The Provinces of the Roman Empire 37

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 37

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.

 

[Sidenote: Egyptian manners.]

 

[Sidenote: Revolt of the “Herdsmen.”]

 

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 A.D. 127,

on such an occasion, the Ombites in southern Egypt were suddenly

assailed by a neighbouring community[236] 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. 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.

 

[Sidenote: 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.

 

[Sidenote: 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.

 

[Sidenote: 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.