Multiracial though the soldiers were, they all spoke Greek. They had to regulate their private conduct and their business affairs by the special laws established in Egypt for the benefit of the various ethne, or nationalities, to which they belonged. For in Ptolemaic Egypt, as in the Turkish empire to-day, foreigners brought their own legal restrictions and safeguards with them, which, however, were formulated, for use in the Ptolemaic courts, in ethnic codes. These codes, however, were either couched originally in Greek, or, like the laws of Moses, which the Jews observed, they were translated into Greek at an early date. How much political freedom the various nations enjoyed, it is difficult to say; but in general they seem to have tempered the absolutism of the Ptolemies only where they were massed together in large numbers, as in Memphis and, above all, Alexandria. Elsewhere the ethnic groups were, doubtless, constituted chiefly of the territorial soldiers, or _cleruchs_, as they were called.[99] These, however, ceased to have any civil rights when called by the king into active service. With them political agitation could become effective only when it became mutiny. Prominent among the institutions which the Hellenic and Hellenized foreigners brought into Egypt were those that centred in the gymnasia. Some of them were, doubtless, at first and for long, a subject of scandal and wonderment to the natives. As the Greeks ran and tumbled stark naked in the palæstræ, or in the contests for which, as for the army, the palæstræ were the training-grounds, the story of Heracles and Busiris was constantly reënacted; except that in time Busiris came to see whence sprang the strength which he could not resist. It was in the gymnasia also that the Greeks received their higher education and by its means that they secured for their sons the ideas which the poetry and philosophy of Hellas alone could give. In the gymnasia temples of Hellenism appeared in county after county of Egypt.