The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (24 page)

At the end of the cease-fire in 218 BC, Antiochus resumed his conquest of southern Syria, but the revitalized Egyptians put up sufficient resistance to check him in the Bekaa Valley, in what is now Lebanon, and to hold on to Damascus and Sidon. This bought enough time for Sosibius to bring his new weapon into play.

By the spring of 217 BC the Ptolemaic secret army was ready and was led to battle by Ptolemy IV. According to Polybius the army included 70,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, and 73 African elephants. Against him Antiochus fielded 62,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and 102 Indian elephants.

The two armies met outside the small town of Raphia, modern-day Rafah near Gaza, setting up camp opposite each other, where they sized each other up for five days. On the fifth day, June 22, 217 BC, Ptolemy moved his troops out of camp to take up battle positions, and Antiochus immediately followed suit. Both sides placed their strongest, handpicked phalanxes in the center, with elephants and cavalry on each wing. Ptolemy, his sister Arsinoe, and their retinue took a place on the left flank, opposite Antiochus and his horse guards on their extreme right. At the same moment, Ptolemy and Antiochus gave the signal for their elephants to charge, and the battle began. According to Polybius, Antiochus’s Indian elephants outweighed and outfought the smaller African forest elephants of Ptolemy’s army, and many of the latter turned and fled into their own ranks, breaking the line of Ptolemy’s left wing and causing enormous confusion. Still the forces facing each other on Ptolemy’s right wing held back, waiting. Polybius tells us:

 
An overconfident Antiochus now pressed home his advantage on the right wing, assuming that both the center ground held by the phalanxes and the left wing were as victorious as he had been, and hence believing that the battle was as good as won. But at that moment Ptolemy, who had taken shelter within his own phalanx, suddenly rode forward, urging his men on. This stunned the enemy and rallied Ptolemy’s own troops in the center. Lowering their
sarissas
—eighteen-foot-long double-pointed pikes—the phalanx under Ptolemy’s general Andromachus and the Egyptian phalanx under Sosibius advanced together in full charge. The Syrians facing them resisted briefly, but soon crumbled under the overwhelming pressure and turned and fled. Antiochus, not yet the great general he would one day become, was forced to dash for cover behind the walls of Raphia and console himself with the solace of all bad workmen who blame their tools rather than themselves: “He retired to Raphia, in the confident belief that as far as it depended on himself he had won the battle, but had suffered this disaster owing to the base cowardice of the rest” (Polybius,
The Histories,
book 5, chapter 85).

Polybius reports that Antiochus left behind on the battlefield more than 10,000 infantry dead and 300 cavalry also killed, with a further 4,000 men taken prisoner. Ptolemy had lost about 1,500 foot and 700 horse, as well as 16 elephants dead and most of the rest captured. Ptolemy, so it seemed, was as victorious as his father had been. But this would be the last time Asia would see a pharaoh ride out to battle in person.

The next few, heady months were spent reoccupying Syria, after sending Sosibius to Antioch to negotiate punitive peace terms with Antiochus. In the meantime the young Ptolemy occasionally laid siege to or sacked a town to keep up the pressure on the negotiations. Finally, on October 12, 217 BC, Philopator returned in triumph to Egypt, rewarding his victorious army with three hundred thousand pieces of gold and sending abundant gifts to the temples of Egypt, to thank the gods for his great victory. On the face of it, he seemed to be repeating the pattern of all his ancestors, setting off while still young to score a resounding victory in Asia and reestablishing the Near Eastern buffer zone. Surely now he was entitled to the abundant leisure he so craved. Unfortunately for the Ptolemies, back in Alexandria, the perfect setting for his decadence had already been created, ironically enough, in the halls of the museum.

The literary scene that would provide the backdrop to Philopator’s disastrous reign had been created during his father’s lifetime, and it had begun with a new emphasis in the institution on literature rather than science. Ptolemy III had given his most gifted scholar-writer, Callimachus of Cyrene, the immense task of cataloging the ever-increasing mountain of books accruing in the library. This he began at the height of his powers around 250 BC when he embarked on his
Pinakes
(literally, “Lists”), whose full title translates as “List of Those Who Distinguished Themselves in All Branches of Learning, and Their Writings.” As the full title suggests, this was no mere catalog. Running to 120 separate books, it was a comprehensive survey of all the books held in the great library, along with biographical and bibliographical details of the authors—in short, a survey of all known classical literature up to the time of its compilation.

In this work he also introduced the notion of a library classification system—the forerunner of our Dewey decimal system—in which all books were classified as written by (1) dramatists, (2) epic and lyric poets, (3) legislators, (4) philosophers, (5) historians, (6) orators, (7) rhetoricians, or (8) miscellaneous writers. Not that this impressed everyone; one of the first new tomes Callimachus had to catalog with his system was Aristophanes of Byzantium’s highly critical
Against Callimachus’s Library Lists.
History does not record which number he chose for it.

Besides the mammoth task of the
Pinakes,
Callimachus also wrote his own poetry. His longest work, the
Aitia
(“Causes”), is a narrative elegy in four parts, one of which,
The Lock of Berenice,
records the story of the constellation Coma Berenice. This poem was freely copied by Catullus and subsequently became the model for Alexander Pope’s 1712 poem
The Rape of the Lock.

Callimachus was above all a stylist, famed for his conciseness, precision, and artistry, a great master of the finely turned phrase, often in epigrammatic form. Even when he tackled enormous subjects like the
Pinakes
or Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
his method was to break up the longest works by having them copied into shorter sections. He is said to have maintained that all big books were boring books.

For all his love of brevity, Callimachus was a prolific writer, credited with producing about seven hundred works in all, and he became hugely famous in his day and in the succeeding centuries. In fact no other Greek poet except Homer is so often quoted by the grammarians of late antiquity. He was best known for his epigrams, of which sixty-three have survived. Epigram 31, an epitaph, displays his wit and elegance superbly. It takes the form of a dialogue:

 
Callimachus’s insistence on brevity put him somewhat at odds with his most famous pupil, Apollonius of Rhodes, whose lifetime ambition had been to set down in verse the epic adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. But Apollonius’s epic chimed with the times: an adventure tale of brave Greek warriors who journeyed (like Alexander) to the edges of the known world, visiting en route Cyrenaica, the Aegean Islands, and the Black Sea, all places of considerable interest to the Ptolemies and their trading, seafaring nation. The heroes are portrayed in overtly Homeric style, and the boat itself and accompanying technology are deliberately set in an archaic context, but Apollonius weaves into the text all sorts of “modern” scientific (and geographical) ideas and knowledge along with the more traditional fabulous geography of clashing rocks, sirens, and mythical beasts.

Into this admixture of modern science within the traditional setting, Apollonius introduces an innovation of his own, a running commentary on his own narrative, as Richard Hunter explains in the introduction to his 1993 translation of the
Argonautica:

 
The poet stands outside his poem and contemplates it, almost as though he had nothing to do with it.

This dreamlike, wistful mythmaking was now the setting for Ptolemy IV’s return from the wars. The revival in heroic literature gave him the perfect foil for his own reign, the perfect opportunity to revel in his own position as a hero-god to his people; but in this, as with so much, he was gravely mistaken.

Taking the sister who had accompanied him to war as his wife, although still entirely under the sway of his mistress Agathoclea, he now lost himself in romantic reveries of heroic tales. The future seemed bright. His father had fought a great war at the beginning of his reign and then retired, safe, to live out his years among his scholars and courtiers. Why shouldn’t the son do exactly the same? But Ptolemy was no returning Jason, and his Argonauts were no more than a gaggle of sycophants. Back at court the king and his favorites became ever more detached from the reality of life in Egypt and the political situation outside. The young king duly set about building his own literary court, but even here something was clearly different from his father’s day. In the place of the Aristarchus and Eratosthenes of previous years the court now, according to an early-twentieth-century biographer of the Ptolemies, “swarmed with literary pretenders, poets, grammarians, whores, buffoons, philosophers” (Edwyn R. Bevan,
The House of Ptolemy,
chapter 7).

It seems Ptolemy Philopator was not content simply to fund the museum; he intended to be its greatest star as well, and as such gathered around him a multitude of favorites to praise his own work. When he wrote his own, terrible play, an erotic idyll called
Adonis,
the obsequious Agathocles immediately produced a laudatory commentary on it. One story from the time tells how the king arranged a poetry competition where the entries were judged on the amount of applause each rendition received. However, one judge, Aristophanes of Byzantium, chose the poem that received the least applause. When asked why, he went to the great library and produced texts that proved that only the poem he had chosen was actually original. All the others were simply copied from earlier works. Ptolemy’s court had pretensions to be the museum, but in fact it was a mockery.

But far more serious than the pharaoh’s personal delusions was the situation in his country. The great victory Sosibius had orchestrated contained a poisonous seed.

That seed lay in the heart of Sosibius’s greatest achievement, among the native Egyptian troops he had raised and trained to fight for their pharaoh. They had seen the magnificence of the Greek Ptolemaic court, they had seen the plunder, and now they had returned to the reality of life in their country. Many of these highly trained warriors made their way back to the heartland of the ancient capital of Thebes (modern Luxor), only to find their families in extreme poverty and much of the land in disrepair. Native Egyptians had always known they were an underclass under Greek rule, but while the Ptolemies made Egypt great again, they had kept their silence. Now the administration was in the hands of corrupt favorites, taxes were exorbitant, and their sacrifice in the Middle East seemed to have benefited everyone except themselves.

There was only one conclusion: Ptolemy IV Philopator was not a god-king, he was a foreign impostor; and when the situation in the countryside failed to improve, a full-scale rebellion broke out in Thebes in 206 BC against the “false gods” of the Alexandrians. This immediately struck chords with the Egyptian peasantry, who had been taxed to the breaking point to finance Ptolemy’s war. In fact many had fled to remote areas in the desert or in the marshy Nile Delta, where they had become outlaws, roaming the countryside and ravaging small villages and temple complexes, rather than working themselves to the bone for next to no reward. This process, known as
anachoresis
(literally, “to go up-country”), had occurred quite frequently in pharaonic times of famine, crop failure, or acute economic pressure. This time, however, it was spearheaded by fully trained, battle-hardened troops, troops who had seen how the other half lived in Alexandria.