To the ordinary men-at-arms lots of land all over Egypt were assigned; to those of the guard and the cavalry, sixty-five and forty-five acre farms, to the infantrymen, farms of twenty acres. For Egyptian conditions these were very large units, and since under Philadelphus--who perfected this system of farming out his soldiers--the army consisted of 57,600 foot and 23,200 horsemen, over one quarter of all the arable land in Egypt would have been in their possession, if only land naturally watered by the Nile had been given to them, and if none of them were mercenaries serving only for hire. Many, however, were doubtless mercenaries of this type; and to the rest, land was commonly distributed which needed some expenditure of capital and energy to be reclaimed from the desert or the water. Of this kind of land the Ptolemies evidently inherited a goodly quantity from the Persians, whose government had been rendered inefficient in the fourth century B.C. by frequent revolts of the natives. The soldiers might sublet their lots in whole or part and live in Alexandria or elsewhere. Or they might take possession and till them with their own hands. To facilitate the actual distribution of the army over the country, the king attached to the lots "quarters" on the premises of the neighboring Egyptians. This was not at all to the liking of the latter, as the following letter of a quartermaster to a county official shows:[98] "We have discovered that certain owners of houses in Crocodilopolis, which were once used for quartering troops, have taken off the roofs, and walled up the doors and built altars in their places. This they have done so as not to have them occupied. If then you agree, in view of the shortage of quarters, write Agenor that he make the owners of the houses take the altars down, and build them up again better than before upon the most suitable and conspicuous parts of the roofs, so that we may be able to take possession." The gods had never objected to having old altars replaced by finer ones. Henceforth, not the entrances, but the roofs, were to be protected by religion. The ancient quartermaster knew his business. It was decidedly to the interest of the government that it should have a sort of garrison in residence in all the _nomes_, or counties, of Egypt--trained soldiers ready to take their places in their companies at the command of the chief nome official, who was also their general. These men were by no means all Macedonians or Greeks. Some of them were Persians who had been in the land when Ptolemy arrived; some were Libyans, Jews, Thracians, Mysians, Galatians; nearly all were from the regions tapped by the empire of the Ptolemies.