The incorporation of Egypt into the Roman empire was accomplished after an abnormal fashion, in so far as the principle--elsewhere dominating the state--of dyarchy, _i.e._ of the joint rule of the two supreme imperial powers, the princeps and the senate, found--apart from some subordinate districts--no application in Egypt alone;[198] but, on the contrary, in this land the senate as such, as well as every individual of its members, were cut off from all participation in the government, and indeed senators and persons of senatorial rank were even prohibited from setting foot in this province.[199] We must not conceive of this position as if Egypt were connected with the rest of the empire only by a personal union; the princeps is, according to the meaning and spirit of the Augustan organisation, an integral and permanently acting element of the Roman polity just like the senate, and his rule over Egypt is quite as much a part of the imperial rule as is the rule of the proconsul of Africa.[200] We may rather illustrate the exact constitutional position by saying that the British Empire would find itself in the same plight if the ministry and Parliament should be taken into account only for the motherland, whereas the colonies should have to obey the absolute government of the Empress of India. What motives determined the new monarch at the very outset of his sole rule to adopt this deeply influential and at no time assailed arrangement, and how it affected the general political relations, are matters belonging to the general history of the empire; here we have to set forth how the internal relations of Egypt shaped themselves under the imperial rule. What held true in general of all Hellenic or Hellenised territories--that the Romans, when annexing them to the empire, preserved the once existing institutions, and introduced modifications only where these seemed absolutely necessary--found application in its full compass to Egypt. Like Syria, Egypt, when it became Roman, was a land of twofold nationality; here too alongside of, and over, the native stood the Greek--the former the slave, the latter the master. But in law and in fact the relations of the two nations in Egypt were wholly different from those of Syria. [Sidenote: Greek and Egyptian towns.]