Bell, Antinoopolis

ANTINOOPOLIS: A HADRIANIC FOUNDATION IN EGYPT

By H. I. BELL

The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 30, Part 2. (1940), pp. 133-147.

(A lecture given at the Annual General Meeting of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 28th May, 1940.)

The city state was the most characteristic expression of the Hellenic way of life; and it is appropriate that the most Philhellenic of Roman emperors should have been distinguished as a founder of cities and an encourager of civic institutions. We are ill informed about the constitution and history of most of his foundations, but concerning one, which was in Egypt, a country whose soil preserves so perfectly the antiquities which it covers, we have a considerable amount of evidence. Antinoopolis is thus of interest not only to the historian of Roman and Byzantine Egypt, but also for the light it may throw on Hadrian’s aims and ideals as a founder of cities.

The site of the city, it must be confessed, though it has been excavated more than once, has not been so productive of papyri as, for example, the neighbouring Hermopolis, still less Oxyrhynchus and several sites in the Fayfim ; but by great good fortune, for reasons which I will discuss later, many documents found elsewhere concern citizens of Antinoopolis and provide valuable evidence on the city’s constitution and municipal organisation.

Hadrian visited Egypt in A.D. 130-131, accompanied by his wife and a great train, one member of which, the court lady Julia Balbilla, left mementoes of the tour in the shape of some very indifferent Greek poems inscribed on the colossus of Memnon. With the Emperor was his favourite Antinous ; and on the voyage up the Nile the beautiful boy was drowned in the river. Legend busied itself in after years with the catastrophe; according to one story Antinous, learning that some great disaster threatened Hadrian, sacrificed himself to the Nile as a peaceoffering. In fact, nothing is really known as to the details ; what is certain is that the Emperor was for the time being overwhelmed with grief at his favourite’s death and, besides other honours, commemorated him by the foundation of a city. The date of the foundation was the 30th October, A.D. 130 ; that of Antinous’s death may presumably be placed a little earlier.

Of course, it is not to be supposed that the foundation of the city had no other motive than to honour Antinous. Hadrian was no scatterbrained enthusiast but an able administrator of large views and comprehensive policy. If he chose this method of commemorating his favourite, it was because he had what [134] seemed to him sound reasons for the foundation. Alone among the lands thrown open to Greek enterprise by the conquests of Alexander Egypt was poor in Greek cities. Alexander himself founded the city which still bears his name ; Ptolemy I, in imitation, founded Ptolemais in Upper Egypt ; but these two, with the older Naucratis, a relic of days when a native dynasty still ruled in Egypt and the Greeks came thither only on a precarious sufferance, and possibly, too, Paraetonium, though its status is a little obscure, ((See A. H. M. Jones, Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 307)) made up the tale. Greeks of course there were in abundance, but they were scattered amid an Egyptian population, settled on the land as military cleruchs or in the nome-capitals as traders, officials, and technicians. Being Greeks, they brought with them their Hellenic institutions, their gymnasia, their educational system and social life ; but until Roman times these were private or at the most semi-official in character. Rome, which favoured Hellenism, gave the gymnasium and its head, the gymnasiarch, official status and organised the nome-capitals on lines which recalled the Greek polis, with a body of magistrates, the gymnasiarch, the eutheniarch, the exegetes, and the like, and even, eventually, with something like a demos or popular assembly, with, moreover, a privileged class, whose sons were educated in the gymnasium and passed through the ephebate ; but from a strictly legal standpoint these metropoleis were still no more than big villages. Hadrian seems to have felt that it would be well to strengthen Hellenism in his Egyptian province by the foundation, in Middle Egypt, of a Greek city to balance Ptolemais in the upper country and Naucratis and Alexandria in the Delta. For the new city was to be definitely Greek in character. The very name of its citizens proclaimed that fact no less clearly than its commemoration of Antinous: ‘to the magistrates, council and demos of the Antinoites, the New Greeks’-such is the full official title of the citizen body as found in Imperial letters addressed to it. ((SB 8012; P. Wiirzb. 9 ; etc.))

Antinoopolis was founded on the east bank of the Nile, a few miles from Hermopolis, which stood on the opposite bank. Probably the accident to Antinous occurred at or near this point, and the city commemorated not merely the event but its position. The Nile here actually runs from south-west to north-east, having on its right a small plain between it and the cliffs which form the desert escarpment. The plan of the city, being determined by the direction of the river, was not strictly orientated, but it will be convenient to assume, as Egyptians do, a true south-to-north course of the Nile and hence of the town itself.

There had been an older settlement on the site. A temple of Rameses II has been excavated there by Gayet, who also found traces of even earlier buildings ; but the place seems to have been of little importance and the absence of any reference to it in later times makes it probable that Hadrian found little or nothing to hamper him in planning his new foundation. The design of this was on lines familiar in so many foundations of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Its circumference seems to have been about 3½ miles, and it was surrounded on three sides by a brick wall, the side towards the river being left open. It was built on the gridiron plan, with streets intersecting each other at right angles. Two principal streets of special splendour ran respectively from north to south and from east to west, and their intersection may be regarded as the central point of the city, though it was in fact not in the actual middle but considerably nearer to the river than to the eastern wall of the town. These streets ended in gates and were bordered throughout their whole length with colonnades of Doric pillars. The breadth of the roadway, irrespective of these colonnades, which served as pavements for foot passengers, was no less than 16 m.; each colonnade was 2 m. in breadth. Thus the total breadth of the street was 20 m., as compared with a greatest width of 9½ m. at Pompeii. The quadrivium or point of intersection was adorned with four specially high columns, probably bearing statues.

Along these main streets were situated the chief public buildings of the town, among which were baths, temples, a building conjectured to be the tomb of Antinous, and the theatre, the last of which is mentioned in a papyrus of A.D. 138 ((P. Baden 74.)) as being then under construction. There was, moreover, a racecourse outside the town on the east side.

Early travellers, notably Jomard, a member of Napoleon’s Commission d’Egypte, who found very much more of the city standing than remains to-day, speak of other important streets ; and these main avenues were connected by many others of minor importance. In this way were formed blocks of buildings, which for convenience were numbered. The larger units or quarters were known as ????????, the smaller blocks, into which these ???????? were divided, as ????????. Thus the address of a particular house was indicated by specifying both the ??????, or quarter, and the ????????? or block; and when in sales of house-property the boundaries were specified, we get something like this: ‘The half-part of a two-storeyed house with cellar and court and all belongings and appurtenances in the 4th quarter [136] and 7th block of the city of Antinous, the boundaries of the whole house being, on the south a public street, which affords entrance and exit, on the north the house of Tithoetion and others, on the east the house of Cornelius and others, on the south another three-storeyed house of the vendor’s.’ ((P. Lond. 1164 (c), 11-16.)) In a few cases a point of the compass is also found, for example, ‘in the second quarter, 7th block, north.’ ((P. Lond. 1164 ( d ) , 12)) The exact significance of this is disputed. ((It is probably to be explained b y P. Lond. Inv. 2000; i.e. this block was divided by an east-west canal)) Alexandria had five quarters ; the highest number yet known for Antinoopolis is four, and the highest plintheion-number at present attested is the 13th. ((P. Lond. Inv. 2000, 6.))

So much for the city. What of the citizens ? The city was to be a bulwark of Hellenism in Middle Egypt; it was therefore necessary to choose for its colonists men with as large a share as possible of Greek blood and Greek culture. It may be doubted whether anyone living in Egypt at this period could truthfully claim a pure Greek descent, but men of Greek antecedents there were, and one city at least had cherished fondly its race and its culture. This was Ptolemais, Ptolemy I’s foundation. Papyrus evidence, scanty though it is, suggests that Hellenic traditions were particularly strong there; so strong indeed that Ptolemais seems at a later time to have been very impervious to Christianity, and it never, with one brief and dubious exception, became an episcopal see, though nome-capitals of inferior importance boasted their bishops long before the Council of Nicaea. It was therefore natural that Hadrian should turn to Ptolemais for one source of colonists. How many of his citizens came from there we do not know, but we have definite evidence that a number of the inhabitants were chosen by lot to settle at Antinoopolis. ((P. Wiirzb. 9, 54 f.))

There were, however, Greeks or so-called Greeks in many other parts of Egypt, notably in the Fayum or Arsinoite nome, where we hear during the Roman period of a fixed body, a numerus clausus, known as ‘the 6475 Greek men in the Arsinoite nome. ((See, e.g., G. Plaumann, Avchiv f.Pap. 6, 176-183)) They were presumably the descendants of the Greek and Hellenised mercenaries settled in the Fayum by the early Ptolemies ; the number 6475 ,which is not recorded in any papyrus of the Ptolemaic period as yet discovered, may well have been fixed by Augustus or an early emperor when Egypt was reorganised after the Roman conquest. They probably corresponded to the so-called gymnasium class, a category unknown in the Fayum, of other nomes. They formed in fact, like the gymnasium class, an elite, who enjoyed the privilege of education in the gymnasium, passed [137] through the epicrisis, or selection of privileged boys, and the ephebate, and provided the municipal magistrates. By a fortunate chance we are able to witness the selection of one family from this privileged class, owing to the discovery of its papers, most of them now in the British Museum. In the year A.D. 122 there was living in the Street of the Treasuries at Arsinoe, the capital of the Fayum, a certain Heraclides alias Valerius who, in a loan on interest of 212 silver drachmae which he borrowed that year, is described as son of Heraclides son of Maron, as 46 years old, and as a Persian of the epigone. ((P.Lond. Inv. 1893.)) Since he subsequently became an Antinoite, this last designation may raise doubts as to the Hellenism of the settlers, but it must be explained that it probably meant little. I feel no doubt as to the correctness of the view tentatively advanced by Mr. J. G. Tait that the phrase ‘ Persian of the epigone ‘ was in the Roman period a legal fiction. ((Archiv f . Pap.,7, 175-182.)) Persians of the epigone were subject to certain disabilities in the matter of distraint in the case of default on a debt, and hence lenders seem to have required their debtors to describe themselves as such in order to facilitate execution should it be necessary. Thus we may conclude that Heraclides alias Valerius was merely an ad hoc Persian, though of course it does not follow that he was a pure-blooded Greek.

Though he was a resident of Arsinoe his family had connections with the village of Tebtunis, in the south of the Fayum, which it maintained even after the foundation of Antinoopolis, and it was probably at Tebtunis that its papers were found. His father, Heraclides son of Maron, occurs in two documents dated in A.D. 108 ((P. Lond. Inv. 1951, 1957.)), in one as 62, in the other as 68 years old-a fact which shows how untrustworthy such statements are. He was a keeper of the public records at Arsinoe in the 12th year of Trajan, ((P.Lond. Inv. 1980; cf. Inv. 1943 (a).)) A.D. 108-109. This was a State, not a municipal, office and one for which a fair property qualification was required. The family was clearly of some standing, belonging in fact to the urban upper class, with landed property in several parts of the Fayum, owning domestic slaves, and in its family nomenclature, Maron, Lysimachus, Apollonius, Hermes, Heraclides, showing Hellenic traditions.

We must now pass on to the year 133, when, 2½ years after the foundation of Antinoopolis, we find Heraclides alias Valerius a newly enrolled citizen, and in the act of entering his sons in the citizen class. On the 5th May, 133, there was drawn up in the office of the prytanis the necessary document, known as an &-rrapx.il, of which a translation may be of interest: ((P. Lond. Inv. 1896 (Aegyptus, 13, 522 ff.).))

[138] (Among the) Greek men who within the regulated period handed in memorials to the Senate and afterwards presented their children : Heraclides also called Valerius son of Heraclides son of Maron, an Antinoite, a settler from the Arsinoite nome, one of the Greek men, aged 57 years, for two sons Lysimachus also called Didymus, seven years old, Philosarapis, one year old. Guarantors : Heraclides also called Gemellus son of Heraclides also called Aelurius, an Antinoite, a settler from the Arsinoite nome, one of the Greek men ; Suchus son of Ptolemaeus son of Tryphon, an Antinoite, a settler from the Arsinoite nome, one of the Greek men ; Heron son of Ptolemaeus son of Tryphon, an Antinoite, a settler from the Arsinoite nome, one of the Greek men. Year 17 of Imperator Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, month of Metagitnion which is Pachon, the 10th. Prytanis: Castor son of Ammonius. Signed by me, Arius son of Hermias.

There are several interesting points here, to which I must draw attention later. At the moment the chief feature of interest arises from its early date in the history of the city. It will be noticed that neither Heraclides himself nor any one of his guarantors gives his tribe or deme, all alike being described as settlers from the Arsinoite nome and as belonging to the body of ‘ Greek men ‘, that is, the numerus clausus of 6475. Their citizenship in fact was too new for any deme-assignment to have taken place. Quite different is the position revealed by later ???????, one of which may be translated as a pendant to the one I have just quoted. ((P.Lond. Inv. 1895 (Aegyptus, 13, 525 ff.) ))

It is dated the 24th February, A.D. 151, and refers to a son of one of the boys registered in the previous document:-

Lysimachus also called Didymus son of Heraclides, of the Matidian tribe and Callitecnian deme, 25 years old, for his son Heraclides also called Valerius, twenty days old on the 15th of Thargelion mhich is Mecheir in the present 14th year of Antoninus Caesar the lord. Guarantors : Lysanias son of Didymus, of the Matidian tribe and Plotinian deme, Didymus son of Didymus, of the Matidian tribe and Callitecnian deme, Ptolemaeus son of Heraclides, of the Osirantinoan tribe and Clitorian deme. Fourteenth year of Imperator Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius, month of Thargelion which is Mecheir, the 30th. Prytanis : Messius Iunianus. Signed by me, Heraclides son of Heraclides.

There is no talk here of ‘ Greek men ‘ or of ‘ settlers from the Arsinoite nome ‘, nor are any of the parties described as Antinoites ; they are designated by tribe and deme, which in the now fully established city was sufficient for identification.

The Arsinoite nome, however, was by no means the only nome in which Greeks were to be found, nor was it the only one to which Hadrian turned for colonists. We know of Antinoites at Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere, and the Arsinoite analogy justifies us in concluding that some at least of them were settlers drawn from the nomes in which they are found.

Two sources of supply were then the inhabitants of the Greek foundation Ptolemais and the Greek settlers organised as [139] officially recognised communities in the nomes. A third was the veterans, who on their discharge were sometimes given Antinoite citizenship, though this did not necessarily involve residence in the city. At this period only the Greek or Hellenised inhabitants of Egypt were admitted into the army ; hence a veteran was ipso facto at least nominally a ‘ Greek man ‘. There is, however, no evidence that veterans were drawn on by Hadrian ; those at present known as Antinoites did not become citizens till the reign of Antoninus Pius, and it seems likely that about that time an attempt was made to increase the population of the city by new settlements. This may suggest that the results of Hadrian’s efforts had been numerically disappointing, an hypothesis in some measure supported by the fact that papyrus evidence shows many Antinoites to have kept up their connection with their old homes. I have referred to Heraclides alias Valerius, whose papers are so valuable a source of information. These papers enable us to construct a genealogy of the family from his grandfather Maron, who must have flourished as early as the reign of Nero, to his great-grandchildren, who were living in the reign of Severus Alexander ; and they show that the family continued to reside largely in the Fayum, in particular at Tebtunis, where its muniments were probably found. We meet with other Antinoite families established at Philadelphia and at Karanis in the Fayiim, at Oxyrhynchus, and elsewhere.

The explanation may be that Hadrian overdid the propaganda for his colony : he made citizenship so attractive that many people who had property and social ties elsewhere were glad to accept it for the sake of the privileges which it conferred, but without the intention of making the new city their permanent home. What these privileges were I shall describe presently ; for the moment I should like to turn back to the two documents already quoted.

You will perhaps have noticed that in these two certificates the months were in each case given in double form, first a Greek and second an Egyptian name : ‘ Metagitnion which is Pachon,’ ‘Thargelion which is Mecheir.’ Enough of these double names have been found for a restoration of the complete Antinoopolite calendar to be made ; and it is interesting to find that this is identical with the old Milesian calendar as used at Miletus and its colonies, at Ephesus and elsewhere, each month being at Antinoopolis equated with an Egyptian month. ((Mary E. Dicker, Archiv f.Pap. 9,226 f.)) Why Milesian, it may be asked, especially as this old calendar was no longer in use at Miletus during the Roman period? The explanation is clearly that it was taken not directly from Asia Minor but [140] from Naucratis, a Milesian colony, whose laws, as an official document ((Wilcken, Chrest. 27.)) reporting a session of the Senate shows explicitly, Antinoopolis received. But why Naucratis ? Why not Alexandria, all the more since, as is shown by an unpublished example of the literature known as Acta Alexandrinorum, ((P. Oxy. xviii, 2177.)) that city had the same laws as Hadrian’s beloved Athens ? The choice of Naucratis was probably due to the Emperor’s antiquarianism : it was by far the oldest Greek city in Egypt, beside which Alexandria was a mere parvenu. The statement as to the identity of laws is probably to be understood as referring mainly, if not entirely, to private law, since constitutionally it is unlikely that there was any close resemblance. It is at least improbable that Naucratis, founded before Cleisthenes by his deme-organisation had set the model for later foundations, possessed demes ; but they existed at Antinoopolis. It is of interest to consider the nomenclature employed for them, since such names are as significant of the direction of imperial propaganda as the legends of coins.
Ten tribes are known at present, and no doubt this was the total number. Since the highest number of demes known for any tribe is five, we may perhaps conclude that each of the ten tribes contained five demes. The names chosen for tribes and demes were largely dynastic, and they naturally begin with Nerva, after whom one tribe was named. Among its deme-names were Genearcheios and Propatorios, which emphasise Hadrian’s adoptive descent from the founder of the dynasty. Another name, Hestieus, refers to Vesta as mater deorum et dearum, and another, Eirenieus, to Nerva’s peace-loving tendencies. The fifth deme is as yet unrecorded. The Trajanian tribe, of course, commemorates Trajan, and its three known deme-names, Nikephorios, Ktesios and Stratios, have an obvious reference to his military glories. Hadrian’s own name was given to the Hadrianian tribe ; of the four known demenames, Zenios, Olympios, and Kapitolieus identify him with the supreme god of both Greeks and Romans, while Sosikosmios indicates his role as saviour and benefactor of the human race. His gentile name was adopted for the Aelian tribe ; of the three known deme-names, Apidez~ss eems to commemorate his settlement of the troubles occasioned early in his reign by the installation of a new Apis-bull, Dionysieus to the worship of him as the New Dionysus, while Polieus alludes to him as Zeus Polieus. The Sebastian tribe honours him as Augustus ; of its deme-names, Kaisareios celebrates him as Caesar, Asclepios, Dioskourios and Heraklios recall his initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, and Apollonieus points to his identity with the Pythian. His wife [141] and mother-in-law were commemorated by the Sabinian and the Matidian tribes. In the latter, the deme-names Markianios and Plotinios refer respectively to Trajan’s sister and to his wife ; Demetrieus and Thesmophorios point to Eleusis ; and the compliment to Hadrian’s wife implied by Kalliteknios is obvious. This suggests her identification with Kore ; and the Sabinian tribe continues the Eleusinian reference in the deme-names Gamelieus and Trophonieus, perhaps too in an obscure Matalieus, which Pistorius suggests ((P. V. Pistorius, Indices Antinoop., p. 99.)) may be a scribal error for Matralieus, a reference to Ceres Matralis; so also Harmonieus, again with allusion to Sabina as Kore. Finally, Heraieus hints that she is Hera-Juno, as Hadrian was Zeus- Jupiter.

The family nomenclature is continued in the Paulinian tribe, which gets its name from Hadrian’s sister, Paulina. The demenames Hornognios and Philadelphios emphasise, the first her relationship to the Emperor, the second the love which he bore her, while Isidios and Megaleisios identify her with Isis.

So far the tribe-names have been purely imperial and dynastic ; but two tribes had no such reference. The patron god of the new city was the deified Antinous ; inevitably therefore one tribe, the Osirantinoan, honoured him in his identification with Osiris. Of its deme-names, Bithynieus, Kleitorios and Parrhasios refer to his Bithynian origin, the first directly, the second and third via Arcadia, whence the Bithynians claimed their origin, while Hermaieus and Mousegetios identify him respectively with Hermes and with Apollo as leader of the Muses.

Lastly, it is not surprising to find one tribe, the Athenian, named after Hadrian’s favourite city. Its deme-names, Artemisios, Eleusinios, Erichthonios, Marathonios, and Salaminios, require no explanation.
The exact function of this tribe- and deme-organisation and the principle by which men were assigned to a particular tribe and deme are somewhat uncertain, but it is hardly doubtful that part of the purpose was liturgical, the tribes in turn providing the municipal magistrates. That the tribes corresponded with quarters of the city has been suggested, but is disproved by the evidence. ((Pistorius, o.c. p. 101; E. Kuhn, Antinoopolis, 1913, 130.))

I have spoken of the privileges conferred by Hadrian on his citizens, and to these privileges I must now turn. The first which calls for notice was an institution which again differentiates Antinoopolis from Naucratis : it was the right of ???????? or intermarriage with Egyptians. In a city founded to be a bulwark of Hellenism in Middle Egypt this opening for racial intermixture [142] may seem surprising, but it was unavoidable. At Ptolemais the citizens had no such right to intermarry with Egyptians ; but only a part of the colonists was drawn from there, and in the nomes there was no equally strict racial bar. If colonists were to be attracted from places like the Fayum and Oxyrhynchus, they must be allowed to marry Egyptian wives (many had no doubt previously contracted such marriages) without detriment to the status of their children. The privilege seems, however, to have been one-sided : the children of an Antinoite man and an Egyptian woman were citizens, but not so those of an Antinoite woman and an Egyptian man. ((Pistorius, o.c. p. 94, and P. Oxy. vi, 909.))

Again, Antinoites were exempted from the obligation to undertake liturgies and magistracies (technically distinguished as munera and honores but in practice both by now compulsory) outside their own city. These burdens were in the second century growing continually heavier and more dreaded, and indeed they ended by ruining the municipal middle class in Egypt. Hence the privilege was a very real one and the more valuable because so many Antinoites continued to reside in, or maintain their connection with, their old homes. It was an immunity looked on with a very jaundiced eye by local officials, and we hear of numerous cases of infringement and consequent appeals to a higher authority.

A similar exemption was that from the duty of acting as legal guardian to any minor except an Antinoite whose property lay within the nomarchy of Antinoopolis. ((JEA 18, 70 ff. = SB 7558.)) Antinoites were further exempt from the ????????? or tax (at this time of ten per cent) on sales of real property and slaves ((Aegyptus, 13, 516.)) ; apparently also from duties on any goods imported for their own use. ((Pistorius, o.c. p. 88 f.))

Again, Antinoites to whom debts were owing could have their debtors sent to Antinoopolis to be tried in accordance with the laws of that city. ((SB 5343.)) The civic treasury moreover enjoyed, equally with the imperial fiscus, the right of ???????????, that is to say, the prior right to distrain on the property of a defaulting debtor. ((P. Strassb. i, 34.))

Furthermore, Antinoites were apparently, like Alexandrians, exempt from payment of poll-tax. ((Wilcken, Chrest. 28.)) They were by this fact eligible for service in the legions.

Finally, two very substantial material privileges were granted to the settlers at Antinoopolis. In the first place, some at least among them received allotments of land; unfortunately the evidence is insufficient to show how many, or on what principles [143] the allotment was made. ((Kuhn, p. 82 ;P. Lond. ii, 117,no. 383.)) Concerning the second benefit we have more explicit testimony, and I will quote the main part of a document which illustrates it. It is an application to the nomarch of Antinoopolis from a member of that Tebtunis family to which I have already referred, Lysimachus alias Didymus son of Heraclides, of the Matidian tribe and Callitecnian deme ; and it is dated the 9th February, A.D. 151 30: ((P. Lond. Inv. 1905 (Aegyptus, 13, 518 ff))

Petronius Mamertinus, former prefect, made known to us the benefits granted to us by Divus Hadrianus, the founder of our city, by which he directed that the children of Antinoites who are registered by us, their parents, within thirty days of their birth should be maintained from the proceeds of funds granted by him for this purpose and from other revenues. I therefore register the son born to me, Heraclides alias Valerius, twenty days old, by my wife Ninnarous daughter of Orsenuphis, an Antinoite, the fee for whose birth certificate I paid through the most excellent Senate, furnishing three guarantors of the marriage and the parentage, Lysanias son of Didymus, of the Matidian tribe and Plotinian deme, Didymus son of Didymus, of the Matidian tribe and Callitecnian deme, and Ptolemaeus son of Heraclides, of the Osirantinoan tribe and Clitorian deme; and I swear by the Fortune of Imperator Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius and the most great god Osirantinous that the foregoing particulars are true, or may I be subject to the consequences of the oath.

This document is closely connected with that I quoted earlier. Father and son are the same, so are the guarantors ; the date is fifteen days earlier. The other document is the official certificate of registration, the ??????: this is the notification to the nomarch in order to secure to the child the benefit of Hadrian’s munificence.

Antinoopolis appears to have had the usual municipal magistrates, gymnasiarch, exegetes, agoranomos, cosmetes, ((An unpublished papyrus of A.D. 347 in the possession of the Egypt Exploration Society)) and the like; hitherto no reference has been found to a eutheniarch, but this is probably mere accident. The prytanis, probably one for each tribe, exercising the function in rotation, may have been an eponymous magistrate for internal dating, but this is not certain. Besides these posts, usual alike in the nome-capitals and in the Greek cities, there was at Antinoopolis an official who in the nomes ranked not among the municipal magistrates but as a State official. This was the nomarch. At Antinoopolis his functions were certainly in the main municipal, though in addition to his duties within the city (some light on which is thrown by the document just quoted and which included certain judicial functions) he seems, at least on occasion, to have acted as the representative of Antinoopolis vis-a-vis the higher authorities in [144] Egypt and the State officials in the nomes. Thus in one papyrus ((SB 5343.)) a creditor in Antinoopolis, who had failed to recover a loan from a debtor in the Fayum, petitions the prefect, who directs him to apply to the nomarch : he does so and the nomarch thereupon writes to the local strategus asking him to send the debtor to Antinoopolis to have his case tried ‘according to the regulations established for Antinoites’.

Ptolemy in a list of Egyptian nomes includes an Antinoite nome with Antinoopolis as its capital. ((Ptol. iv, 5, 61.)) Till recently his authority has been accepted without question, and there has been much discussion among scholars as to the constitutional position of the city. The nomes were part of the governmental organisation of Egypt, and each was administered by a State official called the strategus, who had his headquarters in the nome-capital. Antinoopolis as a self-governing city should have been independent of his authority: what then were the relations between the strategus and the city which served as capital of his nome? Recent evidence resolves the question by getting rid of the strategus: it now appears certain that Ptolemy was mistaken and that Hadrian did not establish an Antinoopolite nome at all but left his new city in the nome of Hermopolis, though independent of the Hermopolite strategus. ((See P. Wurzb. 8 intr. ; P. Iand. 140.)) There was indeed a nomarchy of Antinoopolis, part of the nome of Hermopolis, but its relation to the city is obscure. The nomarchs whom we find in the nomes were State officials; but the nomarch of Antinoopolis, borrowed perhaps from Naucratis ((P. Oslo, iii, 92.)) seems, as I have said, to have been civic in character, and possibly the identity of name is a mere accident.

Though there was perhaps some difficulty at first in obtaining a sufficiency of settlers, and despite the apparent reluctance of many of the new citizens to make the city their permanent and exclusive home, Antinoopolis seems quickly to have attained considerable importance and prosperity; and literary papyri found there, though they do not equal in number or variety discoveries at the purely Graeco-Egyptian metropolis, Oxyrhynchus, show that the citizens were not unworthy of their proud title ‘New Greeks’. The city’s size and importance did not end with the beginning of the Byzantine period, but there was then one important change. In a papyrus of A.D. 302, ((P. Lond. Inv. No. 2288.)) we find for the first time documentary mention of an Antinoite nome. When this nome was created it is not possible to say with certainty, but it may probably have been as part of the drastic reorganization which Diocletian carried out in 296. The grant of councils to [145] the nome-capitals by Septimius Severus had given them an almost municipal status and thus tended to lessen the distance between them and the Greek cities; the changes of the early fourth century, which abolished the nome-organisation and turned Egypt into a country of civitates, each with its territorium, still further diminished the pre-eminence of the self-governing cities. There is mention of a tribe as late as A.D. 330, ((P. Lond. 977 (iii, 231).)) but later we hear nothing of the tribe- and deme-organisation, which seems to have fallen into disuse, and even the description ) ’????????, ‘Antinoite,’ used by Antinoites outside the city, is replaced by ??ò ’???????? ??????, ‘from Antinoopolis,’ which was the regular mode of indicating the origin of any Egyptian or Graeco- Egyptian. The Hellenism of the citizens was indeed becoming more and more nominal, and in the course of the Byzantine age the city lost its special position and was merged in the general mass of Egyptian municipalities. The grant of ???????? by its founder opened a dangerous avenue to Egyptianisation. No doubt, despite some modern racial theories, Hellenism, like other national characteristics, is less a matter of blood than of culture and tradition, but the survival of a cultural tradition threatened by an alien environment is probably helped by racial purity, as may be seen by the example of Ptolemais. There was no such safeguard at Antinoopolis, and the Hellenism of its citizens was not sufficiently robust to withstand the influences of their Egyptian surroundings, reinforced as those influences were by the general decay of the municipal middle class which characterised the Byzantine Age and by the rise of Christianity. Recent excavations have brought to light a notable proportion of Coptic papyri and Coptic inscriptions, showing that in the Byzantine period Antinoopolis contained a large Egyptian-speaking element.

Yet the city did not lose its importance ; on the contrary this increased, and it was the seat, in the earlier Byzantine period, of the praeses, later on of the Duke, of the Thebaid; it was in fact the capital of that province, and from the sixth century onwards, if not before, was a garrison town. As a great administrative centre it was also of some importance educationally. Several grammatical works figure among the comparatively small number of papyri found on the site ; and not only the ubiquitous Homer, the Greek dramatists and historians, but even Theocritus, an author who seems to have been surprisingly little read in Egypt, was studied there. Fragments of shorthand manuals testify to the existence of schools which trained the shorthand writers employed in the law-courts and the government bureaux, and the high proportion of Latin texts, both literary and [146] documentary, discovered on the site, may remind us of the increased importance which the Latin language acquired in Egypt in consequence of Diocletian’s innovations. Nor was this study of Latin purely utilitarian : the site has yielded a vellum leaf of Juvenal which must rank as the oldest existing text of the lines which it preserves. Its glosses and scholia, the oldest known to us and belonging to a tradition not elsewhere recorded, show that the poet was studied seriously. Art, too, flourished at Antinoopolis; it was there that Dr. John Johnson found the beautiful drawing of charioteers on a piece of papyrus which obviously formed part of some illustrated bok ((JEA 17, 1)) and a fragment of a botanical work with illustrations ; and the recent Italian excavations have brought to light some notable wall paintings.

Many Byzantine papyri written (though mostly not found) at Antinoopolis reveal there an active commercial and administrative life. The city had its trade guilds and its river-borne traffic, its churches and its monasteries. Of its social life we learn something from (for example) the papers of Dioscorus, the sixth-century advocate-poet from the village of Aphrodito who, having quarreled with his pagarch and found his native district too hot to hold him, fled to Antinoopolis and became a public notary there. The contracts and arbitrations which he drew up show us something of the mutual relationships of the citizens ; the poems he wrote to the administrative nobility afford evidence for the culture of the day. We must beware of concluding from the inflated style of his petitions and the excessive badness of his verses what was the level of education in the highest class ; for Dioscorus, born in a village of the Antaeopolite nome, may well have seemed to them very much of a ‘country cousin’; but he belonged to the higher ranks of the Graeco-Coptic rural populace, had probably been educated away from home, perhaps at Antinoopolis itself, had seen something of the world, visiting Alexandria and even Constantinople, and may be taken as fairly representative of the urban middle class. It is a strange world he presents to us: a world where Hellenic paganism and Christianity, native Egyptian and cosmopolitan culture, the ancient and the medieval, are inextricably mingled. We are far enough away from the Hellenism at which Hadrian fondly aimed when he established his ‘New Greeks’ to honour the memory of Antinous ; but at least this strangely altered society looks back to and, so far as it can, cherishes Hellenic traditions ; and though Hadrian might have smiled (if he had not shuddered) at Dioscorus’s verses - well, after all Balbilla is not exactly a star of later Greek poetry.

[147] The official position of Antinoopolis did not end even with the Arab conquest. In a Coptic document from Jeme datable as late as about A.D. 755, over a century after the conquest, we read: ‘we went to Antinoe and [a word which is unread] the Duke for that whole land.’ Clearly then Antinoopolis was still the seat of the Duke, an official whom the Arabs had taken over from their Byzantine predecessors.

After this the city disappears into the obscurity of medieval Egypt. When the scholars whom Napoleon took with him in his train visited the site considerable ruins of the town were still to be seen; columns, gateways, the lines of streets, and some of the public buildings were sufficiently preserved to give some idea of what Antinoopolis had been ; but the ever-drifting Egyptian sands and the vandalism of the Egyptian peasant (who, if we are to believe Anatole France, shows more of true philosophy when he demolishes an ancient temple to build himself a hut than all the archaeologists who ever grubbed in the soil) have swept most of that away ; and now only the spade of the excavator, the plans and pictures of Napoleon’s Commission, and an imaginative use of the evidence to be derived from papyri can give us any picture of Hadrian’s Egyptian foundation.