The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (2 page)

The romance of Athens and the might of Rome have overshadowed the Hellenistic civilization spawned by the vast conquests of Alexander. Somehow the people of this place and their extraordinarily modern ideas have fallen down the gap between where classical Greece ended and imperial Rome began.

So our first aim in this book is to look again at Alexandria, to reconstruct the life of the institutions that made it unique—the library and the museum—and to breathe life back into a city that was once the center of the world. Physically there is almost nothing left of ancient Alexandria, but among the drowned ruins in her harbor, in the fragments of the books that survive from her great library, and hidden among the works of later authors lie the keys to this city of wonders.

It was a city of mechanical marvels, of an anatomy school where the circulation of the blood was understood two thousand years before it was previously thought possible, of geographers who knew the earth was spherical and traveled around the sun, of philosophers who even conjectured that everything was made of microscopically small particles called “atoms” (from the Greek
atomos
—“indivisible”). This was the home of Euclid, the father of geometry, whose books are still in print two thousand years after his death, and of Archimedes, of “Eureka” fame. Here too was the young Galen, the greatest doctor and physiologist of the age; and Claudius Ptolemy, the father of both astronomy and geography; and Apollonius, the author of
Jason and the Argonauts.
Stranger names, but no less influential, include Eratosthenes, the first man to measure the circumference of the earth; Aristarchus, the first to envisage a heliocentric solar system; Plotinus, a founder of Neoplatonism; Clement of Alexandria, a father of Christian theology; Arius, perhaps the first great Christian heretic; and Philo, the radical Jewish theologian. These are just a few of the host of geniuses who walked and talked, debated and denounced, read copiously, and finally set pen to paper in the great library and museum attached to the royal palaces of Alexandria. And while some of these legions of scholars are still household names, remembered for their mastery of one or two fields of study, it was the declared aim of all to achieve mastery in all fields of study, all branches of knowledge. And some actually achieved this, turning themselves truly into philosophers—“lovers of wisdom”—and reaching intellectual heights never achieved before or since.

The story of each of these characters tells a part of the history of Alexandria, a history peopled by the political giants of the ancient world: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. Our aim in this book is to explore, within the framework of this turbulent political history, the ways in which human knowledge and understanding developed and evolved in this extraordinary city, to trace the evolution of the “Alexandrian Way,” which stimulated a dramatic acceleration in our appreciation, not just of science and the material world, but also of literature, metaphysics, philosophy, and religion.

To do this we have had to follow the Alexandrian Way ourselves to some extent, by first reading everything we could find on all the people, subjects, and events in Alexandria’s long history—the flotsam and jetsam from the shipwreck of time. We have then laid out those pieces and tried to discover the patterns lying behind them, to fill in the lacunae, the gaps, so that we might explore both the physical and mental worlds of the city and its people.

Wherever possible we have returned to firsthand testimonies and let the people of Alexandria speak for themselves, not merely to restore voices so often drowned out by Rome and Athens, but to try to convey a sense of what it must have been like to actually be there and experience the journey of discovery that was life “at the conjunction of the whole world.” In their words we can walk again in the corridors of the world’s first and only true “university” and reach out for the long-lost scrolls of the library itself. We can gaze upon the golden mausoleum of Alexander, and discover the cold body of Cleopatra in her quayside palace. We can see the world they knew around them and explore the yet stranger worlds of their minds, in a story that begins with the rise of the Ptolemies—the heirs of Alexander and the last, tragic dynasty in three millennia of pharaohs. We will then pass through the conquest by Octavian into the shadow of the Roman Empire, and end with the triumph of Christianity, the death of the last librarian, and the destruction of the library and the city itself.

In this book we will not only return to the lost wonders of Alexandria, we will also try to enter the “mind” of the city, to discover why it produced such an extraordinary flowering of creativity, knowledge, and understanding. And we will discover that at the core of this dazzling whirlpool of ideas lies the thing you are reading now: the written word. Words encoded in grammars, bound as books, and held in libraries allow the transmission of ideas from one mind to the next over the generations, and the transformation of those ideas into new, fresh thoughts as they travel. While the early Greek scholars and philosophers mostly preferred to establish private schools where their thoughts would be transmitted face-to-face, master to pupil, it was in the great libraries of Alexandria that the real power of the written word burst forth upon generation after generation of scholars who could read—and so hold in their own minds— the voices of the world’s great thinkers, speaking to them across the distant expanses of space and time.

Alexandria was the greatest mental crucible the world has ever known, the place where ideas originating in obscure antiquity were forged into intellectual constructs that far outlasted the city itself. If the Renaissance was the “rebirth” of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its original birthplace. Our politics may be modeled on Greek prototypes, our public architecture on Roman antecedents, but in our minds we are all the children of Alexandria.

CHAPTER ONE

FLOUR AND SAND

Heraclitus,
Herakleitos and Diogenes

 
 
From atop the walls of the castle of Qaitbey in Egypt you can look across the rocky coast on which the castle stands to where fishing boats still ride at anchor in the bay and local children fling themselves from the rocks into the warm, clear sea that laps the shore. It is a sight familiar to perhaps thousands of shorelines around the Mediterranean, a timeless scene that, with only a few modifications, could come from just about any century. But few shores have seen as much history wash across them as this one has. The very stones of the castle you look out from once belonged to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and the shoreline beyond, boats, children, and all, was a scene that once reached the ears of the Greek poet Homer.

According to Plutarch of Chaeronea, it was through Homer that this place came to the attention of perhaps the greatest general in all history, who, over 2,300 years before you, stood on this same shore, his precious copy of Homer locked in a golden casket in his hands. But when he turned from the sea and looked south he saw only a narrow strip of water separating this island from the mainland, and beyond that an empty coast to which only the smallest of villages clung. When you turn, you will no longer find that scene, for in its place has risen the city founded there by that man, that dreamer—the huge, heaving metropolis of Alexandria.

At the time Homer wrote, there had been some sort of Bronze Age trading post here, almost certainly more impressive than the settlement Alexander found; but Homer’s words echoed through the centuries to Alexander, and the mention of this place changed his mind about a great project he was planning. Plutarch tells us that he had it in mind to build a great Greek city on this Egyptian coast, one which would receive the ultimate honor of bearing his name. His architects and surveyors had thus been dispatched and had selected a suitable site where work was just about to begin. Then, he had a dream:

 
What he found here was a strip of land running east-west, with a large lake to the south and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Just off that coast stood the island Homer had mentioned—Pharos—and it soon became clear to Alexander, or his architects at least, that by joining this island to the mainland with a causeway, two great harbors would be created, making the safest and largest anchorage on the whole of the north coast of Egypt. Alexander was delighted and “exclaimed that Homer was admirable in other respects and was also an excellent architect, and ordered the plan of the city to be drawn in conformity with the terrain” (Plutarch,
Life of Alexander,
in
Parallel Lives,
26, 3-10).

And so, on this coast in early 331 BC, a strange sight could be seen. On what had once been the quietest of shores the cries of thousands of birds could now be heard. Anyone sailing down this coast might have seen the great flock wheeling in the blinding Egyptian sun and beneath them, on the beach, a small encampment. But these were not desperate, lost desert travelers, patiently circled by the ever watchful vultures; they were Alexander’s men, and the birds that dived again and again on them were not harbingers of a death, but of a birth.

Closer inspection might have shown the reason for the birds’ interest.

Crisscrossing the sandy shore were lines of barley flour, carefully poured out by workmen walking behind teams of surveyors who calculated angles and distances using tools unchanged since the days of the pyramid builders. The entire area now lay under a net of these white lines, attended to by countless small birds that did their best to eat them as fast as they were laid. Had we been able to see this work from on high, as the birds did when they flew up, we might have seen their purpose—to lay out a new harbor. And around this harbor they were to describe an entire city. It seemed like madness—but an inspired, perhaps even divine lunacy.

The idea to use flour had come from one who now stood among them. It was a practical solution to the lack of chalk in Egypt but, typically, an impulsive and perhaps not wholly thought-out one. As fast as the lines were laid, the birds descended and ate them. Some of the workmen muttered that it was an omen, and a bad one at that. What good could come from a city that the gods tried to eradicate the very moment it was first laid out? However, Alexander’s personal soothsayer, Aristander, countered that it simply showed that Alexandria would one day feed the whole world, and according to an ancient source known today as “the pseudo-Callisthenes” in the
Alexander Romance,
when the great man consulted the Egyptian gods himself on the matter, he was told: “The city you are building will be the food-giver and nurse of the whole world” (Arrian,
Anabasis,
book 3a, chapter 2).

So the work on the shore opposite the little island of Pharos progressed, painfully slowly. Alexander, however, could not wait. Within a few days he had gone, perhaps a little bored by the daily drudgery of deciding where palaces and temples should go, but also tempted away by a new idea that had seized him while designing his city. It had been suggested to him by some Egyptians that he might not be a man at all, but a god, for surely only a god could achieve what he had done. It was flattery of course, but in a heroic age and on the lips of an ancient people perhaps it was more. Either way he set off with all speed to the desert shrine of Ammon to discover if it was indeed true.

 
 
Thus Plutarch describes the foundation of the city of Alexandria by its first and greatest son, Alexander the Great. As with so much about Alexander’s life, it can be difficult to separate fact from myth in a story filled with omens and peopled by gods. The ancient sources do not even agree on whether Alexander founded his city before or after he spoke to the oracle at the shrine of Ammon in Siwa, but what all do agree on is that he alone chose the place, and the choice was a spectacularly good one.

Lying on the Mediterranean coast west of the Nile, this was an area that had not been well integrated into the ancient Egyptian states of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. This is not to suggest that the area was completely empty, however. Excavations have shown that a small fishing village called Rhakotis had existed here since the thirteenth century BC, and the value of the anchorage was indeed known to Homer, whether or not he appeared to Alexander in a dream to remind him, as he wrote in the
Odyssey:

 
Some evidence of the prehistoric harbor that Homer knew of has even been found off the shores of the island of Pharos. In the early years of the twentieth century Gaston Jondet, the chief engineer of ports and lights in Egypt, noted an extensive series of breakwaters beneath the present sea level which were unmentioned in classical texts. These had formed a Bronze Age harbor at a time when the Egypt of Rameses the Great and Tutankhamen traded extensively with the Minoan world, providing a port free from the choking silt of the delta. But they had already fallen into disuse and disappeared beneath the waves by the time Alexander arrived here. It is apposite, perhaps, that it should be Homer, a Greek source, who first makes mention of this place, for it was a Greek who was about to transform it.