The soldiers might sublet their lots in whole or part and live in Alexandria or elsewhere. Or they might take possession and till them with their own hands. To facilitate the actual distribution of the army over the country, the king attached to the lots "quarters" on the premises of the neighboring Egyptians. This was not at all to the liking of the latter, as the following letter of a quartermaster to a county official shows:[98] "We have discovered that certain owners of houses in Crocodilopolis, which were once used for quartering troops, have taken off the roofs, and walled up the doors and built altars in their places. This they have done so as not to have them occupied. If then you agree, in view of the shortage of quarters, write Agenor that he make the owners of the houses take the altars down, and build them up again better than before upon the most suitable and conspicuous parts of the roofs, so that we may be able to take possession." The gods had never objected to having old altars replaced by finer ones. Henceforth, not the entrances, but the roofs, were to be protected by religion. The ancient quartermaster knew his business.
It was decidedly to the interest of the government that it should have a sort of garrison in residence in all the nomes, or counties, of Egypt—trained soldiers ready to take their places in their companies at the command of the chief nome official, who was also their general.
These men were by no means all Macedonians or Greeks. Some of them were Persians who had been in the land when Ptolemy arrived; some were Libyans, Jews, Thracians, Mysians, Galatians; nearly all were from the regions tapped by the empire of the Ptolemies.
They paid no rents for their lots, no poll-tax, and one tenth, in place of one sixth, of the yield of their gardens and orchards. Like the Hellenes generally, they might give commutation money in lieu of manual labor on dykes and canals. In other respects they were taxed rather more severely than the "royal tenants"; and, in addition, they had to pay certain feudal "aids" to the king. If they failed to pay these "aids," or if they fell in arrears with their taxes, they lost their holdings. Hence they were under a financial constraint to make the land, which they commonly received as waste land, productive. The soldiers were, accordingly, the "pioneers" of Ptolemaic Egypt, steadily at work enlarging the arable areas of the country and redressing the agricultural wrongs which it had sustained during the troubles of the later Persian régime.
Their lots reverted to the king when they died or left the army. The king could then add them to his domain or reassign them to other soldiers. During the imperial period of Ptolemaic history he seems to have taken the former course whenever the land was in a condition to bring him in a rent in addition to the taxes. However, from the very beginning, he undertook to make a new or a re-grant to the sons of dead or superannuated soldiers who were trained for military service. These were officially designated "men of the epigone, or increase," and they entered the army at the same time that they entered upon their inheritance. In this way the Ptolemies bred a crop of new soldiers in Egypt, so that they might look forward to being gradually less dependent upon mercenaries recruited from beyond the seas. Egypt was being enriched by a new military caste which should take the place by the side of the new dynasty which the "machimoi" or "warriors" had occupied during the old days of the native Pharaohs.
Multiracial though the soldiers were, they all spoke Greek. They had to regulate their private conduct and their business affairs by the special laws established in Egypt for the benefit of the various ethne, or nationalities, to which they belonged. For in Ptolemaic Egypt, as in the Turkish empire to-day, foreigners brought their own legal restrictions and safeguards with them, which, however, were formulated, for use in the Ptolemaic courts, in ethnic codes. These codes, however, were either couched originally in Greek, or, like the laws of Moses, which the Jews observed, they were translated into Greek at an early date. How much political freedom the various nations enjoyed, it is difficult to say; but in general they seem to have tempered the absolutism of the Ptolemies only where they were massed together in large numbers, as in Memphis and, above all, Alexandria. Elsewhere the ethnic groups were, doubtless, constituted chiefly of the territorial soldiers, or cleruchs, as they were called.[99] These, however, ceased to have any civil rights when called by the king into active service. With them political agitation could become effective only when it became mutiny.
Prominent among the institutions which the Hellenic and Hellenized foreigners brought into Egypt were those that centred in the gymnasia. Some of them were, doubtless, at first and for long, a subject of scandal and wonderment to the natives. As the Greeks ran and tumbled stark naked in the palæstræ, or in the contests for which, as for the army, the palæstræ were the training-grounds, the story of Heracles and Busiris was constantly reënacted; except that in time Busiris came to see whence sprang the strength which he could not resist. It was in the gymnasia also that the Greeks received their higher education and by its means that they secured for their sons the ideas which the poetry and philosophy of Hellas alone could give. In the gymnasia temples of Hellenism appeared in county after county of Egypt.
The foreigners brought with them into Egypt their native religions, and, when they were not monotheists like the Jews, they came easily into sympathy with the myriad cults of the natives. A religious rapprochement was thus established and a bi-religious milieu created, by which a new half-Greek, half-Egyptian god, Sarapis, whom Ptolemy I introduced from Sinope, prospered. Before long this Janus-like deity, who was endowed with a sanctity and miraculous power which hoary Egypt could alone give, and with a plastic beauty peculiarly Greek, became distinctively the great god of Egypt, and, in conjunction with Isis, Anubis, and Harpocrates, the most active religious force in the whole world of the Ptolemaic empire. Sarapis-Osiris, the monarch, judge, and savior of the world of the dead: Ptolemy-Pharaoh, the monarch, judge, and savior of the world of the living;—these two and these two alone received the divine homage of Greeks and Egyptians alike. The early Ptolemies willed the impossible; to accept the native deities, cults, creeds, and hierarchies as the active element in the fused Græco-Egyptian religion; to let the two civilizations represented in their realm coalesce in so far as their religious ideas, practices, aspirations, and hopes were concerned; and at the same time to keep them apart in other respects: to preserve in other matters the unapproachable superiority of the invaders.
Certainly, success in this attempt to graft the ancient religion which he as Pharaoh was bound to accept and preserve on the new stock of Hellenism without corrupting the fine flavor of the fruit hitherto borne by it in Greece, depended on making the Greek cities, Alexandria, Naucratis, and Ptolemais, and the Græco-Macedonian military colonies simply the Egyptian portion of a Græco-Macedonian realm reaching over the seas to the head of the Ægean. This necessary support to his position in Egypt the third Ptolemy jeopardized when he neglected to replace the great fleet after 242 B.C. For twenty long years, moreover, he left his army at work farming in Egypt, with the inevitable result that it became immobile. Such a neglect of military matters seemed warranted by the impotence of his two great rivals. For during this entire period Asia was rent by a dynastic struggle and Macedon was paralyzed by a general insurrection in Greece. His weak and indolent son paid the penalty for his father's neglect. By strengthening his army with 26,000 natives, whom he armed and drilled in the Macedonian fashion (221-217 B.C.), he saved the empire for seventeen years, when it fell before the combined attack of Macedon and Syria (202-200 B.C.); but he tempted the Egyptians to lay claim with the sword to partnership with the foreigners in the government. Thus presented, their claim was rejected, as was natural; but once the empire was lost and the flow of immigration into Egypt ceased, the Ptolemies of the "domestic" period were forced to acknowledge its justice.