In Egypt Severus seems to have dated the years of his reign from the death of Niger, though he had reigned in Rome since the deaths of Pertinax and Julian. His Egyptian coins are either copper, or brass plated with a little silver; and after a few reigns even those last traces of a silver coinage are lost in this falling country. In tracing the history of a word’s meaning we often throw a light upon the customs of a nation. Thus, in Rome, gold was so far common that avarice was called the love of gold; while in Greece, where silver was the metal most in use, money was called argurion. In the same way it is curiously shown that silver was no longer used in Egypt by our finding that the brass coin of one hundred and ten grains weight, as being the only piece of money seen in circulation, was named an argurion.
The latter years of the reign of Caracalla were spent in visiting the provinces of his wide empire; and, after he had passed through Thrace and Asia Minor, Egypt had the misfortune to be honoured by a visit from its emperor. The satirical Alexandrians, who in the midst of their own follies and vices were always clever in lashing those of their rulers, had latterly been turning their unseemly jokes against Caracalla. They had laughed at his dressing like Achilles and Alexander the Great, while in his person he was below the usual height; and they had not forgotten his murder of his brother, and his talking of marrying his own mother. Some of these dangerous witticisms had reached his ears at Rome, and they were not forgotten. But Caracalla never showed his displeasure; and, as he passed through Antioch, he gave out that he was going to visit the city founded by Alexander the Great, and to consult the oracle in the temple of Serapis.
The Alexandrians in their joy got ready the hecatombs for his sacrifices; and the emperor entered their city through rows of torches to the sound of soft music, while the air was sweetened with costly scents, and the road scattered with flowers. After a few days he sacrificed in the temple of Serapis, and then visited the tomb of Alexander, where he took off his scarlet cloak, his rings, and his girdle covered with precious stones, and dutifully laid them on the sarcophagus of the hero. The Alexandrians were delighted with their visitor; and crowds flocked into the city to witness the daily and nightly shows, little aware of the unforgiving malice that was lurking in his mind.
The emperor then issued a decree that all the youths of Alexandria of an age to enter the army should meet him in a plain on the outside of the city; they had already a Macedonian and a Spartan phalanx, and he was going to make an Alexandrian phalanx. Accordingly the plain was filled with thousands of young men, who were ranged in bodies according to their height, their age, and their fitness for bearing arms, while their friends and relations came in equal numbers to be witnesses of their honour.
The emperor moved through their ranks, and was loudly greeted with their cheers, while the army which encircled the whole plain was gradually closing round the crowd and lessening the circle. When the ring was formed, Caracalla withdrew with his guards and gave the looked-for signal. The soldiers then lowered their spears and charged on the unarmed crowd, of whom a part were butchered and part driven headlong into the ditches and canals; and such was the slaughter that the waters of the Nile, which at midsummer are always red with the mud from the upper country, were said to have flowed coloured to the sea with the blood of the sufferers. Caracalla then returned to Antioch, congratulating himself on the revenge that he had taken on the Alexandrians for their jokes; not however till he had consecrated in the temple of Serapis the sword with which he boasted that he had slain his brother Geta.
Caracalla also punished the Alexandrians by stopping the public games and the allowance of grain to the citizens; and, to lessen the danger of their rebelling, he had the fortifications carried between the rest of the city and the great palace-quarter, the Bruchium, thus dividing Alexandria into two fortified cities, with towers on the walls between them. Hitherto, under the Romans as under the Ptolemies, the Alexandrians had been the trusted favourites of their rulers, who made use of them to keep the Egyptians in bondage. But under Caracalla that policy was changed; the Alexandrians were treated as enemies; and we see for the first time Egyptians taking their seat in the Roman senate, and the Egyptian religion openly cultivated by the emperor, who then built a temple in Rome to the goddess Isis.
On the murder of Caracalla in A.D. 217, Macrinus, who was thought to be the author of his death, was acknowledged as emperor; and though he only reigned for about two months, yet, as the Egyptian new year’s day fell within that time, we find Alexandrian coins for the first and second years of his reign. The Egyptians pretended that the death of Caracalla had been foretold by signs from heaven; that a ball of fire had fallen on the temple of Serapis, which destroyed nothing but the sword with which Caracalla had slain his brother; and that an Egyptian named Serapion, who had been thrown into a lion’s den for naming Macrinus as the future emperor, had escaped unhurt by the wild beasts.
Macrinus recalled from Alexandria Julian, the prefect of Egypt, and appointed to that post his friend Basilianus, with Marius Secundus, a senator, as second in command, who was the first senator that had ever held command in Egypt. He was himself at Antioch when Bassianus, a Syrian, pretending to be the son of Caracalla, offered himself to the legions as that emperor’s successor. When the news reached Alexandria that the Syrian troops had joined the pretended Antoninus, the prefect Basilianus at once put to death the public couriers that brought the unwelcome tidings. But when, a few days afterwards, it was known that Macrinus had been defeated and killed, the doubts about his successor led to serious struggles between the troops and the Alexandrians. The Alexandrians could have had no love for a son of Caracalla; Basilianus and Secundus had before declared against him; but, on the other hand, the choice of the soldiers was guided by their brethren in Syria. The citizens flew to arms, and day after day was the battle fought in the streets of Alexandria between two parties, neither of whom was strong enough, even if successful, to have any weight in settling the fate of the Roman empire. Marius Secundus lost his life in the struggle. The prefect Basilianus fled to Italy to escape from his own soldiers; and the province of Egypt then followed the example of the rest of the East in acknowledging the new emperor.
For four years Rome was disgraced by the sovereignty of Elagabalus, the pretended son of Caracalla, and we find his coins each year in Alexandria. He was succeeded by the young Alexander, whose amiable virtues, however, could not gain for him the respect which he lost by the weakness of his government. The Alexandrians, always ready to lampoon their rulers, laughed at his wish to be thought a Roman; they called him the Syrian, the high priest, and the ruler of the synagogue. And well might they think slightly of his government, when a prefect of Egypt owed his appointment to the emperor’s want of power to punish him. Epagathus had headed a mutiny of the prætorian guards in Rome, in which their general Ulpian was killed; and Alexander, afraid to punish the murderers, made the ringleader of the rebels prefect of Egypt in order to send him out of the way; so little did it then seem necessary to follow the cautious policy of Augustus, or to fear a rebellion in that province. But after a short time, when Epagathus had been forgotten by the Roman legion, he was removed to the government of Crete, and then at last punished with death.
In this reign Ammonius Saccas became the founder of a new and most important school of philosophy, that of the Alexandrian platonists. He is only known to us through his pupils, in whose writings we trace the mind and system of the teacher. The most celebrated of these pupils were Plotinus, Herennius, and Origen, a pagan writer, together with Longinus, the great master of the “sublime,” who owns him his teacher in elegant literature. Ammonius was unequalled in the variety and depth of his knowledge, and was by his followers called heaven-taught. He aimed at putting an end to the triflings and quarrels of the philosophers by showing that all the great truths were the same in each system, and by pointing out where Plato and Aristotle agreed instead of where they differed; or rather by culling opinions out of both schools of philosophy, and by gathering together the scattered limbs of Truth, whose lovely form had been hewn to pieces and thrown to the four winds like the mangled body of Osiris.