The Provinces of the Roman Empire 34

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 34

What held true in general of all Hellenic or Hellenised

territories--that the Romans, when annexing them to the empire,

preserved the once existing institutions, and introduced modifications

only where these seemed absolutely necessary--found application in its

full compass to Egypt.

 

Like Syria, Egypt, when it became Roman, was a land of twofold

nationality; here too alongside of, and over, the native stood the

Greek--the former the slave, the latter the master. But in law and in

fact the relations of the two nations in Egypt were wholly different

from those of Syria.

 

[Sidenote: Greek and Egyptian towns.]

 

Syria, substantially already in the pre-Roman and entirely in the

Roman epoch, came under the government of the land only after an

indirect manner; it was broken up, partly into principalities, partly

into autonomous urban districts, and was administered, in the first

instance, by the rulers of the land or municipal authorities. In

Egypt,[201] on the other hand, there were neither native princes

nor imperial cities after the Greek fashion. The two spheres of

administration into which Egypt was divided--the “land” (ἡ χώρα) of

the Egyptians, with its originally thirty-six districts (νομοί), and

the two Greek cities, Alexandria in lower and Ptolemais in upper

Egypt[202]--were rigidly separated and sharply opposed to each other,

and yet in a strict sense hardly different. The rural, like the urban,

district was not merely marked off territorially, but the former as

well as the latter was a home-district; the belonging to each was

independent of dwelling-place and hereditary. The Egyptian from the

Chemmitic nome belonged to it with his dependents, just as much when

he had his abode in Alexandria as the Alexandrian dwelling in Chemmis

belonged to the burgess-body of Alexandria. The land-district had for

its centre always an urban settlement, the Chemmitic, for example, the

town of Panopolis, which grew up round the temple of Chemmis or of Pan,

or, as this is expressed in the Greek mode of conception, each nome had

its metropolis; so far each land-district may be regarded also as a

town-district. Like the cities, the nomes also became in the Christian

epoch the basis of the episcopal dioceses. The land-districts were

based on the arrangements for worship which dominated everything in

Egypt; the centre for each one is the sanctuary of a definite deity,

and usually it bears the name of this deity or of the animal sacred to

the same; thus the Chemmitic district is called after the god Chemmis,

or, according to Greek equivalent, Pan; other districts after the dog,

the lion, the crocodile. But, on the other hand, the town-districts are

not without their religious centre; the protecting god of Alexandria is

Alexander, the protecting god of Ptolemais the first Ptolemy, and the

priests, who are installed in the one place as in the other for this

worship and that of their successors, are the Eponymi for both cities.

The land-district is quite destitute of autonomy: administration,

taxation, justice, are placed in the hands of the royal officials,[203]

and the collegiate system, the Palladium of the Greek as of the Roman

commonwealth, was here in all stages absolutely excluded. But in the

two Greek cities it was not much otherwise. There was doubtless a body

of burgesses divided into phylae and demes, but no common council;[204]

the officials were doubtless different and differently named from those

of the nomes, but were also throughout officials of royal nomination

and likewise without collegiate arrangement. Hadrian was the first to

give to an Egyptian township, Antinoopolis, laid out by him in memory

of his favourite drowned in the Nile, urban rights according to the

Greek fashion; and subsequently Severus, perhaps as much out of spite

to the Antiochenes as for the benefit of the Egyptians, granted to the

capital of Egypt and to the town of Ptolemais, and to several other

Egyptian communities, not urban magistrates indeed, but at any rate an

urban council. Hitherto, doubtless, in official language the Egyptian

town calls itself Nomos, the Greek Polis, but a Polis without Archontes

and Bouleutae is a meaningless name. So was it also in the coinage. The

Egyptian nomes did not possess the right of coining; but still less did

Alexandria ever strike coins. Egypt is, among all the provinces of the

Greek half of the empire, the only one which knows no other than royal

money. Nor was this otherwise even in the Roman period. The emperors

abolished the abuses that crept in under the last Lagids; Augustus

set aside their unreal copper coinage, and when Tiberius resumed the

coinage of silver he gave to the Egyptian silver money just as real

value as to the other provincial currency of the empire.[205] But the

character of the coinage remained substantially the same.[206] There

is a distinction between Nomos and Polis as between the god Chemmis

and the god Alexander; in an administrative respect there is not any

difference. Egypt consisted of a majority of Egyptian and of a minority

of Greek townships, all of which were destitute of autonomy, and all

were placed under the immediate and absolute administration of the king

and of the officials nominated by him.

 

[Sidenote: Absence of a land-diet.]

 

It was a consequence of this, that Egypt alone of all the Roman

provinces had no general representation. The diet is the collective

representation of the self-administering communities of the province.

But in Egypt there was none such; the nomes were simply imperial or

rather royal administrative districts, and Alexandria not merely

stood virtually alone, but was likewise without proper municipal

organisation. The priest standing at the head of the capital of the

country might doubtless call himself “chief priest of Alexandria and

all Egypt” (p. 248, note), and has a certain resemblance to the Asiarch

and the Bithyniarch of Asia Minor, but the deep diversity of the

organisations is thereby simply concealed.

 

[Sidenote: The government of the Lagids.]

 

The rule bore accordingly in Egypt a far different character than in

the rest of the domain of Greek and Roman civilisation embraced under

the imperial government. In the latter the community administers

throughout; the ruler of the empire is, strictly taken, only the

common president of the numerous more or less autonomous bodies of

burgesses, and alongside of the advantages of self-administration its

disadvantages and dangers everywhere appear. In Egypt the ruler is

king, the inhabitant of the land is his subject, the administration

that of a domain. This administration, in principle as haughtily and

absolutely conducted as it was directed to the equal welfare of all

subjects without distinction of rank and of estate, was the peculiarity

of the Lagid government, developed probably more from the Hellenising

of the old Pharaonic rule than from the urban organisation of the

universal empire, as the great Macedonian had conceived it, and as it

was most completely carried out in the Syrian New-Macedonia (p. 120).

The system required a king not merely leading the army in his own

person, but engaged in the daily labour of administration, a developed

and strictly disciplined hierarchy of officials, scrupulous justice

towards high and low; and as these rulers, not altogether without

ground, ascribed to themselves the name of benefactor (εὐεργέτης), so

the monarchy of the Lagids may be compared with that of Frederick,

from which it was in its principles not far removed. Certainly Egypt

had also experienced the reverse side, the inevitable collapse of the

system in incapable hands. But the standard remained; and the Augustan

principate alongside of the rule of the senate was nothing but the

intermarriage of the Lagid government with the old urban and federal

development.

 

[Sidenote: Egypt and the imperial administration.]

 

A further consequence of this form of government was the undoubted

superiority, more especially from a financial point of view, of the

Egyptian administration over that of the other provinces. We may

designate the pre-Roman epoch as the struggle of the financially

dominant power of Egypt with the Asiatic empire, filling, so far as

space goes, the rest of the East; under the Roman period this was

continued in a certain sense in the fact that the imperial finances

stood forth superior in contrast to those of the senate, especially

through the exclusive possession of Egypt. If it is the aim of the

state to work out the utmost possible amount from its territory, in

the old world the Lagids were absolutely the masters of statecraft.

In particular they were in this sphere the instructors and the models

of the Caesars. How much the Romans drew out of Egypt we are not able

to say with precision. In the Persian period Egypt had paid an annual

tribute of 700 Babylonish talents of silver, about £200,000; the annual

income of the Ptolemies from Egypt, or rather from their possessions

generally, amounted in their most brilliant period to 14,800 Egyptian

silver talents, or £2,850,000, and besides 1,500,000 artabae = 591,000

hectolitres of wheat; at the end of their rule fully 6000 talents,

or £1,250,000. The Romans drew from Egypt annually the third part

of the corn necessary for the consumption of Rome, 20,000,000 Roman

bushels[207] = 1,740,000 hectolitres; a part of it, however, was

certainly derived from the domains proper, another perhaps supplied

in return for compensation, while, on the other hand, the Egyptian

tribute was assessed, at least for a great part, in money, so that we

are not in a position even approximately to determine the Egyptian

income of the Roman exchequer. But not merely by its amount was it of

decisive importance for the Roman state-economy, but because it served

as a pattern in the first instance for the domanial possessions of the

emperors in the other provinces, and generally for the whole imperial

administration, as this falls to be explained when we set it forth.

 

[Sidenote: Privileged position of the Hellenes.]

 

But if the communal self-administration had no place in Egypt, and in

this respect a real diversity does not exist between the two nations

of which this state, just like the Syrian, was composed, there was

in another respect a barrier erected between them, to which Syria

offers no parallel. According to the arrangement of the Macedonian

conquerors, the belonging to an Egyptian locality disqualified for

all public offices and for the better military service. Where the

state made gifts to its burgesses these were restricted to those of

the Greek communities;[208] on the other hand, the Egyptians only

paid the poll-tax; and even from the municipal burdens, which fell on

the settlers of the individual Egyptian district, the Alexandrians

settled there were exempted.[209] Although in the case of trespass the

back of the Egyptian as of the Alexandrian had to suffer, the latter

might boast, and did boast, that the cane struck him, and not the

lash, as in the case of the former.[210] Even the acquiring of better

burgess-rights was forbidden to the Egyptians.[211] The burgess-lists

of the two large Greek towns organised by and named after the two

founders of the empire in lower and upper Egypt embraced in them the

ruling population, and the possession of the franchise of one of these

towns was in the Egypt of the Ptolemies the same as the possession of

the Roman franchise was in the Roman empire. What Aristotle recommended

to Alexander--to be a ruler (ἡγεμών) to the Hellenes and a master to

the barbarians, to provide for the former as friends and comrades,

to use the latter like animals and plants--the Ptolemies practically

carried out in all its extent. The king, greater and more free than

his instructor, carried in his mind the higher idea of transforming

the barbarians into Hellenes, or at least of replacing the barbarian

settlements by Hellenic, and to this idea his successors almost

everywhere, and particularly in Syria, allowed ample scope.[212] In

Egypt this was not the case. Doubtless its rulers sought to keep touch

with the natives, particularly in the religious sphere, and wished not

to rule as Greeks over the Egyptians, but rather as earthly gods over

their subjects in common; but with this the inequality of rights on the

part of the subjects was quite compatible, just as the preference _de

iure_ and _de facto_ of the nobility was quite as essential a part of

the government of Frederick as the equality of justice towards gentle

and simple.

 

[Sidenote: 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.