Resentment was also offset by the fact that the new cities increased the demand for agricultural products and local farmers’ profit margins. Many of the immigrants were content to let former owners continue as tenant farmers, and they increased productivity by introducing new crops and new techniques wherever possible, such as double-cropping and the use of iron plowshares. The extensive irrigation systems of Egypt and Babylonia were also serviced and extended; they were essential in these regions, which could not rely on rainfall. But the newcomers also learned; the seeding plow, which placed seeds in regular furrows, had long been in use in Babylonia, but not in mountainous Greece, whose small amount of good arable land was sown by hand. Overall, the coming of the Greeks and Macedonians did not make as much of a difference as might be thought. Even in a remote area like Bactria, recent archaeology has shown that the incoming Greeks expanded land use only by 10 percent. ⁴

Ptolemy’s kingdom comprised about 23,000 square kilometers (8,880 square miles) and a population of about four million; Seleucus’s, at its largest extent, occupied over 3,750,000 square kilometers (about 1,500,000 square miles) and had a population of about fifteen million. The immigrant population was never more than 10 percent in either kingdom. They were heavily outnumbered. And so they took more radical measures to avoid displeasing at least the more powerful among the native populations—the merchants and landowners, and especially the priests, who were in effect the only political group in both Egypt and Babylonia. If resistance was going to emerge, it would most likely be fomented by the priests, as the leaders of their people—and as the managers of wealthy temple estates with a lot to lose. A king who did not have the support of the priesthood would not last long; he would not even be considered a true pharaoh.

First, as successful defenders of their realms, the kings brought peace and prosperity, which went a long way toward mitigating any hatred their arrival might have caused. Second, existing temple-run lands (which could be massive estates, including a number of villages along with their workshops and farmland) and large privately owned estates generally remained in place—which is to say that the king graciously granted that much of his spear-won land to the temples and landowners. Their side of the bargain was loyalty, or at least passivity. Ptolemy and Seleucus also both undertook programs of refurbishing old temples or building new ones, and made certain to take part in the appropriate local ceremonies and celebrations. Their Persian predecessors had rarely acted with such diplomacy toward the Egyptian priesthood.

Third, both of them employed natives in responsible positions in the administration. How could they not? They needed collaborators, people who spoke the languages and were familiar with the way things worked at a local level. They needed to guarantee a smooth transition to the new dispensation, so that taxes would begin to flow in as quickly as possible. But they fell short of Alexander’s notion of an empire governed by both Macedonians and natives; under Ptolemy and Seleucus, natives rarely rose very high in the administration. Few provinces of Asia and none of the forty-two counties (or “nomes”) of Egypt, for instance, ever had a native governor. The top jobs, and positions at court, were reserved for Greeks and Macedonians.

Nevertheless, as the years and decades passed, the native elite became more and more hellenized, in the familiar colonial process whereby the closer one gets to the ruling class, the more cultural differences are eradicated. To this extent, the upper levels of society were permeable by natives. Otherwise, in both states, hellenization was superficial; people were proud of their traditions and were encouraged in that pride by their priests. The gymnasia that sprang up all over Egypt and Asia, and resources such as the Museum in Alexandria, were intended primarily for Greek use, not to hellenize the natives. Just as the gymnasia in classical Greece had been for the aristocratic elite, so the gymnasia of every town and even large village in the new world were for the new elite, Greeks and other nonnatives, with rare exceptions for successful social-climbing natives. As in British India, there were formidable barriers to full assimilation. ⁵

Fourth, they interfered as little as possible in native traditions. Both Egypt and Seleucid Asia were Janus states, in which local religious practices, artistic conventions, and so on continued unabated alongside newly introduced Greek forms. Successor imperialism was happily unaccompanied by the phenomenon familiar from later empires of missionary conversion of the natives to a “better” religion; Greek religion was scarcely dogmatic, and like polytheists from all times its practitioners were tolerant and found it easy to identify their gods with native gods.

In both Egypt and Seleucid Asia, two sets of laws—native and Greek—ran in parallel for the two populations; the language of the case documents determined in which court the case was heard. The kings were likely to intervene in local law only if their revenues were threatened. Both kingdoms used two official languages (Greek and Aramaic; Greek and demotic Egyptian) and even had double calendrical systems. Year One of the new era that was ushered in by Seleucus’s recovery of Babylon began on the Babylonian new year—but also on the Macedonian new year, which fell about six months earlier. In Egypt, the gap was considerably greater; Ptolemy began to count his regnal years in Greek from his first gaining the province in 323, but native Egyptians counted from 305, when he formally became an Egyptian pharaoh. He was King of the Macedonians, but Pharaoh of the Egyptians, the first pharaoh of the thirtieth, final, and longest-lasting dynasty of the ancient kingdom of Egypt. Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia were not fully Greek states but slightly awkward amalgams.

The fact that local systems were allowed to run in parallel to the conquerors’ preferences indicates a considerable degree of local autonomy—more in Asia, because of its sheer size. There were plenty of crossover points, but the Greek-speakers kept themselves apart as much as possible. Their tolerance of the continuation of local administrative institutions mirrored their cultural isolation from the native populations. The separation between conquerors and subjects was most marked in the founding of new Greek enclaves, and best epitomized by the fact that the full title of the city of Alexandria, distinguishing it from all the other Alexandrias around the world, was not “Alexandria in Egypt” but “Alexandria by Egypt.” The title reeks of the supremacism inherent in the imperialist mentality. It is an often repeated but still telling fact that Cleopatra VII (the famous Cleopatra), the last Macedonian ruler of Egypt, was also the first to learn the Egyptian language.

Despite these measures, however, the fact that there was little trouble, at least for a good while, was due as much as anything to the long history, in both Egypt and Asia, of foreign occupation. Many of the native populations, especially in Asia, were so remote from the king that their lives hardly changed; they simply exchanged one distant master for another, while continuing to give their immediate allegiance to the same landowner for whom they had been working before.

Ptolemy’s and Seleucus’s regimes were authoritarian in nature, backed up by a strong military presence. Their appeasement measures could do no more than prevent passive acquiescence from escalating into active resentment. In Asia, where the Persians had been the top dogs, Seleucus tactfully let their heartland, Persis, retain a greater degree of autonomy than other provinces of his empire; Macedonians were described there in one document as “the demons with disheveled hair of the Race of Wrath.” ⁶In Egypt, Ptolemy took the precaution, after the Battle of Gaza in 312, of not employing a native Egyptian contingent in his army; his great-grandson, Ptolemy IV, took the momentous step over a century later of rearming native troops, and the cost was the first native rebellion in Ptolemaic times. The core of the Seleucid army, however, was made up right from the start of native troops, armed and trained in the Macedonian manner.