Altered character of Judaism.But if the legions could destroy Jerusalem, they could not raze Judaism itself; and what on the one side was a remedy, exercised on the other the effect of a poison. Judaism not only remained, but it became an altered thing. There is a deep gulf between the Judaism of the older time, which seeks to spread its faith, which has its temple-court filled with the Gentiles, and which has its priests offering daily sacrifices for the emperor Augustus, and the rigid Rabbinism, which knew nothing and wished to know nothing of the world beyond Abraham’s bosom and the Mosaic law. Strangers the Jews always were, and had wished to be so; but the feeling of estrangement now culminated within them as well as against them after a fearful fashion, and rudely were its hateful and pernicious consequences drawn on both sides. From the contemptuous sarcasm of Horace against the intruding Jew from the Roman Ghetto there is a wide step to the solemn enmity which Tacitus cherishes against this scum of the human race, to which everything pure is impure and everything impure pure; in the interval lie those insurrections of the despised people, and the necessity of conquering it and of expending continuously money and men for its repression. The prohibitions of maltreating the Jew, which are constantly recurring in the imperial ordinances, show that those words of the cultured were translated, as might be expected, by their inferiors into deeds. The Jews, on their part, did not mend the matter. They turned away from Hellenic literature, which was now regarded as polluting, and even rebelled against the use of the Greek translation of the Bible; the ever-increasing purification of faith turned not merely against the Greeks and the Romans, but quite as much against the “half-Jews” of Samaria and against the Christian heretics; the reverence toward the letter of the Holy Scriptures rose to a giddy height of absurdity, and above all an—if possible—still holier tradition established itself, in the fetters of which all life and thought were benumbed. The gulf between that treatise on the Sublime which ventures to place Homer’s Poseidon shaking land and sea and Jehovah, who creates the shining sun, side by side, and the beginnings of the Talmud which belong to this epoch, marks the contrast between the Judaism of the first and that of the third century. The living together of Jews and non-Jews showed itself more and more to be just as inevitable, as under the given conditions it was intolerable; the contrast in faith, law, and manners became sharpened, and mutual arrogance and mutual hatred operated on both sides with morally disorganising effect. Not merely was their conciliation not promoted in these centuries, but its realisation was always thrown further into the distance, the more its necessity was apparent. This exasperation, this arrogance, this contempt, as they became established at that time, were indeed only the inevitable growth of a perhaps not less inevitable sowing; but the heritage of these times is still at the present day a burden on mankind.
CHAPTER XII.
EGYPT.
The annexation of Egypt.The two kingdoms of Egypt and Syria, which had so long striven and vied with each other in every respect, fell nearly about the same time without resistance into the power of the Romans. If these made no use of the alleged or real testament of Alexander II. († 673)81 B.C. and did not then annex the land, the last rulers of the Lagid house were confessedly in the position of clients of Rome; the senate decided in disputes as to the throne, and after the Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, had with his troops brought back the king Ptolemaeus Auletes to Egypt (699; comp. iv. 160) B.C. 55. iv. 153., the Roman legions did not again leave the land. Like the other client-kings, the rulers of Egypt took part in the civil wars on the summons of the government recognised by them or rather imposing itself on them; and, if it must remain undecided what part Antonius in the fanciful eastern empire of his dreams had destined for the native land of the wife whom he loved too well ([p. 25]), at any rate the government of Antonius in Alexandria, as well as the last struggle in the last civil war before the gates of that city, belongs as little to the special history of Egypt as the battle of Actium to that of Epirus. But doubtless this catastrophe, and the death connected with it of the last prince of the Lagid house, gave occasion for Augustus not to fill up again the vacant throne, but to take the kingdom of Egypt under his own administration. This annexation of the last portion of the coast of the Mediterranean to the sphere of direct Roman administration, and the settlement, coincident with it in point of time and of organic connection, of the new monarchy, mark—as regards the constitution and administration of the huge empire respectively—the turning-point, the end of the old and the beginning of a new epoch.
Egypt exclusively an imperial possession.The incorporation of Egypt into the Roman empire was accomplished after an abnormal fashion, in so far as the principle—elsewhere dominating the state—of dyarchy, i.e. of the joint rule of the two supreme imperial powers, the princeps and the senate, found—apart from some subordinate districts—no application in Egypt alone;[198] but, on the contrary, in this land the senate as such, as well as every individual of its members, were cut off from all participation in the government, and indeed senators and persons of senatorial rank were even prohibited from setting foot in this province.[199] We must not conceive of this position as if Egypt were connected with the rest of the empire only by a personal union; the princeps is, according to the meaning and spirit of the Augustan organisation, an integral and permanently acting element of the Roman polity just like the senate, and his rule over Egypt is quite as much a part of the imperial rule as is the rule of the proconsul of Africa.[200] We may rather illustrate the exact constitutional position by saying that the British Empire would find itself in the same plight if the ministry and Parliament should be taken into account only for the motherland, whereas the colonies should have to obey the absolute government of the Empress of India. What motives determined the new monarch at the very outset of his sole rule to adopt this deeply influential and at no time assailed arrangement, and how it affected the general political relations, are matters belonging to the general history of the empire; here we have to set forth how the internal relations of Egypt shaped themselves under the imperial rule.
What held true in general of all Hellenic or Hellenised territories—that the Romans, when annexing them to the empire, preserved the once existing institutions, and introduced modifications only where these seemed absolutely necessary—found application in its full compass to Egypt.
Like Syria, Egypt, when it became Roman, was a land of twofold nationality; here too alongside of, and over, the native stood the Greek—the former the slave, the latter the master. But in law and in fact the relations of the two nations in Egypt were wholly different from those of Syria.
Greek and Egyptian towns.Syria, substantially already in the pre-Roman and entirely in the Roman epoch, came under the government of the land only after an indirect manner; it was broken up, partly into principalities, partly into autonomous urban districts, and was administered, in the first instance, by the rulers of the land or municipal authorities. In Egypt,[201] on the other hand, there were neither native princes nor imperial cities after the Greek fashion. The two spheres of administration into which Egypt was divided—the “land” (ἡ χώρα) of the Egyptians, with its originally thirty-six districts (νομοί), and the two Greek cities, Alexandria in lower and Ptolemais in upper Egypt[202]—were rigidly separated and sharply opposed to each other, and yet in a strict sense hardly different. The rural, like the urban, district was not merely marked off territorially, but the former as well as the latter was a home-district; the belonging to each was independent of dwelling-place and hereditary. The Egyptian from the Chemmitic nome belonged to it with his dependents, just as much when he had his abode in Alexandria as the Alexandrian dwelling in Chemmis belonged to the burgess-body of Alexandria. The land-district had for its centre always an urban settlement, the Chemmitic, for example, the town of Panopolis, which grew up round the temple of Chemmis or of Pan, or, as this is expressed in the Greek mode of conception, each nome had its metropolis; so far each land-district may be regarded also as a town-district. Like the cities, the nomes also became in the Christian epoch the basis of the episcopal dioceses. The land-districts were based on the arrangements for worship which dominated everything in Egypt; the centre for each one is the sanctuary of a definite deity, and usually it bears the name of this deity or of the animal sacred to the same; thus the Chemmitic district is called after the god Chemmis, or, according to Greek equivalent, Pan; other districts after the dog, the lion, the crocodile. But, on the other hand, the town-districts are not without their religious centre; the protecting god of Alexandria is Alexander, the protecting god of Ptolemais the first Ptolemy, and the priests, who are installed in the one place as in the other for this worship and that of their successors, are the Eponymi for both cities. The land-district is quite destitute of autonomy: administration, taxation, justice, are placed in the hands of the royal officials,[203] and the collegiate system, the Palladium of the Greek as of the Roman commonwealth, was here in all stages absolutely excluded. But in the two Greek cities it was not much otherwise. There was doubtless a body of burgesses divided into phylae and demes, but no common council;[204] the officials were doubtless different and differently named from those of the nomes, but were also throughout officials of royal nomination and likewise without collegiate arrangement. Hadrian was the first to give to an Egyptian township, Antinoopolis, laid out by him in memory of his favourite drowned in the Nile, urban rights according to the Greek fashion; and subsequently Severus, perhaps as much out of spite to the Antiochenes as for the benefit of the Egyptians, granted to the capital of Egypt and to the town of Ptolemais, and to several other Egyptian communities, not urban magistrates indeed, but at any rate an urban council. Hitherto, doubtless, in official language the Egyptian town calls itself Nomos, the Greek Polis, but a Polis without Archontes and Bouleutae is a meaningless name. So was it also in the coinage. The Egyptian nomes did not possess the right of coining; but still less did Alexandria ever strike coins. Egypt is, among all the provinces of the Greek half of the empire, the only one which knows no other than royal money. Nor was this otherwise even in the Roman period. The emperors abolished the abuses that crept in under the last Lagids; Augustus set aside their unreal copper coinage, and when Tiberius resumed the coinage of silver he gave to the Egyptian silver money just as real value as to the other provincial currency of the empire.[205] But the character of the coinage remained substantially the same.[206] There is a distinction between Nomos and Polis as between the god Chemmis and the god Alexander; in an administrative respect there is not any difference. Egypt consisted of a majority of Egyptian and of a minority of Greek townships, all of which were destitute of autonomy, and all were placed under the immediate and absolute administration of the king and of the officials nominated by him.