Personal privileges in the Roman period.As the Romans in the East generally continued the work of the Greeks, so the exclusion of the native Egyptians from the acquiring of Greek citizenship not merely continued to subsist, but was extended to the Roman citizenship. The Egyptian Greek, on the other hand, might acquire the latter just like any other non-burgess. Entrance to the senate, it is true, was as little allowed to him as to the Roman burgess from Gaul (p. 89), and this restriction remained much longer in force for Egypt than for Gaul;213 it was not till the beginning of the third century that it was disregarded in isolated cases, and it held good, as a rule, even in the fifth. In Egypt itself the positions of the upper officials, that is, of those acting for the whole province, and likewise the officers’ posts, were reserved for Roman citizens in the form of the knight’s horse being required as a qualification for them; this was given by the general organisation of the empire, and similar privileges had in fact been possessed in Egypt by the Macedonians in contrast to the other Greeks. The offices of the second rank remained under the Roman rule, as previously, closed to the Egyptian Egyptians, and were filled with Greeks, primarily with the burgesses of Alexandria and Ptolemais. If in the imperial war-service for the first class Roman citizenship was required, they, at any rate in the case of the legions stationed in Egypt itself, not seldom admitted the Egyptian Greek on the footing that Roman citizenship was conferred on him upon occasion of the levy. For the category of auxiliary troops the admission of the Greeks was subject to no limitation; but the Egyptians were little or not at all employed for this purpose, while they were employed afterwards in considerable number for the lowest class, the naval force still in the first imperial times formed of slaves. In the course of time the slighting of the native Egyptians doubtless had its rigour relaxed, and they more than once attained to Greek, and by means of it also to Roman, citizenship; but on the whole the Roman government was simply the continuation, as of the Greek rule, so also of the Greek exclusiveness. As the Macedonian government had contented itself with Alexandria and Ptolemais, so in this province alone the Romans did not found a single colony.214

Native language.The linguistic arrangement in Egypt remained essentially under the Romans as the Ptolemies had settled it. Apart from the military, among whom the Latin alone prevailed, the business-language for the intercourse of the upper posts was the Greek. Of the native language, which, radically different from the Semitic as from the Arian languages, is most nearly akin perhaps to that of the Berbers in North Africa, and of the native writing, the Roman rulers and their governors never made use; and, if already under the Ptolemies a Greek translation had to be appended to official documents written in Egyptian, at least the same held good for these their successors. Certainly the Egyptians were not prohibited from making use, so far as it seemed requisite according to ritual or otherwise appropriate, of the native language and of its time-hallowed written signs; in this old home, moreover, of the use of writing in ordinary intercourse the native language, alone familiar to the great public, and the usual writing must necessarily have been allowed not merely in the case of private contracts, but even as regards tax-receipts and similar documents. But this was a concession, and the ruling Hellenism strove to enlarge its domain. The effort to create for the views and traditions prevailing in the land an universally valid expression also in Greek gave an extension to the system of double names in Egypt such as we see nowhere else. All Egyptian gods whose names were not themselves current among the Greeks, like that of Isis, were equalised with corresponding or else not corresponding Greek ones; perhaps the half of the townships and a great number of persons bore as well a native as a Greek appellation. Gradually Hellenism in this case prevailed. The old sacred writing meets us on the preserved monuments last under the emperor Decius about the middle of the third, and its more current degenerated form last about the middle of the fifth century; both disappeared from common use considerably earlier. The neglect and the decay of the native elements of civilisation are expressed in these facts. The language of the land itself maintained its ground still for long afterwards in remote places and in the lower ranks, and only became quite extinct in the seventeenth century, after it—the language of the Copts—had, just like the Syriac, experienced in the later imperial period a limited regeneration in consequence of the introduction of Christianity and of the efforts directed to the production of a national-Christian literature.

Abolition of a resident court.In the government the first thing that strikes us is the suppression of the court and of its residency, the necessary consequence of the annexation of the land by Augustus. There was left doubtless as much as could be left. On the inscriptions written in the native language, and so merely for Egyptians, the emperors are termed, like the Ptolemies, kings of upper and lower Egypt, and the elect of the Egyptian native gods, and indeed withal—which was not the case with the Ptolemies—great-kings.215 Dates were reckoned in Egypt, as previously, according to the current calendar of the country and its royal year passing over to the Roman rulers; the golden cup which every year the king threw into the swelling Nile was now thrown in by the Roman viceroy. But these things did not reach far. The Roman ruler could not carry out the part of the Egyptian king, which was incompatible with his imperial position. The new lord of the land had unpleasant experiences in his representation by a subordinate on the very first occasion of his sending a governor to Egypt; the able officer and talented poet, who had not been able to refrain from inscribing his name also on the Pyramids, was deposed on that account and thereby ruined. It was inevitable that limits should here be set. The affairs, the transaction of which according to the system of Alexander devolved on the prince personally216 not less than according to the arrangement of the Roman principate, might be managed by the Roman governor as by the native king; king he might neither be nor seem.217 That was to a certainty deeply and severely felt in the second city of the world. The mere change of dynasty would not have told so very heavily. But a court like that of the Ptolemies, regulated according to the ceremonial of the Pharaohs, king and queen in their dress as gods, the pomp of festal processions, the reception of the priesthoods and of ambassadors, the court-banquets, the great ceremonies of the coronation, of the taking the oath, of marriage, of burial, the court-offices of the body-guards and the chief of that guard (ἀρχισωματοφύλαξ), of the introducing chamberlain (εἰσαγγελεύς), of the chief master of the table (ἀρχεδέατρος), of the chief master of the huntsmen (ἀρχικυνηγός), the cousins and friends of the king, the wearers of decorations—all this was lost for the Alexandrians once for all with the transfer of the seat of the ruler from the Nile to the Tiber. Only the two famous Alexandrian libraries remained there, with all their belongings and staff, as a remnant of the old regal magnificence. Beyond question Egypt lost by being dispossessed of its rulers very much more than Syria; both nations indeed were in the powerless position of having to acquiesce in what was contrived for them, and not more here than there was a rising for the lost position of a great power so much as thought of.

The officials.The administration of the land lay, as has been already said, in the hands of the “deputy,” that is, the viceroy; for, although the new lord of the land, out of respect for his position in the empire, refrained as well for himself as for his delegates of higher station from the royal appellations in Egypt, he yet in substance conducted his rule throughout as successor of the Ptolemies, and the whole civil and military supreme power was combined in his hand and that of his representative. We have already observed that neither non-burgesses nor senators might fill this position; it was sometimes committed to Alexandrians, if they had attained to burgess-rights, and by way of exception to equestrian rank.218 We may add that this office stood at first before all the rest of the non-senatorial in rank and influence, and subsequently was inferior only to the commandership of the imperial guard. Besides the officers proper, in reference to whom the only departure from the general arrangement was the exclusion of the senator and the lower title, thence resulting, of the commandant of the legion (praefectus instead of legatus), there acted alongside of and under the governor, and likewise for all Egypt, a supreme official for justice and a supreme finance-administrator, both likewise Roman citizens of equestrian rank, and apparently not borrowed from the administrative scheme of the Ptolemies, but attached and subordinated to the governor after a fashion applied also in other imperial provinces.219

All other officials acted only for individual districts, and were in the main taken over from the Ptolemaic arrangement. That the presidents of the three provinces of lower, middle, and upper Egypt, provided—apart from the command—with the same sphere of business as the governor, were taken in the time of Augustus from the Egyptian Greeks, and subsequently, like the superior officials proper, from the Roman knighthood, deserves to be noted as a symptom of the increasing tendency in the course of the imperial period to repress the native element in the magistracy.

Under these superior and intermediate authorities stood the local officials, the presidents of the Egyptian as of the Greek towns, along with the very numerous subalterns employed in the collecting of the revenue and the manifold imposts laid on business-dealings, and again in the individual district the presidents of the sub-districts and of the villages—positions, which were looked upon more as burdens than as honours, and were imposed by the higher officials upon persons belonging to, or settled in, the locality, to the exclusion, however, of the Alexandrians; the most important among them, the presidency of the nome, was filled up every three years by the governor. The local authorities of the Greek towns were different as to number and title; in Alexandria in particular four chief officials acted, the priest of Alexander,220 the town-clerk (ὑπομνηματογράφος),221 the supreme judge (ἀρχιδικαστής), and the master of the night-watch (νυκτερινὸς στρατηγός). That they were of more consequence than the strategoi of the nomes, is obvious of itself, and is shown clearly by the purple dress belonging to the first Alexandrian official. We may add that they originate likewise from the Ptolemaic period, and are nominated for a time by the Roman government, like the presidents of the nomes, from the persons settled therein. Roman officials of imperial nomination are not found among these urban presidents. But the priest of the Mouseion, who is at the same time president of the Alexandrian Academy of Sciences and also disposes of the considerable pecuniary means of this institute, is nominated by the emperor; in like manner the superintendency of the tomb of Alexander and the buildings connected with it, and some other important positions in the capital of Egypt, were filled up by the government in Rome with officials of equestrian rank.222

As a matter of course, Alexandrians and Egyptians were drawn into those movements of pretenders which had their origin in the East, and regularly participated in them; in this way Vespasian, Cassius, Niger, Macrianus (p. 103), Vaballathus the son of Zenobia, Probus, were here proclaimed as rulers. But the initiative in all those cases was taken neither by the burgesses of Alexandria nor by the little esteemed Egyptian troops; and most of those revolutions, even the unsuccessful, had for Egypt no consequences specially felt. In the Palmyrene period.But the movement connected with the name of Zenobia (p. 107) became almost as fateful for Alexandria and for all Egypt as for Palmyra. In town and country the Palmyrene and the Roman partisans confronted each other with arms and blazing torches in their hands. On the south frontier the barbarian Blemyes advanced, apparently in agreement with the portion of the inhabitants of Egypt favourable to Palmyra, and possessed themselves of a great part of upper Egypt.223 In Alexandria the intercourse between the two hostile quarters was cut off; it was difficult and dangerous even to forward letters.224 The streets were filled with blood and with dead bodies unburied. The diseases thereby engendered made even more havoc than the sword; and, in order that none of the four steeds of destruction might be wanting, the Nile also failed, and famine associated itself with the other scourges. The population melted away to such an extent that, as a contemporary says, there were formerly more gray-haired men in Alexandria than there were afterwards citizens.

When Probus, the general sent by Claudius, at length gained the upper hand, the Palmyrene partisans, including the majority of the members of council, threw themselves into the strong castle of Prucheion in the immediate neighbourhood of the city; and, although, when Probus promised to spare the lives of those that should come out, the great majority submitted, yet a considerable portion of the citizens persevered to the uttermost in the struggle of despair. The fortress, at length reduced by hunger (270), was razed and lay thenceforth desolate; but the city lost its walls. The Blemyes still maintained themselves for years in the land; the emperor Probus first wrested from them again Ptolemais and Coptos, and drove them out of the country.

Revolt under Diocletian.The state of distress, which these troubles prolonged through a series of years, must have produced, may probably thereupon have brought to an outbreak, the only revolution that can be shown to have arisen in Egypt.225 Under the government of Diocletian, we do not know why or wherefore, as well the native Egyptians as the burgesses of Alexandria rose in revolt against the existing government. Lucius Domitius Domitianus and Achilleus were set up as opposition-emperors, unless possibly the two names denote the same person; the revolt lasted from three to four years, the towns Busiris in the Delta and Coptos not far from Thebes were destroyed by the troops of the government, and ultimately under the leading of Diocletian in person in the spring of 297 the capital was reduced after an eight months’ siege. Nothing testifies so clearly to the decline of the land, rich, but thoroughly dependent on inward and outward peace, as the edict issued in the year 302 by the same Diocletian, that a portion of the Egyptian grain hitherto sent to Rome should for the future go to the benefit of the Alexandrian burgesses.226 This was certainly among the measures which aimed at the decapitalising of Rome; but the supply would not have been directed towards the Alexandrians, whom this emperor had truly no cause to favour, unless they had urgently needed it.

Agriculture.Economically Egypt, as is well-known, is above all the land of agriculture. It is true that the “black earth”—that is the meaning of the native name for the country, Chemi—is only a narrow stripe on either side of the mighty Nile flowing from the last rapids near Syene, the southern limit of Egypt proper, for 550 miles in a copious stream, through the yellow desert extending right and left, to the Mediterranean Sea; only at its lower end the “gift of the river,” the Nile-delta, spreads itself out on both sides between the manifold arms of its mouth. The produce of these tracts depends year by year on the Nile and on the sixteen cubits of its flood-mark—the sixteen children playing round their father, as the art of the Greeks represented the river-god; with good reason the Arabs designate the low cubits by the name of the angels of death, for, if the river does not reach its full height, famine and destruction come upon the whole land of Egypt. But in general Egypt—where the expenses of cultivation are singularly low, wheat bears an hundred fold, and the culture of vegetables, of the vine, of trees, particularly the date-palm, as well as the rearing of cattle, yield good produce—is able not merely to feed a dense population, but also to send corn in large quantity abroad. This led to the result that, after the installation of the foreign rule, not much of its riches was left to the land itself. The Nile rose at that time nearly as in the Persian period and as it does to-day, and the Egyptian toiled chiefly for other lands; and thereby in the first instance Egypt played an important part in the history of imperial Rome. After the grain-cultivation in Italy itself had decayed and Rome had become the greatest city of the world, it needed constant supplies of moderately-priced transmarine grain; and the principate strengthened itself above all by the solution of the far from easy economic problem how to make the supply of the capital financially possible and to render it secure. This solution depended on the possession of Egypt, and, in as much as here the emperor bore exclusive sway, he kept Italy with its dependencies in check through Egypt. When Vespasian seized the dominion he sent his troops to Italy, but he went in person to Egypt and possessed himself of Rome through the corn-fleet. Wherever a Roman ruler had, or is alleged to have had, the idea of transferring the seat of government to the East, as is told us of Caesar, Antonius, Nero, Geta, there the thoughts were directed, as if spontaneously, not to Antioch, although this was at that time the regular court-residence of the East, but towards the birthplace and the stronghold of the principate—to Alexandria.

For that reason, accordingly, the Roman government applied itself more zealously to the elevation of agriculture in Egypt than anywhere else. As it is dependent on the inundation of the Nile, it was possible to extend considerably the surface fitted for cultivation by systematically executed water-works, artificial canals, dykes, and reservoirs. In the good times of Egypt, the native land of the measuring-chain and of artificial building, much was done for it, but these beneficent structures fell, under the last wretched and financially oppressed governments, into sad decay. Thus the Roman occupation introduced itself worthily by Augustus subjecting the canals of the Nile to a thorough purifying and renewal by means of the troops stationed in Egypt. If at the time of the Romans taking possession a full harvest required a state of the river of fourteen cubits, and at eight cubits failure of the harvest occurred, at a later period, after the canals were put into order, twelve cubits were enough for a full harvest, and even eight cubits yielded a sufficient produce. Centuries later the emperor Probus not merely liberated Egypt from the Ethiopians but also restored the water-works on the Nile. It may be assumed, generally, that the better successors of Augustus administered in a similar sense, and that especially with the internal peace and security hardly interrupted for centuries, Egyptian agriculture stood in a permanently flourishing state under the Roman principate. What reflex effect this state of things had on the Egyptians themselves we are not able to follow out more exactly. To a great extent the revenues from Egypt rested on the possession of the imperial domains, which in Roman as in earlier times formed a considerable part of the whole area;227 here, especially considering the small cost of cultivation, only a moderate proportion of the produce must have been left to the small tenants who provided it, or a high money-rent must have been imposed. But even the numerous, and as a rule smaller, owners must have paid a high land-tax in corn or in money. The agricultural population, contented as it was, remained probably numerous in the imperial period; but certainly the pressure of taxation, as well in itself as on account of the expenditure of the produce abroad, lay as a heavier burden on Egypt under the Roman foreign rule than under the by no means indulgent government of the Ptolemies.

Trades.Of the economy of Egypt agriculture formed but a part; as it in this respect stood far before Syria, so it had the advantage of a high prosperity of manufactures and commerce as compared with the essentially agricultural Africa. The linen manufacture in Egypt was at least equal in age, extent, and renown to the Syrian, and maintained its ground through the whole imperial period, although the finer sorts at this epoch were especially manufactured in Syria and Phoenicia;228 when Aurelian extended the contributions made from Egypt to the capital of the empire to other articles than corn, linen cloth and tow were not wanting among them. In fine glass wares, both as regards colouring and moulding, the Alexandrians held decidedly the first place, in fact, as they thought, the monopoly, in as much as certain best sorts were only to be prepared with Egyptian material. Indisputably they had such a material in the papyrus. This plant, which in antiquity was cultivated in masses on the rivers and lakes of lower Egypt, and flourished nowhere else, furnished the natives as well with nourishment as with materials for ropes, baskets, and boats, and furnished writing materials at that time for the whole writing world. What produce it must have yielded, we may gather from the measures which the Roman senate took, when once in the Roman market the papyrus became scarce and threatened to fail; and, as its laborious preparation could only take place on the spot, numberless men must have subsisted by it in Egypt. The deliveries of Alexandrian wares introduced by Aurelian in favour of the capital of the empire extended, along with linen, to glass and papyrus.229 The intercourse with the East must have had a varied influence on Egyptian manufactures as regards supply and demand. Textiles were manufactured there for export to the East, and that in the fashion required by the usage of the country; the ordinary clothes of the inhabitants of Habesh were of Egyptian manufacture; the gorgeous stuffs especially of the weaving in colours and in gold skilfully practised at Alexandria went to Arabia and India. In like manner the glass beads prepared in Egypt played the same part in the commerce of the African coast as at the present day. India procured partly glass cups, partly unwrought glass for its own manufacture; even at the Chinese court the glass vessels, with which the Roman strangers did homage to the emperor, are said to have excited great admiration. Egyptian merchants brought to the king of the Axomites (Habesh) as standing presents gold and silver vessels prepared after the fashion of that country, to the civilised rulers of the South-Arabian and Indian coast among other gifts also statues, probably of bronze, and musical instruments. On the other hand the materials for the manufacture of luxuries which came from the East, especially ivory and tortoise-shell, were worked up hardly perhaps in Egypt, chiefly, in all probability, at Rome. Lastly, at an epoch, which never had its match in the West for magnificent public buildings, the costly building materials supplied by the Egyptian quarries came to be employed in enormous masses outside of Egypt; the beautiful red granite of Syene, the green breccia from the region of Kosêr, the basalt, the alabaster, after the time of Claudius the gray granite, and especially the porphyry of the mountains above Myos Hormos. The working of them was certainly effected for the most part on imperial account by penal colonists; but the transport at least must have gone to benefit the whole country and particularly the city of Alexandria. The extent to which Egyptian traffic and Egyptian manufactures were developed is shown by an accidentally-preserved notice as to the cargo of a transport ship (ἄκατος), distinguished by its size, which under Augustus brought to Rome the obelisk now standing at the Porta del Popolo with its base; it carried, besides 200 sailors, 1200 passengers, 400,000 Roman bushels (34,000 hectolitres) of wheat, and a cargo of linen cloth, glass, paper, and pepper. “Alexandria,” says a Roman author of the third century,230 "is a town of plenty, of wealth, and of luxury, in which nobody goes idle; this one is a glass-worker, that one a paper-maker, the third a linen-weaver; the only god is money." This held true proportionally of the whole land.

Egyptian navigation of the Mediterranean.Of the commercial intercourse of Egypt with the regions adjoining it on the south, as well as with Arabia and India, we shall speak more fully in the sequel. The traffic with the countries of the Mediterranean comes less into prominence in the traditional account, partly, doubtless, because it belonged to the ordinary course of things, and there was not often occasion to make special mention of it. The Egyptian corn was conveyed to Italy by Alexandrian shipmasters, and in consequence of this there arose in Portus near Ostia a sanctuary modelled on the Alexandrian temple of Sarapis with a mariner’s guild;231 but these transport-ships would hardly be concerned to any considerable extent in the sale of the wares going from Egypt to the West. This sale lay probably just as much, and perhaps more, in the hands of the Italian ship-owners and captains than of the Egyptian; at least there was already under the Lagids a considerable Italian settlement in Alexandria,232 and the Egyptian merchants had not the same diffusion in the West as the Syrian.233 The ordinances of Augustus, to be mentioned afterwards, which remodelled the commercial traffic on the Arabian and Indian Seas, found no application to the navigation of the Mediterranean; the government had no interest in favouring the Egyptian merchants more than the rest in its case. The traffic there remained, presumably, as it was.

Population.Egypt was thus not merely occupied, in its portions capable of culture, with a dense agricultural population, but also as the numerous and in part very considerable hamlets and towns enable us to recognise, a manufacturing land, and hence accordingly by far the most populous province of the Roman empire. The old Egypt is alleged to have had a population of seven millions; under Vespasian there were counted in the official lists seven and a half millions of inhabitants liable to poll tax, to which fall to be added the Alexandrians and other Greeks exempted from poll tax, so that the population, apart from the slaves, is to be estimated at least at eight millions of persons. As the area capable of cultivation may be estimated at present at 10,500 English square miles, and for the Roman period at the most at 14,700, there dwelt at that time in Egypt on the average about 520 persons to the square mile.

When we direct our glance upon the inhabitants of Egypt, the two nations inhabiting the country—the great mass of the Egyptians and the small minority of the Alexandrians—are circles thoroughly different,234 although the contagious power of vice and the similarity of character belonging to all vice have instituted a bad fellowship of evil between the two.

The native Egyptians cannot have been far different either in position or in character from their modern descendants. They were contented, sober, capable of labour, and active, skilful artisans and mariners, and adroit merchants, adhering to old customs and to old faith. If the Romans assure us that the Egyptians were proud of the scourge-marks received for perpetrating frauds in taxation,235 these are views derived from the standpoint of the tax officials. There was no want of good germs in the national culture; with all the superiority of the Greeks in the intellectual competition of the two so utterly different races, the Egyptians in turn had the advantage of the Hellenes in various and essential things, and they felt this too. It is, after all, only the plain reflection of their own feeling, when the Egyptian priests of the Greek conversational literature ridicule the so-called historical research of the Hellenes and its treatment of poetical fables as real tradition from primitive past times, saying that in Egypt they made no verses, but their whole ancient history was described in the temples and monuments; although now, indeed, there were but few who knew it, since many monuments were destroyed, and tradition was made to perish through the ignorance and the indifference of later generations. But this well-warranted complaint carried in itself hopelessness; the venerable tree of Egyptian civilisation had long been marked for cutting down. Hellenism penetrated with its decomposing influence even to the priesthood itself. An Egyptian temple-scribe Chaeremon, who was called to the court of Claudius as teacher of Greek philosophy for the crown-prince, attributed in his Egyptian History the elements of Stoical physics to the old gods of the country, and expounded in this sense the documents written in the native character. In the practical life of the imperial period the old Egyptian habits come into consideration almost only as regards the religious sphere. Religion was for this people all in all. The foreign rule in itself was willingly borne, we might say hardly felt, so long as it did not touch the sacred customs of the land and what was therewith connected. It is true that in the internal government of the country nearly everything had such a connection—writing and language, priestly privileges and priestly arrogance, the manners of the court and the customs of the country; the care of the government for the sacred ox living at the moment, the provisions made for its burial at its decease, and for the finding out of the fitting successor, were accounted by these priests and this people as the test of the capacity of the ruler of the land for the time, and as the measure of the respect and homage due to him. The first Persian king introduced himself in Egypt by giving back the sanctuary of Neith in Sais to its destination—that is, to the priests; the first Ptolemy, when still a Macedonian governor, brought back the images of the Egyptian gods, that had been carried off to Asia, to their old abode, and restored to the gods of Pe and Tep the land-gifts estranged from them; for the sacred temple-images brought home from Persia in the great victorious expedition of Euergetes the native priests convey their thanks to the king in the famous decree of Canopus in the year 238 B.C.; the customary insertion of the living rulers male or female in the circle of the native gods these foreigners acquiesced in for themselves just as did the Egyptian Pharaohs. The Roman rulers followed their example only to a limited extent. As respects title they doubtless entered, as we saw (p. 244, note), in some measure into the native cultus, but avoided withal, even in the Egyptian setting, the customary predicates that stood in too glaring a contrast to Occidental views. Since these ‘favourites of Ptah and of Isis’ took much the same steps in Italy against the Egyptian worship as against the Jewish, they betrayed nothing, as may readily be understood, of such love except in hieroglyphic inscriptions, and even in Egypt took no part in the service of the native gods. However obstinately the religion of the land was still retained under the foreign rule among the Egyptians proper, the Pariah position in which these found themselves alongside of the ruling Greeks and Romans, necessarily told heavily on the cultus and the priests; and of the leading position, the influence, the culture of the old Egyptian priestly order but scanty remains were discernible under the Roman government. On the other hand, the indigenous religion, from the outset disinclined to beauty of form and spiritual transfiguration, served, in and out of Egypt, as a starting-point and centre for all conceivable pious sorcery and sacred fraud—it is enough to recall the thrice-greatest Hermes at home in Egypt, with the literature attaching to his name of tractates and marvel-books, as well as the corresponding widely diffused practice. But in the circles of the natives the worst abuses were connected at this epoch with their cultus—not merely drinking-bouts continued through many days in honour of the individual local deities, with the unchastity thereto appertaining, but also permanent religious feuds between the several districts for the precedence of the ibis over the cat, or of the crocodile over the baboon. In the year 127 A.D., on such an occasion, the Ombites in southern Egypt were suddenly assailed by a neighbouring community236 at a drinking-festival, and the victors are said to have eaten one of the slain. Soon afterwards the community of the Hound, in defiance of the community of the Pike, consumed a pike, and the latter in defiance of the other consumed a hound, and thereupon a war broke out between these two nomes, till the Romans interfered and chastised both parties. Such incidents were of ordinary occurrence in Egypt. Nor was there a want otherwise of troubles in the land. The very first viceroy of Egypt appointed by Augustus had, on account of an increase of the taxes, to send troops to upper Egypt, and not less, perhaps likewise in consequence of the pressure of taxation, to Heroonpolis at the upper end of the Arabian Gulf. Revolt of the “Herdsmen.”Once, under the emperor Marcus, a rising of the native Egyptians assumed even a threatening character. When in the marshes, difficult of access, on the coast to the east of Alexandria—the so-called "cattle-pastures" (bucolia), which served as a place of refuge for criminals and robbers, and formed a sort of colony of them—some people were seized by a division of Roman troops, the whole banditti rose to liberate them, and the population of the country joined the movement. The Roman legion from Alexandria went to oppose them, but it was defeated, and Alexandria itself had almost fallen into the hands of the insurgents. The governor of the East, Avidius Cassius, arrived doubtless with his troops, but did not venture on a conflict against the superiority of numbers, and preferred to provoke dissension in the league of the rebels; after the one band ranged itself against the other the government easily mastered them all. This so-called revolt of the herdsmen probably bore, like such peasant wars for the most part, a religious character; the leader Isidorus, the bravest man of Egypt, was by station a priest; and the circumstance that for the consecration of the league, after taking the oath, a captive Roman officer was sacrificed and eaten by those who swore, was as well in keeping with it as with the cannibalism of the Ombite war. An echo of these events is preserved in the stories of Egyptian robbers in the late-Greek minor literature. Much, moreover, as they may have given trouble to the Roman administration, they had not a political object, and interrupted but partially and temporarily the general tranquillity of the land.

Alexandria.By the side of the Egyptians stood the Alexandrians, somewhat as the English in India stand alongside of the natives of the country. Generally, Alexandria was regarded in the imperial period before Constantine’s time as the second city of the Roman empire and the first commercial city of the world. It numbered at the end of the Lagid rule upwards of 300,000 free inhabitants, in the imperial period beyond doubt still more. The comparison of the two great capitals that grew up in rivalry on the Nile and on the Orontes yields as many points of similarity as of contrast. Both were comparatively new cities, monarchical creations out of nothing, of symmetrical plan and regular urban arrangements. Water ran into every house in Alexandria as at Antioch. In beauty of site and magnificence of buildings the city in the valley of the Orontes was as superior to its rival as the latter excelled it in the favourableness of the locality for commerce on a large scale and in the number of the population. The great public buildings of the Egyptian capital, the royal palace, the Mouseion dedicated to the Academy, above all the temple of Sarapis, were marvellous works of an earlier epoch, whose architecture was highly developed; but the Egyptian capital, in which few of the Caesars set foot, has nothing corresponding to set off against the great number of imperial structures in the Syrian residency.

Alexandrian Fronde.The Antiochenes and Alexandrians stood on an equal footing in insubordination and eagerness to oppose the government; we may add also in this, that the two cities, and Alexandria more particularly, flourished precisely under and through the Roman government, and had much more reason to thank it than to play the Fronde. The attitude of the Alexandrians to their Hellenic rulers is attested by the long series of nicknames, in part still used at the present day, for which the royal Ptolemies without exception were indebted to the public of their capital. The Emperor Vespasian received from the Alexandrians for the introducing of a tax on salt fish the title of the “sardine-dealer” (Κυβιοσάκτης); the Syrian Severus Alexander that of the “chief Rabbin;” but the emperors came rarely to Egypt, and the distant and foreign rulers offered no genuine butt for this ridicule. In their absence the public bestowed at least on the viceroys the same attention with persevering zeal; even the prospect of inevitable chastisement was not able to put to silence the often witty and always saucy tongue of these townsmen.237 Vespasian contented himself in return for that attention shown to him with raising the poll-tax about six farthings, and got for doing so the further name of the “sixfarthing-man;” but their sayings about Severus Antoninus, the petty ape of Alexander the Great and the favourite of Mother Jocasta, were to cost them more dearly. The spiteful ruler appeared in all friendliness, and allowed the people to keep holiday for him, but then ordered his soldiers to charge into the festal multitude, so that for days the squares and streets of the great city ran with blood; in fact, he enjoined the dissolution of the Academy and the transfer of the legion into the city itself—neither of which, it is true, was carried into effect.

Alexandrian tumults.But while in Antioch, as a rule, the matter did not go beyond sarcasm, the Alexandrian rabble took on the slightest pretext to stones and to cudgels. In street uproar, says an authority, himself Alexandrian, the Egyptians are before all others; the smallest spark suffices here to kindle a tumult. On account of neglected visits, on account of the confiscation of spoiled provisions, on account of exclusion from a bathing establishment, on account of a dispute between the slave of an Alexandrian of rank and a Roman foot-soldier as to the value or non-value of their respective slippers, the legions were under the necessity of charging among the citizens of Alexandria. It here became apparent that the lower stratum of the Alexandrian population consisted in greater part of natives; in these riots the Greeks no doubt acted as instigators, as indeed the rhetors, that is, in this case the inciting orators, are expressly mentioned;238 but in the further course of the matter the spite and the savageness of the Egyptian proper came into the conflict. The Syrians were cowardly, and as soldiers the Egyptians were so too; but in a street tumult they were able to develop a courage worthy of a better cause.239 The Antiochenes delighted in race-horses like the Alexandrians; but among the latter no chariot race ended without stone-throwing and stabbing. Both cities were affected by the persecution of the Jews under the emperor Gaius; but in Antioch an earnest word of the authorities sufficed to put an end to it, while thousands of human lives fell a sacrifice to the Alexandrian outbreak instigated by some clowns with a puppet-show. The Alexandrians, it was said, when a riot arose, gave themselves no peace till they had seen blood. The Roman officers and soldiers had a difficult position there. "Alexandria," says a reporter of the fourth century, “is entered by the governors with trembling and despair, for they fear the justice of the people; where a governor perpetrates a wrong, there follows at once the setting of the palace on fire and stoning.” The naive trust in the rectitude of this procedure marks the standpoint of the writer, who belonged to this “people.” The continuation of this Lynch-system, dishonouring alike to the government and to the nation, is furnished by what is called Church-history, in the murder of the bishop Georgius, alike obnoxious to the heathen and to the orthodox, and of his associates under Julian, and that of the fair freethinker Hypatia by the pious community of Bishop Cyril under Theodosius II. These Alexandrian tumults were more malicious, more incalculable, more violent than the Antiochene, but just like these, not dangerous either for the stability of the empire or even for the individual government. Mischievous and ill-disposed lads are very inconvenient, but not more than inconvenient, in the household as in the commonwealth.

Alexandrian worship.In religious matters also the two cities had an analogous position. To the worship of the land, as the native population retained it in Syria as in Egypt, the Alexandrians as well as the Antiochenes were disinclined in its original shape. But the Lagids, as well as the Seleucids, were careful of disturbing the foundations of the old religion of the country; and, merely amalgamating the older national views and sacred rites with the pliant forms of the Greek Olympus, they Hellenised these outwardly in some measure; they introduced, e.g. the Greek god of the lower world Pluto into the native worship, under the hitherto little mentioned name of the Egyptian god Sarapis, and then gradually transferred to this the old Osiris worship.240 Thus the genuinely Egyptian Isis and the pseudo-Egyptian Sarapis played in Alexandria nearly the same part as Belus and Elagabalus in Syria, and made their way in a similar manner with these, although less strongly and with more vehement opposition, by degrees into the Occidental worship of the imperial period. As regards the immorality developed on occasion of these religious usages and festivals, and the unchastity approved and stimulated by priestly blessing, neither city was in a position to upbraid the other.

Down to a late time the old cultus retained its firmest stronghold in the pious land of Egypt.241 The restoration of the old faith, as well scientifically in the philosophy annexed to it as practically in the repelling of the attacks directed by the Christians against Polytheism, and in the revival of the heathen temple-worship and the heathen divination, had its true centre in Alexandria. Then, when the new faith conquered this stronghold also, the character of the country remained nevertheless true to itself; Syria was the cradle of Christianity, Egypt was the cradle of monachism. Of the significance and the position of the Jewish body, in which the two cities likewise resembled each other, we have already spoken in another connection (p. 163). Immigrants called by the government into the land like the Hellenes, the Jews were doubtless inferior to these and were liable to poll-tax like the Egyptians, but accounted themselves, and were accounted, more than these. Their number amounted under Vespasian to a million, about the eighth part of the whole population of Egypt, and, like the Hellenes, they dwelt chiefly in the capital, of the five wards of which two were Jewish. In acknowledged independence, in repute, culture, and wealth, the body of Alexandrian Jews was even before the destruction of Jerusalem the first in the world; and in consequence of this a good part of the last act of the Jewish tragedy, as has been already set forth, was played out on Egyptian soil.

The learned world of Alexandria.Alexandria and Antioch were pre-eminently seats of wealthy merchants and manufacturers; but in Antioch there was wanting the seaport and its belongings, and, however stirring matters were on the streets there, they bore no comparison with the life and doings of the Alexandrian artisans and sailors. On the other hand, for enjoyment of life, dramatic spectacles, dining, pleasures of love, Antioch had more to offer than the city in which “no one went idle.” Literary amusements, linking themselves especially with the rhetorical exhibitions—such as we sketched in the description of Asia Minor—fell into the background in Egypt,242 doubtless more amidst the pressure of the affairs of the day than through the influence of the numerous and well-paid savants living in Alexandria, and in great part natives of it. These men of the Museum, of whom we shall have to speak further on, did not prominently affect the character of the town as a whole, especially if they did their duty in diligent work. But the Alexandrian physicians were regarded as the best in the whole empire; it is true that Egypt was no less the genuine home of quacks and of secret remedies, and of that strange civilised form of the "shepherd-medicine," in which pious simplicity and speculating deceit draped themselves in the mantle of science. Of the thrice-greatest Hermes we have already made mention (p. 261); the Alexandrian Sarapis, too, wrought more marvellous cures in antiquity than any one of his colleagues, and he infected even the practical emperor Vespasian, so that he too healed the blind and lame, but only in Alexandria.

Scholar-life in Alexandria.Although the place which Alexandria occupies, or seems to occupy, in the intellectual and literary development of the later Greece and of Occidental culture generally cannot be fitly estimated in a description of the local circumstances of Egypt, but only in the delineation of this development itself, the Alexandrian scholarship and its continuation under the Roman government are too remarkable a phenomenon not to have its general position touched on in this connection. We have already observed (p. 126) that the blending of the Oriental and the Hellenic intellectual world was accomplished pre-eminently in Egypt alongside of Syria; and if the new faith which was to conquer the West issued from Syria, the science homogeneous with it—that philosophy which, alongside of and beyond the human mind, acknowledges and proclaims the supra-mundane God and the divine revelation—came pre-eminently from Egypt: probably already the new Pythagoreanism, certainly the philosophic Neo-Judaism—of which we have formerly spoken (p. 170)—as well as the new Platonism, whose founder, the Egyptian Plotinus, was likewise already mentioned (p. 126). Upon this interpenetration of Hellenic and Oriental elements, that was carried out especially in Alexandria, mainly depends the fact, that—as falls to be set forth more fully in surveying the state of things in Italy—the Hellenism there in the earlier imperial period bears pre-eminently an Egyptian form. As the old-new wisdoms associated with Pythagoras, Moses, Plato, penetrated from Alexandria into Italy, so Isis and her belongings played the first part in the easy, fashionable piety, which the Roman poets of the Augustan age and the Pompeian temples from that of Claudius exhibit to us. Art as practised in Egypt prevails in the Campanian frescoes of the same epoch, as in the Tiburtine villa of Hadrian. In keeping with this is the position which Alexandrian erudition occupies in the intellectual life of the imperial period. Outwardly it is based on the care of the state for intellectual interests, and would with more warrant link itself to the name of Alexander than to that of Alexandria; it is the realisation of the thought that in a certain stage of civilisation art and science must be supported and promoted by the authority and the resources of the state, the consistent sequel of the brilliant moment in the world’s history which placed Alexander and Aristotle side by side. It is not our intention here to inquire how in this mighty conception truth and error, the injuring and elevating of the intellectual life, became mingled, nor is the scanty after-bloom of the divine singing and of the high thinking of the free Hellenes to be once more placed side by side with the rank and yet also noble produce of the later collecting, investigating, and arranging. If the institutions which sprang from this thought could not, or, what was worse, could only apparently, renew to the Greek nation what was irrecoverably lost, they granted to it on the still free arena of the intellectual world the only possible compensation, and that, too, a glorious one. For us the local circumstances are above all to be taken into account. Artificial gardens are in some measure independent of the soil, and it is not otherwise with these scientific institutions; only that they from their nature are directed towards the courts. Material support may be imparted to them otherwise; but more important than this is the favour of the highest circles, which swells their sails, and the connections, which, meeting together in the great centres, replenish and extend these circles of science. In the better time of the monarchies of Alexander there were as many such centres as there were states, and that of the Lagid court was only the most highly-esteemed among them. The Roman republic had brought the others one after another into its power, and had set aside with the courts also the scientific institutes and circles belonging to them. The fact that the future Augustus, when he did away with the last of these courts, allowed the learned institutes connected with it to subsist, is a genuine, and not the worst, indication of the changed times. The more energetic and higher Philhellenism of the government of the Caesars was distinguished to its advantage from that of the republic by the fact that it not merely allowed Greek literati to earn money in Rome, but viewed and treated the great guardianship of Greek science as a part of the sovereignty of Alexander. No doubt, as in this regeneration of the empire as a whole, the building-plan was grander than the building. The royally patented and pensioned Muses, whom the Lagids had called to Alexandria, did not disdain to accept the like payments also from the Romans; and the imperial munificence was not inferior to the earlier regal. The fund for the library of Alexandria and the fund for free places for philosophers, poets, physicians, and scholars of all sorts,243 as well as the immunities granted to these, were not diminished by Augustus, and were increased by the emperor Claudius—with the injunction, indeed, that the new Claudian academicians should have the Greek historical works of the singular founder publicly read year by year in their sittings. With the first library in the world Alexandria retained at the same time, through the whole imperial period, a certain primacy of scientific work, until Islam burnt the library and killed the ancient civilisation. It was not merely the opportunity thus offered, but at the same time the old tradition and turn of mind of these Hellenes, which preserved for the city that precedence, as indeed among the scholars the native Alexandrians are prominent in number and importance. In this epoch numerous and respectable labours of erudition, particularly philological and physical, proceeded from the circle of the savants “of the Museum,” as they entitled themselves, like the Parisians “of the Institute”; but the literary importance, which the Alexandrian and the Pergamene court-science and court-art had in the better epoch of Hellenism for the whole Hellenic and Hellenising world, was never even remotely attached to the Romano-Alexandrian. The cause lay not in the want of talents or in other accidents, least of all in the fact that places in the Museum were bestowed by the emperor sometimes according to gifts and always according to favour, and the government dealt with them quite as with the horse of the knight and the posts of officials of the household; the case was not otherwise at the older courts. Court-philosophers and court-poets remained in Alexandria, but not the court; it was here very clearly apparent that the main matter was not pensions and rewards, but the contact—quickening for both sides—of great political and great scientific work. The latter doubtless presented itself for the new monarchy and brought its consequences with it; but the place for it was not Alexandria: this bloom of political development justly belonged to the Latins and to the Latin capital. The Augustan poetry and Augustan science attained, under similar circumstances, to a similar important and pleasing development with that attained by the Hellenistic at the court of the Pergamenes and the earlier Ptolemies. Even in the Greek circle, so far as the Roman government operated upon it in the sense of the Lagids, this development was linked more with Rome than with Alexandria. It is true that the Greek libraries of the capital were not equal to the Alexandrian, and there was no institute in Rome comparable to the Alexandrian Museum. But a position at the Roman libraries opened up relations to the court. The professorship of Greek rhetoric in the capital, instituted by Vespasian, filled up and paid for by the government, gave to its holder, although he was not an officer of the household in the same sense as the imperial librarian, a similar position, and was regarded, doubtless on that account, as the chief professorial chair of the empire.244 But, above all, the office of imperial cabinet secretary in its Greek division was the most esteemed and the most influential position to which a Greek man of letters could at all attain. Transference from the Alexandrian academy to such an office in the capital was demonstrably promotion.245 Even apart from all which the Greek literati otherwise found in Rome alone, the court-positions and the court-offices were enough to draw the most distinguished of them thither rather than to the Egyptian "free table." The learned Alexandria of this time became a sort of "jointure" of Greek science, worthy of respect and useful, but of no pervading influence on the great movement of culture or mis-culture of the imperial period; the places in the Museum were, as was reasonable, not seldom bestowed on scholars of note from abroad, and for the institution itself the books of the library were of more account than the burgesses of the great commercial and manufacturing city.

The Egyptian army.The military circumstances of Egypt laid down, just as in Syria, a double task for the troops there; the protection of the south frontier and of the east coast, which indeed may not be remotely compared with that required for the line of the Euphrates, and the maintenance of internal order in the country as in the capital. The Roman garrison consisted, apart from the ships stationed at Alexandria and on the Nile, which seem chiefly to have served for the control of the customs, under Augustus of three legions, along with the not numerous auxiliary troops belonging to them, about 20,000 men. This was about half as many as he destined for all the Asiatic provinces—which was in keeping with the importance of this province for the new monarchy. But the occupying force was probably even under Augustus himself diminished about a third, and then under Domitian by about a further third. At first two legions were stationed outside of the capital; but the main camp, and soon the only one, lay before its gates, where Caesar the younger had fought out the last battle with Antonius, in the suburb called accordingly Nicopolis. The suburb had its own amphitheatre and its own imperial popular festival, and was quite independently organised; so that for a time the public amusements of Alexandria were thrown into the shade by those of Nicopolis. The immediate watching of the frontier fell to the auxiliaries. The same causes therefore which relaxed discipline in Syria—the police-character of their primary task and their immediate contact with the great capital—came into play also for the Egyptian troops; to which fell to be added, that the bad custom of allowing to the soldiers with the standards a married life or at any rate a substitute for it, and of filling up the troop from their camp-children, had for long been naturalised among the Macedonian soldiers of the Ptolemies, and soon prevailed also among the Romans, at least up to a certain degree. Accordingly, the Egyptian corps, in which the Occidentals served still more rarely than in the other armies of the East, and which was recruited in great part from the citizens and the camp of Alexandria, appears to have been among all the sections of the army the least esteemed; as indeed also the officers of this legion, as was already observed, were inferior in rank to those of the rest.

The properly military task of the Egyptian troops was closely connected with the measures for the elevation of Egyptian commerce. It will be convenient to take the two together, and to set forth in connection, in the first instance, the relations to the continental neighbours in the south, and then those to Arabia and India.