The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (39 page)

Revenge was swift. Caracalla ordered all the young men of the city arrested, regardless of their race or creed. He then unleashed upon the city his army, which set to looting and pillaging. Next he had the city cordoned off into zones to prevent freedom of movement, and suspended the local games, abolished all the communal messes of the museum, and revoked all Roman privileges. Finally he gave the order which would scar the city’s life for generations to come so that no one would forget what they called “the fury of Caracalla.” The young men seized during the looting were taken to the city walls and systematically slaughtered. Within a few hours the flower of Alexandria’s youth, some twenty-five thousand young men, lay dead. And then as a last tilt at his tormentors Caracalla had the governor of the city publicly executed.

Fortunately, Caracalla’s reign of terror was not to last, and ironically, this ruthless emperor would meet his end pursuing yet another act of religious devotion. According to the colorful but not overly reliable
Historia Augusta,
in the spring of 217 he set off to make a visit to the temple of the moon god at Carrhae accompanied only by a select corps of bodyguards. On his way back he stopped to defecate, and at that moment a bodyguard named Martialis struck him down, only to be killed moments later by a loyal Scythian archer. The emperor died quickly. The scars he inflicted on Alexandria would take longer to heal.

Caracalla had certainly taught the Alexandrians a lesson they would never forget, but if he thought he had cowed them into silent submission in the process he was very wrong. From then on the city would be a focus of discontent and rebellion, and thus an almost irresistible magnet for rebellious generals and would-be emperors, who would be welcomed into the city with open arms.

 
 
It is uncertain just what effect the “fury of Caracalla” had on the museum and library beyond the statement in Cassius Dio that the emperor abolished the “communal messes” of the Alexandrians (Cassius Dio,
Roman History,
book 77, chapter 23). This may refer simply to the dining clubs in the city, but may also refer to the communal dining halls of the museum where the scholars, who held everything in common, ate together. Considering his loathing of the Aristotelians, this is not unlikely.

Academic life in the city was clearly not extinguished, however, as the few details we have of one of the great mathematicians of this era confirm. Diophantus of Alexandria, a Hellenized Babylonian, was probably just a child at the time of the fury, but he survived it, and went on to master enough of the knowledge left in the museum for him to become one of the greatest mathematicians of his or any age. By adapting Babylonian techniques and concentrating on arithmetic rather than geometry he invented a whole new area of mathematics, where numbers were replaced with symbols, allowing problems to be solved for any number, not just specific instances. As such he has become known as the “Father of Algebra,” the originator of the hugely complex collections of Greek letters and symbols which fill the blackboards of modern mathematicians and the exercise books of their often baffled students. Indeed, it was his book the
Arithmetica,
a collection of 130 problems and their various solutions, that inspired one of the most complicated pieces of mathematical research of all time. When the great seventeenth-century mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote in the margins of his copy of the
Arithmetica
that he had discovered a remarkable proof of a theorem suggested by Diophantus, he also noted that he hadn’t the space to prove it there. Sadly, he never found time to write it out anywhere else either, setting off a 357-year mathematical search for the proof to what became known as “Fermat’s Last Theorem.” The problem, originated in the second century and formulated in the seventeenth, was not finally published until 1995, in a paper so complex that most modern mathematicians still don’t fully understand it.

Nor was this the only riddle Diophantus left behind. As with so many Alexandrians, it can be painfully difficult to extract personal details from his work, but the Father of Algebra did leave us his own mathematical clues. His epitaph, describing his life, is itself an algebraic problem:

 
 
Those with mathematical talents can rewrite the above as two equations which can be solved simultaneously to discover something of Diophantus’s life. From this we learn that his boyhood lasted fourteen years, he entered his majority at twenty-one, was married at thirty-three, and had a son at thirty-eight. His son died aged forty-two while Diophantus lived on into great old age, dying four years later aged eighty-four.

Diophantus’s biographical riddles may have illuminated the twilight of Alexandrian mathematics, but it was the spiritual investigations of the Alexandrians of this turbulent age that were now having the most profound effect not just on their city, but on the world as a whole. Uncertain times drive many to question the nature of the world and the motives of the gods, or even their very existence. Any Alexandrian street philosopher could have told you that Caracalla wasn’t divine, but the question as to what
was
divine increasingly vexed the inhabitants of the museum. Strangely, for both the main schools of thought that would fight for supremacy in the city’s final days, the answer came not from the porticoes of the library, but from the waterfront.

The somewhat unlikely father of this process was a man named Ammonius Saccas. Born into a very poor family, he may initially have had a Christian upbringing in the institution which preceded Pantaenus’s catechetical school. After school Ammonius went to work on the Alexandrian harbor front as a porter or sack bearer, hence his second name—Saccas. There he enjoyed a second education, talking to the traders and captains with their travelers’ tales of distant lands, surprising customs, and alien religions. For anyone who wanted to learn of the world, these wharves and quays were a university in themselves, a gathering together of people and goods from the whole known world, the most cosmopolitan place on earth. It was a setting to get anyone thinking, and that’s exactly what Ammonius Saccas did, both on the dockside and in the public lectures in the pagan philosophy schools which he attended after work.

Ammonius was not content to follow any one school of thought, however, but was all the time developing his own theories. Indeed, so deeply did he think about what he heard during the days that, it was said, these ideas followed him into his dreams at night, and during these dreams he found his insights. That was how he came to be known as
theodidactos,
or “God-taught,” though he referred to himself as merely a
philolethian,
a “lover of the truth.”

At some point in the early third century, perhaps even during the upheavals of the fury, Ammonius set up his own school of philosophy. He taught only orally, and like Pythagoras, he bound his advanced students with a vow of secrecy, so it is difficult to discover what his actual philosophy was. There is a further complication in understanding Ammonius, in that he was formally adopted as the founder of Theosophy by the spiritualist medium H. P. Blavatsky when she founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. This led to an enormous amount of speculation about Ammonius’s life and thoughts and a considerable attribution of eccentric Victorian quasi-religious ideas about universal brotherhoods and the like to Ammonius, with virtually no evidence to support it.

However, the pupils that Ammonius attracted do throw some light on the man and his ideas. Two of these pupils would go on to become the most influential thinkers and authors of the third century. From them we learn that Ammonius was very selective in allowing pupils to attend his school, taking on only a few pupils every year. His pupils were initially divided into three groups—novices, initiates, and masters—and he divided his teachings into two sections, the exoteric and the esoteric. This division was very widespread at the time and can be traced to many early philosophers, including Pythagoras. The exoteric teachings were openly available to all and were characteristically ethical, like the ones Ammonius himself attended as a young man. These were the lectures that the public could attend. The esoteric or “greater” mysteries were different. These were taught in private and were reserved for the fully trained and dedicated few.

Here Ammonius’s pupils learned of his notion of absolute deity, utterly transcendent and indescribable, something that both Christ and Plato could agree upon. He believed that the human soul was an immortal radiation from the universal soul or ether, and that gave every individual the possibility of experiencing divinity. But he also considered that there was a universal ethical basis within all metaphysical systems, and that in essence
all
philosophies and religions shared this universal ethical and spiritual foundation. In short, therefore, there was no underlying conflict between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and even Christ’s teaching could be seen as an authentic expression of the timeless wisdom. In this way his views came to be known as “eclectic,” capable of embracing all religious and philosophical systems.

Ammonius also posited that the best way to understand all sacred myths, legends, and mysteries was to interpret them by analogy, seeking correspondences between them and thus revealing the universality of their content. In this he is, of course, methodologically aligned with his illustrious Jewish predecessor, Philo. As his most able students began to employ these ideas, they became known as “Analogeticists.”

The broad base of Ammonius’s philosophy attracted students from a wide range of philosophical backgrounds, and among the most able of those were two young men who between them would describe the shape of Alexandria’s last years. The first of these was a Greek speaker with a Roman name who was probably born in Egypt in 205—Plotinus.

Because Ammonius himself left no written testimony, the title of “founder” of the pagan movement that became known as Neoplatonism is usually given to Plotinus, although his own ideas were certainly born out of what he heard from Ammonius in those secret lectures. Neoplatonism was not merely a revival of Plato’s teaching, but a whole new interpretation and development of his philosophy, as closely related to the original as, say, Protestantism is to Catholicism. Plotinus’s philosophical ideas began with his physical being, and they were none too flattering. Recalling that in Plato’s cosmos the waking, conscious world of humans and nature was the most debased and corrupted level of existence, he took the idea much more personally. He could hardly bear the thought that his soul was trapped in so base a thing as his body, which he sometimes called a “detestable vessel,” one which acted as an obstacle to spiritual development. He insisted that “to rise up to very truth is altogether to depart from bodies. Corporeality is contrary to soul and essentially opposed to soul” (Plotinus,
Enneads,
3, 6.6).

In a similar ascetic vein he refused to reveal his birthday, as he did not wish his friends to celebrate it, avoided eating meat, and took a daily massage instead of indulging in the rather Roman luxury of bathing. When a pupil, friend, and physician suggested he sit for a portrait, he castigated the unfortunate doctor, roaring that surely it was bad enough to be entrapped in the form in which nature had cast him without making an image of that image, as if that would be something worth staring upon.

Much of this idea of self must have come from the diminutive Alexandrian porter whom Plotinus first met when, at twenty-seven, he came to Alexandria in search of a philosophy teacher. At first he was depressed and disappointed with the offerings in the public lecture halls, until a friend mentioned Ammonius. They went to one of his lectures, after which Plotinus exclaimed, “This was the man I was looking for” (Porphyry,
Introduction to Plotinus
).

He stayed with Ammonius for eleven years, then decided he would travel to the East in search of the philosophies of the Persians, Chaldeans, and Indians. To this end he got himself attached to the army of the Roman emperor Gordian III, which was intent on invading Persia. However, Gordian was assassinated before he reached his destination and Plotinus found himself abandoned in the wilderness. It took him the best part of two years to make his way back to Antioch, and from there he took a ship to Rome, where he lived the rest of his life. He never returned to the city that had nurtured his dream.

In Rome Plotinus quickly became something of a star, commanding the respect of the emperor and his wife, along with many prominent citizens, particularly some of the more important and influential women. So deeply was he revered that several families decided to endow him with property and income in exchange for educating their children, so his house became full of young boys and girls who mixed with senators and foreign students—even Alexandrians—who had become his pupils.

One of his most able students was Malchus of Tyros, who was known in Rome as Porphyry, a humorous allusion to the purple robes of the emperor. It was he who eventually persuaded his master that for posterity’s sake he must break with Ammonius’s injunction never to write down the secrets of his philosophy, and commit his teachings to paper. So from about the age of fifty Plotinus started to record his ideas, his dialogues with his students, and his lecture notes. But he was not a patient scribe. His handwriting was tiny and very untidy, and he cared not a jot for spelling. Fortunately for us, Porphyry was the soul of patience and tact, and he both copied and edited Plotinus’s meanderings, later completing the work and considerably reordering it, as well as writing a biography of his master, before the work was finally published under the title of the
Enneads,
meaning “Groups of Nine”—each book consisting of nine discussions.