THE AUGUSTAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER X

EGYPT UNDER THE EARLY PRINCIPATE

I. THE STATUS OF EGYPT IN THE EMPIRE

IT is unfortunately difficult, in the present state of the evidence, to determine in any detail the changes which Augustus introduced into the administration and economic machinery of Egypt. Even the initial question of the relation between Egypt and the empire is not free from difficulties. Augustus himself in his Res Gestae declares that he ‘added Egypt to the dominions of the Roman People’, and more than one ancient author speaks of the country as a province; but a province of the same kind as the other provinces it can hardly be called, and some writers have even represented it as the property of the Emperor and its connection with the empire as personal only. This is to go too far. Egypt was held by a Roman army and in its turn supplied recruits alike to the legions and to the auxilia; it was administered not by a procurator of Caesar but by a Prefect, trained in the regular Imperial service; and its revenues went to the central treasury, where they were used, in common with the other moneys there accumulated, for the needs of the empire.

Nevertheless it differed markedly from other provinces in several respects. Its wealth and the importance to the Roman food­supply of the corn which it exported made it a possible source of danger in the hands of a rival; and Augustus, though he nominally handed it over to the Roman People, took special precautions to keep it under his own control. Alone among the provinces administered by him it was governed by an equestrian prefect instead of a man of senatorial rank; and the anomaly was the more obvious because this prefect was in command of a legionary army. Moreover (and in this Egypt stood quite alone in the empire) senators and equites illustres were expressly forbidden to enter the country without the Emperor’s permission.

Within the country itself Augustus was frankly the successor of the Ptolemaic kings. In the Egyptian temples he and his successors replaced the divine Ptolemy, were represented on the monuments in the same manner as the Pharaohs of old, received the same divine honours, and were accorded the same titles, though the new position of the country as part of a wider empire was recognized by the addition of the title ‘king of kings’ to the old ‘lord of the two lands.’ On the other hand the Greek cult of the living ruler ceased to be a State cult and was continued merely as a communal institution. The Imperial titles usual elsewhere were in Egypt employed only in official Latin documents, and the consular dating was replaced, except in such documents, by the regnal years of the reigning Emperor, an apparent attempt to establish an Era by the kratesis Kaisaros or ‘dominion of Caesar’ having failed to establish itself. The Emperor in fact, though under the early principate he did not, in Greek, bear the royal title, was to his Egyptian subjects no less a king than any of the Ptolemies. The prefect, his representative, who held office at his pleasure and not for a fixed term, was therefore a viceroy, and is indeed so described by both Strabo and Tacitus. On his official visits to the temples he was accorded royal honours; and he sent the traditional offerings to the Nile at Philae and was subject to the ancient taboo which forbade the king to navigate the river during the inundation. He was invested with proconsular powers, his enactments had the force of law, and he could manumit slaves and appoint guardians.

II. DEFENCE: CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION: THE LAND

Through the many centuries of Egyptian history the rulers of the country have always been faced by three main tasks, upon the performance of which the success of their rule has depended; and just as the surest sign of decay has been the neglect of these, so has a resolute handling of them been the first care of a conquering power. These three tasks are the maintenance of the irrigation system, the preservation of the country’s internal unity, and its defence against attack from without. The last subject and that of the military organization generally are treated elsewhere, but for the sake of completeness some reference must be made to them here.

The establishment, as a result of Petronius’ war with the Ethiopians, of the frontier district known as the Dodekaschoinos, which was administered, under the ultimate authority of the epistrategos of the Thebaid, by the strategos of the nome of Ombos and Elephantine, and garrisoned by detachments of legionary and auxiliary troops, prevented further trouble for many years to come; and the force left in Egypt by Augustus, three legions, nine cohorts, and three alae, was larger than any external danger demanded. Its size was probably dictated in part by a fear of the turbulence and insubordination for which the Egyptians were proverbial, but even so it was larger than was needed; and before a.d. 23 one of the legions had been withdrawn, though without an equivalent reduction of the auxiliary forces, which thenceforward stood in a rather high ratio to the legionary troops. The single legions were commanded not by senatorial legati but by praefecti legionis chosen from among those who had twice held the first centuriate and had attained the highest rank in the equestrian military service. The commander in chief was, of course, the prefect of Egypt. The Egyptian like the Oriental legions generally were recruited largely in the East and as time went on were drawn more and more from Egypt itself. Their recruits were taken primarily from among the Romans and from the privileged Greeks, who were given the Roman citizenship as a preliminary to enlistment. The auxiliary forces were recruited, in principle, from the peregrini, in Egypt mainly the hellenized Graeco-Egyptians, who received the citizenship on their discharge; but in the course of time the distinction of status between legions and auxilia tended to disappear. The veterans frequently settled as landowners in the villages or nome-capitals, where they played a considerable part, forming, socially if not economically, a sort of rural upper class.

Though Alexandria was the military base of the army, legionary detachments, as well as auxiliary units, were detailed for service in posts extending the whole length of Egypt to the southern frontier of the Dodekaschoinos. The duties of the troops were not merely military. They were employed in the construction and repair of canals, of cisterns on the desert routes, and of other public works; they acted as guards, perhaps also in an administrative capacity, in the mines and quarries; and it is probable that even as early as the reign of Gaius or the later years of Tiberius they were detached on occasion to assist in the collection of taxes, thus inaugurating a practice which in the Byzantine age was to occasion grave abuses. They were further used to augment the local police. The coasts of Egypt and probably Libya as well were protected by a fleet known as the classis Augusta Alexandrine, which was also responsible for convoying the grain fleet to Italy. It was commanded by a prefect, who was further responsible, at a later date if not from the first, for the river police on the Nile.

In Egypt, which, apart from the Delta, consists in effect of the long and narrow Nile valley, there has always been a pronounced tendency, whenever the central authority has grown weak, for the districts farthest from the seat of government to break away. Our information as to internal conditions during the last half-century of Ptolemaic rule is scanty in the extreme, but it may be doubted whether during much of that time the royal authority was very effective in Upper Egypt. Certain it is that on the arrival of the Roman tax-collectors in 30—29 b.c. the Thebaid, long accustomed to defy the rulers at Alexandria, rose in revolt. But the rebels soon found that the Roman army was of another calibre than the Ptolemaic levies. In a campaign of fifteen days, which included two pitched battles and the capture of five towns, the first prefect, Cornelius Gallus, who had already suppressed a revolt at Heroonpolis, crushed the rebellion so effectually that for a century and a half we hear of no further trouble.

Augustus did not content himself with military measures, but, like the Ptolemies before him and the Arabs later, reformed the administrative system in the direction of greater centralization. Under the later kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty the Thebaid had been governed by an official known as the epistrategos, who possessed both civil and military powers and towards the end of the period enjoyed an almost royal authority. Augustus retained this official and seems even to have left the existing Greek epistrategos in office; but he deprived him of all military power, vesting in the prefect the ultimate command over the army of Egypt. This reduction in the importance of the post was emphasized by the appointment, perhaps at the same time, of two similar officials. Egypt was in fact divided into three administrative districts, the Thebaid, the Delta, and the intervening country, known officially as ‘the Seven Nomes and the Arsinoite Nome’, with an epistrategos at the head of each. The functions of these officials, who were always (with the sole exception of the Greek just mentioned) Roman knights, were purely civil and administrative. They included the selection of persons nominated for certain liturgical offices, a supervision of the gymnasia, the admission of ephebi in the Greek cities, and certain judicial powers of a secondary kind; but the epistrategos, though often delegated by the prefect to hear cases, had no independent jurisdiction.

In nothing indeed was the centralizing tendency of the new government more marked than in the administration of justice. The Ptolemaic itinerant courts were swept away, at least in their original form, and judicial power was concentrated in the hands of the prefect. He held an annual assize for each of the three areas (not identical with the districts of the epistrategoi) into which, for judicial purposes, Egypt was now divided. The venue of the assizes was announced each year; but normally the sessions were held at Alexandria for the nomes of the western Delta, at Pelusium for those of the eastern Delta, and at Memphis for the rest of Egypt. The business was by no means confined to judicial matters. It included a general survey of the local administration, and the various officials concerned were required to submit their accounts and records to audit.

The choice of the assize towns was presumably intended to prevent a time-wasting journey by the prefect into Upper Egypt; but it must have entailed great inconvenience to litigants from the remoter nomes, who had now to make the long journey to Memphis or even farther; for cases from the upper country seem at times to have been heard at Pelusium. This inconvenience was but slightly lessened by occasional changes in the venue of the court. As early as possible in his tenure of office each prefect made a tour of inspection in the Thebaid, and no doubt sometimes took the opportunity to hold the assizes in that district; but since most prefects probably paid no more than one visit to Upper Egypt, it was but rarely that litigants from the southern nomes were able to have their suits heard locally. Of greater utility was the frequent practice of delegation. The prefect was assisted at the assizes by other officials, acting as his deputies; some suits were referred to local magistrates; and when very contentious cases arose they might be adjourned to the following year, with an injunction for the preliminary enquiries to be made locally.

The prefect was the sole magistrate in Roman Egypt possessing unrestricted independent jurisdiction; but there were others who had limited powers, though probably the prefect alone was competent in criminal cases. Of the officials with judicial power the chief was the Juridicus, who, like the prefect, was a Roman knight and received his commission direct from the Emperor, with authority extending over the whole of Egypt. The Archidicastes also had an authority embracing the whole country, though he was intimately connected with Alexandria, from the leading families of which, usually those possessing the Roman citizenship, most holders of the office were drawn. He was not, as the title suggests, a Chief Justice nor, probably, a judge of appeal, and appears most often in connection with the process of execution and distraint for unpaid debts. He had authority over the katalogeion or Public Record Office, was concerned in the registration of ephebi, and was the responsible authority in the procedure for giving public validity to private contracts or chirographs. If he had any independent jurisdiction apart from the process of execution for debt, it was probably in cases arising out of contractual obligations.

Jurisdiction, in matters affecting their own departments, was possessed also by the two great financial officers, the Dioiketes and the Idios Logos. The former, who does not appear under this title in extant papyri until the second century a.d., is probably not to be connected directly with the high Ptolemaic official so called; but the office was clearly one of importance, and the holders of it seem always to have been Romans. Much more is known of the Idios Logos or Idiologos, an office certainly of Ptolemaic origin but continued by the Romans, apparently with little essential change of function, though with greatly increased importance. The holder of this office was always a knight. The title did not denote anything like our ‘Privy Purse’, and is to be translated, not ‘private’ but ‘special account’; the Idios Logos was in fact not so much a separate department as a term of book-keeping, and the sums collected went to the central treasury. Broadly speaking, the Idiologos, as the procurator at the head of the department was called, was responsible for all irregular or sporadic sources of revenue, notably those derived from ownerless and confiscated property and all species of fines. Land taken over, if fertile, was transferred to the category of royal land, but if unproductive was retained under his own control unless and until it could be sold. He claimed all dead trees or dry branches of living trees, even when in private ownership. Fines, confiscations and licences for the unauthorized cultivation of land, for changes of name, for breaches of the laws of status, all fell within his competence; and he appears so often in matters affecting temples, as in the sale of priestly offices, the exaction of dues for the circumcision of priests’ sons, and the collection of fines for infringement of regulations, that he was long supposed to be ex officio High Priest as well as procurator idiu logu; but this is probably an error, so far at least as the first and second centuries are concerned. Not only the local officials and his own special staff but a whole army of informers, some of whom appear to have occupied a semi-official position, aided him in his task; and though it was an exaggeration when the prefect Ti. Julius Alexander declared in an edict that Alexandria was almost depopulated through the activities of these gentry, there can be no doubt that in times of financial stringency the department of the Idios Logos was an instrument of fiscal oppression as efficient as it was all-pervading.

The other central officials, procurators, Imperial freedmen and the like, may be disregarded here; but something must be said as to Augustus’s ecclesiastical policy, for not only does it further illustrate his centralizing tendency, but the control of the Egyptian church was as essential to the preservation of internal unity as centralization itself. Under the later Ptolemies the influence of the priests had grown steadily, and additional privileges, grants of lands, and extensions of the right of asylum to even minor temples had been wrung from the enfeebled government. Augustus, recognizing the danger of this State within the State, returned to the stricter control of the earlier Ptolemies, which he even strengthened. Considerable confiscations of the temple lands were made, probably in the main from the estates granted by the later kings and managed by the priests themselves. The ordinary sacred land was, as formerly, under the control of the State officials, the relations of its lessees being with them, not with the temples. Apart from particular exceptions, the priests continued to receive a stipend from the government, and the taxes paid for sacred purposes formed a special department of the revenue; but the very fact that the priesthood was dependent on State support was a guarantee against insubordination. It was probably to the same end that the management of the temples was transferred, in many cases at least, from the single overseer of Ptolemaic times to a college or committee of the priests; for a division of power seemed less dangerous than its concentration in the hands of one man. But the most effective measure was the subjection, either by Augustus himself or by a later emperor, of the whole ecclesiastical organization to a central authority, that of the ‘High Priest of Alexandria and all Egypt’. This functionary, who, despite his title, was no priest but a Roman civil official, exercised a strict control over all the details of cult and temple organization. Each temple was required to send to the strategos of the nome an annual list of its priests and property, together with its accounts. The priests must even resign themselves to losing some of their special privileges. The exemption from poll-tax which they had enjoyed under the Ptolemies was continued, but in a restricted form, a fixed number of priests being assigned to each temple and all in excess of that figure being rendered liable to the tax. Priests were not even, in principle, exempt from liability to liturgical offices and the corvée, though particular cases of exemption are recorded. Yet effective as these measures were in curtailing the power of the priesthood, and though the interest of the Roman government in the religious organization of Egypt seems to have been primarily fiscal, it is by no means certain that the true drift of the new policy was perceived at the time. Not for nearly two centuries after the conquest do we hear of any disorders in which the priests were concerned. Augustus continued, like the Ptolemies, to protect the ancient religion of the country and to build or enlarge temples; and the strict control over the priests and their property, if it implied a limitation of their powers, at least guaranteed their subsistence. They were Danaan gifts that Caesar gave to the Egyptian church, but it may well be that only the more far-seeing priests knew them for such.

The third of the three great tasks which have always confronted the rulers of Egypt is the most vital of all; for upon the maintenance of the dykes and canals depends the very possibility of organized life in the rainless Nile valley. Times of political disorganization and economic decay have always been marked by a shrinkage of the cultivable area, necessitating, as soon as a more capable government was established, an attempt to reclaim the land which had fallen waste. It is clear that the state of agriculture had deteriorated in the later Ptolemaic period, and Octavian found it advisable, like the early Ptolemies before and the Arab conquerors after him, to undertake a reform of the irrigation system. He employed his troops in the task of cleaning and deepening the neglected canals, and so effective were his measures that, according to Strabo, whereas before the Roman conquest a time of abundance occurred only with a rise of fourteen cubits in the level of the Nile, and a rise of eight meant famine, in the prefecture of Petronius a rise of only twelve produced a record harvest and there was no scarcity when the rise was but eight cubits. For the further maintenance of the dykes and canals the immemorial corvée, by which the peasantry were compelled to give their labour, was maintained by the Romans, but with some changes, notably in the method of reckoning the quota of labour.

It was not sufficient to improve the irrigation; the lands which had fallen waste under the later Ptolemies must be brought into cultivation again. In the measures taken to this end Augustus followed essentially the methods employed by his predecessors, bringing to their logical conclusion tendencies already marked before the conquest. The Ptolemaic king, like the Pharaoh before him, was in theory sole owner of all the land in Egypt, and the fertile arable land was in fact for the most part retained under his control and cultivated on leases of indefinite duration by the ‘royal tenants’; but considerable areas, chiefly of the less productive land, were ‘released’ from the direct control of the king. The released land included various categories, but all alike belonged ultimately to the king; nor, despite a tendency towards an increasing security of tenure, does it appear from our evidence that a true ownership ever developed under the Ptolemies.

On the conquest the whole land of Egypt fell to Octavian, who transferred it to the Roman People. The main categories continued, but considerable changes were made. The tenure of the katoikic land or military allotments of the Greek settlers naturally ceased to be military, and much of it was confiscated. The remainder was treated frankly as private property, subject to a tax in kind, and of the confiscated allotments portions were sold to private purchasers. This land continued, however, to form a separate category and was entered in a special register.

Just as the Roman government transformed the military tenures into full property (to the extent, that is, to which Roman law recognized private property in the provinces), so did it abandon the theory of the royal ownership of the so-called ‘private’ land. Indeed the formation of private property was actively forwarded, whether by selling barren or derelict land at a fixed price, with exemption from taxes for a given period and thereafter payment of the one-artaba tax, or by offering confiscated land for sale by auction to the highest bidder. Conditions no doubt varied greatly, but it is clear that the agrarian history of the Roman period was characterized by a great extension of private property in land and by the growth of a class of peasant proprietors. The policy was dictated less by any regard for the interests of the populace than by the desire to see the financial responsibilities of the cultivators backed by guarantees; for land was the most concrete and most accessible form of property.

The domain land still played an important role, comprising as it did the majority of the more fertile soil. As of old, it was leased to the ‘royal’ (now ‘public’) tenants on an indefinite lease; at irregular intervals fresh distributions were made, but a lease could be terminated at any time if an offer of higher rent was received. The rents varied according to the quality of the soil; and in times of depression, in order to attract tenants, special rates were offered. If voluntary tenants were lacking, compulsion, already employed exceptionally in a crisis by the Ptolemies, was resorted to; but this practice, which took various forms, and was eventually to become a burdensome abuse, hardly falls within the period covered by this chapter, though there are occasional indications of it in the first century.

Though a good deal of sacred land was confiscated, this category was not abolished. The Ptolemaic ‘gift land’ finds a Roman analogy in the domains (ousiai) which were created in great numbers during the early Principate, probably in part out of confiscated estates, and were granted to or purchased by members of the Imperial family, Imperial freedmen, and prominent private persons, Roman or Alexandrine. These domains, which probably included a good proportion of fertile land, were leased partly to tenants of the same class as the royal tenants, partly to large-scale lessees. From the time of Claudius, and particularly in that of Nero, they fell in rapid succession into the possession of the emperor; and by the reign of Titus most, if not all, belonged to the Imperial patrimonium. Probably at that period a change was made in their administration, and it may have been then that the office of procurator usiacus, to manage this class of land, was created. But the later history of the domains lies outside the scope of this chapter. Not so with regard to another class of public land, the so-called ‘revenue land’, which can be traced back at least to the middle of the first century. Its nature is still in dispute, but it seems likely that it was land which had in some way passed, permanently or for a time, out of private into Imperial possession.

III. THE GREEK CITIES AND THE NATIONALITIES

After the fall of Alexandria Octavian, in a Greek speech, promised the citizens an amnesty, and he further pleased them by paying a ceremonial visit to the tomb of Alexander; but he declined to inspect the mummies of the Ptolemaic kings, and seems indeed to have made no extraordinary effort to conciliate Alexandrian loyalty. He confirmed all the privileges of the city, which he left, as he had found it, the capital of Egypt.

It is a striking example of the fragmentary and haphazard character of our evidence for the history of Graeco-Roman Egypt that we know so little of the constitution and administrative system of this city, the greatest in the eastern Mediterranean, and in the Empire second only to Rome. Even the question whether Octavian found a senate there is still in dispute. It is a reasonable supposition that Alexander established one, but we have no clear evidence of its existence during the Ptolemaic period, and it is certain that there was none under the Empire until the reign of Septimius Severus. It is often asserted that Octavian abolished it; but the weight of evidence favours the view that if Alexandria ever had a senate it had ceased to exist before the Roman period. If the Caesar mentioned in a recently discovered papyrus fragment is to be identified with Octavian, it would appear that the Alexandrines, either immediately after the conquest or, more probably, at a later period in his reign, made an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a senate, as we know that they did after the accession of Claudius.

We hear nothing of any popular assembly, but some machinery there must have been for expressing the corporate will of the city and electing the magistrates. Of the four magistrates whom Strabo mentions, the only one whom we can regard as certainly municipal was the exegetes, who seems to have been originally the chief of the Alexandrian magistrates, and who was particularly concerned with the enrolment of the ephebi. The gymnasiarch, who at an earlier time may well have been a private or semi-private functionary, is more prominent than the exegetes in the texts of the Roman period, and it is possible that Augustus reorganized municipal administration, giving the gymnasiarch the principal place. Associated with the gymnasiarch in his supervision of the gymnasium and the games connected with it was the kosmetes. Among others of whom we hear were the eutheniarch, responsible for the food-supply, the agoranomos, in charge of the market and notarial business, and the hierothytai. Whether all of these magistrates existed throughout the Roman period, what was their method of election, what the qualifications required, and whether their authority extended over the whole population or only over the full citizens—these are questions which may be answered with greater or less degrees of probability, but no certainty can be attained at present.

Under the Ptolemies Alexandria had its own law-courts, and two of these continued after the conquest, lasting at least till the 26th year of Augustus, after which they are not heard of again and probably disappeared; but even before that date the extant papyri of the reign of Augustus do not show them exercising any functions which can be regarded as strictly judicial, their activities being confined to a peculiar kind of legal contract known as synchoresis. Their place was taken later by the Archidicastes and his bureau, the katalogeion, which was also concerned in the enrolment of ephebi and during the Roman period developed from a municipal institution into a Record Office for Egypt at large.

It has already been implied that the actual citizens were not the only element in the population of Alexandria, and indeed they were certainly a minority there. Even among them there were grades. The full citizens were those enrolled in tribes and demes. The important and constant element was the deme rather than the tribe, and during the Ptolemaic and earlier Roman period it was customary, since the deme-names of Alexandria and Ptolemais differed, to describe a citizen of either city by his deme only. The tribe-names were more fluid; thus we know that Claudius sanctioned a proposal to name a tribe in his honour. Sweeping changes Were made in the nomenclature from the reign of Nero onwards; at the same time the relations of demes and tribes were altered, and it became the practice to describe citizens by both tribe and deme.

Besides these deme-members there were citizens of inferior right, belonging to no deme. The letter of Claudius to the Alexandrines shows, indeed, that the prerequisite for citizenship (special grants excepted) was not membership of a deme but admission to the ephebate, a privilege granted only to the sons of former ephebes, whose qualifications were examined before admission, and who were then enrolled in symmories.

In the absence of a senate and possibly of an assembly citizenship carried only limited political rights, but it offered substantial advantages. It was the essential preliminary, for natives of Egypt, to the Roman citizenship; it gave the right to enter the legions, as well as immunity from poll-tax and from the obligation to liturgies and similar burdens throughout the rest of Egypt; and it naturally carried much social prestige.

Alexandria had from the first contained a considerable Egyptian population, whose number probably grew with time. There were also many Greeks who were not citizens. The Macedonians formed a special class, outside the citizen body; and we hear of Phrygians and of Persians of the epigone; but it is doubtful whether any of these national groupings survived the reign of Augustus, with the one exception of the Jews. Settled in the city from an early period of its existence, at first in the ‘Delta’ quarter but spreading later to a second quarter also, the Jewish community enjoyed marked privileges. Not indeed citizens, they were to this extent actually superior to the Alexandrines, that they had a council of elders (gerousia). At the head of the community, perhaps the president of the gerousia, was an official called ethnarch or genarch, who enjoyed powers of jurisdiction. The Jews possessed a special archive and their own courts; but we have no documentary evidence as to the law and procedure which obtained there.

Diodorus states on the authority of the registration officials that in his day the free inhabitants of Alexandria numbered over 300,000. If we add to these the slaves and the floating population always present in a great commercial capital and seaport, we shall arrive at a figure of about half a million. Fierce, fickle, turbulent, pleasure-loving, flippant in speech and ready of wit, always apt to be stirred by some popular song or ribald jest into incalculable action, divided by racial feuds, and subject to sudden accesses of political violence or religious fanaticism, the people of Alexandria were a perpetual anxiety to their Roman rulers. But if they were unruly and licentious they were certainly industrious. Alexandria was now at the zenith of its fortunes; trade and industry prospered, the population increased, and the city, with its broad, well-lighted thoroughfares lined by colonnades and adorned with splendid public buildings, must have presented an impressive spectacle. Its intellectual life was centred in the Museum, now as under the Ptolemies a State institution, supported by a regular subvention and under the direction of an official of equestrian rank appointed by the emperor. Though it was probably an institute for research rather than for teaching, its professors were free to give instruction and no doubt often did so. It cannot be said at this period to have been responsible for any work of paramount importance, but it still boasted scholars of some standing; and its activity was paralleled in the Jewish community by a group of writers whose leading representative was Philo. It was in truth by no mere accident that Alexandria became later the seat of that Christian catechetical school to which the names of Clement and Origen have given an unfading lustre.

Besides Alexandria there were, before the founding of Antinoopolis, only two Greek cities in Egypt, Naucratis and Ptolemais. We know even less of them than of Alexandria, but concerning Ptolemais we may draw some inferences from what is known of it under the Ptolemies. It is certain that it then possessed both a senate and an assembly; and though we have no documentary mention of either between the Roman conquest and a.d. 202, there is no sufficient reason to suppose that Augustus abolished them. As at Alexandria the citizens were enrolled in tribes and demes; but there was no reorganization of these under Nero. It is likely that they enjoyed in general the same privileges as Alexandrines, but this cannot be proved in detail.

The position of the Greek cities was quite exceptional. The nome-capitals (metropoleis), though called poleis, were not to Greek conceptions cities in the proper sense, but merely glorified villages. They possessed none of the marks of a polis, neither senate nor assembly, no organization by tribes and demes, and originally no civic magistrates; and they were as much under the authority of the nome officials as any part of the nome. There was however, alike in them and in the villages, a non-Egyptian element, the military settlements established by the Ptolemies. The settlers, Macedonians, Phrygians, etc., were organized in racial unions or politeumata, both Greek and oriental; but all alike were more or less hellenized, were regarded by the natives as Greeks, and in course of time came to be in some sort a unified group of ‘Hellenes’ as opposed to the native ‘Egyptians’. The prevailing view, that the effect of the Roman conquest was to reinforce the Greek element in Egypt and correspondingly to depress the status of the Egyptians, has recently been called in question. Bickermann holds that from the reign of Augustus all inhabitants of Egypt except the citizens of the Greek cities were to the Romans ‘Egyptians’; and though he has to admit some difficulties, for which no solution has yet been discovered, his theory seems in the main to be well-founded.

The Romans recognized and indeed emphasized a difference between Hellenic and Egyptian culture, but the actual distinction which they made for administrative purposes was one between the inhabitants of the metropoleis and those of the villages. Accustomed to self-governing municipalities in the provinces, they did introduce in Egypt certain elements which bore some resemblance to municipal institutions, though nothing that can properly be called municipal government. They initiated in fact a process of development which was to lead, with the grant of the senates by Septimius Severus in a.d. 202, to at least a semi-municipalization, and later on to the transformation of Egypt from a country divided into nomes, each with a metropolis, into one of poleis or civitates, each with its territorium. On the assumption, doubtless justified to a considerable extent, that the inhabitants of the nome-capitals were likely to be more deeply imbued with Hellenic culture than mere villagers, the metropolites, though they paid poll-tax like other ‘Egyptians’, were assessed, if of metropolitan descent on both sides, at a lower rate, which varied from metropolis to metropolis, but was always substantially lower than the standard rate paid by villagers. Simultaneously the politeumata seem to have been abolished, and a momentous change was made in the administration of the metropoleis. The typical expression of Hellenic culture and the centre of Hellenic life was the gymnasium, and its existence, wherever Greeks settled in any considerable number, was as much a matter of course as the club and cricket-field wherever the modern Englishman is found. In Ptolemaic Egypt gymnasia are widely recorded, not only in the nome-capitals but in country villages. In the more important centres they acquired a status which gave them a semi-official air; but nowhere in the chora, and perhaps not even in Alexandria, were they official institutions. It may have been Augustus who made the Alexandrian gymnasiarch a regular municipal magistrate; it was certainly he who gave official recognition to the gymnasiarchs of the nome-capitals, and with them, in imitation of Alexandrian institutions, to a group of magistrates who bore titles familiar in the Greek city-states, the exegetes, the kosmetes, the chief priest, the agoranomos, the eutheniarch, and the hypomnematographos. It is not certain that these magistrates formed a corporation from the first, but they certainly did later; and in them on the one side and the privileged metropolites on the other we may recognize the nuclei of a senate and an assembly or demos.

Not all metropolites were eligible for the magistracies. True to her principle of favouring everywhere an aristocratic form of government, Rome established a superior class within the metropolite body, that known as ‘the gymnasium class’. Only members of this were entitled to that education in the gymnasium which was as much the hall-mark of social superiority as a public school education has been in England, and only they were eligible for election to the magistracies. They formed a closed hereditary caste within the community, probably corresponding with the class of ephebes at Alexandria; and like the Alexandrines they were eligible for the ephebate, to which they were admitted after an examination of their credentials. Yet this privileged aristocracy was not exempt from the reduced poll-tax and was not necessarily of pure Greek blood. As if to mark more decisively the difference between the ‘Egyptian’ villages and the hellenized metropoleis, the village gymnasia disappeared with the introduction of the new order in the latter.

All the available evidence converges to show that these changes were made about a.d. 4—5 and were part of a carefully thoughtout policy. But we cannot speak dogmatically of a clean-cut distinction between Romans and citizens of the Greek cities on the one side and ‘Egyptians’ on the other nor, among the latter, between metropolites and inhabitants of the villages. As has been already mentioned, there are some unsolved problems. Among these is the question of the katoikoi, or military settlers. Though the katoikic land continued to be classed as a separate category, the katoikoi seem to occur as a special class only in the Arsinoite nome, where they were perhaps identical with a caste known as ‘the 6475 Greek men in the Arsinoite nome’. Practically nothing is known as to this body or as to the Greeks of the Delta and the Thebaid, who are mentioned in an inscription; nor is it quite beyond doubt that the katoikoi were, as generally stated, exempt from poll-tax.

Naturally, in a population so nicely graded, some machinery for determining status was indispensable. The means adopted was the so-called epicrisis, in regard to which there were two somewhat different modes of procedure. The epicrisis of Roman citizens, whether veterans or youths, and of Alexandrines (possibly too the citizens of the other Greek cities, though this is doubtful), was conducted by the prefect, either personally or by deputy; that of the Graeco-Egyptians of various classes by local officials, varying in different nomes. The object was always the same, to determine status, though the ultimate motive was no doubt fiscal. It should be added that slaves were subject to epicrisis equally with their masters, whose condition, in this respect, they followed.

IV. LOCAL ADMINISTRATION: TAXATION

In the sphere of local government the Roman conquest brought little immediate change. At the head of the nome administration was still the strategos, now quite divested of military power but otherwise uniting in his own person all the functions of government. The strategoi, drawn most often from the wealthier Graeco-­Egyptian class, though Roman or Alexandrian citizens are also found among them, were appointed by the prefect, normally for three years. The next to them in rank was not the nomarch, now a mainly financial official, but the royal scribe, who even in the Imperial period retained this immemorial title. His functions too were mainly financial, but he had some share in the general administration and usually acted as strategos during a vacancy in that office.

The nome was normally divided into toparchies, each with a toparch and a scribe; and below them in the administrative scale came the village scribe, who was charged with every kind of business affecting the financial administration. His counterpart in the metropolis was the scribe (or rather scribes, for there were generally two) of the city; and in each of the quarters or amphoda into which most metropoleis were divided was an amphodarch, to whom, in the third century, was added a scribe of the amphodon.

All these were State officials, but there were others who may be described as organs and representatives of the community. Such were, in the nome-capitals, the semi-municipal magistrates mentioned in the preceding section; in the village, the elders and the guards of all kinds. There were of course many other officials of various grades, charged with such special functions as the inspection of crops, the labour on the dykes, the collection of tolls and taxes, and so forth; but exigencies of space exclude the mention of any but the bibliophylakes, who were in charge of the Public Record Office of the nome, situated in the metropolis. This was an innovation of the Roman period, probably introduced about the middle of the first century. There was at first only one such institution in each nome, but eventually (in the Arsinoite nome not long after a.d. 72, somewhat later in other nomes) it was divided, and henceforth there was one office for official documents, such as census and taxation rolls, land registers, and the like, and another for private contracts, particularly those concerning real property, each under the supervision of two bibliophylakes.

Apart from these institutions and the incipient municipalization of the nome-capitals referred to in the previous section, there was to all appearance little that was new in the Roman administrative system. The real and far-reaching change which Roman rule brought, and that very gradually and hardly at all in the period covered by this chapter, lay in the basis rather than in the details of the system. The Ptolemaic bureaucracy was in the main a professional one. In times of depression or political anarchy applicants for the administrative posts might be wanting, and then the sovereign State did not scruple to resort to compulsion; but such cases were quite exceptional. This salaried bureaucracy was at first continued by the Romans, perhaps for nearly a century after the conquest, but gradually recourse was had, at first sporadically and then more and more generally, to the liturgical system, by which all persons possessing the necessary property qualification and not otherwise exempt; were compelled to undertake certain offices. The principle was of course no Roman invention; but its substitution for the Ptolemaic bureaucracy was a change of fateful importance. Beginning probably with the minor local offices, it spread farther and farther up the administrative hierarchy; and though there was always in theory a distinction between the liturgy and the once coveted municipal offices, between munera and honores, yet by the middle of the second century the principle of compulsion was already well established for the latter as well. In fact the only difference between liturgy and magistracy came at length to lie in the qualifications and social status of the persons conscribed. Along with the liturgical system went the principle of collective responsibility: the community, as in the case of the village officials, or the class, as with the municipal magistrates, was responsible alike for the proposal of the liturgists and for their proper performance of their duties. The system was disas­trous in its effects; and just as the heavy burden of taxation crushed the poorest members of the community, so was the middle class, higher and lower alike, impoverished by the liturgies and liturgical magistracies. These developments fall, it is true, outside the scope of this chapter; but the edict of the prefect Tiberius Julius Alexander (a.d. 68) suggests that the principle was even then creeping into practice, though perhaps not yet officially recognized.

It is possible that the first introduction of the liturgical system was connected with a change in the method of tax-collection. Under the Ptolemies the taxes had been farmed, in accordance with the usual Greek practice; but at least as early as the reign of Tiberius we find some of them collected by praktores, acting directly under the State; and since these men were responsible with their property for the raising of the statutory amount, and at the beginning of the second century were certainly liturgists appointed by and in the community which formed the sphere of their work, it is at least a plausible suggestion that the reason for the change of machinery was precisely to secure that corporate responsibility which was the essence of the liturgical system as developed in Roman Egypt. The old method was retained for some taxes, and doubtless the employment of praktores was only gradually extended; roughly we may say that the indirect taxes in general were farmed, the direct ones collected by State officials.

The total quota of taxes was fixed by the emperor himself, and the prefect had no power to vary the amount. The actual taxes were for the most part the same as in the Ptolemaic period; and they were both numerous and, to the modern investigator, confusing. The chief novelty was the poll-tax (laographia), for though it is now known that a similar tax existed even under the kings, it had a different name, and its incidence was probably not the same as in the Roman period. As already said, the ‘metropolites’ were assessed at a lower rate. Romans and the citizens of the Greek cities, a certain number of priests and possibly the katoikoi and other ‘Greeks’ were wholly exempt. The rest of the male population between the ages of fourteen and sixty paid the full poll-tax at rates which for some unexplained reason varied widely not only from nome to nome but even in different localities within a single nome.

The money taxes fell into various classes. Some, like the laografhia, were assessed on a capitation basis, others were in the nature of licences; and there were also taxes on sales, on sacrifices, on domestic animals, and a ‘crown tax’, in theory a gift to a new ruler, which became later a regular impost and was as burdensome an abuse as the ‘benevolences’ of Tudor and Stuart times in England. There was a developed system of tolls and customs, not only at Coptos, which formed the Egyptian end of the Red Sea route, or Schedia, where the traffic up and down the Nile paid toll, but at points like the chief exits from the Fayum or Arsinoite nome.

Various kinds of land-tax are found, corresponding to the various classes of land and payable partly in money, partly in kind. The chief corn-tax varied in amount between one and two artabas per aroura. On vineyards, orchards and garden-land generally were levied money-taxes, differing among themselves in amount and incidence. The corn-taxes were delivered to the sitologoi at the local granaries, whence the corn was conveyed by donkeys or camels to the places of embarkation for transport to Alexandria, the transport being managed by the ‘public livestock­breeders,’ who were organized as a guild and in later times discharged their functions as a compulsory liturgy, though they were paid fees for the carriage.

To the great quantities of corn collected for the corn-tax must be added the grain paid as rent in kind on the royal, sacred, public, and domain land, some at least of which was probably added to the tax-corn to make up the quota sent annually to Rome, where, we are told, a third of the year’s supply came from Egypt. The conveyance from Alexandria to Rome was the task of the classic Alexandrina. The granaries at Alexandria, in which the corn was stored after receipt, were situated in the quarter known as Neapolis, and were placed under the charge of the procurator Neaspoleos et Mausolei.

These regular imposts were not the only burdens which the tax-payer had to bear. There were also requisitions of provisions and other necessaries for the periodic tours of inspection of the prefect, epistrategoi or other officials, or for the rarer visits of the Emperor himself or some member of the Imperial family. The needs of the army, not only in provisions but in clothing and other supplies, were met by similar requisitions, whether by way of tax or, as in the case of the frumentum emptum, by forced sales, the amount required being determined by the prefect and the distribution among villages and the single contributors carried out by the officials of the nome and of the village respectively. Not till the end of the second century do we find the annona militaris established as a regular tax.

This complicated system of taxation necessitated an equally elaborate system of registers and taxing-lists to determine the amounts due from each tax-payer. The personal registers rested ultimately on the fourteen-year census, which in the Roman period replaced the annual returns of Ptolemaic times. The earliest recorded instance of the census can be dated with practical certainty in the year a.d. 20, but it has been inferred (since the Ptolemaic institution of annual returns is known to have been in force as late as 18 b.c.) that the new system was introduced in 10-9 b.c.

A return was required from every householder (usually from the owner), in which he specified all the occupants of the house; and hence the census was called ‘the house-to-house registration’. The returns were addressed, generally in duplicate, to the ordinary local officials and to a special commission of laographoi or to some of them; and since personal attendance was required, the prefect issued an edict requiring all persons absent from home, unless specially exempted, to return for the enrolment. On the basis of the single returns were prepared elaborate registers showing, quarter by quarter, or street by street, and house by house, the whole population, with age and status and careful note of all exemptions.

The period of fourteen years was no doubt adopted because it was at fourteen that boys became liable to poll-tax; but between one census and another the registers were kept up to date by returns of births, which were compulsory, and of death, which, since their effect was exemption from the liability to poll-tax, were left to the initiative of the tax-payers. Voluntary too were the applications for the epicrisis of those claiming to belong to one of the privileged classes; and these returns also were united in composite rolls and used in the preparation of special registers.

Parallel with this personal registration was the procedure in respect of property. Annual returns of livestock were required; indeed, in the case of sheep and goats we hear of two returns in the year. The census itself, since it was based on the returns of householders, furnished a register of house property; and among the duties of the property Record Office mentioned above was that of keeping a register of real property, which recorded not only ownership but all such liens as arose from hypothecation, dower rights, and government claims against State debtors. The official notarial offices periodically sent to the archives copies and abstracts of the contracts drawn up by them, and it was forbidden to alienate or encumber property thus registered without the authorization of the bibliophylakes. At intervals, whenever the registers of the office were found to be in disorder, which happened not infrequently, the prefect ordered general returns of property, on the basis of which new registers were prepared.

Even more meticulous and elaborate was the procedure in registering land of all categories, as was natural in a country where year by year the inundation not only obliterated landmarks but altered the relative fertility and even, by erosion or the deposition of silt, the conformation of holdings. Defect or excess of water or an accumulation of sand might justify partial or even total remission of taxes or rents due, and all such variations from the normal were reported to the responsible authorities, the statements being of course checked by an official inspection; and as in the Ptolemaic period, detailed registers were kept of all land, arranged both geographically, by areas, and personally, by holders.

V. INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE: CURRENCY

The Roman period was marked, as by a great extension of private property in land, so also by increased freedom of trade. The protective policy of the Ptolemies seems to have been abandoned; for though duties were certainly levied at the points of entry into the country, they were probably imposed for the purpose of revenue rather than as a protective tariff. The system of State monopolies, so characteristic of Ptolemaic Egypt, was maintained under the Emperors but in modified and restricted forms. Indeed, since licences were regularly granted for the exercise of monopolized industries, we should perhaps speak less of monopolies in the strict sense than of State-controlled undertakings, many carried on by private enterprise under official supervision.

In the country districts industry was usually on a small scale and served local needs only, but at Alexandria and perhaps in the Delta capitalistic enterprise was doubtless common enough, though the paucity of evidence forbids any insight into its methods. Alexandria was a manufacturing as well as a commercial centre, and a large proportion of the export-goods of Egypt must have been produced there. The mines and quarries were placed at first under the charge of an official known as the archimetallarches., who administered them through a procurator; but the title is not found in later times, when the same authority was exercised by the praefectus montis Berenicidis. The quarries were exploited in part directly by the State, in part through contractors or lessees; how far there was any private property in them or in the mines is doubtful. The actual work was performed by convicts, prisoners of war, and slaves, but also by free labourers. Egypt produced, besides emeralds, several kinds of stone, particularly porphyry and granite, which were valued abroad and which must therefore be reckoned among the exports.

The exports of Egypt were indeed greater than the imports, according to Strabo, who remarks that ocular demonstration of the fact might be got from a comparison between the lading of the ships entering and those leaving the port of Alexandria. Octavian’s conquest, though it might hurt the pride of the Alexandrines, certainly benefited their pockets, and the commerce of the city had never been so great as in the early Roman period. There was also an extensive transit trade, particularly in goods from Somaliland and Arabia and from the Indies.

The Arabian expedition of Gallus was in part due to commercial motives, in which respect it was not unsuccessful; and though the later plan for an expedition under Augustus’s grand­son Gaius was dropped it is possible that the Romans succeeded about this time in occupying Aden, which would secure for the empire a valuable station and port of call for the Indian trade. During the reign of Augustus repeated embassies from India came to Rome, and under Claudius we hear of one from Ceylon. The discovery of the monsoons, perhaps about a.d. 40, gave a further impetus to the eastern trade, and great fleets sailed annually for India, to return laden with the merchandise of the East. This was brought to the ports of the Red Sea, Myos Hormos or Berenice, whence they were carried by the desert roads to Coptos, and so, after paying toll there, down the Nile to Alexandria. Merchants from all parts of Egypt shared in this trade and made the voyage to India; while in the multitudes which thronged the quays and streets of Alexandria Indians were no uncommon sight. In exchange for the imports, such commodities as slaves, wine, flax, corn, glass, and coral were sent to the East; but the balance of trade would seem to have been against the empire, and there was much export of coin, a fact which attracted indignant comment from more than one writer, particularly as the Eastern imports were mainly articles of luxury.

The banking monopoly which had existed under the Ptolemies was relaxed, if not abolished, by the Romans. The royal (now called public) banks continued to function; but besides them we meet with numerous private banks. The machinery of banking was highly developed, and payments of all kinds were frequently made not in cash but by simple transfer of a credit from one banking account to another; we even meet with a form of order which may in some degree be compared with the modern cheque. The public granaries stored not only the grain paid as land-tax or rent on the State lands but the stocks of private owners as well; and in a country where natural economy had never been wholly ousted by the use of money, it is not surprising that a banking procedure, with book-payments and ‘cheques’, established itself in them also.

The issue of the silver tetradrachm by the Alexandrian mint was stopped by Augustus, though a copper coinage continued to be minted; but in a.d. 19-20 Tiberius introduced a tetradrachm of debased silver, equated with the Roman denarius, which was thenceforth the main currency of Egypt throughout the Roman period, though its value gradually declined. The old Ptolemaic silver coinage continued, however, to circulate, and was indeed in great estimation; Roman coins, except the aureus, seem to have played but a small part in the monetary system. The Alexandrian mint was regularly used, with considerable skill, for purposes of propaganda, and a study of coin-types throws much light on the aims and currents of Roman policy in Egypt.

VI. HISTORICAL EVENTS

If it be true that that country is happy which has no history, Egypt must be counted fortunate during the reigns of the earlier emperors; for it is hardly a mere accident of tradition that it figures so little in the works of historians between the settlement of the southern frontier by Petronius and the reign of Nero. Only in Alexandria, the storm-centre of the eastern Mediterranean, did events occur such as would attract the attention of contemporary historians. The citizens could not forget that their city had once been the capital of the richest and most powerful of the Hellen­istic monarchies; and their failure to obtain a Senate was the more galling because Augustus confirmed the rights of the Jews, with their council of elders. For the Jews, who had twice betrayed the national cause and helped the Roman invader, were already hateful to the Alexandrines; and the latter saw with growing exasperation the favour and protection accorded by Rome to their rivals. Thus it came about that the militant nationalism of Alexandria found expression in hostility to the Jews, and the literature which it evoked, though primarily inspired by opposition to Rome, has in fact a strongly anti-Semitic tone. This literature (often called ‘Pagan Acts of the Martyrs’) has been casually preserved in very fragmentary papyri, mostly of the age of Caracalla; but it is clear that the texts contained in these derive from contemporary ac­counts, and that the literary genre was of much earlier origin than the manuscripts themselves. Nevertheless we have no evidence, literary or documentary, of any collision between Greek and Jew during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.

In a.d. 19 Germanicus, disregarding the rule which forbade men of senatorial rank to enter Egypt without the Emperor’s permission, paid a visit to the country. His action was reprimanded by Tiberius, and it was not made less exceptionable by his behaviour at Alexandria, where he appeared in Greek costume and took considerable pains to render himself agreeable to the citizens. The ostensible reason for his visit was a serious famine, which he relieved by opening the granaries and distributing corn to the populace. It is not surprising, particularly since he excluded the Jews from a share in the distribution, that he received from the Alexandrines such exaggerated homage as made it necessary for him to deprecate their excessive attentions and remind them that divine honours were appropriate to the Emperor alone. It does not appear however that any special friction between Jews and Greeks followed his visit, nor did Sejanus’s hostility to the Jews have any effect at Alexandria. Not till the reign of Gaius did serious disturbances occur.

The prefect at this time was A. Avillius Flaccus, a trusted servant of Tiberius and a friend of Gaius’ co-regent Gemellus, and of Macro, the praetorian prefect. The leaders of the Alexandrian opposition were Dionysius, Isidorus, and Lampon, members of the civic aristocracy but turbulent and unscrupulous intriguers, and the last two personal enemies of Flaccus. When first Gemellus and then Macro fell victims to the Emperor’s jealousy, Flaccus began to fear for his own position. He had the more reason to do so if the conjectural restoration of an unfortunately fragmentary papyrus, recently edited, can be relied on; for it would appear from this that Isidorus had (or claimed to have) a hand in the fall of Macro. The position was the more serious since Gaius felt a special affection for Alexandria, which he designed to visit, and Flaccus seems to have decided that a rapprochement with the nationalist party was necessary. In the existing state of feeling this meant hostility to the Jews; and not long afterwards events occurred which precipitated a clash between the two factions. Julius Agrippa, the friend and boon companion of the Emperor, had been made by him king of the former tetrarchies of Philip and Lysanias; and tearing himself away from the dissipations of Rome in the early summer of a.d. 38, he set out for his kingdom by way of Alexandria, where his last appearance had been in the role of a bankrupt fleeing from his creditors. When the Jews, despite an attempt on his part to make an unobtrusive entry, gave him a royal reception, the irritated Alexandrines staged an elaborate parody of him and his suite, parading through the streets an idiot in royal robes. It was a gross insult to an intimate friend of Gaius, and alike to the demonstrators and to Flaccus, who had taken no action against them, and who had moreover suppressed a decree in honour of the Emperor which the Jews had asked him to forward, reflection brought considerable misgiving. When therefore the Alexandrines hit upon the idea of demanding that statues of Gaius should be placed in the Jewish synagogues conformably to Imperial order, Flaccus welcomed the move, and on the inevitable refusal by the Jews branded them in an edict as ‘aliens and intruders’. Taking the hint, the city mob fell upon the Jews with the cry to restrict them to the ‘Delta’ quarter. Statues of the Emperor and a quadriga, dragged from the gymnasium, were introduced into the synagogues, several of which were burned, the Jewish houses were pillaged, and many of the Jews themselves were butchered with every circumstance of horror. Flaccus, who chose to throw the blame for these events on the Jews, had many members of their council publicly scourged, and forbade the exercise of their religion, closing the synagogues.

The Jews, however, were not without a defender. Agrippa procured a copy of their suppressed decree and sent it to Gaius, doubtless with a formal complaint against the prefect, whose complaisance to the Alexandrines had signally failed in its object, since Isidorus and Lampon now appeared at Rome as his accusers. Gaius needed no incentive to proceed against an official already suspect; a centurion from Rome arrested Flaccus as he was dining at the house of one of Tiberius’s freedmen, and he was taken to Rome, condemned, banished to Andros, and later put to death there.

The Jews, impoverished by the pillage of their homes, denied the right of worship, and apprehensive of further outrages, sent an embassy to Rome, of which Philo, one of the envoys, has given a vivid account. They failed to obtain satisfaction but suffered no evil consequences beyond a rather terrifying display of Gaius’ grim humour. The Emperor was indeed occupied with a scheme, the erection of a statue of himself in the temple at Jerusalem, which for the Jews overshadowed even the events at Alexandria and, if persisted in, would certainly have provoked a revolt of Judaea; but the daggers of Chaerea and his associates ended the career of the tyrant before his intention could be carried out.

Meantime the Alexandrian Jews had been preparing for revenge; and the accession of Claudius, also a close friend of Agrippa, who was instrumental in procuring his recognition as Emperor, was the signal for an attack on their Greek neighbours. A desperate struggle followed, so obstinate and prolonged that Claudius had to send the prefect instructions for its suppression. Both parties sent embassies to Rome, ostensibly to congratulate the new Emperor on his accession but largely to exculpate themselves for their share in the disturbances. The Jews, dissatisfied with their privileged position, were agitating for the Alexandrian citizenship, and there can be little doubt that their envoys were instructed also to ask for this. Claudius had already, on his accession, issued two edicts, the one confirming all the privileges of the Alexandrian Jews, the other making similar provisions for the Jews throughout the empire. He now received the rival embassies and listened to their arguments; and a copy of the reply which he sent to the Alexandrines has fortunately been preserved on the back of a papyrus roll. He accepted some but declined others of the honours voted to him, confirmed the Alexandrian citizenship to all who had become ephebi down to his principate except such as had been wrongly entered on the lists, accepted a proposal to make the municipal magistracies triennial, and diplomatically shelved the request which the Alexandrines had advanced for a senate by referring it to the prefect. In the last section of his letter, turning to the recent disturbances, he warned both parties that the aggressor in any subsequent outbreak would receive condign punishment, informed the Alexandrines that he had confirmed all the rights and customs of the Jews, and finally, in language of unexpected sharpness, bade the latter be content with what they had and not introduce into the city Jews from Syria or Egypt, lest he should be compelled to punish them for ‘fomenting a general plague for the whole world’.

The settlement thus effected was not permanent if a law-suit brought by the Alexandrines against Agrippa, of which a record has been preserved in several papyrus fragments, is rightly referred to Agrippa II and to the year 53. The exact grounds of the quarrel cannot be determined, but the real reason was no doubt the old racial animosity. The two Alexandrian leaders, Isidorus and Lampon, after a display (probably exaggerated in the propagandist tract) of astonishing insolence to Claudius, were both executed, and their memory was long cherished as that of martyrs to the cause of Alexandrian nationalism.

Egypt again comes into the light of history in the following reign. The army of occupation was required in a.d. 63 to furnish detachments for the Parthian war, and about the same time Nero is credited with contemplating a war against Ethiopia. There is some evidence for a concentration of troops at Alexandria, and an expedition was certainly sent up the Nile to Meroe to explore the sources of the Nile and possibly to report on the political situation there. Any such schemes were, however, stopped by the revolt of Judaea. That event had its repercussions in Alexandria, where a meeting of the citizens, called to discuss an embassy to Nero, ended in a battle royal between them and the Jews. The prefect, Tiberius Alexander, a renegade Jew, after vainly attempting to make his countrymen see the folly of their intransigence, was compelled to employ against them not only the regular garrison but a newly arrived detachment from Cyrene; and Josephus declares that 50,000 of the Jews perished before order was restored. This severity was effective, and there was no further trouble till after the fall of Jerusalem, when some of the fanatical sicarii, fleeing to Alexandria, attempted without success to stir up a revolt there. Among the schemes which flashed through the disordered brain of Nero in the days during which he saw the empire falling away from him was one for a flight to Alexandria, where he thought to establish a new empire in the East; but he jacked resolution for that as for other projects and perished ingloriously near his revolted capital.

VII. THE SPIRIT OF ROMAN RULE IN EGYPT

It remains to ask what was the effect of the Roman conquest on Egypt. Scanty as our evidence is for the early period, there can be no doubt that it brought at first an increase in prosperity. An efficient defence of the frontier prevented raids from without, order and settled government were established internally, the repair and deepening of canals much increased the yield of agriculture, the new agrarian policy caused a great extension of private pro­perty, and trade and industry flourished. The resumption of a silver coinage by Tiberius is an indication of growing prosperity, and the activity of the Alexandrian mint was so marked in the early years of Claudius that it has been held to reflect the discovery of the monsoons, since it was probably due to a sudden expansion of the Indian trade. The municipalization of the nome-capitals no doubt stimulated communal activities and intensified Hellenic culture there, while the unprivileged Egyptians of the villages at least profited by the increased agricultural production. So far as we can judge from the combined evidence of excavation and papyrus records there was in the average household a reasonably high standard of comfort, though no doubt conditions differed widely, and archaeological material comes mainly from the Fayum. The houses, constructed of mud-brick, were well built, the interior walls plastered and generally painted with ornamental patterns; many contained ornamental niches, steps and door-posts of stone are occasionally found, and the wood-work was usually good. Little furniture has been found, but it has perhaps perished or it was removed when the houses were deserted; but pottery, some of it of good design and workmanship, glass, wooden chests and coffers, bronzes, basket-work, terracotta lamps and figurines, jewellery, and hoards of coins, to say nothing of the sometimes high quality of the portraits so characteristic of the period, all attest some degree of refinement. The use, even among peasants who paid the highest rate of poll-tax, of pure Greek names, not merely those familiar among the military settlers but such literary names as Hector, Pylades, Laertes or Meleager, shows a certain cultural assimilation of Egyptian to Hellenic elements; and in the larger villages there were many people who could write, and some at least who were familiar with Greek literature.

Yet this well-being was very insecurely based. The substitution of a strong and efficient government for a weak and incompetent one is bound, particularly in a country dependent like Egypt on a proper control of the irrigation system, to produce at first greater prosperity. How long this will endure depends on the spirit of the government; and it was precisely in the spirit which inspired it that Roman rule in Egypt was at fault. To the Ptolemies the country was the personal estate of the ruler, its people were his servants, their individual interest was subordinated throughout to that of the State. This conception, when inherited to the full by the Romans, was bound to be more harmful; for whereas the corn and money wrung from his subjects by a Ptolemy remained for the most part in the country itself, under the Romans much of both went to Rome as tribute, and no corresponding advantage accrued to the inhabitants. Egypt was, indeed, no more than a demesne added to the empire by Augustus and administered for the good of the Roman People. There is no reason to suppose that the relative amount of taxes was substantially increased; but the very efficiency of the Romans made them more burdensome. The exemption or partial exemption from poll-tax of the privileged, who were in general the wealthier, classes threw the weight of this impost on to the peasantry; and with the introduction, very likely in our period and certainly soon afterwards, of the liturgical system the middle classes also began to be burdened beyond their strength. The principle of collective responsibility, in both spheres, made the evil doubly disastrous. On the other hand, if the Roman government was efficient—how efficient may be seen by studying the evidence for the operations of the department of the Idiologos— in collecting the last penny of its dues, it was much less successful in controlling its own servants, the tax-collectors and other officials. There is plenty of evidence, documentary and literary, to show that the gravest irregularities existed before the middle of the first century. The better governors strove to get rid of these; but a system which placed the fiscal interest before all else invited abuse. And signs are not wanting that economic difficulties were already making themselves felt. An edict of the prefect Flaccus prohibiting the carrying of arms may indicate disturbances or the threat of them; and when we read in a petition dating from about a.d. 55-60 of villages partially depopulated by the flight or death of tax-payers we cannot doubt that there was something gravely wrong with the whole system. For though local causes may have been operative here, this piece of evidence, though specially striking, does not stand alone. The population was burdened to its utmost capacity, and any failure of the harvest or slump in prices, though some remission of taxes might be conceded, was bound to cause a crisis. From every such crisis recovery became progressively more difficult under a government whose one remedy for a failure in the policy of compulsion was to tighten up the system, and which met a default on the part of the tax-payer or liturgist by shifting his burden on to other shoulders. Thus the early Principate, efficient as was its administration and just as were its intentions, may fairly be held to have sown the seed whose harvest was to be the economic collapse of the third century and, in process of the years, the Byzantine servile State.

CHAPTER XI

HEROD OF JUDAEA