chapter 12._

See, also, MACEDONIA, &c.: B. C. 334-330; and EGYPT: B. C. 332.

ALEXANDRIA: Reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, B. C. 282-246. Greatness and splendor of the City. Its Commerce. Its Libraries. Its Museum. Its Schools.

Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of Ptolemy Soter, succeeded to the throne of Egypt in 282 B. C. when his father retired from it in his favor, and reigned until 246 B. C. "Alexandria, founded by the great conqueror, increased and beautified by Ptolemy Soter, was now far the greatest city of Alexander's Empire. It was the first of those new foundations which are a marked feature in Hellenism; there were many others of great size and importance—above all, Antioch, then Seleucia on the Tigris, then Nicomedia, Nicæa, Apamea, which lasted; besides such as Lysimacheia, Antigoneia, and others, which early disappeared. … Alexandria was the model for all the rest. The intersection of two great principal thoroughfares, adorned with colonnades for the footways, formed the centre point, the omphalos of the city. The other streets were at right angles with these thoroughfares, so that the whole place was quite regular. Counting its old part, Rhakotis, which was still the habitation of native Egyptians, Alexandria had five quarters, one at least devoted to Jews who had originally settled there in great numbers. The mixed population there of Macedonians, Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians gave a peculiarly complex and variable character to the population. Let us not forget the vast number of strangers from all parts of the world whom trade and politics brought there. It was the great mart where the wealth of Europe and of Asia changed hands. Alexander had opened the sea-way by exploring the coasts of Media and Persia. Caravans from the head of the Persian Gulf, and ships on the Red Sea, brought all the wonders of Ceylon and China, as well as of Further India, to Alexandria. There, too, the wealth of Spain and Gaul, the produce of Italy and Macedonia, the amber of the Baltic and the salt fish of Pontus, the silver of Spain and the copper of Cyprus, the timber of Macedonia and Crete, the pottery and oil of Greece—a thousand imports from all the Mediterranean—came to be exchanged for the spices of Arabia, the splendid birds and embroideries of India and Ceylon, the gold and ivory of Africa, the antelopes, the apes, the leopards, the elephants of tropical climes. Hence the enormous wealth of the Lagidæ, for in addition to the marvellous fertility and great population—it is said to have been seven millions—of Egypt, they made all the profits of this enormous carrying trade. {38} We gain a good idea of what the splendours of the capital were by the very full account preserved to us by Athenæus of the great feast which inaugurated the reign of Philadelphus. … All this seems idle pomp, and the doing of an idle sybarite. Philadelphus was anything but that. … It was he who opened up the Egyptian trade with Italy, and made Puteoli the great port for ships from Alexandria, which it remained for centuries. It was he who explored Ethiopia and the southern parts of Africa, and brought back not only the curious fauna to his zoological gardens, but the first knowledge of the Troglodytes for men of science. The cultivation of science and of letters too was so remarkably one of his pursuits that the progress of the Alexandria of his day forms an epoch in the world's history, and we must separate his University and its professors from this summary, and devote to them a separate section. … The history of the organization of the University and its staff is covered with almost impenetrable mist. For the Museum and Library were in the strictest sense what we should now call an University, and one, too, of the Oxford type, where learned men were invited to take Fellowships, and spend their learned leisure close to observatories in science, and a great library of books. Like the mediæval universities, this endowment of research naturally turned into an engine for teaching, as all who desired knowledge flocked to such a centre, and persuaded the Fellow to become a Tutor. The model came from Athens. There the schools, beginning with the Academy of Plato, had a fixed property—a home with its surrounding garden, and in order to make this foundation sure, it was made a shrine where the Muses were worshipped, and where the head of the school, or a priest appointed, performed stated sacrifices. This, then, being held in trust by the successors of the donor, who bequeathed it; to them, was a property which it would have been sacrilegious to invade, and so the title Museum arose for a school of learning. Demetrius the Phalerean, the friend and protector of Theophrastus, brought this idea with him to Alexandria, when his namesake drove him into exile [see GREECE: B. C. 307-197] and it was no doubt his advice to the first Ptolemy which originated the great foundation, though Philadelphus, who again exiled Demetrius, gets the credit of it. The pupil of Aristotle moreover impressed on the king the necessity of storing up in one central repository all that the world knew or could produce, in order to ascertain the laws of things from a proper analysis of detail. Hence was founded not only the great library, which in those days had a thousand times the value a great library has now, but also observatories, zoological gardens, collections of exotic plants, and of other new and strange things brought by exploring expeditions from the furthest regions of Arabia and Africa. This library and museum proved indeed a home for the Muses, and about it a most brilliant group of students in literature and science was formed. The successive librarians were Zenodotus, the grammarian or critic; Callimachus, to whose poems we shall presently return; Eratosthenes, the astronomer, who originated the process by which the size of the earth is determined to-day; Appollonius the Rhodian, disciple and enemy of Callimachus; Aristophanes of Byzantium, founder of a school of philological criticism; and Aristarchus of Samos, reputed to have been the greatest critic of ancient times. The study of the text of Homer was the chief labour of Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus, and it was Aristarchus who mainly fixed the form in which the Iliad and Odyssey remain to this day. … The vast collections of the library and museum actually determined the whole character of the literature of Alexandria. One word sums it all up—erudition, whether in philosophy, in criticism, in science, even in poetry. Strange to say, they neglected not only oratory, for which there was no scope, but history, and this we may attribute to the fact that history before Alexander had no charms for Hellenism. Mythical lore, on the other hand, strange uses and curious words, were departments of research dear to them. In science they did great things, so did they in geography. … But were they original in nothing? Did they add nothing of their own to the splendid record of Greek literature? In the next generation came the art of criticism, which Aristarchus developed into a real science, and of that we may speak in its place; but even in this generation we may claim for them the credit of three original, or nearly original, developments in literature—the pastoral idyll, as we have it in Theocritus; the elegy, as we have it in the Roman imitators of Philetas and Callimachus; and the romance, or love story, the parent of our modern novels. All these had early prototypes in the folk songs of Sicily, in the love songs of Mimnermus and of Antimachus, in the tales of Miletus, but still the revival was fairly to be called original. Of these the pastoral idyll was far the most remarkable, and laid hold upon the world for ever."

_J. P. Mahaffy, The Story of Alexander's Empire,