Dividing the Spoils

by Waterfield, Robin

  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—w
hich 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 dioikts. 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.