Augustus began his reign in Egypt in B.C. 30 by ordering all the statues of Antony, of which there were more than fifty ornamenting the various public buildings of the city, to be broken to pieces; and it is said he had the meanness to receive a bribe of one thousand talents from Archibus, a friend of Cleopatra, that the queen’s statues might be left standing.  It seems to have been part of his kingcraft to give the offices of greatest trust to men of low birth, who were at the same time well aware that they owed their employments to their seeming want of ambition.  Thus the government of Egypt, the greatest and richest of the provinces, was given to Cornelius Gallus.

Before the fall of the republic the senate had given the command of the provinces to members of their own body only; and therefore Augustus, not wishing to alter the law, obtained from the senate for himself all those governments which he meant to give to men of lower rank.  By this legal fiction, these equestrian prefects were answerable for their conduct to nobody but the emperor on a petition, and they could not be sued at law before the senate for their misdeeds.  But he made an exception in the case of Egypt.  While on the one hand in that province he gave to the prefect’s edicts the force of law, on the other he allowed him to be cited before the senate, though appointed by himself.  The power thus given to the senate they never ventured to use, and the prefect of Egypt was never punished or removed but by the emperor.  Under the prefect was the chief justice of the province, who heard himself, or by deputy, all causes except those which were reserved for the decision of the emperor in person.  These last were decided by a second judge, or in modern language a chancellor, as they were too numerous and too trifling to be taken to Rome.  Under these judges were numerous freedmen of the emperor, and clerks entrusted with affairs of greater and less weight.  Of the native magistrates the chief were the keeper of the records, the police judge, the prefect of the night, and the Exegetes, or interpreter of the Egyptian law, who was allowed to wear a purple robe like a Roman magistrate.  But these Egyptian magistrates were never treated as citizens; they were barbarians, little better than slaves, and only raised to the rank of the emperor’s freedmen.

Augustus showed not a little jealousy in the rest of the laws by which his new province was to be governed.  While other conquered cities usually had a senate or municipal form of government granted to them, no city in Egypt was allowed that privilege, which, by teaching the citizens the art of governing themselves and the advantages of union, might have made them less at the mercy of their masters.  He not only gave the command of the kingdom to a man below the rank of a senator, but ordered that no senator should even be allowed to set foot in Egypt without leave from himself; and centuries later, when the weakness of the country had led the emperors to soften some of the other stern laws of Augustus, this was still strictly enforced.