The Historians' History of the World 06

The most important change was that the sovereign no longer resided at Alexandria but at Rome, and that the great offices of the Egyptian court, the chief master of the ceremonies, the grand master of the household, and the chief forester, were not filled by fresh appointments; though the scholars of the famous Museum of Alexandria enjoyed the same patronage and encouragement as before. At the head of this richly endowed institution was a priest, formerly appointed by the king and in future to be appointed by the Cæsar. The latter regarded himself as in every respect the successor of the Ptolemies, and caused the Egyptian priests to do him honour with the very ceremonial that had grown up under his predecessors. It is true that the Roman emperors did not habitually reside in Alexandria, but their viceroys had to assist at all the religious rites in which the Ptolemies had formerly taken part, for the new ruler was wise enough to introduce no alteration whatever in matters of religion. The ancient gods of Egypt, which had survived the dominion of the Greeks, continued to exist as before, in peaceful association with the gods of Greece. The Egyptian gods were naturally wroth at the fall of the monarchy; their statues turned a gloomy gaze upon their worshippers, Apis bellowed hideously and even shed tears. But Cæsar was not disconcerted; he did indeed decline in his own person to visit the Apis of Memphis on his journey through Egypt, but he did not put the least hindrance in the way of his worship by the Egyptians, still less did he dream of starting a propaganda in Egypt on behalf of the state religion of Rome.

The position of the various classes of the population also remained what it had become in the course of historic development. The native Egyptians, the original lords of the soil, remained in the subjection to which they had been reduced by the conquests of the Persians and Macedonians; they constituted the population of the country districts and country towns, and had neither political organisation nor political rights. The foreign conqueror naturally had no inducement to give the vanquished rights that had been denied them by their own kings. Egypt was to be a province absolutely dependent upon himself, and that would have been impossible if the Roman element in Egypt had grown so strong and had so far intermingled with the natives that the sovereign was forced to take it into account. The Egyptian proper was therefore on principle precluded from acquiring the rights of Roman citizenship. For example, an Egyptian of ancient days could no more act on a Roman jury than a Bedouin could nowadays be elected to the English parliament. In later times this prohibition was occasionally evaded by first conferring the freedom of Alexandria upon the native and then admitting him to Roman citizenship as an Alexandrian. On the other hand the material condition of the Egyptian population improved under the judicious rule of the Cæsars.

The mechanism of government, administration, and taxation had been admirably organised through centuries of practice; it naturally discharged its functions as well under the new sovereign as under the old, and consequently became the type of the technics of imperial administration. In this respect the republic had left the empire much to do. The Romans were the first to appoint officers in the level land who had more to do than collect the taxes. Their epistrateges of upper, lower, and middle Egypt, their nomarchs and ethnarchs, had of course only a circumscribed sphere of action, but they saw to the maintenance of law and order and probably decided simple lawsuits among the natives.

Among the Egyptians, unlike the Hellenes, we find a simple division into nomes instead of a municipal organisation; and like many provincial cities under the Roman Empire, these nomes were allowed to strike their own coins, though only with a Greek superscription. A collective organisation was, however, denied to the natives. In the latter days of Augustus the various provinces of the Roman Empire had diets of their own, invested with very modest political rights; Egypt alone never had a provincial diet, in token that it was not really a province at all but was regarded as a great demesne of the sovereign.

Next above the Egyptians was the Græco-Macedonian population, which was practically if not entirely concentrated in Alexandria, and was separated from the natives by a great gulf. As members of the same race as the Egyptian kings the Greeks of Alexandria enjoyed political rights and communal autonomy; and these they retained in the main under the Romans. In like manner their language remained the official language of Egypt under the empire, Roman officials addressed Greeks and Egyptians in Greek; only in the Latin garrison of Alexandria, Latin was naturally predominant.