give to an Egyptian township, Antinoopolis, laid out by him in memory of his favourite drowned in the Nile, urban rights according to the Greek fashion; and subsequently Severus, perhaps as much out of spite to the Antiochenes as for the benefit of the Egyptians, granted to the capital of Egypt and to the town of Ptolemais, and to several other Egyptian communities, not urban magistrates indeed, but at any rate an urban council. Hitherto, doubtless, in official language the Egyptian town calls itself Nomos, the Greek Polis, but a Polis without Archontes and Bouleutae is a meaningless name. So was it also in the coinage. The Egyptian nomes did not possess the right of coining; but still less did Alexandria ever strike coins. Egypt is, among all the provinces of the Greek half of the empire, the only one which knows no other than royal money. Nor was this otherwise even in the Roman period. The emperors abolished the abuses that crept in under the last Lagids; Augustus set aside their unreal copper coinage, and when Tiberius resumed the coinage of silver he gave to the Egyptian silver money just as real value as to the other provincial currency of the empire.[205] But the character of the coinage remained substantially the same.[206] There is a distinction between Nomos and Polis as between the god Chemmis and the god Alexander; in an administrative respect there is not any difference. Egypt consisted of a majority of Egyptian and of a minority of Greek townships, all of which were destitute of autonomy, and all were placed under the immediate and absolute administration of the king and of the officials nominated by him. [Sidenote: Absence of a land-diet.] It was a consequence of this, that Egypt alone of all the Roman provinces had no general representation. The diet is the collective representation of the self-administering communities of the province. But in Egypt there was none such; the nomes were simply imperial or rather royal administrative districts, and Alexandria not merely stood virtually alone, but was likewise without proper municipal organisation. The priest standing at the head of the capital of the country might doubtless call himself “chief priest of Alexandria and all Egypt” (p. 248, note), and has a certain resemblance to the Asiarch and the Bithyniarch of Asia Minor, but the deep diversity of the organisations is thereby simply concealed. [Sidenote: The government of the Lagids.]