But if the communal self-administration had no place in Egypt, and in this respect a real diversity does not exist between the two nations of which this state, just like the Syrian, was composed, there was in another respect a barrier erected between them, to which Syria offers no parallel. According to the arrangement of the Macedonian conquerors, the belonging to an Egyptian locality disqualified for all public offices and for the better military service. Where the state made gifts to its burgesses these were restricted to those of the Greek communities;[208] on the other hand, the Egyptians only paid the poll-tax; and even from the municipal burdens, which fell on the settlers of the individual Egyptian district, the Alexandrians settled there were exempted.[209] Although in the case of trespass the back of the Egyptian as of the Alexandrian had to suffer, the latter might boast, and did boast, that the cane struck him, and not the lash, as in the case of the former.[210] Even the acquiring of better burgess-rights was forbidden to the Egyptians.[211] The burgess-lists of the two large Greek towns organised by and named after the two founders of the empire in lower and upper Egypt embraced in them the ruling population, and the possession of the franchise of one of these towns was in the Egypt of the Ptolemies the same as the possession of the Roman franchise was in the Roman empire. What Aristotle recommended to Alexander--to be a ruler (ἡγεμών) to the Hellenes and a master to the barbarians, to provide for the former as friends and comrades, to use the latter like animals and plants--the Ptolemies practically carried out in all its extent. The king, greater and more free than his instructor, carried in his mind the higher idea of transforming the barbarians into Hellenes, or at least of replacing the barbarian settlements by Hellenic, and to this idea his successors almost everywhere, and particularly in Syria, allowed ample scope.[212] In Egypt this was not the case. Doubtless its rulers sought to keep touch with the natives, particularly in the religious sphere, and wished not to rule as Greeks over the Egyptians, but rather as earthly gods over their subjects in common; but with this the inequality of rights on the part of the subjects was quite compatible, just as the preference _de iure_ and _de facto_ of the nobility was quite as essential a part of the government of Frederick as the equality of justice towards gentle and simple. [Sidenote: Personal privileges in the Roman period.]