THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES

The death of Alexander the Great was followed by some days of indescribable confusion. When a certain semblance of order was restored the view was officially promulgated that he had not died at all, but had simply "departed from the life among men." His memory was, accordingly, not damned; and, in a sense, his presence in the world which he had transformed continued to be recognized. But not in any real sense. The imperial coins, wherever issued, bore for some time the great king's face as Zeus Ammon; but no imperial cult existed to bring steadily to men's consciousness the idea that their dead lord had an honored place among the Olympians. It was not by the will of those who succeeded to his power, but by the force of historic developments, that his acta were validated.

His heirs were the Macedonians whom he had recently tried to oust from their ancestral partnership with him. They were now to be found, partly in Macedon, partly in detachments throughout the empire, and partly in Babylon where Alexander had died. Those in Babylon took it upon themselves to act for the whole people; and what they did was to establish a regency in the interest of Philip ArrhidÆus and the son whom Roxane was expected to bear, and to concur in the "grab" of the important western satrapies which was at once made by their chief officers.

It was they, too, who decided not to proceed with Alexander's ambitious projects. These, as read to them from his papers,[77] were "to build in Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia, and Cyprus one thousand battleships of the super-trireme pattern for the campaign against the Carthaginians and the other peoples dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean from Libya and Iberia clear round to Sicily; to construct a road along the coast from Cyrene to the Pillars of Hercules, and prepare harbors and naval stations at suitable places; to erect six temples at the enormous cost of $1,890,000 each (fifteen hundred talents); to found cities and transplant men and women both from Asia into Europe and from Europe into Asia, thus linking the two greatest continents by understandings based upon friendly intercourse and by brotherly feeling due to intermarriages." Alexander, it appeared, had looked upon his work as only half done: the Macedonians were eager to enjoy the fruits of an enterprise which they regarded as already finished.

Their sentiment was shared by Ptolemy, son of Lagos, formerly one of Alexander's aides. He had married a Persian princess at Alexander's order, but now he deserted her, and, taking his Athenian mistress, Thais, with him, he went off to Egypt, which had been given to him as his province. There he established himself securely, governed with power and sagacity for forty years, and, marrying in succession two Macedonian princesses, founded a dynasty which gave to Egypt its last great queen, Cleopatra VI, and prior to her accession, ten kings,[78] all of whom were named Ptolemy. Between them they reigned two hundred and seventy-one years; the average length of the reign was over thirty-two years; several of them were expelled temporarily and several of them had colleagues, but nine of them died in possession of the throne. That constitutes a statistical record which it is hard to parallel in all history.

It would be a fascinating study of human enterprise and human depravity to trace the careers of these eleven monarchs. But to do so would be to exhaust the space at my disposal without reaching the special subject of my essay. It must suffice, therefore, to observe that the history of the Ptolemies falls into an imperial period of four reigns and one hundred and twenty years (323-203 B.C.); and a domestic period, likewise of one hundred and twenty years (200-80 B.C.), in which the native peoples, encouraged by the weakness of the Ptolemies abroad, and by a ruinous schism between the military and the civil elements of the foreign-resident population, gained point after point at the expense of the dynasty. A third period follows of fifty years' duration, in which Egypt was at the mercy, not now of the Roman Senate, but of the all-powerful generals who had dethroned it.

The last king of Egypt, Ptolemy the Piper, a bastard by birth and instinct, demeaned himself for twenty-eight years (80-52 B.C.); but by bankrupting his treasury and sacrificing the good opinion of his countrymen, he managed to transmit a badly tarnished crown to his famous daughter, then a girl of seventeen years.

Cleopatra VI had an asset of much greater value than the servility and buffoonery of her father, namely, her personal attractiveness. She early lost all repugnance against using her physical charms, as well as her even more notable mental graces, in what, with all our dislike for the imperial courtesan, we must characterize as her gallant and patriotic effort to rescue her country from the spoiler, to make the queen of Egypt the consort instead of the slave of the coming Roman monarch, to set proud Alexandria beside imperious Rome at the head of the Mediterranean peoples.

She gave herself to Julius CÆsar; bore him a son; left her kingdom and joined him in Rome, where Cicero and others paid her court in CÆsar's gardens, wondering, perhaps, if she was to become their titular queen. In contemporary documents CÆsar is called "the savior and benefactor of the inhabitable world"; and during the last year of his life he was busied with projects of universal empire. He meant to add the districts not yet Roman to his realm, to subdue the GetÆ, the Scythians, and the Parthians. Why was not Egypt, the richest prize of all, included in the list of his intended conquests? It was the country which he had tried over twenty years earlier to secure as his own province. But that was before he had met Cleopatra. That he left it out of the military programme on which he was engaged at the time of his murder shows, I think, that Cleopatra's solution of the Egyptian question was likely to be his also.

Ten years later Alexandria witnessed an extraordinary spectacle.[79] On a stage plated with silver two thrones of gold stood, and on them sat side by side Antony as Dionysus and Cleopatra as Isis. At their feet sat CÆsarion, Cleopatra's son by CÆsar, and on a level with him Alexander, her oldest son by Antony, in Persian costume and with the tiara of the Persian kings. Lower down sat Alexander's twin sister, Cleopatra Selene, and at her side her younger brother, Philadelphus, in Macedonian costume and with the headgear of the kings of Macedon. The significance of the tableau Antony himself explained: Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, Cyprus, and Coele-Syria, was henceforth 'queen of queens'; her son, CÆsarion, 'king of kings.' Alexander was declared king of Armenia and of the states lying between the Euphrates and India, Philadelphus, of Syria and all the lands between the Euphrates and the Hellespont, Cleopatra Selene, queen of Libya including Cyrene. It was the restoration of the ancient empire of the Ptolemies, and in Antony "captured Italy" was symbolized. The Alexandrian siren had regained what her ancestors had lost; and, had the Roman whom she had enthralled only proved equal to the task of maintaining his initial ascendency in Italy, she might, indeed, have fulfilled her boast and administered justice on the Capitol. But Antony went down to defeat at Actium and the young Augustus came to Egypt, like the comrades of Ulysses to the shore of the tempters, with his ears stuffed with wax.

Pascal[80] says: Le nez de ClÉopÂtre: s'il eÛt ÉtÉ plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changÉ. But Pascal speaks as a philosopher. He probably did not know that Cleopatra had a prominent nose. He was certainly ignorant that her death made little or no difference in the constitutional position of Egypt. In a sense Augustus was simply the executor of the great queen's policy; for, after his reorganization of the Roman empire was completed, "it is," as Mommsen[81] says, "quite as correct to say that the kings of Egypt ruled in Rome as that the prince of the Roman people reigned in the valley of the Nile." Be that as it may, the empire of the Ptolemies could not have been recalled from the past even by the magic of a woman's beauty; for, as we shall see when we come to look at the second period of its history, the death it had died was a natural one. It had but experienced the fate to which its constitution made it prone. It was beset from its birth with incurable weaknesses.

None the less it made a brave show during the first century of its existence; and during the reign of its second monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246 B.C.), its capital, Alexandria, was the London of the ancient world. Its only rival in trade and commerce was its neighbor to the west, Carthage. The golden age of the Ptolemies coincides with the one epoch in the history of the world in which Africa was the leader in business enterprise, in money power, in naval strength, in luxury, in science, and, till the real test came, in political prestige and influence. The commercial aristocracy of Carthage and the enlightened despots of Alexandria had the Mediterranean divided between them. West of Sicily lay a Carthaginian lake, into which foreign ships entered at their own peril; east of it, the chief harbors in the whole circuit from Cyrene to Corcyra, as well as the islands which lay in the area thus inclosed, the Ptolemies aimed to secure. Possession of the sea between Egypt and the GrÆco-Macedonian world and of the coasts which it washed and the islands which it surrounded, was the main object of the foreign policy of the early Ptolemies.

The founder of the dynasty was a brave soldier, but a cautious general. Again and again he withdrew from Asia before a land attack and put his main reliance upon the natural defenses of Egypt. He was no sailor at all; yet he became an admiral, and as the result of three great maritime expeditions (308-306, 295-294, 288-287 B.C.), he handed over to his unwarlike son the essential body of the possessions of the family outside of Egypt. The founder of the dynasty was at the same time the founder of the empire.

The Solomon of the Ptolemies, Philadelphus, is addressed by Theocritus,[82] a Sicilian poet who had recently come to Alexandria looking for a patron, in the following adulatory strains:—

"Lo he hath seen three hundred towns arise,
Three thousand, yea three myriad; and o'er all
He rules, the prince of heroes, Ptolemy.
Claims half Phoenicia, and half Araby,
Syria and Libya, and the Æthiops murk;
Sways the Pamphylian and Cilician braves,
The Lycian and the Carian trained to war,
And all the isles; for never fleet like his
Rode upon ocean: land and sea alike
And sounding rivers hail King Ptolemy."

The hero of these lines had just brought a war against his brother in Cyrene and his rival in Asia to a successful termination (273 B.C.); and, except for a probable interval of four years (253-249 B.C.), the invincible fleet which he then possessed ruled the sea till his death. But he was anything but a warrior king. During his whole life he never commanded an army or a fleet in person. Like Augustus CÆsar, with whom he has been compared, he had a delicate constitution which unfitted him for the rough and tumble of war. He had a lively intelligence, which was carefully cultivated, and, like the Emperor Hadrian, an insatiable thirst for novelties. A new book, an old painting, a strange animal, a useful invention, alike aroused his curiosity. One amazing woman—his own sister—swept him from his self-indulgent moorings. She made herself his wife—as any Egyptian woman might do with her brother—and, though she was his queen for six years at most (275-270 B.C.), when she was over forty and he over thirty-two, he followed her policy and cherished her memory for many long years.

That her acta might not be invalid he had her deified after her death, and that he might still be her consort, he had himself elevated at the same time to her side as the first self-constituted god-king since Alexander.

A sensualist by instinct, he surrounded himself in Alexandria with everything that appealed to his variegated lusts.[83] The women whom he took into his harem after his sister's death were given palaces and race-horses, public statues,—in costumes which were not always modest,—and even divine honors. Splendid new quarters were laid out in Alexandria, and public works erected there and elsewhere in his realm. The capital thronged with scientific, literary, and musical celebrities, attracted by the endowments and collections of the Museum, the richness of the library, the profusion of festivals, and the liberality of the king, who wished Alexandria to become to the new world what Athens had been to the old.

Yet despite all these manifold gratifications, life palled on the much-experienced monarch. He turned from the doctors to the quacks, and, shrinking from pain and death, experimented with draughts that were alleged to confer immortality: a strange act for one who was already a god! While suffering agony from the gout, he envied the lot of the fellahs, whom he saw from his window stretched out on the sand in the sun eating their simple meal. "Ye poor," he is said to have once exclaimed, "would that I had been one of you."

"From behind the rich curtains of his palace," as his stout adversary, Antigonus of Macedon,[84] phrased it, Ptolemy Philadelphus played cautiously and adroitly the great game of international politics. His emissaries, laden with gifts and money, were to be found at every capital from the Ganges to the Tiber. "Mighty kings" and "great cities," Theocritus tells us,[85] were in his pay; and in the harbor of Alexandria many great battleships lay ready to give emphasis to diplomacy, to support the agents whom his gold had brought into action.

By these means, too, he kept open the roads which led across the sea from all directions to Alexandria; shut off, by a fringe of Egyptian possessions, the great continental empire of the Seleucids from access to the Mediterranean; and kept Greece so persistently in insurrection against its suzerain, Macedon, that he was able to ward off all danger from that quarter.

He enlarged his inherited empire by seizing Ionia when Eumenes I of Pergamum threw off the suzerainty of the Seleucids and shattered their authority in Asia Minor (263-261 B.C.); but the gains he then made he had to abandon during the upheaval which accompanied the revolt of his "son" in Ephesus (259-255 B.C.), and he suffered still further losses in Asia during the war he waged thereafter (253-249 B.C.), with Macedon and Syria combined. These, however, his son, Euergetes, at the opening of his reign (246-242 B.C.), regained, and he acquired districts in Ionia and the Hellespont besides; and the position which he thereby secured he held till his death twenty years later. On the sea, however, he showed himself less persistent than his father. Philadelphus had lost control of the Ægean when beaten at Cos in 253 B.C. by Antigonus of Macedon, but had not rested till he had regained it four years later, when the league of the Islanders, which was the immediate bone of contention, came again under the authority of his admirals. Euergetes suffered a crushing naval defeat in 242 B.C. off the island of Andros at the hands of the "veteran" Antigonus; whereupon he let the Cyclades go altogether. That was not the only sequel, however; for in consequence of the large outlay for little gain entailed in building and keeping in readiness the huge battleships then employed, and perhaps also in consequence of the failure of the Carthaginians, despite great naval expense and preparations, to hold the sea against the improvised fleets of Rome in the First Punic War (which had just ended), the third Ptolemy, like the Barcid government in Carthage, abandoned the policy of maintaining a fleet strong enough to drive all enemies from their respective parts of the Mediterranean. It was a great mistake in each case. When at the end of the third century B.C. Macedon and Syria, the traditional and long-suffering enemies of Egypt, were in a position to renew their joint struggle with the Ptolemies, the far-spread Ptolemaic empire fell together like a house of cards, and Rome alone saved the dynasty from complete destruction.

A variety of motives actuated the early Ptolemies in their struggle for foreign dominions. Pride of possession was among them, of course. The court poet Callimachus[86] struck a responsive chord when, in his poem on the death of ArsinoË, the sister-wife of Philadelphus, he has the sad news flashed from beacon point to beacon point till it reaches Lemnos at the outer edge of the empire. National honor is a strong motive for action, but it is commonly stirred by the fear of losing something possessed rather than by the hope of acquiring something new. Hence we must look deeper for the reasons which led cautious statesmen like the first two Ptolemies to place round Egypt its girdle of power.

The motive suggested by Polybius[87] is quite different. It was with regard to possible movements on the part of the monarchs of Syria, Asia Minor, Thrace, and Macedon that the Ptolemies held, as he says, "the most important towns, places, and harbors along the whole coast" of the eastern Mediterranean. And there can be no doubt that he is right in attributing this rather malicious aim to them. They were, doubtless, great intriguers. But to Polybius, looking on from without, from one of the districts which had been affected by the close proximity of Egyptian garrisons and naval stations, the connection of these posts with the foreign policy of the Ptolemies was apt to obtrude itself to the exclusion of everything else. Nowadays historians are prone to a similar onesidedness because of the close attention they give to economic factors. They are quite right when they stress the importance of Ptolemaic naval power and of the vantage-points held in Europe and Asia for the development of Alexandrian commerce. The lighthouse which Ptolemy erected at the mouth of the Nile at a cost of a million dollars (eight hundred talents) was not only one of the seven wonders of the world: it was a messenger of good will to the trading vessels which came from all the dependencies with or without cargoes, to get for Greek consumption the varied products of the Alexandrian factories, the Egyptian grain-fields, and the Nile-borne traffic of Arabia, India, Somaliland, and Ethiopia. What the lighthouse symbolizes, the growth of Alexandria to half a million in a hundred years proves: the magnitude of the commerce which the transmarine possessions of Egypt stimulated, when they did not originate it.

Where the economic historians are wrong, however, is in doing what Polybius did. He made the imperial policy of the early Ptolemies primarily foreign; they make it primarily commercial. The truth is that it was dictated also by the plain necessities of the domestic situation. Let us see what that was.

The first Ptolemy had stepped into the place of the Pharaohs on Alexander the Great's death. The only right he cared to acknowledge for the obedience of the Egyptians was the right of conquest. As for them, we may be sure that just as they created the myth that Alexander was not really Philip's child, but a son begotten from Olympias by either Nectanebus, the last native Pharaoh, or Ammon, the great god himself who had taken the form of Nectanebus for the purpose; and just as they in later times represented CÆsar and Antony as Ammon reincarnate, that Cleopatra's bastard children might be legitimate Pharaohs: so, too, they applied to Ptolemy the fiction by which for thousands of years they had been wont to bridge over the gaps in the genealogy of their kings.[88]

The bridge was necessary, however; for, in their thinking, the gods, who had once lived among men, on withdrawing to the divine abodes, had left one of their number to rule over the world—which, of course, was Egypt. From him all their kings were descended. The Pharaoh was, accordingly, the only god who resided upon the earth, and, as such, fittingly the mediator between men and the great gods and goddesses of the upper and nether world.[89] The Pharaoh was, therefore, both the god-king and the chief priest. The whole land and people of Egypt were his property. Without his presence and ministrations the earth would literally languish and grow barren, and the men, women, and children would perish. Egypt was, accordingly, bound to have a legitimate Pharaoh. Ptolemy could be made Ammon's offspring as easily as Alexander the Great; but how it was done we do not know.

On his arrival in Egypt, Ptolemy found there two other states in addition to that of the Egyptians. These were the old Greek city of Naucratis and the new city of Alexandria. A third arose when he himself founded Ptolemais to be to Upper Egypt what Alexandria was to Lower Egypt—the centre and rallying point of Hellenic interests. To these three city-states he added a multitude of others in and about the Mediterranean when he acquired for his house its foreign dominions. The convenient thing for these to do was to bind themselves to him by the Gordian knot of religious worship; and, as Ptolemy Soter, or the Savior, he was in fact enrolled in the circle of deities recognized by the several cities. In Alexandria we may be sure that its founder, Alexander the Great, had been accorded divine honors from the beginning, and that after his death the citizens appointed each year a priest of Alexander, just as they had been in the habit of doing while he was alive, and just as they appointed one for Zeus or Apollo. However, at some date between 311 and 289 B.C., perhaps on his assumption of the regal title in 306 B.C., Ptolemy took into his own hands the administration of his capital, and thenceforth appointed personally the priest of the city-god Alexander, who became therewith an imperial god. To this cult Philadelphus did not add that of his parents, "the savior gods," when he had them officially deified at their death (283 B.C.); but he did add to it that of his deceased queen and of himself when in 270 B.C. he inaugurated the worship of "the brother gods." His example was followed by each succeeding pair of rulers to the end of the dynasty, except that the savior gods were inserted by the fourth Ptolemy in their proper place after Alexander. So that central among the gods of the capital of the empire stood ultimately the long series of the departed rulers and at its head the living king and queen.

Outside the capital, in the city-states of the realm, as later on in the provinces subject to the Roman emperors, the reigning monarchs were alone the recipients of divine honors. The living Ptolemy, by recognizing the divinity of his predecessors, assumed responsibility for the validity of all their acta. They had issued their mandates (prostagmata) as gods; so long as they remained gods their mandates must be obeyed. The cities, on the other hand, had no concern except to legalize the orders issued to them by their living rulers, once their living rulers had legalized and thus become responsible for all orders issued by the dead. At Rome the memory of certain emperors was damned, and their acts rescinded. That was possible there because the emperor was theoretically only an officer of the Roman people. One means employed to invalidate the acta of deposed rulers was to refuse to have them among their gods after their death. The Alexandrians had no such discretion. After about 306 B.C. they were subjects themselves, not masters, of the Ptolemies. In their city it was the living Ptolemy who willed his own deification, and he could withhold divine honors from his predecessor only when, as in the solitary case of the founder of the dynasty, the monarch neglected to have himself created a god during his lifetime. Since his wish was decisive, it is not surprising that he had the members of his family, his wife, sisters, children, and concubines, elevated to Olympus along with himself. Curiously enough, however, Philadelphus and his four immediate successors, while demanding that their subjects should worship them as deities, treated themselves simply as kings, and carefully refrained from describing themselves as gods even in their public communications. The fact seems to be that only by accepting the Egyptian theory of a divine incarnation could the Ptolemies find a theological ground for constituting themselves gods. This concession to native thinking the proud early members of the dynasty refused, however, to make, preferring to challenge by their own self-denial the divine honors which they required from others. With this view accords the further fact that the first Ptolemy deliberately to court a native support for his throne—Euergetes II—was also the first to sign his edicts as ?e??, or "god."

While it is true that no great empire ever existed without a constitutional fiction, it is also true that it never endured on a fiction alone. The Macedonian soldiers whom Ptolemy found in Egypt and those whom he brought with him and sent for later were essential for the maintenance of his government. So long as the son of Alexander the Great lived, and, indeed, for four years longer (till 306 B.C.), Ptolemy was simply their general. Then he became their king, and to legitimatize this practical usurpation, the legend arose that he was not really the son of Lagos, but the son of Philip. It is to the honor of Ptolemy that he had nothing to do with this libel on the good name of his mother, and preferred rather to be an illegitimate king than an illegitimate son. Besides, it was only necessary to go back a generation or two to attach the line of Ptolemy to that of the ancient "Zeus-born" kings of Macedon. The wife of Lagos had belonged, in fact, to the royal family, as the Ptolemies took good care to observe.

The Ptolemaic empire was, accordingly, based on three concurrent theories, one for the native Egyptians, one for the Greek city-states and one for the Macedonians.

Appian of Alexandria,[90] writing about two hundred years after the death of Cleopatra, cites the royal registers as authority for his report that Philadelphus kept, for land operations 200,000 foot, 40,000 cavalry, and arms for 300,000 men; in addition, 300 war elephants and 2000 war chariots; for naval warfare, 2000 transports, 1500 battleships with three to five banks of rowers, and oars and rigging for twice that number. He had also, according to the same authority, 800 royal barges with gilt poops and beaks, and in his treasury a reserve of 740,000 Egyptian talents, or $890,000,000.

That the reserve as given amounts to three times the value of the gold and silver in the United States treasury shows that the enumeration belongs only in the history yet to be written of the absurdities of statistics. More credible estimates of the Egyptian army place it at 80,800 under the second Ptolemy and (exclusive of natives, who then numbered 26,000) 49,700 under the fourth Ptolemy.[91] These are very large totals. It will help to solve many questions of Ptolemaic policy to observe where the soldiers came from.

But first we may notice that they could not come from the natives; for their most important duty was to hold them in subjection. There were so many people to keep down! Alexandria itself had a large native quarter. The other two Greek cities in the land were but alien flecks in the midst of a great multitude. Up and down the valley lay the native hamlets, to the number of 33,333 according to Theocritus, teeming with the seven million people whom Egypt then sustained. Alexander the Great may have dreamed of Hellenizing these masses; Ptolemy, however, had no such thought, as is shown conclusively by the fact that under his dynasty and, indeed, for at least two centuries after its fall, Naucratis, and probably also Ptolemais, forbade by law marriages between their citizens and the natives.[92]

The sole landowner in Egypt was the king. The entire valley of the Nile was literally his personal estate.

Except for certain portions "set apart" for particular purposes, which we shall examine in a moment, the arable land surrounding the countless native villages was in the possession of tenants of the crown, who paid to the king about seven bushels of grain per acre as rent and sowed their land according to royal orders with seed provided by him; who might be dispossessed at any time, but could neither abandon their plots (at least in seeding- and harvest-time) nor their villages (except for short periods), at their own volition; who had numerous services in connection with "geometry," irrigation, transport, post, and similar matters to perform, and might be moved or forced en masse to redeem and cultivate dry or marsh land situated near their hovels; who paid a poll-tax and a house-tax to the king, and one sixth of the yield of their vineyards and orchards, when they had any, to the temple authorities whom the king appointed; who bought their beer, oil, fish, honey, cloth, soda, bricks, wood, paper, and almost every other article of common use either exclusively from the king, who was the sole producer and seller, or in certain cases from private dealers, who, however, paid so much for their license that they could not undersell the king. Watchmen were everywhere in the fields to see that the king was not defrauded. Gendarmes patrolled the country to guard the roads and deserts, to prevent smuggling and "moonshining." Scribes and bankers were in every village to keep account of all changes in families and in leases; to visÉ every payment. Every village had its storehouse of records, of grain, of money. And on the Nile went to and fro the royal transports which carried the surpluses to Alexandria, and the products of the royal factories to the local depots from which they were sold. The king of Egypt was, accordingly, by far the greatest merchant and manufacturer in the whole world. Even in far distant Delos the price of paper, myrrh, and other articles was fixed by the pleasure of the royal monopolist. That his interference "regulated the market" to his own advantage may be inferred from the fact that the sheet of paper which was sold in 296 B.C. for one obol (three and one half cents) cost on the average eleven in 279-250 B.C.[93]

Thus set about by countless officials and shorn to the very skin, the fellahs lived under the Ptolemies, "patient, laborious, cheerful," yet filled with hidden bitterness at the magnificence in which their masters lived at their expense in Alexandria, venting their rage in impotent prophecies that "the great city at the water's edge should become a drying-place for the nets of fishers, and its gods should migrate to the native capital Memphis."[94]

Clearly, the army of the Ptolemies could not be recruited from such elements. The Egyptians might be put on the warships as rowers, used in the transport service, and, occasionally when the need was great, in small numbers as soldiers. But granted that they might be useful in fighting abroad,—at home they belonged to the enemy from whom the early Ptolemies had greatly to fear.

As such, the citizens of Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais were apparently exempt from military service. Hence the great problem of national defense could not have been solved by the founding of new Greek cities of this type in Egypt had there been room for them, or by the founding of any kind of cities, had Ptolemy thought it possible to organize the natives in urban communities round a Greek or Macedonian nucleus—as Alexander may have wished to do, as the Romans in fact did in the year 202 A.D.; for, even if Ptolemy had cared for that kind of thing, the Greek or Macedonian nucleus did not as yet exist in Egypt. It had to be brought there from abroad. Hence it was a question of life and death for the Ptolemaic dynasty to remain in constant communication with the regions of the eastern Mediterranean whence came supporters of their rule, soldiers for their armies.

"But shouldst thou really mean a voyage out," says one Greek peasant to another in Theocritus,[95]—

"The freeman's best paymaster's Ptolemy.
(Æschines)
What is he else?
(Thyonichus)
A gentleman: a man

Of wit and taste: the top of company;
Loyal to ladies; one whose eye is keen
For friends, and keener still for enemies.
Large in his bounties, he, in kingly sort,
Denies a boon to none: but, Æschines,
One should not ask too often. This premised,
If thou wilt clasp the military cloak
O'er thy right shoulder, and with legs astride
Await the onward rush of shielded men:
Hie thee to Egypt."

Phoenicia and its hinterland were necessary to Ptolemy because of their forests of timber for shipbuilding, which Egypt lacked. The rest of his transmarine possessions were necessary because of their stock of reliable soldiers, which Egypt also lacked. Hence, as stated already, the imperial policy of the early Ptolemies was a plain consequence of their domestic policy—of holding Egypt as a foreign country.

Let us now see what they did with the store of soldiers which they possessed and with the new recruits whom they constantly added to it.[96] I have already drawn your attention to certain lands which the Ptolemies "set aside" for particular purposes. One complex of such lands they assigned to the temples. And I may remark that while the Ptolemies appointed and controlled the priests, they also conciliated them, by leaving them valuable perquisites, paying to them stated sums annually, building new temples and repairing old ones, and allowing them to make for their own consumption the various articles which they could buy only at the royal counters and at monopolistic prices. They also set their land aside in a favored category. What is common to this category is not a single fiscal arrangement, but a relinquishing by the king of his right of direct management. To its members he binds himself in a way that does not impair his ownership, but does restrict his ability to take possession.

To this category belong the "gifts" of large blocks of land with their villages to his courtiers, who received them free from rent and taxes. The "friends" of the Ptolemies, though they resided in Alexandria, were thus landed proprietors, absentee landlords, who maintained their luxurious establishments in the capital on the rents which their Egyptian tenants paid. Common soldiers could not expect to become feudal lords by entering Ptolemy's service. But for his "loyal comrades," as Theocritus[97] calls them,—his officers, court dignitaries, and favorites,—he had such benefices to confer.

To the ordinary men-at-arms lots of land all over Egypt were assigned; to those of the guard and the cavalry, sixty-five and forty-five acre farms, to the infantrymen, farms of twenty acres. For Egyptian conditions these were very large units, and since under Philadelphus—who perfected this system of farming out his soldiers—the army consisted of 57,600 foot and 23,200 horsemen, over one quarter of all the arable land in Egypt would have been in their possession, if only land naturally watered by the Nile had been given to them, and if none of them were mercenaries serving only for hire. Many, however, were doubtless mercenaries of this type; and to the rest, land was commonly distributed which needed some expenditure of capital and energy to be reclaimed from the desert or the water. Of this kind of land the Ptolemies evidently inherited a goodly quantity from the Persians, whose government had been rendered inefficient in the fourth century B.C. by frequent revolts of the natives.

The soldiers might sublet their lots in whole or part and live in Alexandria or elsewhere. Or they might take possession and till them with their own hands. To facilitate the actual distribution of the army over the country, the king attached to the lots "quarters" on the premises of the neighboring Egyptians. This was not at all to the liking of the latter, as the following letter of a quartermaster to a county official shows:[98] "We have discovered that certain owners of houses in Crocodilopolis, which were once used for quartering troops, have taken off the roofs, and walled up the doors and built altars in their places. This they have done so as not to have them occupied. If then you agree, in view of the shortage of quarters, write Agenor that he make the owners of the houses take the altars down, and build them up again better than before upon the most suitable and conspicuous parts of the roofs, so that we may be able to take possession." The gods had never objected to having old altars replaced by finer ones. Henceforth, not the entrances, but the roofs, were to be protected by religion. The ancient quartermaster knew his business.

It was decidedly to the interest of the government that it should have a sort of garrison in residence in all the nomes, or counties, of Egypt—trained soldiers ready to take their places in their companies at the command of the chief nome official, who was also their general.

These men were by no means all Macedonians or Greeks. Some of them were Persians who had been in the land when Ptolemy arrived; some were Libyans, Jews, Thracians, Mysians, Galatians; nearly all were from the regions tapped by the empire of the Ptolemies.

They paid no rents for their lots, no poll-tax, and one tenth, in place of one sixth, of the yield of their gardens and orchards. Like the Hellenes generally, they might give commutation money in lieu of manual labor on dykes and canals. In other respects they were taxed rather more severely than the "royal tenants"; and, in addition, they had to pay certain feudal "aids" to the king. If they failed to pay these "aids," or if they fell in arrears with their taxes, they lost their holdings. Hence they were under a financial constraint to make the land, which they commonly received as waste land, productive. The soldiers were, accordingly, the "pioneers" of Ptolemaic Egypt, steadily at work enlarging the arable areas of the country and redressing the agricultural wrongs which it had sustained during the troubles of the later Persian rÉgime.

Their lots reverted to the king when they died or left the army. The king could then add them to his domain or reassign them to other soldiers. During the imperial period of Ptolemaic history he seems to have taken the former course whenever the land was in a condition to bring him in a rent in addition to the taxes. However, from the very beginning, he undertook to make a new or a re-grant to the sons of dead or superannuated soldiers who were trained for military service. These were officially designated "men of the epigone, or increase," and they entered the army at the same time that they entered upon their inheritance. In this way the Ptolemies bred a crop of new soldiers in Egypt, so that they might look forward to being gradually less dependent upon mercenaries recruited from beyond the seas. Egypt was being enriched by a new military caste which should take the place by the side of the new dynasty which the "machimoi" or "warriors" had occupied during the old days of the native Pharaohs.

Multiracial though the soldiers were, they all spoke Greek. They had to regulate their private conduct and their business affairs by the special laws established in Egypt for the benefit of the various ethne, or nationalities, to which they belonged. For in Ptolemaic Egypt, as in the Turkish empire to-day, foreigners brought their own legal restrictions and safeguards with them, which, however, were formulated, for use in the Ptolemaic courts, in ethnic codes. These codes, however, were either couched originally in Greek, or, like the laws of Moses, which the Jews observed, they were translated into Greek at an early date. How much political freedom the various nations enjoyed, it is difficult to say; but in general they seem to have tempered the absolutism of the Ptolemies only where they were massed together in large numbers, as in Memphis and, above all, Alexandria. Elsewhere the ethnic groups were, doubtless, constituted chiefly of the territorial soldiers, or cleruchs, as they were called.[99] These, however, ceased to have any civil rights when called by the king into active service. With them political agitation could become effective only when it became mutiny.

Prominent among the institutions which the Hellenic and Hellenized foreigners brought into Egypt were those that centred in the gymnasia. Some of them were, doubtless, at first and for long, a subject of scandal and wonderment to the natives. As the Greeks ran and tumbled stark naked in the palÆstrÆ, or in the contests for which, as for the army, the palÆstrÆ were the training-grounds, the story of Heracles and Busiris was constantly reËnacted; except that in time Busiris came to see whence sprang the strength which he could not resist. It was in the gymnasia also that the Greeks received their higher education and by its means that they secured for their sons the ideas which the poetry and philosophy of Hellas alone could give. In the gymnasia temples of Hellenism appeared in county after county of Egypt.

The foreigners brought with them into Egypt their native religions, and, when they were not monotheists like the Jews, they came easily into sympathy with the myriad cults of the natives. A religious rapprochement was thus established and a bi-religious milieu created, by which a new half-Greek, half-Egyptian god, Sarapis, whom Ptolemy I introduced from Sinope, prospered. Before long this Janus-like deity, who was endowed with a sanctity and miraculous power which hoary Egypt could alone give, and with a plastic beauty peculiarly Greek, became distinctively the great god of Egypt, and, in conjunction with Isis, Anubis, and Harpocrates, the most active religious force in the whole world of the Ptolemaic empire. Sarapis-Osiris, the monarch, judge, and savior of the world of the dead: Ptolemy-Pharaoh, the monarch, judge, and savior of the world of the living;—these two and these two alone received the divine homage of Greeks and Egyptians alike. The early Ptolemies willed the impossible; to accept the native deities, cults, creeds, and hierarchies as the active element in the fused GrÆco-Egyptian religion; to let the two civilizations represented in their realm coalesce in so far as their religious ideas, practices, aspirations, and hopes were concerned; and at the same time to keep them apart in other respects: to preserve in other matters the unapproachable superiority of the invaders.

Certainly, success in this attempt to graft the ancient religion which he as Pharaoh was bound to accept and preserve on the new stock of Hellenism without corrupting the fine flavor of the fruit hitherto borne by it in Greece, depended on making the Greek cities, Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais, and the GrÆco-Macedonian military colonies simply the Egyptian portion of a GrÆco-Macedonian realm reaching over the seas to the head of the Ægean. This necessary support to his position in Egypt the third Ptolemy jeopardized when he neglected to replace the great fleet after 242 B.C. For twenty long years, moreover, he left his army at work farming in Egypt, with the inevitable result that it became immobile. Such a neglect of military matters seemed warranted by the impotence of his two great rivals. For during this entire period Asia was rent by a dynastic struggle and Macedon was paralyzed by a general insurrection in Greece. His weak and indolent son paid the penalty for his father's neglect. By strengthening his army with 26,000 natives, whom he armed and drilled in the Macedonian fashion (221-217 B.C.), he saved the empire for seventeen years, when it fell before the combined attack of Macedon and Syria (202-200 B.C.); but he tempted the Egyptians to lay claim with the sword to partnership with the foreigners in the government. Thus presented, their claim was rejected, as was natural; but once the empire was lost and the flow of immigration into Egypt ceased, the Ptolemies of the "domestic" period were forced to acknowledge its justice.

They constituted their territorial army more and more from native soldiers, to whom they gave increasingly larger lots, while they progressively diminished the size of those held by the foreigners. They ceased to take back the holdings on the death or superannuation of the occupants, thus admitting the right of sons and other male descendants to get, in return for military service, not dry or marsh land, as in the early days, but land already redeemed by their father's capital and labor. Soldiers ceased to be soldiers spending their spare time winning new land from the desert and the swamp for their master's estate; and became farmers to whom service in the army was a nuisance and a loss. The army became thereby hopelessly immobile.

The age was generally one of economic decline and not of economic advance; for Egypt had gained more, as the sequel proved, from the vigorous government of the early Ptolemies than it had lost by the expenditure of its surpluses on the empire. In this decadent age the Egyptians gained admission freely to the police and administrative service as well as to the army. Thus elevated in social esteem, they were able to intermarry with their ancient lords; so that a considerable half-breed and bilingual population developed—Greek in the outward things, fellaheen, according to Polybius, in character and culture. Alexandria, he says,[100] "three strata occupy: the Egyptian and the native race, sharp and (un)civilized. Then the mercenary troops, oppressive and numerous and dissolute; for from old custom they kept armed troops who had learned to rule rather than to obey, on account of the worthlessness of the kings. The third stratum was that of the Alexandrians, nor was even this truly a civilized population owing to the same causes, but yet better than the other two, for though of mixed breed, yet they were originally Greeks, with traditions of the general type of the Greeks. But this part of the population having disappeared mainly owing to Ptolemy Euergetes Physkon (145-116 B.C.) in whose reign Polybius visited Alexandria,—for Physkon, when revolted against, over and over again let loose his troops on the population and massacred them,—and such being the state of things, to visit Egypt was a long and thankless journey." Foreign enemies the omnipotent Roman Senate kept off during the second century B.C.

But unnerved by the menacing patronage of the great republic, the Ptolemies, now represented by men of vigor and no character or of character and no vigor; by women, who were sprung mostly from adelphic unions, of remarkable ability, beauty, and morals, prefaced with a period of long-continued dynastic and national strife the dramatic epoch of Ptolemy the Piper and Cleopatra the Great.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Mahaffy, J.P. The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895), and The Ptolemaic Dynasty (1899).

2. Beloch, J. Griechische Geschichte, III (1904).

3. BouchÉ-Leclercq, A. Histoire des Lagides, especially vols. III and IV (1906).

4. Rostowzew, M. Studien zur Geschichte des rÖmischen Kolonates (1910).

5. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. Stoat und Gesellschaft der Griechen: D. Die makedonischen KÖnigreiche (1910).

6. Lesquier, J. Les institutions militaires de l'Égypte sous les Lagides (1911).

7. Kornemann, E. Ægypten und das (rÖmische) Reich. In Gercke and Norden's, Einleitung in die AItertumswissenschaft (1912), pp. 272 ff.

8. Mitteis, L., und Wilcken, U. GrundzÜge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde (1912).