They paid no rents for their lots, no poll-tax, and one tenth, in place of one sixth, of the yield of their gardens and orchards. Like the Hellenes generally, they might give commutation money in lieu of manual labor on dykes and canals. In other respects they were taxed rather more severely than the "royal tenants"; and, in addition, they had to pay certain feudal "aids" to the king. If they failed to pay these "aids," or if they fell in arrears with their taxes, they lost their holdings. Hence they were under a financial constraint to make the land, which they commonly received as waste land, productive. The soldiers were, accordingly, the "pioneers" of Ptolemaic Egypt, steadily at work enlarging the arable areas of the country and redressing the agricultural wrongs which it had sustained during the troubles of the later Persian régime. Their lots reverted to the king when they died or left the army. The king could then add them to his domain or reassign them to other soldiers. During the imperial period of Ptolemaic history he seems to have taken the former course whenever the land was in a condition to bring him in a rent in addition to the taxes. However, from the very beginning, he undertook to make a new or a re-grant to the sons of dead or superannuated soldiers who were trained for military service. These were officially designated "men of the _epigone_, or increase," and they entered the army at the same time that they entered upon their inheritance. In this way the Ptolemies bred a crop of new soldiers in Egypt, so that they might look forward to being gradually less dependent upon mercenaries recruited from beyond the seas. Egypt was being enriched by a new military caste which should take the place by the side of the new dynasty which the "_machimoi_" or "warriors" had occupied during the old days of the native Pharaohs.