On his arrival in Egypt, Ptolemy found there two other states in addition to that of the Egyptians. These were the old Greek city of Naucratis and the new city of Alexandria. A third arose when he himself founded Ptolemais to be to Upper Egypt what Alexandria was to Lower Egypt—the centre and rallying point of Hellenic interests. To these three city-states he added a multitude of others in and about the Mediterranean when he acquired for his house its foreign dominions. The convenient thing for these to do was to bind themselves to him by the Gordian knot of religious worship; and, as Ptolemy Soter, or the Savior, he was in fact enrolled in the circle of deities recognized by the several cities. In Alexandria we may be sure that its founder, Alexander the Great, had been accorded divine honors from the beginning, and that after his death the citizens appointed each year a priest of Alexander, just as they had been in the habit of doing while he was alive, and just as they appointed one for Zeus or Apollo. However, at some date between 311 and 289 B.C., perhaps on his assumption of the regal title in 306 B.C., Ptolemy took into his own hands the administration of his capital, and thenceforth appointed personally the priest of the city-god Alexander, who became therewith an imperial god. To this cult Philadelphus did not add that of his parents, "the savior gods," when he had them officially deified at their death (283 B.C.); but he did add to it that of his deceased queen and of himself when in 270 B.C. he inaugurated the worship of "the brother gods." His example was followed by each succeeding pair of rulers to the end of the dynasty, except that the savior gods were inserted by the fourth Ptolemy in their proper place after Alexander. So that central among the gods of the capital of the empire stood ultimately the long series of the departed rulers and at its head the living king and queen.
Outside the capital, in the city-states of the realm, as later on in the provinces subject to the Roman emperors, the reigning monarchs were alone the recipients of divine honors. The living Ptolemy, by recognizing the divinity of his predecessors, assumed responsibility for the validity of all their acta. They had issued their mandates (prostagmata) as gods; so long as they remained gods their mandates must be obeyed. The cities, on the other hand, had no concern except to legalize the orders issued to them by their living rulers, once their living rulers had legalized and thus become responsible for all orders issued by the dead. At Rome the memory of certain emperors was damned, and their acts rescinded. That was possible there because the emperor was theoretically only an officer of the Roman people. One means employed to invalidate the acta of deposed rulers was to refuse to have them among their gods after their death. The Alexandrians had no such discretion. After about 306 B.C. they were subjects themselves, not masters, of the Ptolemies. In their city it was the living Ptolemy who willed his own deification, and he could withhold divine honors from his predecessor only when, as in the solitary case of the founder of the dynasty, the monarch neglected to have himself created a god during his lifetime. Since his wish was decisive, it is not surprising that he had the members of his family, his wife, sisters, children, and concubines, elevated to Olympus along with himself. Curiously enough, however, Philadelphus and his four immediate successors, while demanding that their subjects should worship them as deities, treated themselves simply as kings, and carefully refrained from describing themselves as gods even in their public communications. The fact seems to be that only by accepting the Egyptian theory of a divine incarnation could the Ptolemies find a theological ground for constituting themselves gods. This concession to native thinking the proud early members of the dynasty refused, however, to make, preferring to challenge by their own self-denial the divine honors which they required from others. With this view accords the further fact that the first Ptolemy deliberately to court a native support for his throne—Euergetes II—was also the first to sign his edicts as θεὁς, or "god."
While it is true that no great empire ever existed without a constitutional fiction, it is also true that it never endured on a fiction alone. The Macedonian soldiers whom Ptolemy found in Egypt and those whom he brought with him and sent for later were essential for the maintenance of his government. So long as the son of Alexander the Great lived, and, indeed, for four years longer (till 306 B.C.), Ptolemy was simply their general. Then he became their king, and to legitimatize this practical usurpation, the legend arose that he was not really the son of Lagos, but the son of Philip. It is to the honor of Ptolemy that he had nothing to do with this libel on the good name of his mother, and preferred rather to be an illegitimate king than an illegitimate son. Besides, it was only necessary to go back a generation or two to attach the line of Ptolemy to that of the ancient "Zeus-born" kings of Macedon. The wife of Lagos had belonged, in fact, to the royal family, as the Ptolemies took good care to observe.
The Ptolemaic empire was, accordingly, based on three concurrent theories, one for the native Egyptians, one for the Greek city-states and one for the Macedonians.
Appian of Alexandria,[90] writing about two hundred years after the death of Cleopatra, cites the royal registers as authority for his report that Philadelphus kept, for land operations 200,000 foot, 40,000 cavalry, and arms for 300,000 men; in addition, 300 war elephants and 2000 war chariots; for naval warfare, 2000 transports, 1500 battleships with three to five banks of rowers, and oars and rigging for twice that number. He had also, according to the same authority, 800 royal barges with gilt poops and beaks, and in his treasury a reserve of 740,000 Egyptian talents, or $890,000,000.
That the reserve as given amounts to three times the value of the gold and silver in the United States treasury shows that the enumeration belongs only in the history yet to be written of the absurdities of statistics. More credible estimates of the Egyptian army place it at 80,800 under the second Ptolemy and (exclusive of natives, who then numbered 26,000) 49,700 under the fourth Ptolemy.[91] These are very large totals. It will help to solve many questions of Ptolemaic policy to observe where the soldiers came from.
But first we may notice that they could not come from the natives; for their most important duty was to hold them in subjection. There were so many people to keep down! Alexandria itself had a large native quarter. The other two Greek cities in the land were but alien flecks in the midst of a great multitude. Up and down the valley lay the native hamlets, to the number of 33,333 according to Theocritus, teeming with the seven million people whom Egypt then sustained. Alexander the Great may have dreamed of Hellenizing these masses; Ptolemy, however, had no such thought, as is shown conclusively by the fact that under his dynasty and, indeed, for at least two centuries after its fall, Naucratis, and probably also Ptolemais, forbade by law marriages between their citizens and the natives.[92]
The sole landowner in Egypt was the king. The entire valley of the Nile was literally his personal estate.