Tradition and Power in the Roman Empire. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire (Nijmegen, 18-20 May 2022), edited by S. Betjes, O. Hekster, E. Manders, Leiden: Brill, 2024
Cassius Dio's account of the Roman conquest of Egypt is undoubtedly unsympathetic: he opens the p... more Cassius Dio's account of the Roman conquest of Egypt is undoubtedly unsympathetic: he opens the passage by clarifying that "Egypt was enslaved" and then depicts a clash of gods, a weeping Apis deprecating the entrance of Octavian in Egypt. Octavian himself is shown while refusing to pay homage to the Apis bull, and claiming that he was accustomed to worshipping gods, not cattle; the princeps is portrayed in the act of deliberately bypassing the mausoleum of the Ptolemies, whom he despised as "dead men", while obviously paying homage to the mummified body of Alexander the Great, whose nose he accidentally broke.1 Two hieroglyphic inscriptions inform us that Augustus replaced the high priest of Ptah Padibastet IV-Imhotep, who died two days before Augustus captured Alexandria, with the young Psenamun, who in 28/7 BCE received the new title 'prophet of Caesar' . The dynasty of the high priests died out in 23 BCE, when Padibastet-Imhotep was finally buried.2 The Augustan attitude towards Egyptian temples seems less consistent: on the one hand, the princeps built traditional temples (Dendur, Kalabsha) in the early part of his reign; on the other, there are numerous hints to confiscations of temple land and priests complaining about new taxes after 4 BCE.3 This twofold attitude has been recently studied by A. Connor's book, significantly
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