To say that the Roman presence was a new phenomenon in Egypt after the fall of Alexandria in 30 bc would be an untruth. Ptolemy VIII was the first Ptolemaic monarch to bequeath Egypt to Rome at the end of the second century bc in the form of an inscription (Austin 1981: no. 230), and around 80 bc Ptolemy X Alexander again framed a bequest of his kingdom to Rome. Egypt was not turned into a Roman province probably only because of the internal dissensions within the Roman senate about who should take up the governorship (Bowman 2007). By the 60s BC the crown of Ptolemy nicknamed Auletes, ‘‘the Flute-Player,’’ depended on permission by the Roman senate. When Auletes was expelled from Egypt by the Alexandrian mob in 55, he went to Rome, relied on rich Romans for the expenses during his stay there, and then bribed the senate with 10.000 talents: as a result, he was duly restored as a ‘‘friend and ally of the Roman people’’ with the help of Gabinius, legate of Syria.
Egypt was now a protectorate of Rome, although not yet a province (Heinen 1966; Thompson 1994a). The country was occupied by Roman troops, the so-called Gabiniani, and a Roman, the banker Gaius Rabirius Postumus became the dioiketes, i. e. the finance minister of Egypt. The decision to impose a Roman as the financial manager of Egypt (probably in order to recover the debts of Auletes) was unprecedented, and in 54 BC the Alexandrians revolted against Rabirius, accusing him of tyrannical behavior. He was arrested and then defended by Cicero in a famous speech (Pro Rabirio 39-40; Klodt 1992; Capponi 2005: 6). A papyrus document, SB 22.1503, complains that Postomos ‘‘once he took the power removed those who had been appointed from the beginning and those who inherited from their fathers and from their grandfathers... He appointed incompetent and unknown men, after selling off the goods that had been accumulated and guarded for centuries. . . and then ordered that the able and good men be removed, for the purpose of robbery’’ (Balconi 1994). A list of temple payments refers to ‘‘robbery by the Romans’’ as early as 51 bc.
Julius Caesar’s presence in Egypt symbolizes the importance of the kingdom in Rome’s eastern policy (Bowman 2007: 169). In 48 bc he landed in Egypt to fight the last part of his war against Pompey, whom he found dead, assassinated by the young son of Auletes. Displeased by the news, Caesar decided to support Kleopatra VII as the heir of Auletes in the dynastic struggle between her and her brother. Around 47 Caesar and the queen had a son Ptolemy Caesar, nicknamed Caesarion (‘‘Little Caesar’’) who was later associated with the queen as co-regent with the epithets Philopator Philometor (‘‘Father-loving Mother-loving’’). Thereafter, Caesar went back to Rome, leaving his freedman Ruphio and three legions to keep control of the country, and Kleopatra visited him in Rome at least twice, in order to secure benefits for her kingdom. After the Ides of March and the formation of a second triumvirate Kleopatra met Mark Antony, the new master of the East, at Tarsus. The rest is well known through Plutarch, Cassius Dio, and Shakespeare: they got married, had three children, and ruled together, and after his return from Armenia in 34 bc, Antony granted the queen territories he had conquered in the so-called Donations of Alexandria, a sumptuous ceremony that explicitly evoked Alexander’s empire and conquest of Persia (Dio 49.40-1). Antony and Kleopatra were finally defeated at the Battle of Actium in 31 by Octavian and Agrippa, and after the fall of Alexandria they both committed suicide.
During the reigns of Auletes and Kleopatra Egypt was already occupied by Roman forces, as demonstrated by a document preserving a Latin edict of Octavian as triumvir concerning the Roman veterans in the Fayum region of Egypt. Many Roman names feature in Egyptian documents before 30 bc, perhaps Roman soldiers and officials who settled before the formal conquest (Capponi 2005: 8). Roman tycoons started new businesses in the country: a certain Quintus Ovinius was the chief manager of Kleopatra’s textile industries (Orosius 6.19.20 and Bowman 1996: 676-702), and P. Canidius (or Q. Cascellius, according to a different reading of the text) received tax privileges in a document possibly signed by the queen herself (van Minnen 2000 and 2001a; Zimmermann 2002). The increasing presence of Romans in Egypt probably worried Octavian. For fear that they would become too powerful or monopolize the corn supply of Rome, he revived a Ptolemaic regulation whereby nobody should enter or leave Egypt without a passport, and prohibited both senators and prominent knights from entering Egypt without his permission (Tacitus Ann.2.59; Dio Cassius 51.17.1; Purpura 2002). Vice versa, the Alexandrian Museum exported intellectuals, who went to Rome to teach and often became the tutors of prominent Romans, among them the Stoic Arius Didymus, tutor of Octavian, who declined the offer to rule the province as the first Prefect, and the historian Timagenes, who ended up in disgrace for being critical of the new emperor.
World History
