ONE OF THE most important effects of the battle of Ipsus was that it left Seleucus and Ptolemy in firm control of their kingdoms. This is a good point, then, at which to pause from war narrative and take a closer look at those kingdoms, insofar as we have evidence. Many conclusions must remain tentative, but we are even worse off for other Successor kingdoms. Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt remain our best chances for investigating the important topic of what the Successors made of their realms once they had carved up Alexander’s empire.
After Ipsus, the Ptolemaic kingdom remained unchanged, in terms of core territory, until the Roman takeover in 30 BCE. The Seleucid kingdom suffered more from shifting borders, and there were mountain tribes in several parts of the empire that were never altogether tamed. We have already seen that in 304 Seleucus ceded the satrapies bordering India to Chandragupta, and he and his descendants had to put up with several independent or semi-independent kingdoms in Asia Minor, such as Bithynia. For much of the third century, Persis was semi-independent, and around the middle of the third century, the Seleucids lost Bactria, which went independent under Greek leadership. Worse was to follow: the Parthian satrap declared his province free of Seleucid rule in 246, but within ten years had lost it to invaders from the north, who held it for thirty-five years. Seleucus’s great-great-grandson, Antiochus III, recovered it, but only temporarily, and by the middle of the second century BCE the invaders had annexed Media, and Babylonia and Mesopotamia became the front line of their ongoing war with the Seleucids. The remains of the Seleucid empire were finally broken up by the Romans in 62 BCE, and the Euphrates became the border between the Roman and the Parthian empires.
We have a a lot more evidence for Egypt, thanks to the preservation of papyri in the dry heat, than we do for Asia. Almost all this evidence, however, dates from later than the first forty years of the Hellenistic period with which I am concerned in this book. It may be legitimate, in some cases, to project what we know from a later period back on to an earlier period, but this can be no more than intelligent guesswork. As the history of early modern Europe shows, the processes whereby states become increasingly centralized, territorialized, and bureaucratized are complex and develop over time, but we do not have enough evidence for early Ptolemaic and Seleucid history to see the processes in detail. At any rate, I shall assume that, in our period, the administration of the kingdoms was in the process of development rather than settled. Ptolemy and Seleucus spent a great deal of their time on a war footing, and it is likely that their first administrative measures were designed mainly to ensure that their kingdoms were internally stable enough to guarantee them sufficient income to continue to make war.
In each case, as one would expect, the administration blended Macedonian with local institutions.1 In Asia, “local” largely meant
Achaemenid, since Antigonus’s regime had left hardly a mark (or, if it did, it is impossible to distinguish it), but the Persians themselves had necessarily worked with local subsystems in the further-flung parts of their empire. Egypt held a mix of Egyptian and Achaemenid systems, since it had intermittently been under Persian administration for two hundred years. In each case, the Macedonians came as conquerors, with their own way of doing things, but in order not to ruffle too many feathers, and to keep their lives simple, they took over local structures, which had proved their effectiveness for decades, if not centuries. It follows that we should expect to find both similarities and differences between the administrations of the two kingdoms, with the similarities being due to the Macedonian background and the similar situations in which the kings found themselves, and the differences to inherited local practices or other local conditions, such as the relative sizes of the two kingdoms.
Egypt was a relatively self-contained unit, both geographically and ethnically; it consisted of the Nile delta and a thin fertile strip a thousand kilometers (620 miles) up the river, never wider than thirty kilometers (twenty miles) at any point, and bounded by desert to the east and west. Seleucid Asia, however, was a sprawling empire, consisting of huge territories and varied peoples, each with its own traditions and subcultures. In modern terms, they held much of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, and bits of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Seleucus and his son achieved the remarkable feat of coming as conquerors and holding all this together for fifty years before it began to break up in the east. The size of the empire meant that wherever the king happened to be at the time was the center. In Ptolemy’s case, after 313, the center was Alexandria, but Seleucus had palaces or residences all over the kingdom. He was most likely to be found in Antioch, but Susa, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Celaenae, and Sardis were also royal residences.
THE MACEDONIAN BACKGROUND
Macedon basically consisted of a large and fertile plain to the west of the Thermaic Gulf, ringed by mountains (Upper Macedon). The country was rich in all the essentials: timber, grain, and minerals. It was still very largely rural, with a history of barons and princelings ruling cantons of upland farmers and peasants. These cantons were subject to frequent raids from their neighbors; as a result, military prowess was a dominant virtue in Macedonian culture, and kings and barons were expected to be powerful and successful war leaders as well as performing their administrative and religious duties. Each local princeling relied on the advice of a group of close friends, but was the sole decision maker. Every man bearing arms had the right to assemble, but such an assembly had little independent power; it was formed at the ruler’s behest, and its job was to approve his decisions.
When Philip II united the country under central leadership, he retained the same essential structure: king, friends, assembly of citizens. The assembly consisted of whatever citizens were to hand; out on campaign, then, it consisted of however many Macedonian soldiers were to hand. Citizenship and military obligation were very closely allied: in order to be a citizen, you had to be awarded a grant of land by the king, and being the king’s tenant in this way simultaneously committed you to paying your taxes and serving in the army when needed. Sons inherited their father’s obligations along with the land. The king nominally owned all the land (at least in the sense that it was his to dispose of), but parceled it out as he chose. The assembly was not the source of the king’s legitimacy, but could be a critical factor at times of uncertain succession, or if a king proved weak. We have already seen this, at Babylon after Alexander’s death. The increase in the use of army assemblies by the Successors is a sign of their insecurity; it was a kind of insurance.
But the overriding dynamic of any Macedonian king’s administration lay not so much in his relations with the peasantry and soldiers but in his relations with the barons, many of whom formed his inner circle of advisers and lieutenants. In the first place, these Friends were military leaders in their own right, in command of divisions raised from their own cantons. Even the king’s relations with the army, then, were largely mediated by his barons. Since the barons also ruled regions of Macedon, they formed the basic structure of the state, and they also took on any other jobs within the administration that the king required. There must have been a bureaucracy, to promulgate decisions, arrange for the shipment of goods, conscript troops, and so on, and there were local administrative structures for each town and canton, but there was no overall administration as such other than the king and his Friends.
In theory each king’s power was absolute, but in practice he had to defer to his advisers; after all, he could not know everything that was going on everywhere in the kingdom. He also had to defer to the general populace, in the sense that it helped to retain popularity if from time to time he did so. However, few of those who presented themselves at court got to see the king in person rather than, at best, one of his Friends. The barons therefore acted as intermediaries not only between the king and the army but between the king and his citizens. Without the barons’ goodwill he could hardly function.
In critical situations, a Macedonian king might also decide to call an assembly so that his subjects would be fully informed as to what was about to happen, and have fewer grounds for complaint afterward. So, for instance, when Alexander the Great revealed his plans to march farther east than anyone had expected, he first ran the decision past his men;2 and we have seen how several of the Successors had their troops conduct show trials of their opponents to legitimate their wars and assassinations.
Macedon was a tempered monarchy, then, but not a constitutional monarchy. The king was the executive head of state and the chief religious official. It was his right to decide matters of policy, both foreign and domestic (such as levels of taxation); it was his right to form and break alliances and to declare war and peace, and he was commander in chief of the armed forces. He was also the chief judge, with the power to decide whether or not to hold a trial in any given situation, or even whether to order a summary execution. The Homeric model of kingship was close; in Homer’s poems, the elders advise, the people listen and shout out their views, but the final decisions rest entirely with the king.3
The king’s position could be likened to that of a head of a household: he was decidedly the head, but there were plenty of occasions when he had to negotiate potential opposition to see that he got his way. A lot depended, then, on the personality and will of the king. If he was passionate enough and committed enough to a project, there was no person and no body that could stop him. He could do whatever he could get away with.
SECURITY, ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION, AND APPEASEMENT
The Successors’ default administrative model was the Macedonian system, but their immediate predecessors, Philip II and more especially Alexander the Great, had shifted the model more in the direction of autocracy. Their unprecedented successes gave them unprecedented authority, so that they were less afraid of overriding the wishes of their Friends. The same goes for the Successors, as long as they were successful. Ptolemy and Seleucus were certainly successful, and autocratic.
Apart from their shared Macedonian background, other similarities between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid administrations stem from the simple fact that they both came as conquerors, and like conquerors of all epochs had three immediate concerns: security, economic exploitation (control of resources), and appeasement (or legitimation of their rule). These three concerns are interconnected: their kingdoms would not be secure unless they appeased the native elites, nor would they be secure unless they could maintain armies; but armies needed the money economic exploitation could provide, which in turn required a compliant native population. Unlike many later colonialists, these conquerors saw the stupidity of terrorizing or even exterminating the native populations.
As conquerors, and as Macedonian kings, Seleucus and Ptolemy owned their kingdoms as their private estates; as “spear-won” land, it was theirs to dispose of as they wanted. “Tax” was the equivalent of rent to a landlord; huge swaths of land were crown territory, farmed by royal appointment, with all the profits, not just a taxed percentage, swelling the king’s coffers. All resources were concentrated in the hands of the king and then redistributed. Neither Ptolemy nor Seleucus was ever quite a despot, however, and their power was diffused through the hierarchical structures beneath them. Nor were they simply bandits; they took thought for the future, and wanted their sons and grandsons to succeed to functioning and profitable kingdoms after them.
One of the redistributions the kings made was to give away some of their land to temples, cities, and even deserving individuals, who, depending on the size of the donation, could thus become barons within the kingdom, with estates that might encompass several villages and many tied serfs. This was a way for the kings to attract the loyalty of powerful men, and at the same time it brought more land into production and into the taxation system. The villages and farmers on the estate paid tax to the estate owner, who passed on what he owed to the royal treasury. These estates were not always heritable and alienable; they remained nominally crown territory, and in certain circumstances—presumably extreme ones, such as disloyalty—the king could repossess the land. The king could thus assure himself of the continued loyalty of the Greek and Macedonian elite within his kingdom.
Both Seleucus and Ptolemy also settled their troops on the land; in the Macedonian fashion, these soldiers, and then their descendants, owed military service to the crown, and always formed the core of the kingdoms’ armies. This was an economical policy; it was expensive to maintain a standing army, but a pool of soldiers was needed for emergencies, and the royal coffers would profit from the taxes paid by such people as farmers. The policy also made the men grateful to their king, and hence they or their sons would be more likely to respond willingly to any future call-up. A typical allotment consisted of two or three pieces of land, to be used for different agricultural purposes. The size of the allotment depended on its fertility and on the rank of the settler; officers and cavalrymen, higher up the social scale, as usual got more.
Ptolemy settled mercenaries throughout Egypt, wherever such a settlement might help to develop agriculture, police a district, or secure a trade route. Above all, he drained the Fayyum marshes southwest of Memphis specifically for the purpose of settling his mercenaries—t housands of them, during his reign alone. The draining of the marshes shows in miniature the combination of local and Macedonian expertise: the Egyptians had long been expert at irrigation, and the Macedonians brought new developments in drainage engineering. It was a massive project, as great in its way as the building of Alexandria; the water level of Lake Moeris was lowered by radial canalization, and these new canals served to irrigate the reclaimed land. The amount of land in use was trebled. Many of the new settlers, however, preferred to live as absentee landlords in the Greek cities of Naucratis (founded as a Greek emporium in the second half of the seventh century BCE), Ptolemais (founded by Ptolemy ca. 310 on the site of an earlier Greek settlement), and of course Alexandria. Memphis too had long had a substantial Greek population. After the battle of Ipsus, the settling of mercenaries on allotments was extended throughout Greater Egypt, to Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Phoenicia. Ptolemy now felt that these were more securely his possessions.
The size of Seleucus’s territory meant that he had many more trouble spots and trade routes to police and protect. He established far more mercenary settlements, ranging from fortresses to cities; perhaps as many as twenty cities were founded in the first two generations of Seleucid rule. The cities would attract further immigrants and help to cohere the districts in which they were founded, as plants fix soil on a hillside. In Egypt, only Ptolemais really served the same function, since it was founded in the Thebaid district of southern Egypt, which had a perennial tendency to regard itself as a separate state, and so contained a large garrison as well as serving as the administrative center for the region.
Seleucus too founded his cities in agriculturally rich areas, which could then be exploited and taxed to the maximum, and intermarrying with the local population was encouraged (though not imitated by any king after Seleucus himself). Seleucus offered incentives such as payment of removal costs, grants of grain, and relief from taxation for the first few years, to help the immigrants get started; and as soon as he felt it was feasible, he allowed the land to be alienable—not just passed down from father to son, with implicit renewal of the tenancy at each break, but disposable outside the family. Ptolemy was forced to follow suit, or risk losing out in the market for mercenaries.
Mercenaries felt themselves well rewarded by being set up as farmers, and gave their loyalty accordingly. Many of them had left home in the first place because there was insufficient land for them to prosper there. They had won their share of the booty taken in war, and now they and their sons had financial security for life. In Seleucus’s case, the fact that the Greek settlements were spread thinly over a vast empire meant that he had to take steps to ensure that this loyalty endured. He had the sons of his settlers trained at his military headquarters in Apamea. The son remained in training until his father was withdrawn from the reserve, at which point he returned to his allotment and took his father’s place in the reserve, ready to be called up. The culture of the school shaped his loyalty to the king. Ptolemy felt no need for such provisions.
Not unnaturally, the settlement of foreigners on this scale could disturb local sensibilities, so both Ptolemy and Seleucus took care to confiscate land only from those who were too weak and scattered to organize armed resistance, or where it was scarcely used. Hence, for instance, the draining of the underused Fayyum. Wherever possible, they gave away crown land.
Resentment was also offset by the fact that the new cities increased the demand for agricultural products and local farmers’ profit margins. Many of the immigrants were content to let former owners continue as tenant farmers, and they increased productivity by introducing new crops and new techniques wherever possible, such as double-cropping and the use of iron plowshares. The extensive irrigation systems of Egypt and Babylonia were also serviced and extended; they were essential in these regions, which could not rely on rainfall. But the newcomers also learned; the seeding plow, which placed seeds in regular furrows, had long been in use in Babylonia, but not in mountainous Greece, whose small amount of good arable land was sown by hand. Overall, the coming of the Greeks and Macedonians did not make as much of a difference as might be thought. Even in a remote area like Bactria, recent archaeology has shown that the incoming Greeks expanded land use only by 10 percent.4
Ptolemy’s kingdom comprised about 23,000 square kilometers (8,880 square miles) and a population of about four million; Seleucus’s, at its largest extent, occupied over 3,750,000 square kilometers (about 1,500,000 square miles) and had a population of about fifteen million. The immigrant population was never more than 10 percent in either kingdom. They were heavily outnumbered. And so they took more radical measures to avoid displeasing at least the more powerful among the native populations—the merchants and landowners, and especially the priests, who were in effect the only political group in both Egypt and Babylonia. If resistance was going to emerge, it would most likely be fomented by the priests, as the leaders of their people—and as the managers of wealthy temple estates with a lot to lose. A king who did not have the support of the priesthood would not last long; he would not even be considered a true pharaoh.
First, as successful defenders of their realms, the kings brought peace and prosperity, which went a long way toward mitigating any hatred their arrival might have caused. Second, existing temple-run lands (which could be massive estates, including a number of villages along with their workshops and farmland) and large privately owned estates generally remained in place—which is to say that the king graciously granted that much of his spear-won land to the temples and landowners. Their side of the bargain was loyalty, or at least passivity. Ptolemy and Seleucus also both undertook programs of refurbishing old temples or building new ones, and made certain to take part in the appropriate local ceremonies and celebrations. Their Persian predecessors had rarely acted with such diplomacy toward the Egyptian priesthood.
Third, both of them employed natives in responsible positions in the administration. How could they not? They needed collaborators, people who spoke the languages and were familiar with the way things worked at a local level. They needed to guarantee a smooth transition to the new dispensation, so that taxes would begin to flow in as quickly as possible. But they fell short of Alexander’s notion of an empire governed by both Macedonians and natives; under Ptolemy and Seleucus, natives rarely rose very high in the administration. Few provinces of Asia and none of the forty-two counties (or “nomes”) of Egypt, for instance, ever had a native governor. The top jobs, and positions at court, were reserved for Greeks and Macedonians.
Nevertheless, as the years and decades passed, the native elite became more and more hellenized, in the familiar colonial process whereby the closer one gets to the ruling class, the more cultural differences are eradicated. To this extent, the upper levels of society were permeable by natives. Otherwise, in both states, hellenization was superficial; people were proud of their traditions and were encouraged in that pride by their priests. The gymnasia that sprang up all over Egypt and Asia, and resources such as the Museum in Alexandria, were intended primarily for Greek use, not to hellenize the natives. Just as the gymnasia in classical Greece had been for the aristocratic elite, so the gymnasia of every town and even large village in the new world were for the new elite, Greeks and other nonnatives, with rare exceptions for successful social-climbing natives. As in British India, there were formidable barriers to full assimilation.5
Fourth, they interfered as little as possible in native traditions. Both Egypt and Seleucid Asia were Janus states, in which local religious practices, artistic conventions, and so on continued unabated alongside newly introduced Greek forms. Successor imperialism was happily unaccompanied by the phenomenon familiar from later empires of missionary conversion of the natives to a “better” religion; Greek religion was scarcely dogmatic, and like polytheists from all times its practitioners were tolerant and found it easy to identify their gods with native gods.
In both Egypt and Seleucid Asia, two sets of laws—native and Greek—ran in parallel for the two populations; the language of the case documents determined in which court the case was heard. The kings were likely to intervene in local law only if their revenues were threatened. Both kingdoms used two official languages (Greek and Aramaic; Greek and demotic Egyptian) and even had double calendrical systems. Year One of the new era that was ushered in by Seleucus’s recovery of Babylon began on the Babylonian new year—but also on the Macedonian new year, which fell about six months earlier. In Egypt, the gap was considerably greater; Ptolemy began to count his regnal years in Greek from his first gaining the province in 323, but native Egyptians counted from 305, when he formally became an Egyptian pharaoh. He was King of the Macedonians, but Pharaoh of the Egyptians, the first pharaoh of the thirtieth, final, and longest-lasting dynasty of the ancient kingdom of Egypt. Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia were not fully Greek states but slightly awkward amalgams.
The fact that local systems were allowed to run in parallel to the conquerors’ preferences indicates a considerable degree of local autonomy—more in Asia, because of its sheer size. There were plenty of crossover points, but the Greek-speakers kept themselves apart as much as possible. Their tolerance of the continuation of local administrative institutions mirrored their cultural isolation from the native populations. The separation between conquerors and subjects was most marked in the founding of new Greek enclaves, and best epitomized by the fact that the full title of the city of Alexandria, distinguishing it from all the other Alexandrias around the world, was not “Alexandria in Egypt” but “Alexandria by Egypt.” The title reeks of the supremacism inherent in the imperialist mentality. It is an often repeated but still telling fact that Cleopatra VII (the famous Cleopatra), the last Macedonian ruler of Egypt, was also the first to learn the Egyptian language.
Despite these measures, however, the fact that there was little trouble, at least for a good while, was due as much as anything to the long history, in both Egypt and Asia, of foreign occupation. Many of the native populations, especially in Asia, were so remote from the king that their lives hardly changed; they simply exchanged one distant master for another, while continuing to give their immediate allegiance to the same landowner for whom they had been working before.
Ptolemy’s and Seleucus’s regimes were authoritarian in nature, backed up by a strong military presence. Their appeasement measures could do no more than prevent passive acquiescence from escalating into active resentment. In Asia, where the Persians had been the top dogs, Seleucus tactfully let their heartland, Persis, retain a greater degree of autonomy than other provinces of his empire; Macedonians were described there in one document as “the demons with disheveled hair of the Race of Wrath.”6 In Egypt, Ptolemy took the precaution, after the Battle of Gaza in 312, of not employing a native Egyptian contingent in his army; his great-grandson, Ptolemy IV, took the momentous step over a century later of rearming native troops, and the cost was the first native rebellion in Ptolemaic times. The core of the Seleucid army, however, was made up right from the start of native troops, armed and trained in the Macedonian manner.
TAXATION
The program of appeasement was, of course, self-interested; what the kings were interested in was the generation of income. Both Seleucus and Ptolemy employed a large number of forms of taxation, from percentages of agricultural produce (different percentages for different products) to a monetary tax on certain other products, and even forms of poll tax. Border tolls and harbor dues were imposed. Seleucus took tribute from the Greek cities within his realm and also imposed a tax on slaves. In short, the kings exploited every area they could in order to maximize their income.7
In general, central government interfered less in the lives of Greeks and other nonnatives (who all came to be classified as “Greeks” in both Asia and Egypt, provided they had received a Greek education), and they were taxed at a lower rate. This policy naturally risked increasing resentment, but it encouraged hellenization, and so helped to ensure an efficient and educated bureaucracy. Privileged organizations such as temples received the same kind of preferential treatment, at least for a while—the hands-off approach taken by both Ptolemy and Seleucus was gradually diluted by later kings, who were able to bring the temp les more fully into the royal bureaucratic system, and even took to despoiling them for cash.8 One is reminded of the way fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European kings expanded their power at the expense of the nobles and the Church. It would have been inexpedient for the Ptolemies and Seleucids to have done so straightaway, just as, in England, the dissolution of the monasteries had to wait until the reign of Henry VIII.
Alexander the Great had looted, or liberated, something in the region of five thousand tons of bullion from the Achaemenid empire—comparable to the weight of all the gold stored in Fort Knox—and a great deal of this had been and continued to be turned into coin. The money was used for the whole range of royal expenses, from paying troops and building ships to founding cities and, especially in Alexandria, maintaining a fantastically splendid court. Alexandria was like a gigantic maw, fed by the produce of the Egyptian countryside and the toil of native laborers; already by the middle of the third century it had a population of two hundred thousand. The income generated by taxation was enormous, but so were the kings’ expenses, and in addition to taxes they raised money by selling surpluses abroad and by profiting from the trade in luxuries that passed through their kingdoms—spices from Arabia, gems from the east, gold and ivory from Sudan and from across the Sahara.
Both countries had been to a degree monetized before the coming of the Macedonians, but this process increased at a rapid rate. Along with founding cities, it was one of the main ways in which the kings asserted their kingship and marked the regime change. The natives had to learn to sell at least some of their goods for cash and to accept their wages in cash, because not all their taxes could be paid in kind—some were to be paid in coin. Likewise, when the European imperial nations carved up Africa in the nineteenth century, they introduced coinage to many places which had never used it before, and for the same reason: to facilitate the payment of tax in a form that could readily be used by the central authority.
In due course, both the Ptolemies and the Seleucids developed state-run banks, whose primary purpose was to receive cash payments of tax and thus to act as the equivalent of the royal granaries where tax in kind was stored. Seleucus even encouraged the payment of taxes on cereal crops in cash rather than kind. City building was an important plank in this program, since the surrounding rural population could sell their goods in town for cash, with which they could then pay taxes. Both Ptolemy and Seleucus minted gold and copper or bronze coinage, but silver was the preferred metal—rare enough for the coins to have value, but common enough for even people low down the economic scale to participate in the monetary economy.
The relatively small size of Egypt meant that Ptolemy could control revenue collection more than was possible for Seleucus. Cereal farmers, for instance, were given their seed grain every year from the royal granaries, and by accepting it they accepted the obligation to repay a fixed percentage the following year. Every year, once the flood had subsided, a land survey was undertaken to determine how much good soil the flood had left that year, so that the Ptolemies knew roughly how much income to expect and could plan ahead. A vast and complex bureaucracy was put in place, if it did not already exist, from the court down to villages, to process such information and ensure the regular collection of taxes.9 Within each nome or county, three separate officers, each at the head of his own pyramid of assistants, were responsible, respectively, for agricultural production, finances, and record keeping. All of them reported to the king’s finance minister in Alexandria, the dioik
ts. Censuses were carried out to determine who was to pay the poll tax and at what rate. Capitation tax was initiated by Ptolemy and imitated by Seleucus to the best of his ability, since accurate censuses were impossible in his kingdom.
The efficiency of the system under the first two Ptolemies meant that Egypt was regularly the wealthiest of the Successor kingdoms. In Ptolemy I’s time, it had an estimated annual revenue of about fifteen thousand talents of silver (about nine billion dollars) and eight million artabas of wheat (perhaps 320 million liters, or 72,500,000 U.S. gallons).10 Seleucus took in more (about thirty thousand talents a year), but the natural defenses of Egypt meant that Ptolemy could spend less on the armed services, which, along with city building, were regularly the biggest drain on Seleucus’s finances. As a result, Seleucus’s capital city, Antioch, glittered less brilliantly than Alexandria; he had more urgent demands on his resources.
Another economic measure Ptolemy put in place before the end of the fourth century was to break away from the monetary standard that had been adopted, following Alexander’s lead, all over the empire. Egyptian coins were minted to a considerably lighter standard, and no other coinage was allowed within the realm. All foreign coin brought into Egypt by commerce was surrendered and reminted to the Ptolemaic standard. This somewhat isolated Egypt from the rest of the world, but it “established a royal monopoly of exchange which was extremely profitable to the treasury.”11 Imports were thereby discouraged, while exports could be sold abroad on the higher standard and then recoined at the lower standard, making an extra profit. Egypt was short of silver anyway; one way and another, this was one of Ptolemy’s masterstrokes.
But there was a limit, even in bureaucratized Egypt, to the degree of central control that could be exercised, and more flexible systems were put in place that accommodated existing native institutions. Alexandria intervened more directly in the lives of the new settlements in the Fayyum depression and around Ptolemais than it did elsewhere, where taxation was locally organized, as it always had been. A lot of the complaints that one reads in the papyri from native farmers were complaints against petty Greek prejudice and local corruption, not against the king in Alexandria.12 As long as the taxes came in, Ptolemy was content to let things carry on in the time-honored fashion, or develop in a haphazard way.
The collection of taxes was also decentralized, in keeping with the usual Greek system—or rather, the Greek system was grafted, somewhat awkwardly, on to local systems. The contract for the year’s taxes in a specific product was put up for sale. Tax farmers, wealthy men who were able to post a large surety bond, and often operating as a consortium, underwrote a guarantee of the revenues for a year from a specific tax. If what they collected fell short of the sum bid, the farmers were bound to pay the difference, but if there was the expected surplus, they retained it. But in Egypt (and probably also in Asia), they were not responsible for the actual collection of the taxes in at least some non-Greek areas, which was left in the hands of local agents. In Egypt, the crown similarly licensed the sale of certain key products such as flax, beer, salt, and some oil crops. As with tax farming, this served to protect the Ptolemies from unforeseen variations in revenue.
The size of Seleucus’s kingdom meant that he could not exercise even the limited degree of control that Ptolemy sought. He inherited workable systems and let them continue. In Asia Minor and Syria, Antigonus had replaced the Persian satrapies with smaller, more manageable units that would not give their administrators great wealth, power, or pretensions. Seleucus was therefore able to exert more administrative control there than farther east, where he retained the old satrapal system of the Achaemenid empire. Satrapies and even cities were allowed to retain many of their own institutions. A city in Syria would not necessarily feel itself part of the same “empire” as a city on the borders of Afghanistan or one in Asia Minor.
Just as in Ptolemaic Egypt, a hierarchical pyramid spread out under Seleucus. The first layer was occupied by trusted family members, who were awarded special commands, such as oversight of all the eastern satrapies (Antiochus) or of western Asia Minor as a whole (Achaeus). The second layer was occupied by his Friends, men we could call his ministers of state, chiefly with broad financial responsibilities; for such an enormous empire, there were very few such dedicated ministers. The third layer was occupied by the military and financial administrators of satrapies and other regions and by the city authorities. Each of these layers of officers had considerable power within their domains, while being answerable to the next level above; each officer had a considerable network of junior officials under him. As in Egypt, the jobs of all officials within the hierarchy were chiefly to ensure security and the smooth collection and storage of taxes.
PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .
The Janus nature of Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt—the choice not to impose uniformity—meant that kings had to be adaptable in their official discourses. It depended on who they were talking to: should they be king, conqueror, or god? In Egypt, if they presented themselves as kings, should it be in the Macedonian style or as a pharaoh? In some parts of the empire, they presented themselves as promoters of hellenization and spoke of defending the empire against barbarians; other parts, however, were populated precisely by “barbarian” peoples, and so in these areas the kings came across as preservers of local traditions and guarantors of freedom.
The degree to which long-established local systems were taken over, and kept separate from the instruments reserved for the new elite, meant that, in this sense, the coming of the conquerors made little difference. The greatest impact was in the acceleration of processes that were already taking place: goods could travel farther and more easily (though, apart from luxuries and hard-to-acquire necessities, most trade remained fairly local relative to the size of Alexander’s former empire as a whole), peripheries were brought into a closer relationship with the center, monetization rapidly increased.
Societies remained essentially unchanged in their ancient agricultural forms, only with an additional layer of Macedonian and Greek practices. Hellenization and collaboration with the new rulers were encouraged, but not required, because the new rulers could easily get by with mere acquiescence from the majority of their subject populations. Both Ptolemy and Seleucus were necessarily conservative, since the last thing they needed was to arouse opposition. They supported and even reinvigorated local institutions, and made their subjects’ lives easier and more profitable overall. They were authoritarian rulers and could easily have been despots, but both of them chose the less risky course of appeasement, so that at the same time they could accelerate change in the area that concerned them most—improving the state’s profitability and taxations systems. Their measures worked, in the sense that there was no real trouble in either of their kingdoms during their reigns, or indeed for many years afterward. They managed the most difficult of tricks—a smooth transition to foreign occupation and rule.