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]
That it did not even get started was partly due to Ptolemy, who,
impelled by the magnitude of his danger, took the desperate step of
adding many natives to his army; and partly due to Demetrius, who,
despite his numerical inferiority, his instructions, and the judgment
of his staff officers, risked a pitched battle at Gaza, and was
decisively defeated. That the project could never again be renewed on
similarly advantageous terms was due to Seleucus, the son of Antiochus.
For taking a thousand men with him this accomplished officer, old in
service though still young in years, set out straightway after the
battle of Gaza for Babylon, his own satrapy, whence he had fled to
Egypt for fear of Antigonus four years earlier. Ten years afterwards,
in 302 B.C., when Antigonus again proceeded to conquer Macedon and
Thrace, after having beaten Ptolemy back into Egypt, his great aim
was frustrated, not only because the king of Thrace, Lysimachus,
outmanoeuvred him by getting an army across into Asia Minor, but also
because Seleucus, now master of all the territory in the rear of
Antigonus between the Euphrates and the frontiers of India, threw the
decisive weight of his new army into the scale, and joined Lysimachus
in crushing their common enemy at the great battle of Ipsus in 301 B.C.
Thereby Seleucus advanced his western frontier from the Euphrates to
the edge of the Mediterranean, shifted his capital from Babylon to
newly founded Antioch, and brought his empire into immediate proximity
with the districts whence alone Greek and Macedonian immigrants could
come. The Seleucids dated the founding of their dynasty from the return
of Seleucus to Babylon in 312 B.C. There is, however, much to be said
for the view that their empire was first established after the battle
of Ipsus.
For the next twenty years (301-281 B.C.) Seleucus had the great good
fortune to remain in secure possession of the vast territory which
called him king; and while he failed to pass on to his descendants all
the fruits of his crowning victory over Lysimachus at Corupedion in 282
B.C., he left to his son Antiochus I, surnamed Soter, or the Savior,
and he in turn about twenty years later, to _his_ son Antiochus II,
surnamed Theos, or the God, the fabric of their dominions, somewhat
tattered at the edges, to be sure, but otherwise whole.
The evil genius of the Seleucid empire during the century when it
was a great power was a woman--Laodice, the wife of Antiochus II and
mother of his successor, Seleucus II, surnamed Callinicus, or the
Glorious Victor (246-226 B.C.). Her power as queen is attested by
other evidences, and also by the fact that she was associated with
the king in the worship accorded by the satrapies of the realm to
their rulers, every satrapy being required by Theos to establish a
chief-priesthood in her especial honor.[102] None the less, she had
to yield her place to Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy Philadelphus,
when that crafty monarch seduced her husband from his alliance with
Macedon by giving to him along with his daughter a prodigious dowry
and extensive territorial concessions (249 B.C.). She retired to Asia
Minor, where she owned large estates secured in earlier days at the
expense of the royal domain, and where she could live in almost regal
state. For the death of her former husband, which occurred three
years later, she was probably not responsible,--though rumor held her
guilty,--since Theos had already, on his deathbed apparently, and for
reasons of sound dynastic policy, designated her oldest son, then a
"youth nearing manhood," as his successor, to the exclusion of the boy
with whom his Egyptian queen had recently presented him. Nor is she
to be condemned harshly for having had her rival and her son's rival
put out of the way; for she acted not only in self-defense, but also
to save the Seleucid empire from becoming simply an appanage of Egypt
during the long minority of Berenice's child. For conducting to a
successful termination, despite initial disasters, the campaign against
Ptolemy III, by which she put her son in possession of his throne, she
is deserving of high credit. It was when this was accomplished, and her
son was king, that her ambition led her into maternal and political
crime; for, in order to retain the government, which her oldest son,
now arrived at years of discretion, threatened to take from her, she
set up against him her younger son Antiochus, surnamed the Hawk, for
whom she got the administration of Asia Minor. The Seleucids became
thereby divided against themselves, and for twenty years (242-223 B.C.)
they were so weakened by a dynastic feud that they not only neglected
vital questions of foreign policy, but had to permit the total loss of
certain frontier satrapies and the rebellion of almost all the rest.
Antiochus III, surnamed the Great, opened his reign with an error--the
attempt to deal with the foreign situation before he had put his house
in order; and he ended it with a great disaster--his irreparable defeat
by the Romans at Magnesia in 190 B.C.; but in between he restored
his authority over what Bevan in his _House of Seleucus_ calls "the
essential body of the Empire" and his suzerainty over its "outside
sphere." The latter he accomplished by an impressive campaign, in
Armenia (where ruled Xerxes, betrayed by his name as an Iranian), in
Parthia (where Arsaces, the third king of a barbarian line from the
Turanian desert, which had mastered that country a little less than
forty years before, had just come to the throne), in Bactria (where
Euthydemus, a Greek from Magnesia, had recently founded a new Hellenic
dynasty in the place of an old one established nearly fifty years
earlier by Diodotus, "lord of the thousand Bactrian cities," as he is
called), and in India, where a certain Sophragasenus, following the
examples of Arsaces and Euthydemus, recognized the superior power of
the Seleucid.
On his return to Antioch after five years of marching and fighting in
the Far East (210-205 B.C.), Antiochus wrested Palestine from the now
feeble grasp of the Ptolemies. This exploit gave him the long-desired,
long-lacked, and long-fought-for access to the sea; and for the first
time in the history of the realm an opportunity was secured for the
construction of a great fleet. Simultaneously, Philip of Macedon fell
before the Romans at Cynocephalæ (197 B.C.); whereupon Antiochus went
vigorously to work dislodging all "foreigners" from the Mediterranean
seaboard of Asia Minor. This led in 192 B.C. to conflict with Rome.
Antiochus the Great has been late in coming into his due.[103] The mere
fact that Hannibal, whom the undying hatred of Rome had driven into his
service, worked out for him a plan of campaign against the Romans which
he rejected, and that he put the greatest general of his age in charge
of a new squadron of his extemporized fleet, have sufficed to rule out
of court in advance any apology for his defeat. The issue showed that
the view taken by Hannibal of the power of Rome was right. It is true
that it could have been checked only by a great combination of all the
Mediterranean states. But it is equally true that such a combination
was impracticable. Antiochus had to deal with the situation as he found
it. He risked too much for a few frontier districts and a possible
hegemony in Greece. But he seems to have greatly underestimated the
power of Rome, and to have credited the Senate with far less energy and
tenacity of purpose than it actually possessed. Once his vanguard was
thrown out of Greece by the incomparable Roman legions, his main hope
of defending Asia Minor did actually rest with his fleet. Hannibal was,
accordingly, in the right place. But the fleet was too new and too weak
as well as too scattered to hold the Romans in Europe; and, once the
veterans of the Second Punic War were across the Hellespont, no army in
Asia could have resisted them.
The Seleucids learned a terrible lesson on the battle-fields of
Thermopylæ and Magnesia: the fatality was that all the peoples in Asia
learned it also. That Antiochus the Great consented to surrender all
his possessions in Asia Minor and to pay to the Romans an indemnity
of one thousand talents a year for twelve years; to hand over his
battleships and to limit his fleet to ten decked vessels and a few
small craft; to give up all his war elephants and to keep no others
in the future; to take no Italians into his service as mercenaries,
and to throw open his empire to the merchants and traders from Rhodes,
proclaimed only too clearly to the Orientals that the days of the
lordship of the Macedonians in the world were past.
* * * * *