[193] Biography of Alexander, c. 22: Iudaeis privilegia reservavit, Christianos esse passus est. Clearly the privileged position of the Jews as compared with the Christians comes here to light—a position, which certainly rests in its turn on the fact that the former represent a nation the latter do not.
[194] In order to make good that even in bondage the Jews were able to exercise a certain self-administration, Origen (about the year 226) writes to Africanus, c. 14: “How much even now, where the Romans rule and the Jews pay to them the tribute (τὸ δίδραχμον), has the president of the people (ὁ ἐθνάρχης) among them in his power with permission of the emperor (συγχωροῦντος Καίσαρος)? Even courts are secretly held according to the law, and even on various occasions sentence of death is pronounced. This I, who have long lived in the land of this people, have myself experienced and ascertained.” The patriarch of Judaea already makes his appearance in the letter forged in the name of Hadrian in the biography of the tyrant Saturninus (c. 8), in the ordinances first in the year 392 (C. Th. xvi. 8, 8). Patriarchs as presidents of individual Jewish communities, for which the word from its signification is better adapted, meet us already in the ordinances of Constantine I. (C. Th. xvi. 8, 1, 2).
[195] The jurists of the third century lay down this rule, appealing to an edict of Severus (Dig. xxvii. 1, 15, 6; l. 2, 3, 3). According to the ordinance of the year 321 (C. Th. xvi. 8, 3) this appears even as a right, not as a duty of the Jews, so that it depended on them to undertake or decline the office.
[196] The analogous treatment of castration in the Hadrianic edict, Dig. xlviii. 8, 4, 2, and of circumcision in Paulus, Sent. v. 22, 3, 4, and Modestinus, Dig. xlviii. 8, 11 pr., naturally suggests this point of view. The statement that Severus Judaeos fieri sub gravi poena vetuit (Vita, 17), is doubtless nothing but the enforcement of this prohibition.
[197] The remarkable account in Origen’s treatise against Celsus, ii. 13 (written about 250), shows that the circumcision of the non-Jew involved de iure the penalty of death, although it is not clear how far this found application to Samaritans or Sicarii.
[198] This exclusion of the joint rule of the senate as of the senators is indicated by Tacitus (Hist. i. 11) with the words that Augustus wished to have Egypt administered exclusively by his personal servants (domi retinere; comp. Staatsrecht, ii. p. 963). In principle this abnormal form of government was applicable for all the provinces not administered by senators, the presidents of which were also at the outset called chiefly praefecti (C. I. L. v. p. 809, 902). But at the first division of the provinces between emperor and senate there was probably no other of these but just Egypt; and subsequently the distinction here came into sharper prominence, in so far as all the other provinces of this category obtained no legions. For in the emergence of the equestrian commandants of the legion instead of the senatorial, as was the rule in Egypt, the exclusion of the senatorial government finds its most palpable expression.
[199] This ordinance holds only for Egypt, not for the other territories administered by non-senators. How essential it appeared to the government, we see from the constitutional and religious apparatus called into requisition to secure it (Trig. tyr. c. 22).
[200] The current assertion that provincia is only by an abuse of language put for the districts not administered by senators is not well founded. Egypt was private property of the emperor just as much or just as little as Gaul and Syria—yet Augustus himself says (Mon. Ancyr. 5, 24) Aegyptum imperio populi Romani adieci, and assigns to the governor, since he as eques could not be pro praetore, by special law the same jurisdiction in processes as the Roman praetors had (Tacitus, Ann. xii. 60).
[201] As a matter of course what is here meant is the land of Egypt, not the possessions subject to the Lagids. Cyrene was similarly organised ([p. 165]). But the properly Egyptian government was never applied to southern Syria and to the other territories which were for a longer or a shorter time under the power of Egypt.
[202] To these falls to be added Naucratis, the oldest Greek town already founded in Egypt before the Ptolemies, and further Paraetonium, which indeed in some measure lies beyond the bounds of Egypt.