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.

Among other changes then brought in by the Romans was the use of a fixed
year in all civil reckonings. The Egyptians, for all the common purposes
of life, called the day of the heliacal rising of the dogstar, about our
18th of July, their new year's day, and the husbandman marked it with
religious ceremonies as the time when the Nile began t