the same activity was displayed in the region of Alexandria and throughout the whole marsh-lands of the Delta.

A real difficulty for the Ptolemies was the question of timber building, for Egypt has never possessed forests. To import all the wood needed and at a reasonable price, bearing in mind the anterior necessity of making sure of a sufficient supply for the shipyards and for building in Alexandria, was impossible. So of imported timber up-country we hear nothing. The population supplied its needs by the use of old fruit trees (especially date-palms, of which not only the stem but the leaves were most valuable material for basket-work, mat and rope-making) and by the systematic use of all space suitable for planting trees, especially the embankments, on which the trees and shrubs served a double purpose, consolidating the banks and supplying new fascines for fresh ones.

Hardly less important for the life of the country was the keeping of cattle and poultry: oxen, cows, sheep, goats, pigs, asses, geese and ducks had ever been the glory and pride of Egypt. In developing cattle-breeding the Ptolemies showed even more initiative than in agriculture. Under their rule the horse was used not only in war but for transportation, and we hear of camels for the first time. They tried also to acclimatize various hybrids; they imported ;new breeds of sheep and for the first time began to get wool fit for the finer textiles: many new breeds of poultry were introduced. The Ptolemies found Egypt the home of ancient and famous manufactures. Weaving and pottery, particularly the making of glazed ware and bright tiles, leather work and other handicrafts had flourished for centuries, while from all time Egypt had produced admirable unblown glass and exported it wholesale. Her products of decorative stone, especially alabaster, supplied a world-market, while her most famous monopoly was in the production of paper from papyrus. Under the rule of the Ptolemies all these crafts continued to flourish and in the manufacture, for example, of&n glass and papyrus new devices were introduced. But for the development of agriculture and still more of manufactures Egypt had always needed large and regular imports. She possessed excellent quarries and rich mines of natron and salt, but hardly any metals, apart from a little copper and iron of inferior quality, and hardly any heavy timber. This goes far to explain the perpetual attempts of Egypt before the Ptolemies to conquer Cyprus, Syria, the ports of Phoenicia and parts of Asia Minor. Gold and silver always came to Egypt from outside, partly as bullion from Cyprus, Syria, Phoenicia and Central Africa, partly, under the Persians and later, as coined metal paying for Egyptian agricultural produce, cattle and manufactures. So it was natural that Egypt should from the beginning have sought both to frame her foreign policy in accordance with these facts and to develop her external trade.

The result of this development of trade with Central Africa, Arabia, India, Palestine, Syria and Phoenicia, and also with the countries on the Aegean, Mediterranean and Black seas, was that Egypt from time immemorial had obtained other materials than metal and wood, and these called into existence new branches of manufacture. The splendid level attained in early Egypt by the art of the jeweller and goldsmith, and by the skill of the craftsman in ivory and various imported woods, has often been described. Another ancient speciality of Egypt was the preparation of scents, cosmetics and sweet-smelling oils.

The Ptolemies gave an immense stimulus to the external trade of Egypt. None of the old trade-routes were abandoned and many new ones were opened. Masses of wares of all kinds went in and out through Alexandria and the other ports of Northern Egypt, especially Pelusium, east of Alexandria, on the one side, and through the Red Sea ports on the other. Exports were corn, without which industrial Greece could not exist, linen stuffs, papyrus, glass, objects of ivory, wood, alabaster and precious metals, scents, salves and other cosmetics: imports were wine and olive oil mostly from Syria and Greece, metals from Cyprus and Phoenicia, timber from Asia Minor, horses from Syria and Palestine, slaves from the East and Greece, gold, precious stones, ivory, precious woods, sweet-scented oils, silk, possibly cotton from Central Africa, Arabia and India. For the encouragement of commerce the Ptolemies kept up the ancient ways across the desert from the quays upon the Nile to the little ports on the Red Sea, which rapidly increased in size. Philadelphus even cleared out and made navigable the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea that Pharaoh Necho had dug and Darius had restored. The Ptolemies were active in furthering the interests of their merchants along the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts. Egyptian trade came to be worldwide in the then sense of the word. The products of Egypt were to be found in China, and in India, in Central Africa and far away to the West: in Northern Africa, Spain, Britain, Gaul, on the Steppes of South Russia and in Central Asia.

Hand in hand with the development of external, as of internal trade went the development of industry. Alongside the old centres of Egyptian industry, with the ancient guilds of craftsmen in the temples of the metropoleis of Egypt, Alexandria became more and more, not merely the place where the goods produced in Egypt were accumulated for export, but a centre of industrial production. We have to arrive at this supposition a priori, for, strange as it may appear, we have no exact data to guide us. The name ‘ Alexandrian ’ borne by certain manufactures on the world-market proves nothing. They came on the market from Alexandria, but they might just as well have been made up-country. However, it is difficult to believe that at Alexandria, to which gravitated masses of raw materials, no industry arose. But we must not exaggerate and think that Alexandrian industry put an end to that of Egypt. Probably we shall never be able to say whether any particular stuff, any particular glass bottle, any particular ivory box or silver vessel was made in the capital itself or in one of the little workshops of the towns and villages of Egypt. Of the weaving industry we do know that the workshops in the temples and throughout the ‘country’ went on making not merely plain cloths, but dyed and embroidered stuffs, rich carpets and curtains, the famous ‘byssus,’ even in Ptolemaic times, partly for their own use, partly for the king, that is, for Alexandria and the foreign market. Equally, Mendes continued to be the great centre for the production of myrrh and other perfumes.

On the organization of commerce in Alexandria and Egypt we are ill-informed, particularly as to Alexandria. We know that foreign trade was in the hands both of Alexandrians (we find groups of them organized in societies at Delos and other places) and of foreign merchants. We have some idea how certain big men under the Ptolemies managed their commerce: Apollonius had his own merchant fleet, both for the Nile and for the sea. In Syria, Palestine and Phoenicia he had a number of agents, who bought up for him slaves, olive oil, wine and various other things. All these were dispatched to Egypt, as we see by the documents which speak of paying the import duties. The same was done by many members of his household and presumably by the heads and members of many other great households in Alexandria. It is not likely that Apollonius did all this in the name of the king and for the king’s profit, though this is not actually ruled out. Still less can we distinguish how far the agents of Apollonius worked on his account and how far on their own.

As to industry in Alexandria and its organization we know decidedly less. The large importation of slaves into Egypt from Syria and Palestine, the existence of a law forbidding their export, the elaborate legislation about home-born slaves, the existence of a special tax upon slaves, all go to show the importance of servile labour in Ptolemaic Egypt and particularly in Alexandria. For it is hard to believe that all the slaves imported into Egypt were for domestic use in the great households. Apollonius undoubtedly imported slaves for his cloth works at Memphis. If this be so, we may suppose that in Alexandria industry was developed not only by the growth of a large class of small craftsmen, but on the lines already adopted at Athens of establishing rather large factories with numerous hands either slaves or free. But we must admit that this is all guesswork.

We know rather more about the organization of industry up-country. Some branches were only carried on by the state. This is true of the preparation of vegetable oils. All the mills belonged exclusively to the state as did all the raw material, either bought at a forced price from the producer or else received by the treasury as rent from the so-called crown-peasants. There were no templemills and no private ones. Labour was supplied by the native population, in return for payment, but it was obligatory to render it for a definite time. The workers were members of the oliveworkers’ guild; but we do not know whether they were professional olive-workers or ordinary peasants and artisans.

Nor do we know whether the same principle was applied to other branches of industry, but it is quite likely in the case of salt and also in that of natron. Weaving was arranged quite otherwise : the work was done at home by the proprietors of looms. It is possible that the production, sale and buying of linen and woollen stuffs was uncontrolled. But the state had a register of all looms, and their work was strictly supervised by royal officials and contractors. The first obligation of the weavers was to execute orders from the state; for each piece they were paid according to scale. Whether they were allowed also to work on their own account and for the general market we do not know. The temple weavers mostly worked to supply the needs of the temples.

Again, we do not know what branches of industry were organized in the same way as weaving. There certainly were some in which the state did not interfere as much as with oil, salt and stuffs. In these industries it is possible that the state contented itself with taxing the craftsman who might produce what he liked and offer it on the general market without being burdened with obligatory state orders.

We must not think that the Ptolemies in their economic policy and their efforts to develop the resources of the country thought only of their private gain, that is, that their main purpose was to enrich themselves and not the country. Of course their foreign policy and their personal expenses swallowed up enormous sums, but we have no right to suppose that for them the good of Egypt was only a means and not an end. The first Ptolemies devoted much energy to their foreign policy, trying to secure for themselves the first place among the powers of the Hellenistic world: but their success did not tend to exhaust Egypt, on the contrary it strengthened and enriched her. We have seen how great were the revenues received by them from their provinces and how enormously important it was for the development of economic life in Egypt itself that Cyprus, Phoenicia, Syria and Palestine, and parts of Asia Minor were Ptolemaic, that is Egyptian, possessions and that at one time the Ptolemies ruled the Aegean Sea. There is no reason to think that after Soter any of his successors dreamed of restoring Alexander’s empire under the sceptre of the Ptolemies and it is far from certain that even Soter sought the restoration of the whole empire. Still less can we impute imperialistic tendencies to the Ptolemies of the last two centuries BC. They were well content if they succeeded in defending the independence of Egypt against foreign foes. 

VI.

TAXATION

 

The economic and fiscal policy of the Ptolemies made its chief aim to establish and confirm the prosperity of Egypt, and there is no doubt that they were genuinely anxious that Egypt should be rich and contented. But it goes without saying that they did their best to make use of this prosperity for the purposes of state. The Greeks had always put the interests of the state a long way first and private interests second. The taxation of the country was therefore heavier than in modern states and on quite a different basis. This basis was partly an inheritance from the past, partly a direct consequence of the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, partly a logical development of the Greek idea of the supremacy of the state and its self-sufficiency. The governing idea was that Egypt, both the country itself and the provinces, belonged to the king and that the king had the full right to use for the purposes of state, that is for the general good, the wealth and strength of the population. On these two premises the whole financial organization of the country was built up.

The Ptolemies both as successors of the Pharaohs and so gods in human form and the sons of gods, and also as persons who held Egypt by right of conquest, were, as we said above, the owners of the whole land of Egypt and all that it contained. From time immemorial, the land had been cultivated by the native population living in the towns and villages. Year after year they would plough this or that plot as crown peasants of the crown land assigned to this or that village. Owners of this land they had never been and did not consider themselves such. The land belonged to the god and king and its tilling was carried out by the directions of the king and his officials. But as a matter of fact the peasants were bound to the land and the land to them by ties going back hundreds of years. To break these ties was neither in the power nor in the interest of the king. So under the Ptolemies as under the Pharaohs the crown land continued to be ploughed by the crown peasants. Their right to the land was not defined juridically. In Greek terminology they were leaseholders paying to the king rent in money or in kind. But they differed from a Greek leaseholder, in that they were bound to their land and compelled to cultivate it under whatever conditions the state might dictate to them. Still, the state was not really free in defining the conditions. They had been for ever defined by a tradition based upon the experience of centuries and any infringement of the tradition aroused mass resistance: the peasants appeal to God, go off to ‘take seat’ in a temple, and refuse to work.

The peasants who tilled the land to support the temples and the cult of the gods were upon the same footing. They too laboured for themselves and also for the state. But into their relations with the temples and the priests the Ptolemies brought a great change by cutting the direct connection between the peasants and the priesthood: henceforward the peasants paid their rent not to the priests but to the king’s officials; the state in return guaranteed to supply the needs of each temple and its cult. The same reform was introduced in the collection of a special impost upon vine-dressers which formerly had gone to the temple treasuries. From the time of Philadelphus this apomoira supported the cult of Arsinoe.

One might think that in this organization which had endured for centuries there was no room for new men and new Greek methods. But the new men, as we have seen, were the real basis of the king’s power and strength. Room had to be made for them in Egypt and their life must be arranged upon conditions that they would accept. So a part of their land was granted by the Ptolemies to the new settlers, mainly soldiers of their army. At first probably a certain amount of land reached by the inundation and fit for growing cereals was still at the disposal of the state. This may have been the estates of the great landowners in former times, both natives and foreigners. But these lands would not suffice for long, so new lands had to be found for the new settlers. This explains the Ptolemies’ feverish activity in the Fayum and probably in the Delta to reclaim marshes and desert and turn them into allotments. These were given to the new soldier-settlers for them to hold, but ownership remained with the king and they could enjoy them only as long as they served the state. For the use of the land they naturally made certain payments. One man, however, might do no more than till the land which was flooded every year and was part of the old cultivation; another might have the capital and energy to apply his labour to land which was not suited for raising the ordinary cereals, but good enough, if suitably irrigated, to support fruit trees and vines. Such a piece would then, in accordance with ancient practice both in Egypt and Greece, become his own ‘property’ (ktema) and was his to enjoy so long as he went on keeping up the orchard or vineyard and paid rather heavy dues to the king and the temples. This procedure was open not only to soldiers, but to anyone with the needful capital and enterprise. Besides the soldiers certain officials received grants of land upon much the same conditions. In early days when there was more land than men who wanted it, and when it was desirable to attract private capital and private enterprise to get the land skilfully farmed and brought into good condition, the Ptolemies distributed great tracts to the men immediately about them, high officials and generals. These lands were either free grants or held in return for definite services.

From the land accordingly the state received partly a rent in kind partly dues either in kind or money. The amount of the state revenue was determined by the conditions of each year, that is, the height attained by the river Nile in the yearly inundations: money was also paid in taxes on houses and building lots. Landholders had to divide among themselves certain special taxes both temporary and permanent, and were also subject to certain other special conditions. For example, as the state had the right to buy up the whole crop of oil-producing plants at its own price, and naturally did not wish to take more of the produce than it needed, it regulated the amount of these crops to be sown each year throughout the whole of Egypt. The state also claimed to control the cattle fodder with which land was sown after the cereals had been carried or in the years of ‘resting’ prescribed by the rotation of crops mostly practised in Egypt. For the right of using this fodder for their cattle the landholders and leaseholders paid definite sums. They also paid fees for the privilege of turning their beasts out on the pastures which were reckoned state property, or for hiring the pastures. Besides these permanent taxes, landholders and people occupied in keeping cattle or transport work paid a separate tax for the right to keep cattle. The state itself owned great droves of oxen and cows, pigs, goats, sheep and geese, which were looked after by special keepers who hired them from the state. There was a tax on slaves, as we have seen; moreover, a special due was paid for the right of plying a particular handicraft. Finally, the whole population except the soldiers and officials paid a poll-tax.

The collection of all these dues required a strict registration of the land, cattle and people, an exact calculation of what was due and an exact account of what was paid. All this was the business of the officers of the nome working in some branches in conjunction with the tax-farmers, who were responsible for the collection and received in consideration of their labour and responsibility a certain percentage of what was collected.

A great income accrued to the state from trade and industry. We have already spoken of the high export and import duties at Alexandria, Pelusium and the other ports of Egypt. These customs were occasionally protective, for example, the high duties upon wine and olive oil. A recently deciphered papyrus found in the Zeno correspondence shows that all the imported olive oil paid a very high tariff and was bought up at a fixed price by the state. It was sold on the market at the same artificially high price as the home-produced olive oil. This was a heavy burden on those who were not able to live without olive oil, i.e. on the Greeks. Moreover it encouraged the Greeks to plant olive trees, and last but not least it protected the sale of the monopolized native vegetable oils. We have already seen that among the revenues from the exterior provinces the proceeds from customs took a high place. There were also internal customs, for instance on goods imported into the Oases or exported from them, and on goods floated down the Nile.

Still greater was the importance of revenue from industry and industrial dues. We have already mentioned that certain raw products were a state monopoly. These the state further manufactured in its own factories, strictly reserving to special concessionaires the right of selling them. In other branches of industry the state confined itself to its right of manufacturing the produce of which it had need for its own purposes (army, temples, export) in unlimited quantities at its own fixed price in private establishments compelled to work for the state. In certain other occupations, as fowling and fishing, the state, to begin with, claimed for itself a high proportion, 25 per cent, of the catch. In many cases the state laid a certain tax on the trade and often reserved to persons who bought it from the state the right of selling retail. Variations of these main types were many. Our knowledge is very far from complete, very unequally distributed and very indefinite. The state protected itself against loss by employing tax-farmers, whose property was the state’s security. It goes without saying that for the completion of all legal documents, for the validation of buying and selling, for succession to an inheritance, the people paid the state definite dues.

Besides all these payments in money and kind the inhabitants were obliged to render the state service both in person and with their beasts. By this forced labour of man and beast two essential needs of the state were met: the construction, cleaning out and upkeep of the embankments and canals without which Egypt could not exist, and transport both by road and water. The whole population of Egypt had to do its duty by the embankments and canals. The native population with its beasts of burden had to give its own labour; the privileged classes could pay to be let off. For each day’s work the state gave pay, but of course at the lowest possible rate. The question of transport was particularly serious just after the harvest, when enormous masses of grain and other produce had to be carted from the fields to the threshing floors and from there to the nearest store, thence to the river or canal down which the corn went in barges to the granaries of Alexandria. All this was impossible without corvee of men and animals: small distances could be managed with the draught-asses of the landholders: for greater distances the guilds of owners of beasts of burden were employed. River transport was in the hands of shipowners or men who hired state barges, but this too called for forced labour of sailors, and men and beasts for towing. Compulsion was also employed by the Ptolemies in getting together labour for the mines and quarries, for great buildings and men to go long expeditions to catch elephants. Nor were Liturgies, that is the execution of duties imposed by the state, to be avoided by the privileged class. These du ties would naturally be of a special character in accordance with the social position and special knowledge of the men upon whom they were laid. Finally there were requisitions and forced sales of goods to the state at its own price. The movements of the king and his officers, as of the armies and military units, meant requisition of foodstuffs, forced use of ships and beasts of burden, forced labour of the population to put into order the roads and quays, to build rest-houses and the like. Upon definite occasions the Ptolemies expected the population to express their loyalty by complimentary presents (crowns, stephanoi).

How much the Ptolemies’ budget of receipts and expenditure amounted to we do not know. It was naturally based upon actual money, the stores of gold and silver at Alexandria. These stores were also the foundation of the Ptolemaic monetary system with its abundance of gold and full-value silver. The Ptolemies devoted much attention to increasing their reserves in money and regulating currency. At one time they tried to gain for their gold and silver a dominant position in the world-market side by side with the ancient Persian coinage, the coinage of Alexander and the Athenian silver, and in competition with the currency of their rivals the Seleucids. They failed, and the attempt was without any consequences. There is some interest in the attempt of Philadelphus to make only one currency circulate at any rate in Egypt. In the Zeno correspondence we have a letter from the head of the mint to Apollonius reporting on this operation and pointing out some further steps which had to be taken. The main idea was to withdraw from circulation the foreign coins, which were widely current in Egypt, likewise the native ones which were worn and below standard, and substitute for them new full value money of one definite type. How small was the store of gold and silver in the king’s reserves we see from the fact that for this purpose the state was forced to establish a monopoly (perhaps temporary or limited) in gold and silver, that is, of buying and selling them, or to insist on its exclusive right to buy for melting down.

The Ptolemies began to coin on the Rhodian standard and then went over to the Milesian, that is, the Phoenician. The monetary unit was the silver drachma: both in gold and silver higher denominations were coined, io, 8, 4 and 2 drachmae. There remained in circulation the high denominations of gold and the 4 drachma-pieces in silver. But the gold and even the silver did not penetrate far up the country: there after old custom they reckoned in copper, and the unit of account—for there was no such coin in existence—was the copper drachma, at first afterwards of the silver one. But even with the help of copper currency it was found impossible completely to put an end to barter in Egypt. The people reckon both in money and in corn, the state itself calculates its receipts and expenses in money and in corn, wine and oil. It is characteristic that the salary of the priests, for instance, is paid not in cash but in oil and corn. The complication of this double method of reckoning, the complication of reckoning in money in view of the fluctuations of the exchange and the concurrent circulation of foreign coins, made any transaction or any business impossible without the help of specialists. These specialists were most indispensable to the state in its transactions with its subjects. Therefore the state treasuries for payments in cash or in kind quickly became banks. By their help it became possible to make payments to the state and to transfer money and corn from one client’s account to another. Rich business men had current accounts in other places besides where they lived. More and more the bank and the grain-store became the centres of business life and one of the most popular institutions in the country. But the right to open a bank was in Ptolemaic times strictly reserved to the state alone.

 

VII.

SOCIAL, RELIGIOUS AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE. THE HELLENIZATION OF EGYPT

 

Socially Ptolemaic Egypt was from the beginning a miscellaneous conglomeration, as is shown above all by the various elements which made up the population of the capital Alexandria, and its ‘political’ life. Details of life in Alexandria are unluckily little accessible to us. There is no doubt that in the eyes of foreigners and in the eyes of the population of Egypt, Alexandria was the capital of the world, the city par excellence, ‘other cities,’ says a newly discovered early Hellenistic treatise, ‘are but the cities of the country round them, compared to Alexandria they are but villages. Alexandria is the world-city. Alexandria is described in early Hellenistic poetry, in Theocritus and Herodas, and in later sources, Strabo, Dio Chrysostom, Clement of Alexandria, Scriptores Historiae Augustae, when it had long ceased to be the capital of the world. The descriptions give us some glimpses of the topography of the city and we can picture to ourselves the magnificence of its royal and civic buildings: its harbours and its lighthouse, one of the wonders of the world, the royal palace, the Mausoleum of Alexander, the Library and Museum, its wide and straight streets lit by night, its parks and squares, gymnasia and palaestrae, theatres and hippodromes, temples and synagogues; the magnificent Mausolea, both above ground and below, the villas and gardens in the neighbourhood especially at Canopus. Unfortunately the miserable remnants of Alexandria under the modern town give not the slightest general idea of its former magnificence. Still less do we know of its life, of the life of the king and his court, the army, the high officials, of the Museum and Library, the schools, Greek and foreign temples, docks and ports, workshops and stores.

Some detail or other in a letter or in literature lights up a corner of the picture, but it is only a corner and only for a moment. We can see the great celebration of Philadelphus, the magnificent procession, the soldiers of his army, the statues of the gods, the animal victims, the marquee for a feast to the multitude; we can be present at a grand dinner in honour of some foreigners at the court of Philadelphus, or at an auction of the proceeds of imposts and tributes from the provinces; we have a description of Philopator’s luxurious dahabieh, a floating villa; in the letters of Zeno there passes before us the life of Apollonius’s court with its trifling daily excitements, gossip, tale-bearing, perpetual anxiety about getting one’s pay, perpetual fear of the all-powerful master, all sorts of queer goings-on. We hear the specialist in mending knuckle-bones (the best were imported from Syria), proud of his particular skill, criticizing a set given him to put to rights and boasting how he worked for that famous Macedonian exile, Antipater, Cassander’s nephew, ‘the King of the Dog-days’, whose main occupation was evidently playing knuckle-bones. In an anxious letter from one member of Apollonius’s household we can read between the lines of the fall of the all-powerful minister, perhaps of his violent death and the confiscation of his property. In the Aitia of Callimachus we have before us a banquet given to the stars of scientific and literary Alexandria. In his famous idyll Theocritus lets us into the bourgeois house of one of the townsfolk of Alexandria; we meet his wife, her guest, her child, her slavegirl, and go with them on an excursion through the streets and squares of Alexandria with their crowds of people to the place where there is to be the queen’s service in memory of Adonis. From time to time we can be present when the unruly mob of the Alexandrian streets breaks out in riot. But that is all.

We have more information about the ‘country,’ most of all of the villages and towns of the Fayum. Zeno’s correspondence lets us see new towns and villages arising in that new Eldorado of Ptolemy Philadelphus; the houses and streets, temples and public buildings, being constructed and surrounded with orchards and gardens, new canals being dug, new vineyards and plantations set out. The ruins of Philadelphia have been partly excavated and illustrate what the documents say, still more so the ruins of Theadelphia and of Caranis which is being systematically explored. Here, as in most early Ptolemaic documents, we see the life of the new settlers in the ‘country,’ Greeks and hellenized aliens from the Aegean basin, but this life stands out against a background of the life of the native population with which it is bound by a thousand links: in still greater degree is this true of life in the old Egyptian towns with a new Greek population, Memphis, Oxyrhynchus, Hermupolis, Syene, Thebes, as far as we know them from Greek papyri.

The chief question which faces the historian who enquires into this life is that of the mutual relations of the two strata of population in Egypt, the new-comers and the natives, of their influence upon one another, the hellenizing of the natives and the egyptianizing of the Greeks. There is no doubt that at first the new-comers kept themselves to themselves, putting a barrier between themselves as masters and the natives. The Greeks brought with them their religion and their cult, their habits and mode of life, their language and their law, their education and mental outlook. There were few towns in Egypt in which these peculiarities of their life lasted long. Local bye-laws preserved even into Roman times the refusal to recognize as valid intermarriage between Greeks and Egyptians. This was the case at Naucratis, probably at Alexandria and Ptolemais. But even in these cities the Greek system gradually changed and life on new lines came in. There was the influence of the environment, the separation from the Greek world, isolation amid new conditions. The cities of Egypt were Greek cities only outwardly. Alexandria was essentially the capital of the Ptolemies, a cosmopolitan, commercial, and manufacturing city. The life of a Greek polis it did not possess or at any rate only in outer form. It is very possible that under the later Ptolemies even these forms took on a special aspect and even the ‘self-government’ of the Alexandrian citizens was more and more limited by the close watch and strict control exercised by the king and his court.

This new aspect marks everything that in the life of Alexandria can be called specifically Alexandrian: the newness is not the result of fusion with Egypt or influence from Egypt, but the result of a transformation of the Greek spirit in a new environment, and under new conditions, a creation of new Greeks very little like the old. We do not know much about them, but somewhat is clear to us even with our little knowledge. It is not surprising that in the sphere of religion the purely Greek cults, the city cults, for example, of Zeus, Hera and Poseidon, are not the most conspicuous, though they enjoy official recognition. The real religion of the Alexandrians is partly the worship of the gods of the old homes from which the new inhabitants of Alexandria came, partly, indeed chiefly, the mystical cults of Greece and the East which were now spreading over the whole world: the ancient Eleusinian cult, torn away from Attica, the Eleusino-Orphic mysteries of Dionysus Zagreus, common to all Greeks and even to the whole world, the cult of Adonis so strikingly described by Theocritus and celebrated with the same forms and ritual by the up-country Greeks in the early Ptolemaic period. This mystical streak in the religious life of the Greek diaspora, scarcely connected with any particular place, still less with any particular city, but none the less Greek rather than Oriental, explains better than anything else the success of the cult and mysteries of Sarapis. What were the real motives of Ptolemy Soter in introducing the cult of Sarapis as the official cult of his new state side by side with that of Alexander, we do not know. Did he think that he could find in it common ground for the fusion of Greeks and Egyptians in one mass of subjects to one king and worshippers of the king’s god; did he wish like Ikhnaton long ago to create a god for his empire, just as Philopator tried the same thing by bringing into prominence the cult of his mystical ancestor Dionysus? We do not know; one thing is clear, this god Sarapis became the true symbol of the new religiosity and the changed outlook of the new ‘ Greeks ’ in Egypt.

For the Egyptians Sarapis had been and probably remained their god of the underworld. Osiris under the slightly changed name of the dead Apis became Osorapis, whom they had long worshipped at Memphis. The temple of Sarapis built by the Ptolemies at Memphis was just such a scene of Egyptian cult as the temples at Thebes, Edfu, Kom-Ombos and the rest. But this Egyptian deity became dear to the Greeks of Egypt ats well and took the chief place at Alexandria: scarcely as an Egyptian, rather as a new great mystical god, whose theology and whose ritual were worked out in concert by Timotheus the expounder of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the hellenized Egyptian priest and scholar Manetho, a god in whom were united for the Greek both the ancient Egyptian theological wisdom and all the mysticism of the new Greek religion: the mysticism of Zeus and Pluto, of the Sun and Asclepius, and perhaps even more that of Dionysus Zagreus. For him a consort was found in the equally mystic Isis and her divine son Horus (Harpocrates), who took the place of Anubis, Isis with the thousand names and the limitless mystic power, the apotheosis of maternal love and the personification of the mystic female principle. It is no wonder that this god, concentrating in himself the religious aspirations of the new Greek world, was never an artificial god, a god of politics1. Ptolemy Soter did not create him, he only gave him statues, temples and ritual. And to him reached out the souls of believers from all sides.

In a letter to Apollonius, one of Sarapis’s new servants tells the dioiketes that the will of his lord Sarapis has caused him to do all he could to raise a temple to Sarapis in his sea-coast home. Such servants of Sarapis, deeply convinced of his divine power, were the cloistered anchorites, Macedonians and Greeks, in the Sarapeum at Memphis. It may be doubted whether the cult of Sarapis went far towards uniting the religion of Greeks and Egyptians. Their views of it were so different. But for the Greeks he became one of the gods who attracted their souls like the Great Mother in Asia Minor, the Sun in Syria, Mithras in Asia Minor, Sabazius in Thrace; this was true not only in Egypt but far outside throughout the new Greek world.

As in the religious life of the Greek population in Egypt, so in every other department Alexandria took the lead. The Ptolemies invited from everywhere the best poets, scholars, architects, sculptors, and set them to work for themselves and their capital. But can we call what was accomplished at Alexandria typically Alexandrian? Is there a typically Alexandrian stamp upon the poetry of Callimachus, Apollonius and Theocritus, or is it just Hellenistic poetry, the poetry of the time after Alexander, the creators of which happened to live at Alexandria but might have lived at Cos or Miletus or Antioch? The atmosphere of a great cosmopolitan city was not specifically Alexandrian and the peculiarities of the work done by the poets who lived in Alexandria are just the same as those of the poets living elsewhere. No successors were left at Alexandria by the great poets of the third century BC. Their true successors work in the new capital of the world, Rome, and work in Latin.

Alexandria was closely bound up with science and scholarship. The study of the classics, the history of literature, scientific bibliographies, scientific editions of earlier literature, the whole circle of experimental science, astronomy and geography, the whole circle of applied science, all these without the Library, without the constant support of the state, were in the long run unthinkable. But whether Alexandrian science bears the impress of the Alexandrian spirit is a question not to be solved in the state of our knowledge both of the organization and resources of the Library and Museum, and especially of what they produced more particularly in the second and first centuries. One thing is quite clear: as in the poetry so in the science of Alexandria there was nothing Egyptian.

Still more difficult is it to decide whether there was any Alexandrian art. If by Alexandrian art we mean a new Greek version of Egyptian art as we see it in the statues and statuettes of gods and men, in reliefs, the architecture of temples, in certain examples of decorative painting and mosaic, in certain productions of jewelry and goldsmith’s work of the Ptolemaic period, we must of course say that there was. But if that is all, we must also say that Alexandrian art exercised no influence upon the development of Greek art and no new note sounds in it. The style of the neo-Egyptian art did not penetrate into the productions of Greek, Italian, Celtic, even Punic art of the Hellenistic period. A few queer details reached the Greek world, a few motives, especially in decorative art, but that was all.

At Alexandria all the great buildings, sculptures and paintings which decked the capital of the world, have perished. How far we are to look for their reflections in the temples, palaces and villas of later-republican and imperial Rome and Italy we cannot tell: this influence is possible, even probable, but we cannot prove it, just as we cannot prove either the Alexandrian origin even of one of the styles of decorative painting practised at Pompeii, or yet the supremacy of Alexandrian toreutic in the last two centuries BC or the Alexandrian derivation of the so-called picturesque Hellenistic reliefs. But of one thing there can be no doubt—the enormous part that Alexandrian culture played in the life of the Greeks in Egypt. Pompeii can scarcely be reckoned a copy of Alexandria, but the Greek quarters of the cities in Egypt and the new villages of the Fayum, so far as they were Greek, followed in the wake of the great capital. If ever one of these last is systematically excavated, we shall gain some idea of Alexandria.

Alexandria did of course give to its population at least a veneer of Greek. The translation of the Old Testament into Greek shows that the Jews of Alexandria spoke Greek, as did the majority of the Egyptians who lived there: but neither the Jews nor the Egyptians of Alexandria ever became Greek, either in spirit or in countenance. Was it that the Hellenism of Alexandria was not a pure solution, or was it that no one ever has been able to change the Jewish spirit? In externals, however, Alexandria was, and remained right to the very last days of ancient civilization, Hellenic, to the same extent that, for instance, Chicago has the air of an English town. If these Neo-Hellenes did not succeed in hellenizing in spirit, even in the Neo-Hellenic spirit, the other inhabitants of Alexandria, still the other inhabitants left no impress upon the Greeks. If the Alexandrian Greeks were a new type, this was due to their new environment and new conditions of life.

Was it the same with the Greeks up-country, in the towns and villages in which they lived ?

No doubt the Greeks as the dominant nation tried to organize their life in the new places à la grecque. As at Alexandria so at any place where a large number of Greeks lived, we must suppose the existence of gymnasium and palaestra. The existence of elementary Greek schools is made palpable by the preservation both of the boys’ exercise books and of the texts they studied. There were also Greek temples. Baths after the Greek fashion were built. The new towns also probably had squares lined with colonnades in the Greek manner and some public buildings in the Greek style. The Greeks naturally tried to keep together as much as they could, and preserve the likeness of Greeks. They read Greek books, listened to Greek music, went to Greek plays and ballets. The richer men would go in to Alexandria and send their children there.

But the up-country Greeks were living outside the atmosphere of the polis, far more than the Greeks of Alexandria and the other cities of Egypt. Their daily routine, the whole spirit of their life was not urban, and so not Greek, and that means half-way to Egyptian. Like the Egyptians, they were entirely absorbed in material cares; like them, they were in complete dependence upon the king and his officers; like them, they were subject to hundreds of regulations limiting their freedom. The greater part of the people round them were Egyptians. It was hard to find a Greek wife for a Greek soldier, while the Egyptian girls were attractive and ready to hand. Of course in the first generation the children talked Greek and received a Greek up-bringing: without that they would not have felt themselves at home in the privileged class. But they, and still more their children, very likely by a half Egyptian mother, were already only half-Greek and the Egyptian cast of mind was nearer to them than that of their fathers.

As the dominant class the Greeks made their language dominant. In the affairs of state and law-court it gradually ousted Egyptian. There is no doubt that many Egyptians learnt it. It is possible that certain Egyptians for the convenience of the Greek officials assumed Greek names. But the hellenization of the Egyptian masses went no further. Their life was and remained as of old, and accordingly could not be hellenized. The Greeks generally succeeded in hellenizing ‘barbarians,’ but not always, only within the definite life of the city-state. This life the Greeks in Egypt lacked. Perhaps too thorough a hellenization would have been scarcely welcome to the Ptolemies. Too sharp was the contrast between the ideas of a Hellene and the subject condition of an Egyptian, however prosperous. So the Egyptians went on living on their own lines.

The Ptolemies never tried to make any change in the organization of the Egyptian priesthood. The priests continued to be divided into the classed and the non-classed priesthood, higher and lower. In every temple as of old there went on being four, after 238 BC five classes of priests, a special hierarchy, and we know the Greek titles for them: archiereis, prophetai, stolistai (who vested the gods), pterophoroi (wing-bearers), hierogrammateis (sacred clerks). Besides these were the religious, semi-sacerdotal guilds, serving the cult of the gods and the dead; pastophoroi (bearers of shrines), taricheutai (embalmers), paraschistai (who opened the dead body), and so forth. In every temple the priests of the five classes elected the temple council. Every year delegates of the temples met in congress and not only passed resolutions in the king’s honour, but debated long upon their own affairs. What these were we do not know exactly, but there is no doubt they included something besides theology and ritual. It is clear that these synods gave expression not only to what the priests but to what the people were thinking, and were the nucleus about which the Egyptian population of the country gathered.

Into the organization of this population the Ptolemies brought little change. Upon it, upon the centuries-old organization of the laoi (folk) rested the whole system of administration and assessment. Every Egyptian belonged to a group and was firmly and permanently bound to it. The cultivator belonged to the group of his fellow-villagers, and could in no wise escape from it: his village was the place where he was registered, it was his ‘own place’ : without this an exact census of the population was inconceivable. An artisan was a member of his village and of one of the ancient guilds: without this the organization of assessments and monopolies was inconceivable. These guilds, though they had their Greek names, must be strictly distinguished from the Greek associations and clubs, though sometimes the names of one and the other exactly coincided. And all these groups, like the priests, have their own representatives, their own komarchs, their own elders (presbyteroi).

Compared with this stable organization, centuries old, how unstable and indeterminate were the institutions of the Greeks once they had lost their own splendid organization—the city! It is not to be wondered at that side by side with the external hellenization of the Egyptians and a more effective hellenizing of the other non-Greek settlers, there goes on a process of egyptianization, not outward but inward, a gradual egyptianization of the spirit of the immigrant population. This first appears in the sphere of religion. Strange as it may seem, no single Greek temple has been excavated in Egypt though they are often mentioned in documents. In the new villages of the Fayum all the temples excavated have been those either of Egyptian gods or of non-Greek gods egyptianized, e.g. the Thracian Horseman-hero. And many of the Egyptian temples were built by Greeks. For the Ptolemies this was a matter of policy. But what about private people ? From early times we have dedications by Greeks made to Egyptian gods, but no single dedication by an Egyptian to a Greek god.

At first a more or less pure Hellenism was kept up by an accession of Greeks from abroad. But when this current slackened and then probably stopped, the egyptianization of the people, underneath the Greek veneer, went on more and more quickly. Thracians, Galatians, Syrians were of course more open to it than Greeks. A great stratum of the population comes into being, neither Greek nor Egyptian, spiritual half-breeds. Part of it is recognized as such even by law. Between Greeks and Egyptians there appears a special intermediary group assigned to the politeuma of the Persians and enjoying some of the privileges of the Greek population.

In spirit and in outlook, in manner of life and interests the Greeks approached more and more to the Egyptians: whereas the more the Egyptians got used to these new Greeks the more indisposed they were to put up with their own lack of rights and the others’ privileges. The halo round the Greek as a superior being disappears and leaves only hate for the oppressor, the intruder, who is in no way better than the old masters of the country but who holds the best land and the best houses, for whom the Egyptians are forced to work, who orders them about and plunders them, on whose side are the law and authority.

Here lies the explanation why, as soon as the Greeks’ halo began to grow dim and fear of them to pass away, the native population, led by the priests, makes one insurrection after another. The first explosion came under Euergetes, while, from the day when Philopator was compelled to mobilize Egyptians in the contest with Antiochus, the insurrections became endemic, dying down for a time and then bursting out again.

These risings were doomed to failure, nor did they issue in a second Saite period in the life of Egypt. Alexandria did not yield her place to Memphis or to Thebes. On the contrary Thebes was destroyed and the proud city turned into five modest villages. It is true that the government did make some concessions. The Ptolemies insist more on their character of Pharaohs in their dealings with the Egyptian priesthood; the priests in their decrees speak rather more in the Egyptian fashion than before, many small temples are given the right of sanctuary (but with the other hand the Ptolemies take strict measures to regulate all right of taking sanctuary), temples are again allowed to own some property, though to what extent and whether with freedom to make use of their revenues we do not know. As to the rest of the population, one decree after another, at the end of each period of serious risings, promises the insurgents amnesty, bids them come back each to his home to start again upon his peaceful labour. These decrees also offer certain compensations, certain relief. But the relief amounts to very little, is concerned with the abuses of officialdom, and absolutely fails to touch the fundamental question of the class of masters and the class of servants.

Next Philopator deluded himself into believing that the fusion of Greeks and Egyptians had now been accomplished, the Egyptians turned into good enough Greeks, the Greeks brought sufficiently to understand and respect the Egyptians, so that all were equally ready faithfully to serve Ptolemy-Dionysus united in the mysteries of the god. When under this delusion Philopator dared side by side with the Greek to set up an Egyptian army, the clashing discord between Egyptians and Greeks broke out in full strength. It appeared that the Egyptians had not been hellenized at all, and the Greeks were not at all prepared to give up half their privileges. The insurrections of the Egyptians had one decisive result. They forced the Ptolemies to take definitely one side or the other. Philopator had paid too dearly for seeking to ride two horses at once. And as a general rule they leant for support on the population of Egypt which in manner of life and education was Greek, of whatever origin the particular families of ‘Greeks’ might be. Another very important point about the risings is that they largely tended to arrest the process of fusion. The ‘Greeks’ of Egypt were afraid for their rights, their privileged position, and stood shoulder to shoulder in defence of the king and their privileges. To them rallied the more or less hellenized inhabitants who were neither Egyptian nor Greek by origin, and also many of the upper-class Egyptians who had also become in part Greek. Altogether they got the better of the Egyptians and did not allow Egypt to go back to the days of the Twenty-eighth to Thirtieth Dynasties when the Egyptians were lords of the land and the Greeks their servants.

The Greeks of Egypt—little of the Greek as was left in them— kept their position and defended their special culture, in which the chief elements, but not all, were non-Egyptian. When the Romans became lords of Egypt they relied upon this class and used it as the base of their organization of Egypt. With this class they could find contacts; the Egyptians were and remained alien.

If it is hard to say whether Alexandria, that is the type of Greek that arose in Alexandria, added anything to the store of ancient civilization, it is even more difficult to make out what the up-country Greeks contributed. In their letters they speak of nothing but their family affairs and material interests. They read books of many kinds: but there is no trace of this in their letters, not a single quotation, not a single idea with any tinge of reading. Money, squabbles about money, business, family life on its material side, such are the subjects of the letters. It may be said that papyrus was expensive, it was hard to send letters, nothing could be written but what was absolutely necessary. But that means that nothing that was not material was absolutely necessary for the up-country Greek. Of material things he often writes in the fullest detail. Zeno and his correspondents do not spare paper (supplied by the state): they talk at great length of the tiniest everyday things, but in their letters their intellectual interests do not come out.

To judge by all we read, these Greeks were good managers and for a time improved the economic life of the country: but this improvement did not last. The enthusiasm passed and things went back into the old rut, at least in the matter of agriculture. In the two centuries after Philadelphus we can observe no novelty in cultivation. Then something fresh does come in again with the Romans. Nor can we detect much progress in industry. Creative power steadily wanes in artistic handicraft. Anything at all good one has to date in the third or early second century BC. Thus creative power was scarcely the property of Egyptian Hellenism: the city had vanished and with it faded creative power.

To sum up, what value shall we give to the Ptolemies’ work in Egypt? There is no doubt that the Ptolemies during the first century of their rule created a strong power and a mighty state, increased the productivity of the country and established favourable conditions for the economic activities of their new settlers. They applied great skill to elaborating a system of administering the country and exploiting it economically. On the Egyptian foundation they built their edifice in which all the upper storeys were for the dwelling of strangers and the cellars reserved for the natives.

Like any other strong government capable of defending the interests of the state and securing its country’s peace, the Ptolemies established more tolerable conditions of life for the natives than probably had existed under the Persian domination or the latest Pharaohs. But beyond this they gave the Egyptians very little: all their gifts were for the Greeks. It is true that before their time the Egyptians had not had very much. But in earlier times, save for the short dominations of the Assyrians and Persians, they were masters in their own house, servants perhaps but servants of their own gods and their own kings. Now they had become the servants of foreigners. We can see how, in view of this, the increased strictness with which the system of petty and detailed control over the whole life of the population, bound up with the nationalization of production and exchange, was a very heavy burden for the population to bear and aroused intense dissatisfaction. Further, the system necessitated giving officialdom an altogether exaggerated part in affairs, and this worked out particularly badly in Egypt. Even when the government was vigorous and still more in moments of weakness, the abuses and arbitrary action of the officials were really intolerable to the Egyptian population. By the second century BC even the life of the Greeks had ceased to be particularly attractive. Perpetual risings made the future uncertain. The state began to exercise pressure even upon the upper class, which came to experience the doubtful blessings of nationalization carried to extremes.

Historians do not issue diplomas or distribute praise and blame. The Ptolemies in Egypt were in a difficult position. They dealt with it as best they could according to their lights, keeping in mind not only their own interests but the good of the country. It is idle to divide the Ptolemies into sheep and goats, good and bad. They all had the same system of government. In foreign policy some were successful, some were not, but this often depended not on their own abilities but on the conditions under which they had to execute their policy. In the task of maintaining the independence of Egypt they succeeded longer than did their enemies and colleagues in their various empires.

Furthermore, it is due to the conscious and persistent efforts of the Ptolemies that products of Alexandrian and Egyptian art and industry spread far and wide all over the civilized and the half civilized world and contributed thus to the spread of Greek art and civilization. Moreover, it is probable that the efficient organization of Ptolemaic administration, finance and economics influenced the neighbouring countries, especially the nascent Roman Empire. Still more interesting is it to note how similar was the financial and economic organization of the Indian empire of Chandragupta and his successors as set forth in the newly discovered political treatise, the so-called Arthashastra of Kautilia, to that of Ptolemaic Egypt. We see, for instance, the three state monopolies—oil, salt, mines—and their organization, and the far reaching state-socialism under the rule of ‘enlightened monarchs’ both in India and Ptolemaic Egypt. However, so long as the date of the Arthashastra is controversial we shall not be able to decide whether we have to deal with mere coincidences or with an influence of Ptolemaic Egypt on India of the Hellenistic and the early Roman times.

In internal policy the later Ptolemies had to reap the harvest sown by the early ones, and do so under very difficult conditions, an atmosphere of bitter hostility between the two unequal parts of the population. In that struggle they took the side of Hellenism and saved it. To the country in general, especially to the native population, their behaviour was no worse, maybe rather better than that of the early Ptolemies. Beneath the formal phrases of their amnesties one can feel a true sympathy for the country torn by civil wars and groaning under abuses. Here and there in the edicts of certain emperors this note is heard, but apart from that we pass, with the advent of the Roman governors, to a regime in which the voice of sympathy is dumb.