The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

His subordinates, like himself, were men of no rank higher than knighthood and were the personal servants of Cæsar; the mechanism of government remained the same as had been perfected under the Ptolemies, only from this time forward the Greeks were superseded by the Romans. Among the higher offices were those of chief magistrate, administrator of the chest of the dominion of Egypt, prefect of Alexandria, or of certain districts in the capital; and one procurator fari Alexandriæ was certainly chosen from among the ranks of freedmen.

The taxes were no less high than before, but Cæsar saw to it that Egypt was placed in a position to pay her taxes every year. He had all the Nile canals, which had got choked or dried up under previous rulers, thoroughly cleansed and repaired by his soldiers; he completed the canal system where it required completion; and the beneficial results of these necessary measures were very soon apparent. The famous statue of the Nile is surrounded by sixteen putti, as a symbol that the river must rise sixteen cubits if Egypt is to hope for an abundant harvest; if it only rises half that height it means dearth and famine in the land. But after the restoration of the canal system under Augustus a rise of twelve cubits indicated a good harvest as early as the governorship of Petronius, and if the rise was only eight, it did not necessarily mean a bad one. In one of the latter years of Augustus the Nile must have risen to an extraordinary height, if we may trust the mutilated records of the Nilometer at Elephantine—probably twenty-four cubits.

Roman Catapult

The soldiers of Augustus were also employed in making roads and constructing cisterns at various places. Coptos is the point to which most of the roads which connect the Nile Valley with the Red Sea converge. Here an interesting inscription has recently been discovered, dating probably from the last years of the reign of Augustus, and bearing a long list of the names of the soldiers who had made cisterns at various points along these roads and laid out a fortified camp where they met.

The Indian trade rose rapidly to prosperity under Augustus. As early as the time when Strabo journeyed through Egypt he saw at the most diverse spots signs that the country was beginning to recover from the ruinous consequences of the system of government pursued by the last Ptolemies. In the latter years of Cleopatra’s reign barely twenty ships had ventured to put out from the Red Sea; under the rule of Augustus there was a stately fleet of Indiamen, which engaged in the African and Indian trade with great success, and brought in a substantial profit to the Egyptian government, which not only exacted import duties but afterwards charged a considerable export duty upon Indian goods. But it is hardly possible to estimate, even approximately, the revenue which Augustus drew from his newly acquired province.c

ADMINISTRATION OF THE PROVINCES

An explanation should be given of the general principles which were followed by the Romans in the administration of subject lands. The consecutive pursuit of these principles secured the result that provinces originally disparate in every particular, through the influence of Roman administration, were made into a single whole which was not only externally symmetrical but also internally harmonious—a whole in which the various nationalities with their political, civil, and social idiosyncrasies more or less disappear.

The word “provincia” is much older than those conquests outside Italy which we have hitherto designated with the name of provinces; it requires particular explanation. So long as the kingdom existed in Rome, the king was the sole exerciser of the imperium, that is to say, of unlimited military and judicial power. But with the beginning of the republic it was transferred to two consuls, from 367 B.C. it was in the hands of one prætor, from 247 B.C. in the hands of a second prætor; it therefore became necessary to define the limits of a power that was practically unbounded and was the appanage to each of these officials, to establish a definite sphere of action for each of them, the official designation of which is “provincia.” By provincia then we understand the area of activity specially assigned by law or by a senatus consultum or also by lot or accord to a consul or prætor, the area within which he exercises his imperium. In this sense we say consulibus Ligures provincia decernitur, and in this sense we call the office of the prætor urbanus provincia urbana and that of the prætor peregrinus provincia peregrina. No provincia is assigned to offices which do not possess imperium, for where there is mention of the provinces of the quæstors the provinces of the consul or of the prætor are meant to whom the quæstor acts as a subordinate official.

After the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia in the year 227 B.C. four prætors were appointed instead of two and the imperium was also geographically so marked out that in the newly defined districts two prætors received military and judicial powers, that is to say the old consular imperium, simultaneously, this moreover being shared by the remaining prætors and later on by the proconsuls and proprætors. From this time forward provincia becomes the designation for a governorship across seas and means first, in the abstract sense, command in a country outside Italy, secondly, in a concrete sense, the country subjected to the governor itself.