EGYPT should have been the happiest of lands, for not only was the earth freely nourished by the Nile, but the country was the most self-sufficient in the whole Mediterranean basin—rich in cereals and fruits, cutting three crops a year, unexcelled in its industries, exporting to a hundred nations, and seldom disturbed by foreign or civil war. And yet—perhaps for these reasons—“The Egyptians,” Josephus notes, “appear never in all their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.”1 Their wealth tempted, their semitropical lassitude suffered, one despot or conqueror after another through fifty centuries.
Rome classed Egypt not as a province but as the property of the emperor, and ruled it through a prefect responsible only to him. Native Greek officials administered the three divisions—Lower, Middle, and Upper Egypt, and the thirty-six “nomes” or counties; and the official language remained Greek. No attempt was made to urbanize the population, for Egypt’s imperial function was to be the granary of Rome. Large tracts of land were taken from the priests and turned over to Roman or Alexandrian capitalists to be worked as latifundia by fellaheen accustomed to merciless exploitation. The state capitalism of the Ptolemies was continued in reduced form. Every step in the agricultural process was planned and controlled by the state: proliferating bureaucrats determined what crops should be sown and in what quantities, annually allotted the requisite seed, received the product into government warehouses (thesauroi, treasuries), exported Rome’s quota, took out taxes in kind, and sold the rest to the market. Corn and flax were state monopolies from seed to sale; so, at least in the Fayum, was the production of bricks; perfumes, and sesame oil.2 Private enterprise was permitted in other fields, but under ubiquitous regulation. All mineral resources were owned by the state, and the quarrying of marble and precious stones was a governmental privilege.
Domestic industry, already old in Egypt, now expanded in the towns—Ptolemaїs, Memphis, Thebes, Oxyrhynchus, Saїs, Bubastis, Naucratis, Heliopolis; in Alexandria it was half the life of the vibrant capital. Apparently the paper industry had reached the capitalist stage, for Strabo tells how the owners of the papyrus plantations limited production to lift the price.3 Priests used the temple precincts as factories and turned out fine linens for their own use and for the market. Slaves outside of domestic service were few in Egypt, since “free” workers were paid only a notch above nudity and starvation. Sometimes the workers went on strike (anachoresis, secession)—they left their tasks and took sanctuary on temple grounds, whence they were coaxed by hunger or fair words. Occasionally wages were raised, prices went up, and all was as before. Guilds were permitted, but they were mostly of tradesmen and managers; the government used them as agents for the collection of taxes and for the organization of forced labor on dikes, canals, and other public works.
Internal trade was active but slow. Roads were poor, and land transport moved on men, donkeys, or camels—which now replaced horses as draft animals in Africa. Much traffic went by inland waterways. A great canal, 150 feet wide, completed in Trajan’s reign, bound the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean through the Nile and the Red Sea, from whose ports at Arsinoë, Myos Hormos, and Berenice ships left daily for Africa or India. The banking system that financed production and trade was under full governmental control. Each nome capital had a state bank, which acted as a receiver of taxes and repository of public funds. Loans were made to farmers, industry, and business by the government, by priests from temple treasuries, and by private lending associations.4 Taxes were laid upon every product, process, sale, export, or import, even upon graves and burials; and additional assessments were levied from time to time, in kind from the poor, in liturgies from the rich. From Augustus to Trajan the country—or its masters—prospered; after that zenith it succumbed to the discouragement and exhaustion of endless tribute and taxation and the lethargy of a regimented economy.
Outside of Alexandria and Naucratis Egypt remained sullenly, silently Egyptian; Romanization hardly touched it beyond the mouths of the Nile; and even Alexandria, which had been the greatest of Greek cities, was assuming in our second century the character, languages, and odor of an Oriental metropolis. Of Egypt’s 8,500,000 population its capital had now some 800,000 5 (in 1930, 573,000), second only to Rome; in industry and commerce it was first. Everyone in Alexandria is busy, says a letter questionably Hadrian’s; everyone has a trade; even the lame and the blind find work to do.6 Here, among a thousand other articles, glass, paper, and linen were produced on a large scale. Alexandria was the clothing and fashion center of the age, setting the styles and making the goods. Its great harbor had nine miles of wharves, from which its merchant fleet wove a web of commerce over many seas. It was also a tourist center, equipped with hotels, guides, and interpreters for visitors coming to see the Pyramids and the majestic temples of Thebes. The main avenue, sixty-seven feet wide, was lined for three miles with colonnades, arcades, and alluring shops displaying the fanciest products of ancient crafts. At many intersections there were spacious squares or circles named plateai, “broad” (ways)—whence the Italian piazza and our plaza and place. Imposing structures adorned the central thoroughfares—a large theater, an Emporium or exchange, temples to Poseidon, Caesar, and Saturn, a celebrated Serapeum or Temple of Serapis, and a group of university buildings known over the world as the Museum, or Home of the Muses. Of the five sections into which the city was divided, one was almost wholly given to the palaces, gardens, and administrative buildings of the Ptolemies, now used by the Roman prefect. Here, in a pretty mausoleum, lay the city’s founder, Alexander the Great, preserved in honey and encased in glass.
Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Italians, Arabs, Phoenicians, Persians, Ethiopians, Syrians, Libyans, Cilicians, Scythians, Indians, Nubians—nearly every Mediterranean people had its quota in Alexandria. They made a volatile and inflammable mixture, quarrelsome and disorderly, intellectually clever and irreverently witty, shameless in speech, skeptical and superstitious, loose in morals and gay in mood, fanatically fond of the theater, music, and public games. Dio Chrysostom describes life there as “a continuous revel … of dancers, whistlers, and murderers.”8 The canals were alive with merrymakers in gondolas at night on their five-mile sail to the amusement suburb at Canopus. There were musical contests that rivaled the horse races in raising excitement and claques.
If we may believe Philo,9 forty per cent of the city’s population was Jewish. Most Alexandrian Jews were employed in industry and trade, and lived in great poverty;10 many were merchants, a few were moneylenders, some were rich enough to win enviable places in the government. Originally confined to one fifth of the city, they had now overflowed to occupy two fifths. They were governed by their own laws and elders, and Rome confirmed the privileges that the Ptolemies had given them to ignore any ordinance that conflicted with their religion. They gloried in their magnificent central synagogue, a colonnaded basilica so vast that a system of signals had to be used to secure proper response at proper times from worshipers too distant from the sanctuary to hear the words of the priest.11 According to Josephus the moral life of the Alexandrian Jews was exemplary compared with the sexual looseness of the “pagan” population.12 They had an active intellectual culture and contributed substantially to philosophy, historiography, and science. Racial hostility agitated the city at various times; we find in Josephus’ tract Against Apion (an anti-Semitic leader) all the causes, arguments, and legends that disturb the relations of Jew and gentile today. In A.D. 38 a mob of Greeks invaded the synagogues and insisted on placing in each of them a statue of Caligula as a god. The Roman prefect, Avillius Flaccus, annulled the Alexandrian citizenship of the Jews and ordered those of them who lived outside the original Jewish section to return to it within a few days. When these had elapsed the Greek populace burned down 400 Jewish homes, and killed or clubbed Jews, outside the ghetto; and thirty-eight members of the Jewish gerousia or senate were arrested and publicly scourged in a theater. Thousands of Jews lost their homes, their businesses, or their savings. Flaccus’ successor submitted the matter to the Emperor, and two separate delegations—five Greeks and five Jews—went to Rome (A.D. 40) to plead their causes before Caligula. He died before he could judge. Claudius restored the rights of the Jews in Alexandria, confirmed them in their municipal citizenship, and sternly bade both factions keep the peace.