The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (23 page)

So sometime in 80 BC the proud owners must have set the correction dial on this incredible device for the last time. Perhaps they had just sold it to a wealthy Roman and were shipping it off, along with numerous other Greek treasures, from Rhodes or Cos. The new owner must have been looking forward to its arrival—perhaps more so than all the other treasures on board. With this machine he could calculate exact dates and times, make corrections for the notoriously inaccurate official calendars—in short, be master of time itself.

This, then, was the successor to the spheres and planetaria that we know Archimedes wrote about theoretically and that Plutarch places in his arms at the moment of his death. But where had this device come from? And who built it? The answer perhaps lies in the one surviving book by a Greek called Geminus. In this almost unknown work he describes a mechanism he says was built in 87 BC. There are three extraordinary things about this description. First, he appears to be describing a machine like the Antikythera mechanism. Second, the wording he uses is repeated almost exactly on the inscribed plates of the mechanism itself. Finally, Geminus was from Rhodes, where another great philosopher, possibly even his tutor, lived; Poseidonius, who according to Cicero, had made a “sphere . . . the regular revolutions of which show the course of the sun, moon, and five wandering stars, as it is every day and night performed” (Cicero,
On the Nature of the Gods,
book 2, chapter 34). Rhodes was also of course probably the starting point of the mechanism’s fateful last journey, some five years after Geminus had written.

Some have suggested that the mechanism was Geminus’s very own. Certainly the discovery in the cold waters off Antikythera proved he was not just being fanciful in his description. Others have even claimed the mechanism may have been built by the great Archimedes himself, who is recorded in antiquity as having built a model for “imitating the motions of the heavenly bodies.”

One final suggestion takes us back to Athens and the Tower of the Winds. No crank handle was ever found with the Antikythera mechanism, and Derek de Solla Price suggested it may have even been automatic rather than hand turned. If so, it is not taking a great step to imagine Ctesibius’s water clock dripping away at the top of this tower providing the constant power to turn the mysterious, miraculous wheels of the Antikythera mechanism, whirring quietly away below, beautifully mimicking the movements of the heavens so Athenians could tell the time, and know the date and the positions of all the heavenly bodies at that moment.

 
 
But if such a miraculous device did grace the Tower of the Winds, it was marking out the last days of its inventor’s world. In Alexandria the political climate was changing, and a series of immature and ineffectual royal Ptolemies would prove unable to protect themselves, their city, their country, or the scholars who succeeded Archimedes and Ctesibius. The life of Archimedes epitomizes the dichotomy of academic life in the Hellenistic world. Under the patronage of Hiero, king of Syracuse, Archimedes found the time and money to turn his supremely brilliant mathematical mind to questions of pure theory, but only in between solving the more practical problems of his employer. The emergent world order—that of the Romans—had even less time for theory. They had demonstrated this fatally when they encountered the engrossed theorist Archimedes somewhere in a street in Syracuse in 212. There Rome triumphed, and Archimedes’ last problem was solved not with mathematics but with the point of a sword.

Archimedes’ last wish was upheld by the Romans, however, and he was buried in his home city in a tomb bearing the epitaph he had himself chosen. It was not the list of conquests favored by Roman generals, nor the hereditary titles on the graves of kings. Instead, Archimedes chose a diagram of a cylinder circumscribing a sphere with a note describing how the sphere would be exactly two-thirds of the circumscribing cylinder in both area and volume. It was a proof Archimedes had discovered himself and, in his view, vastly more important than odometers, siege engines, and even mechanical computers. It was what his life work had been for—a very Alexandrian epitaph. To the Romans, and indeed even the Romanized Greeks of Syracuse of later years, however, it must have seemed strangely irrelevant. Their age was one of practical action, in which the theories devised in the library of Alexandria had little place. Even Archimedes’ tomb was left to fall into ruins and become overgrown and forgotten, along with his name. In fact it would only be the idle curiosity of the Roman orator Cicero that would eventually bring it back to light, as Cicero himself describes. He tells us that while he was quaestor of Syracuse in 75 BC (some 137 years after the philosopher’s death) he sought out the tomb of an “obscure little man” called Archimedes, but the native population, either still terrified of their Roman masters or simply forgetful, knew nothing about it. Eventually he found his way to an old cemetery by one of the city gates, choked with brambles and thorns, where he remembered

 
So one of the most famous cities in the Greek world, and in former days a great center of learning as well, would have remained in total ignorance of the tomb of its most brilliant citizen, had a man from Arpinum not come and pointed it out. Roman rule had changed Syracuse and its people, and that process of change was now rippling across the Mediterranean.

If even the great Archimedes could be all but forgotten in just over a century in his physical home, what of the fate of his fellow philosophers at his spiritual home, the great library? Dangerous times were coming to Alexandria, and neither books nor their authors would be spared.

CHAPTER TEN

A GREEK TRAGEDY

Sir William Empson, “Missing Dates”

 
 
P
tolemy III’s successor was not the new Rameses his father had hoped for. By the time he came to the throne at about twenty years old in 222 BC, it was clear that he had neither the military genius of a Macedonian king nor the mental sophistication of an Egyptian pharaoh.

This alone was no reason to fear for Egypt’s future. The new pharaoh had inherited a stable administration and stable borders. Provided he could maintain this balance—the Egyptians’ beloved maat—and avoid external trouble, there was reason to think that Ptolemaic rule would continue at least to appear glorious. But what made Ptolemy IV’s succession different was not the usual threats and maneuvers from abroad, but something much closer to home. When the young pharaoh took the Egyptian throne he was not alone. Standing in the shadows was another man, a man who was not simply the king’s adviser but his puppeteer.

The man in the shadows was a court official called Sosibius, and the classical historian Polybius is quite blunt about his role in what was about to unfold: “Sosibius . . . appears to have been a dextrous instrument of evil who remained long in power and did much mischief in the kingdom” (Polybius,
Histories,
book 15, chapter 25).

The problem had begun long before Ptolemy IV took the throne, when it became clear that he would rely on favorites for everything, being unable or unwilling to take any role in the running of his household or the state himself. Many previous pharaohs had of course relied upon court officials to administer the country on their behalf, but all had at least the knowledge and instincts to choose their proxies well. Ptolemy IV was inexperienced, lazy, and a very poor judge of character, and the result was that on his taking the throne Sosibius became Egypt’s first minister. Ptolemy, convinced that the running of the state was now in hand, then retired to indulge in the lavish festivities of the court and the pleasures of the royal bedchamber.

Sosibius kept a tight exclusion zone around the pharaoh, ensuring that all the information he got from the outside world came through him. In doing so he carefully created an atmosphere of suspicion and fear in which those who threatened him or his control over the pharaoh could be denounced and neutralized in a moment. The cull had begun, as in so many previous Ptolemaic reigns, with the death of the new king’s immediate family—those best placed to challenge his rule. Within months of his accession, his uncle (his father’s brother) was dead, then his younger brother was “accidentally” scalded to death with boiling water while taking a bath, and finally his mother perished, most probably poisoned. Sosibius had a hand in all these killings, and the move served him well. Not only could he claim to have removed those who might envy the king his throne, he had in the process left Ptolemy alone, without friends or family for support or advice. Ptolemy was now entirely under Sosibius’s spell. “The murdered is well disposed” (Zenobius,
Proverbs,
book 3, no. 94) became a saying in Alexandria at the time. While stripping away Ptolemy’s support, Sosibius was also careful to build his own. Aiding and abetting him was a courtier called Agathocles, who was probably a boyhood friend of the young king’s, and who cemented his hold on the king by way of his sister, Agathoclea, who became the royal mistress.

Hearing only the whispers of his ministers and mistress, Ptolemy began his reign confident of his own security. He flattered himself that his summary action against his relatives had secured his throne, while news from the Near East that two of his main foreign enemies, Antigonus and Seleucus, had died, leaving children on their thrones, further boosted his sense of invulnerability. The result, as Polybius tells us, was predictable:

 
The first signs of trouble seemed relatively unimportant. During the reign of Ptolemy III an exiled Spartan king by the name of Cleomenes III had taken asylum in Alexandria, where he continued to make a nuisance of himself, constantly plaguing the new king with requests for a ship and a small army so that he could retake his native land. But Ptolemy IV, who on his accession took the almost ironic name Philopator (“he who loves his father”), refused to assist. Cleomenes was not a man to be rebuffed, however, and he began attempting to recruit an army in the city himself. At this news Sosibius panicked, suspecting that the Spartan king might turn the mercenaries currently employed by the Egyptian state against him, so he had Cleomenes imprisoned. In sheer desperation, when Philopator was visiting the delta town of Canopus, Cleomenes and his colleagues managed to escape and, running through the streets of Alexandria, tried to incite the mob to turn against the pharaoh. But despite their shouts that they had evidence that the king had murdered his mother, a very popular woman in the city, and despite the fact that the claim was probably true, the usually restive city mob failed to rise up. In despair Cleomenes and his men took the Spartan way out of what was becoming an impossible situation and killed themselves with their own knives. The Spartan’s wife and children, entrusted to the care of Ptolemy, fared equally poorly and were soon put to death on Sosibius’s orders.

If Ptolemy and Sosibius had been wrong in thinking they could keep their private affairs from the Alexandrian public and men like Cleomenes, they were also mistaken in their assessment of their foreign rivals. A far more serious threat was now emerging in the form of the young Antiochus III, ruler of the Seleucid Empire. Unlike his counterpart in Alexandria, this young man kept himself fully informed of all the news from his rival kingdoms, and so soon realized that the young Ptolemy was both weak and ensnared by a corrupt and self-serving court. He wasted no time. Gathering a strong army, he invaded Syria, rolling up the Ptolemaic possessions in the Near East almost a far as Palestine, Egypt’s front doorstep, before the Egyptian army could muster. In the blink of an eye the conquests of Philopator’s father were lost and the way to Egypt looked open.

Fortunately for Ptolemy Philopator, Antiochus’s campaign encountered much stiffer resistance as it moved south toward Egypt proper, with several cities withstanding his sieges for months. As Antiochus’s army got bogged down, Sosibius called for and got a cease-fire for four months. It was a desperate gamble but it worked, buying time so that he and Agathocles could gather an army to resist the invasion of Egypt itself.

In an attempt to fool Antiochus into believing he would sue for peace, Sosibius built up Egypt’s army secretly at Alexandria. Negotiations for the cease-fire and all other diplomatic traffic were rerouted from the capital to Memphis during the winter of 219-218 BC as recruits from all over the Mediterranean were gathered, drilled, and formed into fighting units in Alexandria. Paying for this huge mercenary army naturally put a heavy burden on the Egyptian peasantry, but Sosibius planned to utilize his own population in another, entirely novel way. Whereas in the past the Ptolemies had fought their wars with local and imported Macedonian and other foreign troops, this time Sosibius decided to recruit and train a local phalanx of Egyptian troops, armed and drilled in Macedonian style. The twenty-thousand Egyptians of the phalanx would be led personally by Sosibius and would play a decisive role in the forthcoming battle, and beyond.