[213] Admission to the equestrian positions was at least rendered difficult: non est ex albo iudex patre Aegyptio (C. I. L. iv. 1943; comp. Staatsrecht, ii. 919, note 2; Eph. epigr. v. p. 13, note 2). Yet we meet early with individual Alexandrians in equestrian offices, like Tiberius Julius Alexander ([p. 246], note).
[214] If the words of Pliny (H. N. v. 31, 128) are accurate, that the island of Pharos before the harbour of Alexandria was a colonia Caesaris dictatoris (comp. iv. 574), the dictator has here too, like Alexander, gone beyond the thought of Aristotle. But there can be no doubt as to the point, that after the annexation of Egypt there never was a Roman colony there.
[215] The titles of Augustus run with the Egyptian priests to the following effect: “The beautiful boy, lovely through worthiness to be loved, the prince of princes, elect of Ptah and Nun the father of the gods, king of upper Egypt and king of lower Egypt, lord of the two lands, Autokrator, son of the sun, lord of diadems, Kaisar, ever living, beloved by Ptah and Isis;” in this case the proper names “Autokrator, Kaisar,” are retained from the Greek. The title of Augustus occurs first in the case of Tiberius in an Egyptian translation (nti χu), and with the retention of the Greek Σεβαστός under Domitian. The title of the fair, lovely boy, which in better times was wont to be given only to the children proclaimed as joint-rulers, afterwards became stereotyped, and is found employed, as for Caesarion and Augustus, so also for Tiberius, Claudius, Titus, Domitian. It is more important that in deviation from the older title, as it is found, e.g. in Greek on the inscription of Rosetta (C. I. Gr. 4697), in the case of the Caesars from Augustus onward the title "prince of princes" is appended, by which beyond doubt it was intended to express their position of great-king, which the earlier kings had not.
[216] If people knew, king Seleucus was wont to say (Plutarch, An seni, 11), what a burden it was to write and to read so many letters, they would not take up the diadem if it lay at their feet.
[217] That he wore other insignia than the officers generally (Hirschfeld, Verw. Gesch. p. 271), it is hardly allowable to infer from vita Hadr. 4.
[218] Thus Tiberius Julius Alexander, an Alexandrian Jew, held this governorship in the last years of Nero ([p. 204]); certainly he belonged to a very rich family of rank, allied by marriage even with the imperial house, and he had distinguished himself in the Parthian war as chief of the staff of Corbulo—a position which he soon afterwards took up once more in the Jewish war of Titus. He must have been one of the ablest officers of this epoch. To him is dedicated the pseudo—Aristotelian treatise περὶ κοσμοῦ ([p. 168]), evidently composed by another Alexandrian Jew (Bernays, Gesammelte Abhandl. ii. 278).
[219] Unmistakably the iuridicus Aegypti (C. I. L. x. 6976; also missus in Aegyptum ad iurisdictionem, Bull. dell’ Inst. 1856, p. 142; iuridicus Alexandreae, C. vi. 1564, viii. 8925, 8934; Dig. i. 20, 2), and the idiologus ad Aegyptum (C. x. 4862; procurator ducenarius Alexandriae idiulogu, Eph. cp. v. p. 30, and C. I. Gr. 3751; ὁ γνώμων τοῦ ἰδίου λόγου, C. I. Gr. 4957, v. 44, comp. v. 39), are modelled on the assistants associated with the legates of the imperial provinces for the administration of justice (legati iuridici) and the finances (procuratores provinciae; Staatsrecht 12, [p. 223], note 5). That they were appointed for the whole land, and were subordinate to the praefectus Aegypti, is stated by Strabo expressly (xvii. 1, 12, p. 797), and this assumption is required by the frequent mention of Egypt in their style and title as well as by the turn in the edict C. I. Gr. 4957, v. 39. But their jurisdiction was not exclusive; “many processes,” says Strabo, “are decided by the official administering justice” (that he assigned guardians, we learn from Dig. i. 20, 2), and according to the same it devolved on the Idiologus in particular to confiscate for the exchequer the bona vacantia et caduca.—This does not exclude the view that the Roman iuridicus came in place of the older court of thirty with the ἀρχιδικαστής at its head (Diodorus, i. 75), who was Egyptian, and may not be confounded with the Alexandrian ἀρχιδικαστής, had moreover perhaps been set aside already before the Roman period, and that the Idiologus originated out of the subsistence in Egypt of a claim of the king on heritages, such as did not occur to the same extent in the rest of the empire, which latter view Lumbroso (Recherches, p. 285) has made very probable.
[220] The ἐξηγητής, according to Strabo, xvii. 1, 12, p. 797, the first civic official in Alexandria under the Ptolemies as under the Romans, and entitled to wear the purple, is certainly identical with the year-priest in the testament of Alexander appearing in the Alexander-romance very well instructed in such matters (iii. 33, p. 149, Müller). As the Exegetes has, along with his title, doubtless to be taken in a religious sense, the ἐπιμέλεια τῶν τῇ πόλει χρησίμων, that priest of the romance is ἐπιμελιστὴς τῆς πόλεως. The romance-writer will not have invented the payment with a talent and the hereditary character any more than the purple and the golden chaplet; the hereditary element, in reference to which Lumbroso (l’Egitto al tempo dei Greci e Romani, p. 152) recalls the ἐξηγητὴς ἔναρχος of the Alexandrian inscriptions (C. I. Gr. 4688, 4976 c.), is presumably to be conceived to the effect that a certain circle of persons was called by hereditary right, and out of these the governor appointed the year-priest. This priest of Alexander (as well as of the following Egyptian kings, according to the stone of Canopus and that of Rosetta, C. I. Gr. 4697), was under the earlier Lagids the eponym for Alexandrian documents, while later as under the Romans the kings’ names come in for that purpose. Not different from him probably was the “chief priest of Alexandria and all Egypt,” of an inscription of the city of Rome from Hadrian’s time (C. I. Gr. 5900: ἀρχιερεῖ Ἀλεξανδρείας καὶ Αἰγύπτου πάσης Λευκίῳ Ἰουλίῳ Οὐηστίνῳ καὶ ἐπιστάτῃ τοῦ Μουσείου καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἐν Ῥώμῃ βιβλιοθηκῶν Ῥωμαικῶν τε καὶ Ἑλληνικῶν καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς παιδείας Ἀδριανοῦ, ἐπιστολεῖ τοῦ αὐτοῦ αὐτοκράτορος); the proper title ἐξηγητής, was avoided out of Egypt, because it usually denoted the sexton. If the chief priesthood, as the tenor of the inscription suggests, is to be assumed as having been at that time permanent, the transition from the annual tenure to the at least titular, and not seldom also real, tenure for life repeats itself, as is well known, in the sacerdotia of the provinces, to which this Alexandrian one did not indeed belong, but the place of which it represented in Egypt ([p. 238]). That the priesthood and the presidency of the Museum are two distinct offices is shown by the inscription itself. We learn the same from the inscription of a royal chief physician of a good Lagid period, who is withal as well exegete as president of the Museum (Χρύσερμον Ἡρακλείτου Ἀλεξανδρέα τὸν συγγενῆ βασιλέως Πτολεμαίου καὶ ἐξηγητὴν καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἰατρῶν καὶ ἐπιστάτην τοῦ Μουσείου). But the two monuments at the same time suggest that the post of first official of Alexandria and the presidency of the Museum were frequently committed to the same man, although in the Roman time the former was conferred by the prefect, the latter by the emperor.
[221] Not to be confounded with the similar office which Philo (in Flacc. 16) mentions and Lucian (Apolog. 12) held; this was not an urban office, but a subaltern’s post in the praefecture of Egypt, in Latin a commentariis or ab actis.
[222] This is the procurator Neaspoleos et mausolei Alexandriae (C. I. L. viii. 8934; Henzen, 6929). Officials of a like kind and of like rank, but whose functions are not quite clear, are the procurator ad Mercurium Alexandreae (C. I. L. x. 3847), and the procurator Alexandreae Pelusii (C. vi. 1024). The Pharos also is placed under an imperial freedman (C. vi. 8582).