Apartheid

164
completing military or administrative service... 317
It is not known to what extent intermarriage between members of the different ethnic
groups was prohibited by law, but it seems that prohibition at first must have increased with
time, as it did in South Africa. The first waves of both Greek and Roman invaders were
soldiers, i.e. men. By the time European women had been brought to Egypt, authorities and
the ethnic Greek social elites were able to increase the racist pressures: ‘Greek tradition, as
well as the laws of some of the older Greek cities, discouraged intermarriage. Only beginning
in the second century [BCE], and generally among the lower classes, did some intermarriage
occur.’ 318 In Alexandria, especially, ‘marriages with non-Greeks were disapproved of by
Greeks’ throughout the Graeco-Roman period. 319 Similarly, the Greeks in Egypt and
elsewhere during the late classical and the entire Hellenistic period “were always quick to
mark the product [of a marriage between a Greek and a non-Greek] hybrid…as ’halfbarbarian’…as
‘bastard Greeks’…Where such marriages were contracted within a Greek city
the offspring were usually to various extents politically disabled and formed a category of
their own”. 320 To all intents and purposes, it seems, the people of mixed Graeco-Egyptian
ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt were of equivalent status to the ‘Coloureds’ in apartheid South
Africa.
In some cases, people were punished directly for marrying across the ethnic lines, in
other cases they were punished indirectly: their possessions were confiscated; their children
acquired a lower official status. Moreover, Greek demographic growth was rewarded,
Egyptian punished. This last condition is why Roman rule was more of a continuation of
apartheid than an introduction of colonial rule. It is shown in the following selection of
marriage laws imposed by the first Roman emperor, Augustus, on the recently conquered
population and even on the invaders themselves:
§ 38. Those born of an urban Greek mother and an Egyptian remain
Egyptians but inherit from both parents.
§ 39. If a Roman man or woman is joined in marriage with an urban
Greek or an Egyptian, their children follow the inferior status.
. . .
§ 45. If an urban Greek marries an Egyptian woman and dies
childless, the fisc appropriates his possessions; if he has children, it
confiscates two-thirds. But if he has begotten children of an urban
Greek women and has three or more children, his possessions go to
them; if two children, a fourth or a fifth [to each]; if one child, a half.
§ 46. Freedmen of Alexandrians may not marry Egyptian women. 321
317 Bowman 1996 (1986): 209. Alexandria may again have outgrown Rome during the late Roman period,
starting in the mid-3 rd century. See Clauss 2003: 221f.
318 Pomeroy, S.B.: Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities, 1997: 217f.
319 Fraser 1972: 71f, quote 71. This was also the prevailing pattern in the Ptolemaic colony of Cyrene, in presentday
Libya, which Ptolemy I annexed to Egypt in 322 BCE. The lower strata of Greek soldiers and colonialists
were allowed to marry Libyans and some did so: “As in a number of other Greek colonies in remote areas, the
colonists were permitted from the outset to intermarry with the women of the surrounding Libyan tribes, and this
permissive legislation, probably not infrequent in the early days of Greek colonization was re-enacted…by
Ptolemy...It would, however, be wrong to suppose that the practice of racial intermarriage penetrated the upper
strata of society, or that Cyrene became a city of ‘mixed-Greeks’.” Fraser 1972: 787. Intermarriage happened,
but it did not change the overall demographic profile, and thus it even played into the hands of the powerful, who
had another possibility of divise rule in this way.
320 Fraser 1972: 71f
321 Lewis, N. 1983: 33. § 46 may have been a way to prevent the most rebellious subjects, the Egyptians, from
forging ties with former and current slaves, which could have resulted in an alliance dangerous to Roman rule.
After all, the slave revolt in Italy under Spartacus lay only four decades back. It had lasted for years and
traumatized Rome and was perhaps the second most successful slave revolt in history after Haiti’s liberation led