ssor. He at once recalled the prefect
of Egypt, and appointed in his place Tiberius Julius Alexander, an
Alexandrian, a son of the former prefect of that name; and thus Egypt
was under the government of a native prefect. The peaceable situation of
the Great Oasis has saved a long Greek inscription of the decree which
was now issued in redress of the grievances suffered under Nero. It is
a proclamation by Julius Demetrius, the commander of the Oasis, quoting
the decree of Tiberius Julius Alexander, the new prefect of Egypt.

The prefect acknowledges that the loud complaints with which he was met
on entering upon his government were well founded, and he promises that
the unjust taxes shall cease; that nobody shall be forced to act as a
provincial tax-gatherer; that no debts shall be cancelled or sales made
void under the plea of money owing to the revenue; that no freeman shall
be thrown into prison for debt, unless it be a debt due to the
royal revenue, and that no private debt shall be made over to the
tax-gatherer, to be by him collected as a public debt; that no property
settled on the wife at marriage shall be seized for taxes due from the
husband; and that all new charges and claims which had grown up within
the last five years shall be repealed. In order to discourage informers,
whom the prefects had much employed, and by whom the families in
Alexandria were much harassed, and to whom he laid the great falling off
in the population of that city, he orders, that if anybody should
make three charges and fail in proving them, he shall forfeit half his
property and lose the right of bringing an action at law. The land had
always paid a tax in proportion to the number of acres overflowed and
manured by the waters of the Nile; and the husbandmen had latterly been
frightened by the double threat of a new measurement of the land, and of
making it at the same time pay according to the ancient registers of the
overflow when the canals had been more open and more acres flooded; but
the prefect promises that there shall be no new measurements, and that
they shall only be taxed according to the actual overflow. In 69 A.D.
Galba was murdered, after a reign of seven months. Some of his coins,
however, are dated in the second year of his reign, according to the
Alexandrian custom of counting the years. They called the 29th of
August, the first new year's day after the sovereign came to the throne,
the first day of his second year.