The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Ptolemy IV Philopator so loved his father that he imitated his wars and his triumphs. But his victory over Antiochus III at Raphia (217) had been won with native troops—their first use by any Ptolemy; and the Egyptians, now armed and conscious of their strength, began from this time onward to break down the authority of the Greeks on the Nile. Philopator gave himself to amusement, spent much time on his spacious pleasure boat, introduced the Bacchanalia into Egypt, and half persuaded himself that he was descended from Dionysus. In 205 his wife was killed by his mistress; and shortly afterward Philopator himself passed away. In the ensuing chaos Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus III of Seleucia were about to dismember and absorb Egypt when Rome—with which the second Ptolemy had made a treaty of friendship—entered upon the scene, defeated Philip, sent Antiochus packing, and made Egypt a Roman protectorate (205).

  II. SOCIALISM UNDER THE PTOLEMIES

  By far the most interesting aspect of Ptolemaic Egypt is its extensive experiment in state socialism. Royal ownership of the land had long been a sacred custom in Egypt; the Pharaoh, as king and god, had full right to the soil and all that it produced. The fellah was not a slave, but he could not leave his place without the permission of the government, and he was required to turn over the larger part of his crops to the state.6 The Ptolemies accepted this system, and extended it by appropriating the great tracts which, under previous dynasties, had belonged to the Egyptian nobles or priests. A great bureaucracy of governmental overseers, supported by armed guards, managed all Egypt as a vast state farm.7 Nearly every peasant in Egypt was told by these officials what soil to till and what crops to grow; his labor and his animals could at any time be requisitioned by the state for mining, building, hunting, and the making of canals or roads; his harvest was gauged by state measurers, registered by the scribes, threshed on the royal threshing floor, and conveyed by a living chain of fellahs into the granaries of the king.8 There were exceptions to the system: the Ptolemies allowed the farmer to own his house and garden; they resigned the cities to private property; and they gave a right of leasehold to soldiers whose services were rewarded with land. But this leasehold was usually confined to areas which the owner agreed to devote to vineyards, orchards, or olive groves; it excluded the power of bequest, and might at any time be canceled by the king. As Greek energy and skill improved these cleruchic (shareholders’) lands, a demand arose for the right to transmit the property from father to son. In the second century such bequest was permitted by custom, but not by law; in the last century before Christ it was recognized by law,9 and the usual evolution from common property to private property was complete.

  Doubtless this system of socialism had been evolved because the conditions of tillage in Egypt required more co-operation, more unison of action in time and space, than individual ownership could be expected to provide. The amount and character of the crops to be sown depended upon the extent of the annual inundation, and the efficiency of irrigation and drainage; these matters naturally made for central control. Greek engineers in the employ of the government improved the ancient processes, and applied a more scientific and intensive agriculture to the land. The ancient shaduf was replaced by the noria, a large wheel sometimes forty feet in diameter, equipped with buckets hanging freely on the interior rim; at the top of the revolution each bucket was tilted by an obstructing bar, and emptied its contents into an irrigation reservoir; better still, the “screw of Archimedes” and the pump of Ctesibius* raised water with a speed unknown before the Ptolemies.10 The centralization of economic management in the hands of the government, and the institution of forced labor, made possible great public works of flood control, road construction, irrigation, and building, and prepared the way for the engineering feats of Rome. Ptolemy II drained Lake Moeris, and turned its bed into a great tract of fertile land for distribution among the soldiers. In 285 he began to restore the canal from the Nile near Heliopolis to the Red Sea near Suez;11 Pharaoh Necho and Darius I had built and rebuilt this, but twice the shifting sands had choked it up, as in a century they would do again.

  Industry operated under similar conditions. The government not only owned the mines, but either worked them itself, or appropriated the ore.12 The Ptolemies opened up valuable gold deposits in Nubia, and had a stable gold coinage. They controlled the copper mines of Cyprus and Sinai. They had a monopoly of oil—derived not from the soil but from plants like linseed, croton, and sesame. The government fixed, each year, the amount of land to be sown to such plants; it took the whole produce at its own price; it extracted the oil in state factories through great beam presses worked by serfs; it sold the oil to retailers at its own price, and excluded foreign competition by a heavy tariff; its profit ranged from seventy to three hundred per cent.13 Apparently there were similar governmental subsidies in salt, natron (carbonate of soda used as soap), incense, papyrus, and textiles; there were some private textile factories, but they had to sell all their product to the state.14 Minor industries were left in private hands; the state merely licensed and supervised them, bought a large share of their output at fixed prices, and taxed a good part of the profits into the royal treasury. Handicrafts were carried on by ancient guilds, whose members were by tradition bound to their trade, their village, even to their domicile.15 Industry was well developed; chariots, furniture, terra cotta, carpets, cosmetics were produced in abundance; glass blowing and the weaving of linen were Alexandrian specialties. Invention was more advanced in Ptolemaic Egypt than in any economy before imperial Rome’s; the screw chain, the wheel chain, the cam chain, the ratchet chain, the pulley chain, and the screw press were all in use;16 and the chemistry of dyes had progressed to the point of treating cloths with diverse reagents which brought forth, from immersion in one dye, a variety of fast colors.17 In general the factories of Alexandria were worked by slaves, whose low cost of maintenance enabled the Ptolemies to undersell in foreign trade the products of Greek handicraft.18

  All commerce was controlled and regulated by the government; retail traders were usually state agents distributing state goods.19 All caravan routes and waterways were owned by the state. Ptolemy II introduced the camel into Egypt, and organized a camel post to the south; this carried only governmental communications, but these included nearly all the commercial correspondence of the country. The Nile was busy with passenger and freight traffic, apparently under private management subject to state regulation.20 For the Mediterranean trade the Ptolemies built the largest commercial fleet of the time, with vessels of three hundred tons burden.21 The warehouses of Alexandria invited world trade; its double harbor was the envy of other cities; its lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders.* The fields, factories, and workshops of Egypt supplied a great surplus, which found markets as far east as China, as far south as central Africa, as far north as Russia and the British Isles. Egyptian explorers sailed down to Zanzibar and Somaliland, and told the world about the Troglodytes who lived along the east African coast on sea food, ostriches, carrots, and roots.24 To break the Arab hold on Indian trade with the Near East, Egyptian ships sailed directly from the Nile to India. Under the wise encouragement of the Ptolemies Alexandria became the leading port of reshipment for Eastern merchandise destined for the markets of the Mediterranean.

  This flowering of commerce and industry was quickened by excellent banking conveniences. Payment in kind survived to some degree, as a legacy from ancient Egypt; and the grain of the royal treasuries was used as part of the bank reserve; but deposits, withdrawals, and transfers of grain might be made on paper instead of being physically performed25 Beside this modified barter rose a complex money economy. Banking was a government monopoly, but its operations might be delegated to private firms.26 Bills were paid by drafts on bank balances; banks lent money at interest, and paid the accounts of the royal treasury. The central bank, at Alexandria, had branches in all the important towns. Never in known history had agriculture, industry, commerce, and finance reached so rich, so unified, and so brutal a development.


  The masters and beneficiaries of this system were the free Greeks of the capital. At the head of all was the Pharaoh-god-king. From the viewpoint of the Greek population the Ptolemy was truly a Soter or Savior, a Euergetes or Benefactor; he gave them a hundred thousand places in the bureaucracy, endless economic opportunities, unprecedented facilities for the life of the mind, and a wealthy court as the source and center of a luxurious social life. Nor was the king an incalculable despot. Egyptian tradition combined with Greek law to build up a system of legislation which borrowed from, and improved upon, the Athenian code in every respect except freedom. The edicts of the king had full legal force; but the cities enjoyed considerable self-government, and the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish population lived each under its own system of law, chose its own magistrates, and pled before its own courts.27 A Turin papyrus gives us the record of an Alexandrian lawsuit; the issues are precisely defined, the evidence is carefully presented, precedents are summarized, and the final judgment is given with judicial impartiality. Other papyri preserve Alexandrian wills, and reveal the antiquity of legal forms: “This is the will of Peisias the Lycian, son of X, of sound mind and deliberate intention.”28

  The Ptolemaic was the most efficiently organized government in the Hellenistic world. It took its national form from Egypt and Persia, its municipal form from Greece, and passed them on to Imperial Rome. The country was divided into nomes or provinces, each administered by appointees of the king. Nearly all these officials were Greek. The idea of Alexander, that Greek and Oriental or Egyptian should live and mingle on equal terms, was forgotten as unlucrative; the valley of the Nile became frankly a conquered land. The Greek overseers brought an advanced technology and management to the economic life of Egypt, and enormously expanded the wealth of the nation; but they took the increase. The state charged high prices for the products which it controlled, and barred competition with a tariff wall; hence olive oil that cost twenty-one drachmas in Delos cost fifty-two in Alexandria. Everywhere the government took rentals, taxes, customs, and tolls, sometimes labor and life itself. The peasant paid a fee to the state for the right to keep cattle, for the fodder that he fed them, and for the privilege of grazing them on the common pasture land. The private owner of gardens, vineyards, or orchards paid a sixth—under Ptolemy II a half—of his produce to the state.29 All persons except soldiers, priests, and government officials paid a poll tax. There were taxes on salt, legal documents, and bequests; a five per cent tax on rentals, a ten per cent tax on sales, a twenty-five per cent levy on all fish caught in Egyptian waters, a toll on goods passing from village to town, or along the Nile; there were high export as well as import duties at all Egyptian ports; there were special taxes to maintain the fleet and the lighthouse, to keep the municipal physicians and police in good humor, and to buy a gold crown for every new king;30 nothing was overlooked that could fatten the state. To keep track of all taxable products, income, and transactions the government maintained a swarm of scribes, and a vast system of personal and property registration; to collect the taxes it farmed them out to specialists, supervised their operations, and held their possessions as security till the returns were in. The total revenue of the Ptolemies, in money and kind, was probably the greatest gathered by any government between the fall of Persia and the ascendancy of Rome.

  III. ALEXANDRIA

  Most of this wealth came to Alexandria. The nome capitals and a few other towns were also prosperous, with paved and lighted streets, police protection, and a good water supply; but nothing quite so “modern” as Alexandria had ever been seen before. Strabo describes it in the first century A.D. as over three miles long and a mile wide; Pliny reckons the city wall as fifteen miles in length.31 Dinocrates of Rhodes and Sostratus of Cnidus laid out the city on the rectangular plan, with a central avenue one hundred feet wide running from east to west, crossed by an equally wide avenue from north to south. Each of these thoroughfares, and probably some others, was well lighted at night, and was kept cool during the day by mile after mile of shaded colonnades. Of the four quarters into which the main arteries divided the city the westernmost, Rhacotis, was occupied chiefly by Egyptians; the northeast portion formed the Jewish quarter; the southeast corner, or Brucheum, contained the royal palace, the Museum, the Library, the tombs of the Ptolemies, the sarcophagus of Alexander (the Hotel des Invalides of the age), the arsenal, the chief Greek temples, and many spacious parks. One park had-a portico six hundred feet in length; another contained the royal zoological collection. In the center of the city were the administrative buildings, the government storehouses, the courthouse, the main gymnasium, and a thousand shops and bazaars. Outside the gates were a stadium, a hippodrome or race track, an amphitheater, and a vast cemetery known as the Necropolis, or City of the Dead.32 Along the beach ran a succession of bathing establishments and resorts. A dike or mole, called Heptastadium because it was seven stadia long, connected the city with the island of Pharos, and made two harbors out of one. Behind the city lay Lake Mareotis, which provided ports and outlets for the traffic on the Nile; here the Ptolemies kept their pleasure boats and took their royal ease.*

  The population of Alexandria about 200 B.C. was as varied as in a modern metropolis: from four to five hundred thousand Macedonians, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Persians, Anatolians, Syrians, Arabs, and negroes.*33 The growth of commerce had swelled the lower middle class, and filled the cosmopolitan capital with a busy, talkative, litigious crowd of shopkeepers and traders, always on the alert for a bargain, and with no prejudice in favor of honesty. At the top were the Macedonians and the Greeks, living in such luxury as astonished the Roman ambassadors who were appointed to the court in 273. Athenaeus recounts the delicacies that burdened the tables and digestions of the master class,34 and Herodas writes: “Alexandria is the house of Aphrodite, and everything is to be found there—wealth, playgrounds, a large army, a serene sky, public displays, philosophers, precious metals, fine young men, a good royal house, an academy of science, exquisite wines, and beautiful women.”35 Alexandria’s poets were discovering the literary value of virginity, and its novelists would soon make it the theme and final casualty of many a tale; but the city was notorious for the generosity of its women and the number of its stepdaughters of joy; Polybius complained that the finest private homes in Alexandria belonged to courtesans.36 Women of all classes moved freely through the streets, shopped in the stores, and mingled with the men. Some of them made a name for themselves in literature and scholarship.37 The Macedonian queens and ladies of the court, from Ptolemy II’s Arsinoe to Antony’s Cleopatra, took an active part in politics, and served policy rather than love with their crimes; but they retained sufficient charm to arouse the men to unprecedented gallantry, at least in poetry and prose, and brought into Alexandrian society an element of feminine influence and grace unknown in classic Greece.

  Probably a fifth of Alexandria’s population was Jewish. As far back as the seventh century there had been Hebrew settlements in Egypt; many Jewish traders had entered in the wake of the Persian conquest. Alexander had urged Jews to emigrate to Alexandria, and had, according to Josephus, offered them equal political and economic rights with the Greeks.38 Ptolemy I, after taking Jerusalem, carried with him into Egypt thousands of Jewish captives, who were freed by his successor;39 at the same time he invited well-to-do Hebrews to establish their homes and businesses in Alexandria40 By the beginning of the Christian era there were a million Jews in Egypt.41 A large number of these lived in the Jewish quarter of the capital. It was no ghetto, for the Jews were free to live in any quarter but the Brucheum, which was restricted to official families and their servitors. They chose their own gerousia or senate, and followed their own worship. In 169 the high priest Onias III built a great temple at Leontopolis, a suburb of Alexandria, and Ptolemy VI, his personal friend, assigned the revenues of Heliopolis for its maintenance. Such temples served as schools and meeting places as well as for religious services; hence they were called by the Gre
ek-speaking Jews synagogai, i.e., places of assembly. Since few Egyptian Jews after the second or third generation in Egypt knew Hebrew, the reading of the Law was followed by an interpretation in Greek. Out of these explanations and applications rose the custom of preaching a sermon on a text; and out of the ritual came the first forms of the Catholic Mass.42

  This religious and racial separation combined with economic rivalries to arouse, towards the end of this period, an anti-Semitic movement in Alexandria. The Greeks and Egyptians alike were habituated to the union of church and state, and frowned upon the cultural independence of the Jews; furthermore, they felt the competition of the Jewish artisan or businessman, and resented his energy, tenacity, and skill. When Rome began to import Egyptian grain it was the Jewish merchants of Alexandria who carried the cargoes in their fleets.42a The Greeks, perceiving their failure to Hellenize the Jews, feared for their own future in a state where the majority remained persistently Oriental, and bred so vigorously. Forgetting the legislation of Pericles, they complained that the Jewish law forbade mixed marriages, and that the Jews for the most part kept to themselves. AntiSemitic literature multiplied. Manetho, the Egyptian historian, gave currency to the story that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt, centuries back, because they had been afflicted with scrofula or leprosy.43 Feeling mounted on both sides until, in the first century of the Christian era, it broke out into destructive violence.