The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Justice was arguably more accessible, both to Greek and non-Greek. The Alexandrians had courts of law in their city, and these courts did serve all residents, not just the restricted ranks of the Greek citizenry. We know something of their recognized body of laws, including the laws on perjury and on sales: they are related to laws which are known in older Greek cities, including Athens. Here, too, Aristotle's pupils and their researches may have helped Ptolemy I to draw up a new code. But the kings could also proclaim other laws by edict, and this 'law' then took precedence over the city code. Beside the city-courts there were royal officials who also dispensed justice according to their own lights.

  Outside Alexandria, in Egypt proper, courts of Greek or Egyptian law were available both to Greeks and to Egyptians, and it was up to them which type of law they chose to use. But here, too, the king's edicts took precedence over all other rulings: as a result, there was the possibility of acquiring a judgement issued by the king himself or by one of his officials which would have greater authority than a local court's decision. It is in Ptolemaic Egypt, therefore, that we have the best evidence for the change which Macedonian royal dominance, since Philip, had brought about in the previously classical Greek world, the giving of justice by an individual's response and its sol­iciting by individuals' written petitions. Surviving petitions on papyrus extend to the most intimate problems of family life, even to such a case as the ungrateful foster-daughter who had grossly neglected her mother, the petitioner. According to her mother, she had taken up with a boyfriend, the 'bugger' (literally), and was ceasing to honour the promises she had made on her mother's behalf.9 These vivid petitions were addressed to the king himself, but usually they went no further than to the officials who were in charge of each district of Egypt. The exceptions were those which could be forced on the king's attention while he travelled on one of his tours round Egypt's temples and townships. On these expensive occasions, as both sides realized, the king was exposed to the hazards of a royal progress. In October 103 bc we find a Ptolemy telling his local commander at Memphis to be sure to see that the 'amnesty' which he has recently proclaimed is in force before he himself arrives. Otherwise, people will go on pester­ing him with their existing grievances."'Justice had begun to depend on access, but access was not to be had for the asking.

  24

  Taxes and Technologies

  To King Ptolemy: greetings from Philotas son of Pyrsous, holder of a military allotment in the great town of Apollo. As there are frequent droughts on the land, now and utterly so, I want, king, to inform you of a machine from which you will sustain no harm, but the land will be saved. For three years the river (Kile) has not risen, so the drought will bring such a

  famine . . . But within fifty days of sowing there will immediately follow a plentiful year's harvest throughout the whole

  Thebaid.

  Edfou Papyrus number 8, perhaps c. 250 bc,

  whose author asks for travelling expenses to show off his new wonder (a water-lifting pump?)

  There is nobody who could see these unfortunate wretches and not pity them for their excessive distress. No sympathy or respite is shown to anyone, not to the sick, the maimed, the aged or a woman's weakness. But all of them are forced by physical blows to persist at their labours until they die from

  maltreatment in their forced necessity. Agatharchides

  (c. 170-50 bc), description of the slaves in the Ptolemies' southern gold mines

  The wars, fleets and city-building of the Hellenistic kings involved huge quantities of raw materials, shaped and transported with remark­able skill. Royal armies fed and deployed 60,000 men or more on either side, numbers which are vastly bigger than those in Western battles in post-classical times until France in the seventeenth century.

  Often they included elephants, which intrepid hunters sought out for the Ptolemies on the east coast of Africa, naming their stopping places in the 'Region of the Elephant Hunters' and then writing books on their routes. Sieges were conducted with even bigger towers and wheeled machines which ranged up to 180 feet in height. Kings patronized military engineers, Diades the man who 'besieged Tyre and other cities with Alexander', or the amazing Archimedes at King Hiero IPs court in Sicily. Surely this world was capable of a high level of technology?

  Off the battlefield, however, there were striking gaps. The pulling power of horses was still blocked by the lack of a horse-collar which did not pull on the horse's throat and stop him breathing. No text, word or monument indicates the existence of a wheelbarrow. Sea-transport was relatively quick and ever cheaper in bulk as the cargoes of merchant-ships increased up to 500 tons by the Roman period. But it remained cheaper to transport heavy goods in bulk from one end of the Mediterranean to the other than to haul them without a river-way for seventy miles inland.

  In one view, 'attitudes are the key to the blockage',1 the literary prejudices of a governing Greek class who regarded applied tech­nology as vulgar, while the abundant existence of slaves made the reduction of labour costs irrelevant. Big property owners might like athletics, horse racing and the theatre, but surely they were detached from grubby production and trade, the business of their slave-bailiffs and agents while they dined, enjoyed poetry and polished themselves for sex in the city?

  Gentlemanly prejudice was certainly eloquent among those who wrote well. Plato scorned applied mathematics, and Plutarch (c. ad 100) claimed that Archimedes left no texts on applied engineering because he considered it 'ignoble and vulgar' beside purely theoretical study.2 But many attitudes were possible in ancient society and men do not always practise what they or others preach. Significantly, we do not know the names of most of the inventors of machines or techniques which the evidence attests for us. But Archimedes, one exception, may have seen things differently to Plato and Plutarch.

  There was no explicit concept of 'growth' as a good in itself year in, year out, and patchy technologies might take a while, perhaps too long, to speed through the diverse kingdoms into which the 'classical' world was now dividing. In itself, however, slavery did not foster technological disdain or stagnation. Slaves were widely available in the age of wars and non-Greeks without citizen rights could be forced very hard. Labour costs, then, were not a serious issue, but output was still worth increasing, to turn into cash and spend on a royal court, an army or an educated life. In the American South, slavery did not stop slave-owners from investing in new technologies. Slaves might make innovations too: shorthand and a system of heating vaulted bathhouses were among those credited to them in the early Roman Empire.'

  Country life was not a barrier to innovations, either. Techniques of milling grain and pressing olives developed importantly, though anonymously. The size and scale of millstones had already progressed by the fifth century bc in Greece, greatly improving the flow of ground flour. Grinding by pairs of rounded stones was then introduced, prob­ably in the third century bc, including the turning of the stones by use of a crankshaft, pivot and handle. Olive presses also developed from simple flat beds with stone rollers to a rotary principle attested before 350 bc. These changes began from a very low base of slow labour, but they directly increased food production. They interrelated with an increasing population, and from the Hellenistic age onwards the ability to sustain more people concentrated in bigger cities. Breeding-stocks of animals were also selected, accounting for the improved bone and muscle of the horses which are shown on Mace­donian coinage across nearly two centuries (King Philip must have kept studs and selected and guarded the good stallions). Greeks even introduced Egypt to a better breed of pig. New varieties of fruit were named, selected and increased by grafting. The Roman Pliny (c. ad 70) knew dozens of different types of pear, plum or apple and regarded grafting as at its peak because 'men have now tried everything'.4 Anonymous ingenuity could transform an entire industry here. Roses were selected so as to flower twice a year, thereby doubling the crops for the cut-flower and petal trade and the big luxury demand for scent. Twice-flowering r
oses resulted from a deliberate crossing with the 'phoenician' rose species. It is still abundant in the wild on the south coast of Turkey, ancient Cilicia, where its value may have been recog­nized quite early by Levantine settlers, not Greeks.

  After Alexander, Greek rulers confronted unfamiliar non-Mediterranean landscapes which they had a motive to improve. They wanted as much tax as possible for the luxurious court-splendour which partly justified their royal status, and for the armies which conducted their mutual wars. Into Egypt, the Macedonian rulers intro­duced tax-farming, whereby the collection of a particular tax was bid for in advance by contractors. The successful bidder had guaranteed to pay the sum he bid, but was free to collect more (or less) as he could. The system suited rulers who needed an assured revenue from taxes which had an unpredictable yearly yield.

  Such taxes were very common in Hellenistic Egypt because the Ptolemies raised revenues by a multiplicity of individual chatges, applied to particular types of asset and transaction. There was a salt tax on each adult man or woman, an oil tax, a tax on nitron-soda (essential for cleaning clothes) and dozens of others. Customs dues were levied on goods being moved between administrative districts of the country, the 'nomes', and even across the line between Upper (southern) and Lower Egypt. Import taxes were imposed at many points of entry into Egypt, at harbours on the Nile Delta or at the southern frontier into Nubia. Known customs rates are as high as 25 or even 50 per cent, and another tax, the 'Gate Toll', was applied to imports which were brought on to Alexandria. Only the Ptolemies' coins were acceptable inside Egypt, and so visitors needed to change their money for re-minting at rates which naturally suited the rulers. There was even an export tax too, showing that 'a short sighted concept of immediate profit to the state dominated all aspects of trade' ,J

  As the kings had monopolies on several essential commodities, it might even seem that the high taxes on imports were intended to encourage buying of the kings' locally produced goods instead. But scholars' older view of Hellenistic Egypt as a 'command economy', directed by centralized targets and taxes, is certainly wrong. New readings of the difficult papyrus texts and more awareness of those written in the Egyptian language, not Greek, have changed the empha­sis. The kings owned much land and leased much too, to tenants for rent and to military colonists in return for service. They also taxed the land's produce (up to half of the year's yield). However, they did not own everything. Temples retained plenty of land, and private land continued to change hands, as we see very well from non-Greek documents in Upper Egypt. There were no yearly targets for pro­duction, set by central bureaucrats. Lists of lands under cultivation were indeed compiled locally and sent up the chain of command. Crops to be cultivated were also partly prescribed, but the realities of cultivation on the ground could be quite different. The emphasis has shifted from a 'totalitarian' system to one which was trying to boss and list but which was subject quite often to the gaps between bureau­crats' lists and wishes and what small farmers, the cultivators, would actually do.

  Much of the king's yearly revenues were still paid in kind: the payers of harvest taxes would have to take grain personally to state granaries. In the Persian period, we know from a newly read papyrus that there were already customs dues on imports to the Nile Delta. There had also been censuses in Egypt and no doubt the individual taxes on many items were traditional. But under the Ptolemies there were even greater changes. Taxes were now being 'farmed' to contrac­tors. The salt tax was new (it probably had a Macedonian precedent) and was payable both by men and women and only in cash. From the 2.60s on, the tax on orchards and vineyards took a 'portion' (up to one-sixth) of the crop value for the novel purpose of a cult of the reigning Ptolemy's sister as a god (she was also his wife). Most of this tax was also to be paid in cash. Coinage was thus greatly extended into Egyptian life, even rural life: in Egypt as a whole, its use had probably been minimal during the Persian period. The settlement of individual soldiers on plots of land was a novelty too, up to fifty acres going to each cavalryman. Above all, there was the great new presence of Alexandria which drew in crops, textiles and objects from the Egyptian countryside. More trade was said, very plausibly, to pass into the city from the hinterland to which it was linked by canals and the Nile than came into the city's harbours from the Mediterranean.

  It was in the interest of the kings to improve cultivation and to increase taxable output. They were not passive heirs to an 'age-old' Egypt where they merely replaced the Persian rulers. Their attempted changes did not all work, and meanwhile the long-proven Egyptian ways of the farmers went on too, especially in the south. But there was also a new attempt at 'development' both in the south and above all in the Fayyum, only some 250 miles south of Alexandria. In the far south, the kings made a military campaign into lower Nubia possibly in the 260s and then retained and exploited the very rich local gold-mines. In the 260s and 250s the Fayyum became a major 'development region', as we shall see, with a smart new town (Philadel­phia), a big lake to help to irrigate it and allotments of several thou­sand acres to important friends and courtiers who tried to farm there intensively. It is here that we have most of our evidence for the use of metal tools and ploughs, novelties in Egyptian farming. New crops were also tried out, to the scepticism of the Egyptian workers. A new type of summer wheat did catch on, allowing a precious second harvest where watering was possible. The wheat flour for bread then changed throughout Egypt.

  The aims and scale of these particular changes were vast: did they cause technological innovations? In Alexandria's scholarly museum, the thinkers were working on the power of compressed air (pneu­matics), a new type of force pump and even a limited use of steam power which they applied to some amusing toys. However, renewed study of their technical texts has shown that new water-lifting devices, powered by animals or water power, were also devised in the third century bc, greatly improving the possible techniques of irrigation. They would be valuable in the new Fayyum farmlands where water needed 'lifting' from the main lake and canals so as to sustain a double harvest. There may even have been water- and animal-powered pounding of grain, exploiting the rotating axles and 'cams' which were certainly invented and applied to Alexandrian toy machines. There is no evidence, as yet, for a Ptolemaic watermill or for extensive water power in the washing, extraction and pounding of the Ptolemies' gold. Instead, we have a vivid account of the slaves in their gold-mines, written by the able courtier Agatharchides (c. 170-150 bc). Through­out, he stresses the hard labour of individual men and women, war captives and criminals who were working naked in intense heat 'until they die in their maltreatment among their forced necessity'. Men and boys would wear their lamps on their heads down the mines' rock-tunnels, but the technologies were muscles and whips.

  'Stagnation' is not the right description for the future of such tech­nology as did exist. At some point before the mid-first century bc, watermills were applied to grind flour in the Greek world: we first know of them in a neat poem, celebrating that the slave-girls can now sleep on peacefully as the Nymphs are running the job mechanically.6 Watermills (but not, so far, windmills) continued to spread through the provinces of the Roman Empire, ever more being found archaeol-ogically, with no 'decline' in the later Empire of the fourth century ad. The huge Roman mine workings in north-west Spain did use slaves too, but a good case now exists for the use of applied water power in the washing and crushing of the ores. Windmills are still unattested and the supreme siege-machine, the trebuchet, was yet to filter westwards from China. But the supposed 'blockage' of technol­ogy under Roman and late Roman rule is not borne out on the ground.

  The ancients, who achieved so much, did not achieve an 'Industrial Revolution'. One simple answer for their failure has been given: their inability to cast big metal boilers so as to make industrial use of steam power. But the absence of 'the industrial' did not mean the absence of applied technologies, used regionally but nonetheless effectively. By c. ad 200 there was at last an improved type of horse
-collar, known to us in northern Gaul under Roman rule. It was locally exploited, admittedly, but it did allow a horse to pull loads without being throttled.'

  25

  The New World

  In India, Megasthenes says, the Brahmans do not share their philosophy with the wives they marry, in order that if the women are wicked they may not communicate any of their unpermitted secrets to the profane public, and if the women are serious they will not promptly abandon their husbands. For nobody who considers with disdain pleasure or hard work, life and death too, is willing to be subjected to another person. A serious man and a serious woman, however, are people like that. . . Megasthenes (who visited India, c. 320-300 bc), as quoted in Strabo, Geography 15.1.59

  For a long while, the house of my ancestors flourished Until the unopposable force of the three Fates ruined it. . . So I, Sophytos . . . of the family of Naratos . . . Received money, which can multiply, from another and left my home

  Resolved never to return, until I had gained the highest pile of riches.

  That is why, going for trade to many cities, I gained a vast fortune, without damage. Much praised, I have now returned to my land after countless years And my return was a joy to my friends . . . At once I rebuilt the decayed house of my fathers With new funds, bigger and better . . .

  From the Greek verse-inscription of Sophytos, son of Naratos (a non-Greek name), on his stele at Kandahar, c. 135 bc (first published in 2004)