The Roman, Christian, and Arabic Periods, History of Egypt Vol. 11

By these unceasing wars, the Egyptian legions had lately been brought into a high state of discipline, and, confident in their strength, and in the success with which they had made their late general emperor of the Roman world, they now attempted to raise up a rival to him in the person of their present general Saturninus. Saturninus had been made general of the Eastern frontier by Aurelian, who had given him strict orders never to enter Egypt. "The Egyptians," says the historian, meaning, however, the Alexandrians, "are boastful, vain, spiteful, licentious, fond of change, clever in making songs and epigrams against their rulers, and much given to soothsaying and augury." Aurelian well knew that the loyalty of a successful general was not to be trusted in Egypt, and during his lifetime Saturninus never entered that province. But after his death, when Probus was called away to the other parts of the empire, the government of Egypt was added to the other duties of Saturninus; and no sooner was he seen there, at the head of an army that seemed strong enough to enforce his wishes, than the fickle Alexandrians saluted him with the title of emperor and Augustus. But Saturninus was a wise man, and shunned the dangerous honour; he had hitherto fought always for his country; he had saved the provinces of Spain, Gaul, and Africa from the enemy or from rebellion; and he knew the value of his rank and character too well to fling it away for a bauble. To escape from further difficulties he withdrew from Egypt, and moved his headquarters into Palestine. But the treasonable cheers of the Alexandrians could neither be forgotten by himself nor by his troops; he had withstood the calls of ambition, but he yielded at last to his fears; he became a rebel for fear of being thought one, and he declared himself emperor as the safest mode of escaping punishment. But he was soon afterwards defeated and strangled, against the will of the forgiving Probus.

 

On the death of Probus, in A.D. 283, the empire fell to Carus and his sons, Numerianus and Carinus, whose names are found on the Alexandrian coins, but whose short reigns have left no other trace in Egypt.

 

 

 

At this time also we find upon the coins the name of Trajan's second Egyptian legion, which was at all times stationed in Egypt, and which, acting upon an authority that was usually granted to the Roman legions in the various provinces, coined money of several kinds for their own pay.

 

The reign of Diocletian, beginning in A.D. 285, was one of suffering to the Egyptians; and in the fourth year the people rose against the Roman government, and gave the title of emperor to Achilleus, their leader in the rebellion. Galerius, the Roman general, led an army against the rebels, and marched through the whole of the Thebaid; but, though the Egyptians were routed whenever they were bold enough to meet the legions in battle, yet the rebellion was not very easily crushed. The Romans were scarcely obeyed beyond the spot on which their army was encamped. In the fourth year of the rebellion, A.D. 292, Diocletian came to Egypt, and the cities of Koptos and Busiris were besieged by the emperor in person, and wholly destroyed after a regular siege.

 

When Diocletian reached the southern limits of Egypt he was able to judge of the difficulty, and indeed the uselessness, of trying to hold any part of Ethiopia; and he found that the tribute levied there was less than the cost of the troops required to collect it. He therefore made a new treaty with the Nobatæ, as the people between the first and second cataracts were now called. He gave up to them the whole of Lower Ethiopia, or the province called Nubia. The valley for seventy miles above Syênê, which bore the name of the Dodecaschonos, had been held by Augustus and his successors, and this was now given up to the original inhabitants. Diocletian strengthened the fortifications on the isle of Elephantine, to guard what was thenceforth the uttermost point of defence, and agreed to pay to the Nobatae and Blemmyes a yearly sum of gold on the latter promising no longer to harass Upper Egypt with their marauding inroads, and on the former promising to forbid the Blemmyes from doing so. What remains of the Roman wall built against the inroads of these troublesome neighbours runs along the edge of the cultivated land on the east side of the river for some distance to the north of the cataract. But so much was the strength of the Greek party lessened, and so deeply rooted among the Egyptians was their hatred of their rulers and the belief that they should then be able to throw off the yoke, that soon afterwards Alexandria declared in favour of Achilleus, and Diocletian was again called to Egypt to regain the capital. Such was the strength of the rebels that the city could not be taken without a regular siege. Diocletian surrounded it with a ditch and wall, and turned aside the canals that supplied the citizens with water. After a tedious siege of eight months, Alexandria was at last taken by storm in 297, and Achilleus was put to death. A large part of the city was burnt at the storming, nor would the punishment of the citizens have there ended, but for Diocletian's humane interpretation of an accident. The horse on which he sat stumbled as he entered the city with his troops, and he had the humanity to understand it as a command from heaven that he should stop the pillage of the city; and the citizens in gratitude erected near the spot a bronze statue of the horse to which they owed so much. This statue has long since been lost, but we cannot be mistaken in the place where it stood. The lofty column in the centre of the temple of Serapis, now well known by the name of Pompey's Pillar,* once held a statue on the top, and on the base it still bears the inscription of the grateful citizens, "To the most honoured emperor, the saviour of Alexandria, the unconquerable Diocletian."

      * See Volume X., page 317.
 

 

This rebellion had lasted more than nine years, and the Egyptians seemed never in want of money for the purposes of the war. Diocletian was struck with their riches, and he ordered a careful search to be made through Egypt for all writings on alchemy, an art which the Egyptians studied together with magic and astrology. These books he ordered to be burnt, under a belief that they were the great sources of the riches by which his own power had been resisted. Want and misery no doubt caused this rebellion, but the rebellion certainly caused more want and misery. The navigation of the Nile was stopped, the canals were no longer kept cleared, the fields were badly tilled, trade and manufactures were ruined. Since the rebellions against the Persians, Egypt had never suffered so much. It had been sadly changed by the troubles of the last sixty years, during which it had been six times in arms against Rome; and when the rebellion was put down by Diocletian, it was no longer the same country that it had been under the Antonines. The framework of society had been shaken, the Greeks had lessened in numbers, and still more in weight. The fall of the Ptolemies, and the conquest by Rome, did not make so great a change. The bright days of Egypt as a Greek kingdom began with the building of Alexandria, and they ended with the rebellions against Gallienus, Aurelian and Diocletian. The native Egyptians, both Kopts and Arabs, now rise into more notice, as the Greek civilisation sinks around them. And soon the upper classes among the Kopts, to avoid the duty of maintaining a family of children in such troubled times, rush by thousands into monasteries and convents, and further lessen the population by their religious vows of celibacy. In the twelfth year of the reign, that in which Alexandria rebelled and the siege was begun, the Egyptian coinage for the most part ceased. Henceforth, though money was often coined in Alexandria as in every other great city of the empire, the inscriptions were usually in Latin, and the designs the same as those on the coins of Rome. In taking leave of this long and valuable series of coins with dates, which has been our guide in the chronology of these reigns, we must not forget to acknowledge how much we owe to the labours of the learned Zoega. In his Numi Ægypti Imperatorii, the mere descriptions, almost without a remark, speak the very words of history.

 

The reign of Diocletian is chiefly remarkable for the new law which was then made against the Christians, and for the cruel severity with which it was put into force. The issuing of this edict in 304 A.D., which was to root out Christianity from the world, took place in the twentieth year of the reign, according to the Alexandrians, or in the nineteenth year after the emperor's first installation as consul, as years were reckoned in the other parts of the empire. The churches, which since the reign of Gallienus had been everywhere rising, were ordered to be destroyed and the Bibles to be burnt, while banishment, slavery, and death were the punishments threatened against those who obstinately clung to their religion. In no province of the empire was the persecution more severe than in Egypt; and many Christians fled to Syria, where the law, though the same, was more mildly carried into execution. But the Christians were too numerous to fly and too few to resist. The ecclesiastical writers present us with a sad tale of tortures and of death borne by those who refused to renounce their faith,—a tale which is only made less sad by the doubt how far the writers' feelings may have misled their judgment, and made them overstate the numbers.

 

But we may safely rely upon the account which Eusebius gives us of what he himself...