Part 12

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).

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 77: Diodorus, XVIII, 4.]

[Footnote 78: Omitting the shadowy Eupator, Philopator Neos, and Alexander II.]

[Footnote 79: Bouché-Leclercq, _Histoire des Lagides_, II, p. 278; Plut., _Antony_, 54; Dio Cassius, XLIX, 41.]

[Footnote 80: _Pensées_, VI, 43 bis. Ed. Havet; cf. Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. des Lagides_, II, p. 180, n. 1.]

[Footnote 81: _Gesammelte Schriften_, IV, p. 256.]

[Footnote 82: _Idyll_, XVII. (Translation of Calverley.)]

[Footnote 83: See Droysen, _Geschichte des Hellenismus_,^2 III, pp. 262 _ff._]

[Footnote 84: Plut., _Aratus_, XV.]

[Footnote 85: _Idyll_, XVII, 110 _f._]

[Footnote 86: Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, _Sitzb. d. Berl. Akad._ XXIX (1912), pp. 524 _ff._]

[Footnote 87: V, 34, 6-8.]

[Footnote 88: Bouché-Leclercq, _Histoire des Lagides_, III, pp. 1 _ff._]

[Footnote 89: Breasted, J.H., _Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt_ (1912).]

[Footnote 90: _Prooem._ 10. Tarn, _Antigonus Gonatas_, pp. 454 _ff._]

[Footnote 91: Athenæus, V, 202 _f._; Polybius, V, 65.]

[Footnote 92: Wilcken, _Grundzüge_, 13, 17, 47.]

[Footnote 93: Glotz, _Journal des Savants_ (1913), pp. 16 _ff._]

[Footnote 94: Wilcken, _Grundzüge_, 22.]

[Footnote 95: _Idyll_, 14, 58 _ff._ (Translated by Calverley.)]

[Footnote 96: For the following section the works of Rostowzew, Bouché-Leclercq (vol. IV), Wilcken, and Lesquier cited in the Select Bibliography at the end of this chapter are fundamental.]

[Footnote 97: _Idyll_, XVII, 111.]

[Footnote 98: Wilcken, _Chrestomathie_, 449.]

[Footnote 99: See for this section Lesquier, _op. cit._, pp. 142 _ff._; Mitteis, _Grundzüge_ Einl. XII; Schubart, W., _Spuren politischen Autonomie in Ægypten unter den Ptolemäern_, _Klio_, X (1910), pp. 41 _ff._; cf. _Id._ _Archiv für Papyrusforschung_, V, pp. 81 _ff._; Jouguet, P., _La vie municipale dans l'Égypte Romaine_ (1911); Plaumann, G., _Ptolemais in Oberægypten_ (1910).]

[Footnote 100: XXXIV, 14 (Translated by Mahaffy, _The Ptolemaic Dynasty_, p. 191.)]

VI

THE SELEUCID EMPIRE

The main portion of the conquests made by Alexander the Great lay in the continent of Asia. On the establishment of the regency this vast district had been divided among over twenty satraps. Ten years afterwards, in the fall of 313 B.C., one of these, Antigonus, known in history as Monophthalmus, or the "One-eyed," had now held for two years all the territory that lay between the fan-shaped offshoots of the Himalaya Mountains and the sea. The whole Asiatic coast of the Mediterranean from the Hellespont to Gaza on the Egyptian frontier was in his possession. His fleet ruled the sea.

The spring of 312 B.C. was one of the most critical moments in ancient history. In Antigonus the man seemed come with the will, ability, and power to take the place of Alexander. By his side stood a son of remarkable attractiveness and brilliancy, Demetrius, surnamed Poliorcetes, or "Taker-of-Cities"; so that a dynasty seemed assured.

The work to be done was plainly indicated and preparations for its accomplishment were already completed. After having stirred up an insurrection in Greece in the preceding year, the fleet of Antigonus had joined his main army which was massed at the Hellespont in readiness to cross into Europe for the conquest of Thrace and Macedon. In this district Antigonus conducted operations in person. His son Demetrius was stationed with a minor army in Palestine with instructions to avoid an engagement, and simply to keep Ptolemy cooped up in Egypt till the European campaign was ended. If beaten in his attack on Thrace and Macedon, Antigonus had nothing serious to fear so long as he was master of the sea; if victorious, he could then fall with irresistible force upon Egypt and complete the unification of Alexander's empire. The whole campaign was admirably planned and the troops well distributed for its successful execution.[101]