A déjà vu or what? While watching the image of tens of thousands of Egyptians demonstrating in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez City is fascinating, this is nothing new. Well at least any Ptolemy kings or Roman governors of Egypt would find their country practically unchanged after 2000 years. In the Hellenic and Roman periods, demonstrations and street violence was quite common in Egypt. Especially what was happening in Alexandria in Roman times is well documented.
Of course, the nature of chaos in street in Egypt is different. Or, is it? It seems that one thing remains constant: Egypt still does not have a mature and functioning democracy and street demonstration is the only way people could express their political will, just as in Roman Alexandria.
The Roman Empire was no democracy. The very concept of democracy had not yet been established in political process of the Mediterranean world, save Athen’s attempt at full participatory democratic system for a brief period. But such a system can work only in a small community of free citizens. In a more cosmopolitan and complex world of Hellenism and Roman imperialism, democracy was unthinkable. It just would not work.
As the Roman world matured, economy became more complex and society diverse. Several political groups, bound by common or similar interests formed spontaneously, but they didn’t have what we might call ideology so they did not articulate their purposes in a language we can understand. Religion provided a sense of identity. There was a roughly four-way split inside Egyptian society: imperial Orthodox Church, representing the people who were gaining real power in the Empire; Egypt’s own brand of Christianity, which represented the native inhabitants of Egypt and would become Coptic Church; the Jews, made up of the intellectuals and international traders who considered themselves above the rest of the common folk; the Pagans, descendants of the earlier Roman aristocracy and a dying breed.
These people fought on streets of Alexandria, trying to gain dominance over city’s politics. This was a time when there was no such thing as election; therefore, they tried to win power by violence. But this was the closest thing they got to a democracy. No matter how despicable the whole thing might have looked to the intellectuals who wrote down some notable incidents, people simply didn’t have any other recourse to get their voices heard.
Sometimes, this street violence got really nasty. One incident recorded by writers of the day was the murder of Hypatia, a pagan philosopher and scientist. She was a highly educated upper class lady. Her father is Theon, a mathematician. She was unwittingly caught up in political struggle in Alexandria. She was probably killed because of her strong political influence over Alexandrians across social divide. She was respected as a well bred intellectual and someone with dignity. As such she was an obstacle to some low born politicians and religious leaders who were trying to intimidate the governor of Egypt. One day, a bunch of these people finally snapped, ambushed Hypatia on the street and murdered her.
At the beginning of 2010, I saw the film Agora (amazingly, Rachel Weiz the Mummy girl as Hypatia), which depicted this incident. Historical films are usually not very accurate as far as facts go, but, as for Hypatia’s murder, facts are rather obscure anyway. But the film had a clear message that bigotry and religious fanaticism stifled humanitarian and scientific advances (apparently, what Hypatia was about to discover was buried in history, until Johannes Kepler finally got it 1200 years later). The film missed the point of unique political development in Roman Egypt and that the street violence was a result of the lack of political system to provide a means of popular expression. What might look like fanaticism to us did not necessarily mean a dysfunctional society.
In this sense, Egypt hasn’t changed much. People there still cannot express their views freely. Apart from the chosen few, most people live in poverty. Yet Egyptian society has become much more complex and diverse than either the British administrators in the colonial days or the Egyptian ruling elite after Nasser’s revolution have ever envisaged. It is no longer a simple country of farmers living of the riches of the Nile and the Bedouins selling stuff for $1 apiece to tourists.
Plus international environment surrounding Egypt and new communication technology changed people dynamic a lot. We don’t know exactly how participants of mob violence were motivated, but the ancient Egyptians appeared to be less timid compared with the Egyptians today. Perhaps that’s due to differences between the loose imperial system of Rome and Mubarak’s regime.
In any case, what we are seeing is almighty helpful for us who study history of ancient and medieval Rome. The contemporary chroniclers described mob violence as a despicable degeneration of civilization, shaking the foundation of Roman civilisation from its roots; yet, what was happening is more of a case of people who were denied access to political process suddenly finding a way to put their demands and exert pressure on the power elite. Again, the film is wrong. The violence of Alexandria in the late fourth century did not signal the fall of Rome. Yet surely society was changing, and unless politics changes accordingly, what we might have is a cataclysmic upheaval, which, if handled badly, could lead to the collapse of half the domain you have. Rome survived the fifth century, but it lost the capital, City of Rome, to the Goths; in two centuries, Egypt itself was lost to the Arabs. After that, the Roman Empire was no longer a cosmopolitan empire that Caesar and Octavian had founded. You might call it a Roman state, and western historians perhaps righty dismiss it and insist that Rome ‘fell’ in 476CE. We can only hope that the ilk of the Al Qaeda would not play the role of the prophet Muhammad himself when the Arab world itself collapsed under the weight of popular anger.
