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Octavian after the Fall of Alexandria

Author(s): Ulrich Wilcken


Source: The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 27, Part 1: Papers Presented to Sir Henry
Stuart Jones (1937), pp. 138-144
Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/297196
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OCTAVIAN AFTER THE FALL OF ALEXANDRIA

By ULRICH WILCKEN

When I received the welcome invitation to take part in this


tribute to Sir Henry Stuart Jones, I realized, to my great regret,
that other pressing obligations would not leave me time to prepare a
paper worthy of the occasion. But, as altogether to miss this oppor-
tunity of expressing my respect and admiration would have been most
distasteful, I have ventured to offer him the notes which follow,
slight and modest though they are.
It had long been known that in Egypt under Augustus dates
were given, in accordance with age-old custom, by his regnal years;
but the papyri have revealed, as I was able to show with the help of
two examples in i895,1 that side by side with this system there
existed another method of dating by the years -c Kocdtapos xpocs6?C)a;
OCov utoi5, both systems alike reckoning from the Egyptian New
Year's day in 30 B.C. (i Thoth = 29 August). 2 Several new documents
soon increased the evidence, which I discussed again in my Griechische
Ostraka (i, 787 if.); and since then a whole series of fresh examples
has come to light. For a long time now these two methods of dating
have been universally recognized ; 3 and it need scarcely be said that
in the admirable new edition of Liddell and Scott, for which it is
impossible to be sufficiently grateful, the scholar whom we are
honouring has referred, s.v. xp&ct6o, to n Ko6axpoQ xpcm6m as ' an
era in Egypt.' For the interpretation of the idea underlying the use
of xCp&-~oCTu in these contexts I compared4 the passage in which
Cassius Dio records5 that, after the fall of Alexandria (i August
30 B.C.), among many other honours to Octavian the Senate voted
that the day of its surrender should be a dies festus and that in future
it should mark the beginning of the local era 6 and this era ordained
by the Senate I identified with the xp&-onq-era of the papyri. For
these reasons I called it a ' conquest-era,' established by Rome ; and
that it is really Roman, and wholly non-Egyptian, is proved by the
fact that in this kratesis-dating Octavian (later as Augustus) is always
called Osoi3 u'Lo (divi filius) 7-a term which is never found in his
dating by regnal years and which regularly points to a Roman origin.
In apparent contradiction of this account it must be admitted that,
IHermes xxx, 151 ff. 51i, 19, 6.
2 Cf. W. Kubitschek in P-W i, 617- 6r v re uidpav, h' i 'AEtdv5pefia 'd?Xw,
a-yaOhv re etvac Ka ES es e7reag cta g7 a'pXnTv T7vS
3 Gardthausen alone (Augustus ii, 457) completely a7rapt06/o?ew5 a7CZV vouLLEcT6o1a.
misunderstood my arguments in Hermes and 7 It is notorious that the Greeks lacked the idea
consequently rejected them. of divus and consequently expressed it by eois. So
4 Hermes, xxx, I5. for them Octavian became 0 e o u vLOs.

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OCTAVIAN AFTER THE FALL OF ALEXANDRIA 139

as the papyri prove, the kratesis-era was reckoned not from the
surrender of Alexandria on i August8 but from the Egyptian New
Year's Day, on which the regnal year also began; but this may be
explained by the assumption that Octavian, who can scarcely have
failed to settle these matters in Egypt himself, took charge of the
re-arrangement of the calendar to prevent two different New Year's
Days from falling close together at the beginning and end of August-
which in practice would have been an absurdity. 9 He was committed,
however, to the Egyptian New Year by the tradition of the regnal
reckoning, and this made him abandon the original significance of
the era ordained by the Senate-the commemoration of the fall of
Alexandria. There is a good deal to be said for the view that, when
the shift was made to i Thoth, Octavian allowed the era to mark
the acquisition not of Alexandria, but of Egypt, which from his
point of view had a far greater political importance. Unfortunately
the only text which is so far known to have contained a
qualification of xpa-Tascoq 0 ? breaks off at the crucial p
A[ .....xocracq KouLacpoq] Ozo5 [u]Loii, and we must hope
for a new find to decide whether 'A[? voApztocs or A[ly6wTrou is to be
supplied. Wessely, who published this document, Preisigke, Kiessling
and others have accepted AlyurnTcou, in my opinion rightly; and in
Liddell and Scott as well ` Kocaocpoq xpxcpmq is glossed' (sc. Aly6wTrou)'.
In any case, in the alteration of the calendar we have an arbitrary
modification of the senatus consultum by Octavian.
So much for what is really no more than a summary of our know-
ledge hitherto about the two systems of dating; but my reason for
returning to the subject is that a new monument has recently been
discovered which will perhaps enable us to penetrate somewhat
deeper into their political significance. The three sumptuous
volumes entitled The Bucheum, edited by Sir Robert Mond and
Oliver H. Myers, contain matter of first-class importance to historians,
archaeologists and students of religion. 11 They record the brilliant
results achieved by the British excavators in five seasons at Hermonthis
(in the Thebaid). Among other discoveries were the burials of the
Buchis-bulls, which are an exact parallel to the Apis-burials at
Sakkara, and those of the Mothers of Buchis. These finds are of the
greatest value for historians of religion; but for our purpose the
main interest lies in Volume ii, where H. W. Fairman gives an
excellent publication of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. Among them
are included the Buchis-stelae, stretching (with some lacunae) from
Nectanebo II to Diocletian, and thcse are quite unlike the familiar
8 There is no trace of an era beginning on VK?7, did not begin on 2 September, the day of the
I August: hence Mommsen, to whom the kratesis- battle, but on the Syrian New Year's Day which
era was unknown, assumed that Dio was in error fell soon afterwards-on I October.
(Rdm. Staatsr. ii3, 804 n. 2).
0 Preisigke, Sammelbuch 5244.
9 For this point cf. Hermes xxx, I 53. In Gr.
Ostraka, i, 788 1 called attention to the fact that 11inFortv-first Excavation Memoir of the Egypt
Syria the Actian Era, which was counted from the Exploration Society, 1934.

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I40 ULRICH WILCKEN

Apis-stelae from the Serapeum because they are official documents,


compiled by the priests of Buchis, in which for each dead Buchis
there are given the dates of his birth, his installation and his death,
and the length of his life. In addition there are frequent mentions
of notable events which occurred during his career.
Here, however, I must only deal with the dating of the stela
which belongs to Year i of Octavian (no. I3). It concerns a bull
which was born in 53 B.C., under Ptolemy Auletes, and which died
in Year I of Octavian on 2I Pharmuthi (= i6 April 29 B.C.). Accord-
ing to Fairman's translation,12 the hieroglyphic text begins with
the words 'Year I, Pharmuthi 2I of Caesar, the mighty one
beloved of the Osiris Buchis, Great God, Lord of* the House of
Atum': this was the day of the bull's death. In vol. ii, p. 32,
Fairman gives his reasons, which in my opinion are convincing, for
taking this ' Caesar' to be Augustus. But what particularly concerns
us here is the group of signs which he translates 'the mighty one (?).'
He quotes from Gauthier's Livre des rois, v, three places where,
though in different constructions, the same Egyptian word mhti
(=power) appears, as in our text, in connection with a date after the
name of Caesar, which is enclosed in the royal cartouche. In the stela
from Hermonthis the words which come after ' Caesar' are a paren-
thesis-' he is powerful' 12a but in the two texts from Year 2I of
Augustus the name is followed by 'of the power which he wields.' 13
This corresponds exactly to the Greek xpOC-Saewq, as was recognized
in the light of our Greek investigations by W. Spiegelberg,14 with
whom Gauthier agreed; and his conjecture that this was an
'Uebersetzungsversuch' to render our Greek formula seems to me
to be confirmed by the fact that in the example from Year 41 there
comes, according to Gauthier, after the name of Caesar and outside
the cartouche s3ntr,15 which represents OZoe uAo6 ( = divi filius).
This provides conclusive proof of Roman origin; and in view of
these parallels, despite the difference of its grammatical construction,
I have no doubt that in our text from rear i of Caesar we have a.
similar attempt to express 'r7C Kocspo4 xpocrrase in Egyptian-as,
indeed, is obviously assumed by Fairman, whom I have to thank
for references to the literature. This by itself is a valuable -result,
because hitherto our evidence for the conquest-era has been confined
to much later years ;16 but now this Buchis-stela provides proof
12Vol. ii, 1z. A photograph of the stela, with (i) Year i : our Buchis-stela. (ii) Year 2i: two
a transcription, is in vol. iii, pl. xliii. cases in Gauthier, vI 1O (Fairman ii, 32). (iii) Year
1 2a I am glad to say that this view of the gram- 23: Preisigke, Sammelbuch 5244 (Fayum). (iv)
matical structure is taken by Dr. A. H. Gardiner. Year 31 : P Frihner in Hermes xxx, I52 (Fayum).
13 The construction in the text from Year 41 is (v) Year 33 : Buchis-stela (Daressy) in Aeg.
different again; but in all cases the word for Zeitschr. xlv, 9I (Spiegelberg); Gauthier v, 14.
'power' appears. (vi) Year 36: BGU I74: Hermes, l.c., 15I (Fayfim).
14 Recueil de travaux, xxxiii, 191 I 178. (vii) Year 38: P Fay. 89. (viii) Year 39: P
1s Not printed by Fairman. Grenf. ii, 40 (Fayam). (ix) Year 41 : Gauthier v,
16 The Greek and Egyptian evidence for dating i 8. (x) Also Year 41 : Preisigke, Sammelbuch
by this era at present known to me is the following. 523I-translation from demotic; see copy ibid.

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OCTAVIAN AFTER THE FALL OF ALEXANDRIA 14I

that the era was being used in the z?poc of Egypt a


of Octavian.17
Still more interesting, however, is the fact that in our Buchis-
stela the name' Caesar ' is not in a cartouche. This striking peculiarity
has been emphasized by Fairman, who points out that ' Caesar does
not bear the developed titulary which the Romans eventually assumed,
nor is his name enclosed in a cartouche ' ; but I cannot agree with
him when he goes on to say that ' this may indicate that the stela
was set up at a time when the claims of the Emperor to be a legitimate
Pharaoh had not been recognized.' Let me recall a text which
belongs to the same Year i, and indeed happens to have been set up
only one day before the death of our bull (that is on 20 Pharmuthi =
15 April, 29 B.C.), wherein the hieroglyphic royal-date shows Caesar
already with the traditional titulary of the Pharaohs. This is the
famous trilingual inscription of the praefectus Cornelius Gallus from
Philae, 18 and it shows that at one and the same time the priests of
Philae were dating their hieroglyphic text by the regnal-era-in
Year i ' under His Majesty, the Horus, the handsome youth, . . .
Caesar (in cartouche), whom we pray may live for ever,' and the
priests of Buchis at Hermonthis were dating by Year i of the xpovr-a
of Caesar, whose name they do not enclose in the royal cartouche.
Unless I am mistaken, the Philae inscription also enables us to explain
the action of the priests at Hermonthis ; for it records that shortly
before this time Gallus had s-uppressed a revolt in the Thebaid in
fifteen days and, as he proudly adds, had captured five cities (urbes !).
It must be admitted that Hermonthis does not appear among the
cities mentioned ; but its position, fourteen miles or so south of
Thebes on the left bank, and the special prominence of Thebes in the
cult of Buchis which is revealed by the new stelae, leave no room for
doubt that it took part in the rebellion. And since the Thebaid had
just been subjugated by the Roman government, it is intelligible
that the inhabitants were resentful of the Roman power. In this
political situation we may, perhaps, see the explanation of the peculiar
dating adopted by the priests of Buchis.
I must confess that it was only the contrast between the attitude
of the priests at Philae, who may well have been influenced by Gallus'
presence when they set up their text, and that of the priests at
Hermonthis which first brought home to me the full significance of
the difference between the two systems of dating.
In the case of the dating by regnal years it must be borne in
mind that this could not be employed until the Egyptian hierarchy
5275. (xi) Between Year 4I and Year 43: PSI i, Hohmann (Zur Chronologie d. Papyrusurkunden,
36a (Fayum). (xii) Early, but lacking the year- 191 I, 47) in support of his mistaken assumption that
number: P Teb. ii, 382. N. Reich's study of the this era was established under the influence of
demotic texts (Sphinx xiv, I9IO), which is quoted Syria.
by A. Stein on p. 54 of his Untersuchbngen, is not 18 Simzungsber. Preuss. Akad. 1896, xx: cf.
accessible to me at present. OGIS 654; ILS 8995. On this see my remarks in
17 This destroys one of the arguments used by
Aeg. Zeitschr. xxxv, 1897, I ff.

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I42 ULRICH WILCKEN

had recognized Octavian as Pharaoh, with all the titles and honours,
including divinity, which had gradually become regular in the course
of ages. Whether these were offered spontaneously, or whether the
initiative was his, or whether the wishes of both parties were the
same, we have no information to show; and I refrain from conjecture.
In any case it is clear that the acknowledgment of Octavian as Pharaoh
happened soon after his victory and certainly before he left Egypt;
for the change in the kratesis-era which the Senate had established
after the surrender of Alexandria assumes, as we have seen already,
a consideration of his regnal years starting on i Thoth. Moreover,
in P Oxy. xii, 1453, we have evidence for the regnal dating from the
beginning of Year i; and this same text proves that his first regnal
year followed immediately on Year 22= -7 (of Cleopatra),1 9 the last
year of the Lagidae. The energy with which Octavian insisted from
the outset on his own worship in Egypt is revealed by the fact that
during the first year of his reign, certainly before his departure from
Egypt, he installed a certain Psenamon as ' Prophet of Caesar' in
Memphis. 20 Naturally this divine kingship had no relevance outside
Egypt. It was completely incompatible with the Roman con-
stitution ; and, though his royal position gave it a very peculiar
character, he included Egypt in his new settlement of the Empire as
a province: 21 as he afterwards said in the Monumentum, ' Aegyptum
imperio populi Romani adieci.' 22 Nevertheless, the decisive fact
was that, by assuming the position of Pharaoh, he showed from the
first his determination that in Egypt, which was economically of
supreme importance to his future, he would rule alone. And this
decision also explains his extraordinarily stringent prohibition,
unparalleled elsewhere, against any senator setting foot in this
country of which he was king, without his own express permission.
The part played by the person of Octavian in this system of
dating by his regnal years is altogether different from that in dates
by the kratesis. In the latter he is nothing more than the victorious
general who had conquered Egypt, a Roman called ' Caesar divi
filius '-an outstanding man indeed, but still a man. This perhaps
enables us to understand why the priests of Buchis, if they were
still bitter against the Roman power after the suppression of the
Theban revolt, found this conquest-era more attractive for dating
than the use of regnal years, which would have involved the
recognition of Caesar as Pharaoh. It exempted them from the
necessity of giving him any of the divine titles of kings, like ' Horus '
and the rest; and they did not even need to enclose his name in the
cartouche, which was the prerogative of kings alone. Its omission
19 For this interpretation of the double date 21 To the earlier evidence for the provincia,
see my comments on P Wisrz. 5, S (Abhandl. P Gnomon ?I02 (ercapXa) is now to be added.
Preuss. Ak. 1933, no. 6, p. 4I f.). 22 Mon. Ancyranum v, 24. Cf. also ' Aegypto in
20 See the demotic text in Gauthier, op. cit., v, potestatem populi Romani redacta' in the obelisk-
4; cf. thereon F. Blumenthal in Archiv fiir Pap. inscriptions (ILS 9i).
V, 317.

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OCTAVIAN AFTER THE FALL OF ALEXANDRIA I43

shows how clearly they appreciated the meaning of the Roman era;
and our conclusion must be that, startling as their dating appeared at
first sight, 23 it was wholly correct save for the omission of divifilius.
On the other hand, they were not prepared to refrain from connecting
the new master with their god in the customary way, and so they
added the traditional formula ' beloved of Osiris-Buchis, the Great
God, the Lord of the House of Atum.'
With this political distinction between the two dating-systems.
in mind, one may be. tempted, though it involves venturing on
hypotheses, to draw inferences about the political designs of the two
parties responsible for them-of the Senate, that is, and of Octavian..
So far as Octavian is concerned it can scarcely be doubted that, by
reckoning years as the years of his reign in the same way as the
Ptolemies and their predecessors, his intention was to make plain the
monarchical position he occupied in Egypt and to keep it permanently
impressed on the minds of the inhabitants. But is it true that the
Senate, as Dio makes out, really sought to do no more than honour
the victorious ' Caesar, divi filius ' when it voted that the day on
which Alexandria surrendered should mark the beginning of an
era ? Or did it suspect and fear that Octavian, for whom the capture
of Alexandria meant an immeasurable increase of power, would
avail himself of the saecular tradition in Egypt to become its king,
and did it seek for that reason to anticipate the introduction of
Octavian's regnal years by ordaining an era of the fall of Alexandria ?
If this was in fact its unconfessed intention-a point which I will not
attempt to decide-it was defeated by the imperiousness of Octavian:
he did indeed adopt the era established by the Senate, though as.
we have seen with a by no means insignificant modification, but side
by side with this republican-Roman method of dating, if so it may be
labelled, he set up another which was that of his own monarchy.
Thus the study of these two radically different dating-systems
leads us to the most intimate arcana imperii and reveals a detail of
Octavian's political career which, though it must be used with
caution, may not be without interest in the controversial question
of the interpretation to be put on his subsequent establishment of
the Principate.24
In conclusion one may add that the original distinction between.
the two systems of dating, which is particularly clear in the stelae of
Year i from Hermonthis and Philae, was completely forgotten in
the course of Augustus' long and peaceful reign. From Years 36 and
38 we have Greek documents in which both datings are used by the
same person on a single page,25 and the hieroglyphic texts from Years
zI and 41 26 show a cartouche round the name of Caesar in a kratesis-
2 3 Above, p. 140. (Ueber Werden und Vergeben der Universalreiche,
Bonn, Fr. Cohen), p. 24.
24 My position on this subject is indicated in my 25 Supra, p. I40, n. i6 (vi) and (vii).
address on the birthday of the Kaiser in 1915 26 Supra, p. I40, n. i6 (ii) and (ix).

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144 OCTAVIAN AFTER THE FALL OF ALEXANDRIA

date. Indeed, in the Buchis-stela of Year 33 published by Daressy27


the formula ' Under His Majesty, etc.', characteristic of a regnal
date,28 is followed according to Spiegelberg (with whom Gauthier
agrees) by an attempt to render Tq . . xpZoMTiaec, and this is
enclosed in a meaningless cartouche. Thus it is clear that among
the Egyptians too the significance of the Roman era was completely
forgotten and a conflation of the two methods of dating occurred.
Long habituation prevented them abandoning the old regnal system
with its high-sounding religious accompaniments. And so, though
at the outset it was regarded as a real era,3 0 there is no difficulty in
the fact that the Roman xp&'maL4-reckoning did not survive the death
,f Augustus. Formerly I sought to explain the Alexandrine coins
showing Years 44 and 46, which are subsequent to the death of
Augustus, whose last year was 43, by assuming the continuance of
this era 31 but since then these coins have been disposed of by
J. Vogt.32 ' Miinzen,' he says, ' mit Jahreszahlen, die iuber d
Regierungszeit des Augustus hinausgingen, gibt es nicht,' and he
explains both cases of the date L,; as false readings.33 From Tiberius
onwards, so long as Egypt retained a special usage of its own, the
only system of dating used in that country was by the regnal years.

27 Supra, p. I40, n. i 6 (v). the era (in years of the KCpdr-qts), and by the quite
28S; Re which comes after the first cartouche general phraseology of Caesius Dio (Ii, i9, 6)-ds i-&
*should not be taken, with Spiegelberg, to represent gwvtra &sT. I emphasize this point against the doubt;
divi filius, which would have had to follow the expressed by A. Stein in Gnomon, i, 342.
second cartouche. It is rather the regular royal 31 Hermes xxx, . 5 I .
title, ' Son of Re.' 32 Die alexandriniscben Munzen i, I924, I2.
29I do not agree with Spiegelberg that these 33 Thus one may agree with Vogt in referring to
unintelligible signs represent Kafaapos. Moreover,the regnal years the whole series of dates found on
the name of Caesar follows in a second cartouche. the Alexandrine coinage of Augustus, which goes
3? This is suggested both by the regular form ofup to Year 42.

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