IV. REVOLT

The lesson of Ptolemaic socialism is that even a government may exploit. Under the first two Ptolemies the system worked reasonably well: great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, marketing was brought into order, the overseers behaved with a modest measure of injustice and partiality, and though the exploitation of materials and men was thorough, its profits went in large degree to develop and adorn the country, and to finance its cultural life. Three factors ruined the experiment. The Ptolemies went to war, and spent more and more of the people’s earnings upon armies, navies, and campaigns. After Philadelphus there was a rapid deterioration in the quality of the kings; they ate and drank and mated, and allowed the administration of the system to fall into the hands of rascals who ground every possible penny out of the poor. The fact that the exploiters were foreigners was never forgotten by the Egyptians, nor by the priests who dreamed of the fleshpots of Egypt that their class had enjoyed before the Persian and Greek domination.

The Ptolemaic conception of socialism was essentially one of intensified production rather than of wide distribution. The fellah received enough of his product to keep him alive, but not enough to encourage him in his work or in the business of rearing a family. Generation after generation the government’s exactions grew. The system of detailed national control became intolerable, like the relentlessly watchful eye of a despotic parent. The state lent seed-corn to the peasant to plant his crop, and then bound him to the farm until the harvest was in. No peasant might use any of his own product until all his debts had been paid to the state. The fellah was patient, but even he began to grumble. By the second century a substantial part of the soil had been abandoned for lack of peasants to work it; the cleruchs or lessees of royal land could get no tenants to till it for them; they tried to do it themselves, but were not up to the task; gradually the desert crept back upon civilization. In the gold mines of Nubia the slaves worked naked in dark and narrow galleries, in cramping positions, loaded with chains, and encouraged by the whip of the overseer; their food was poor, not even enough to keep them alive; thousands of them succumbed from malnutrition and fatigue; and the only welcome event in their lives was death⁴⁷ The common laborer in the factories received one obol (nine cents) a day, the skilled worker two or three. Every tenth day was a day of rest.

Complaints multiplied, and strikes grew more frequent: strikes among the miners, the quarrymen, the boatmen, the peasants, the artisans, the tradesmen, even the overseers and the police; strikes seldom for better pay, since the toilers had ceased to hope for this, but of simple exhaustion and despair. “We are worn out,” says a papyrus record of one strike; “we will run away”—i.e., seek sanctuary in a temple.⁴⁸ Nearly all the exploiters were Greeks, nearly all the exploited were Egyptians or Jews. The priests clandestinely appealed to the religious feelings of the natives, while the Greeks resented any concession made to Jews or Egyptians by the government. In the capital the populace was bribed by state bounties and spectacles, but it was excluded from the royal quarter, was watched by a large military force, and was allowed no voice in national affairs; in the end it became an irresponsible and violent mob.⁴⁹ In 216 the Egyptians revolted, but were put down; in 189 they revolted again, and the mutiny continued for five years. The Ptolemies won for a time by the force of their army, and by raising their contributions to the priests; but the situation had become impossible. The country had been milked to depletion, and even the exploiters felt that nothing remained.

Disintegration set in on every side. The Ptolemies passed from natural to unnatural vice, from intelligence to stupidity; they married with a freedom and haste that forfeited the esteem of their people; luxury unfitted them for war or government, at last even for thought. Lawlessness and dishonesty, incompetence and hopelessness, the absence of competition and of the stimulus that comes from ownership, lowered year by year the productivity of the land. Literature waned, creative art died; after the third century Alexandria added little to either. The Egyptians lost respect for the Greeks; the Greeks, if such a thing can be believed, lost respect for themselves. Year by year they forgot their own language, and spoke a corrupt mixture of Greek and Egyptian; more and more of them married their sisters, after native custom, or married into Egyptian families and were absorbed; thousands of them worshiped Egyptian gods. By the second century the Greeks had ceased to be the dominant race even politically; the Ptolemies, to preserve their authority, had adopted the Egyptian faith and ritual, and had increased the power of the priests. As the kings sank into epicurean ease the clergy reasserted its leadership, and won back year by year the lands and privileges which the earlier Ptolemies had taken away.⁵⁰ The Rosetta Stone, dated 196 B.C., describes the coronation ceremonies of Ptolemy V as following almost completely the Egyptian forms. Under Ptolemy V (203-181) and Ptolemy VI (181-145) dynastic feuds absorbed the energies of the royal house, while Egyptian agriculture and industry decayed. Order and peace were not restored until Caesar, as a mere incident in his career, took Egypt with hardly a blow, and Augustus made it a province of Rome (30 B.C.).