The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (6 page)

 
Despite these affectations Hippodamus and his school were held in high regard when it came to planning towns. For them town planning was about much more than just laying out public squares and markets. For them the job of an architect also included suggesting how a town should function, what the structure of its government should be, and how its citizens should work together for the common good. Aristotle, in a more generous mood, tells us that Hippodamus was

 
He even seems to have gone as far as suggesting the rudiments of a welfare state, when he

 
Of course Hippodamus had rarely had the opportunity to build a city from scratch, having instead to change towns piecemeal and persuade their inhabitants of the merits of his ideas. At Alexandria, however, Dinocrates had a clean slate, and as he paced the burning sand he must have thought of not just how to build a city but how to make it work as well.

The physical system Dinocrates built was based around a grid of roads, each cell of which was then to be filled in with housing, public buildings, and royal palaces. This gridiron provided the maximum road access and commercial frontage while also allowing for privacy within each cell. It was a simple but hugely innovative design, forgotten in the modern world until recent centuries. Today, of course, it is a plan that forms the backbone of some of the greatest cities on earth, from Tokyo to New York.

The most important work, however, was to create the two sea harbors and for this major engineering work was necessary. This took the form of a 600-foot-wide mole, or causeway, stretching between the mainland and the island of Pharos, which divided the bay in half. As this land bridge was seven times the length of a Greek stadium (around 4,200 feet) it was known as the
heptastadion.
The heptastadion was cut and bridged at its top and bottom to allow shipping to pass from one harbor to the other. To the east was the Great Harbor, running from the isle of Pharos over the heptastadion, along the coast, and out via another promontory, the Lochias. Across its narrow neck lay dangerous reefs, making the approach extremely difficult; but inside the harbor, shipping was almost entirely protected from the elements. For a ship finding passage into this haven, an extraordinary new vista now opened up. Ahead lay the tiny island of Antirrhodos, with its own miniature royal harbor, and embracing this, the walls of the harbor proper, where the palaces, apartments, and gardens of the royal quarter spilled down to the edge of the sea. Here the still blue waters ran so deep that even the largest ships could tie up at the walls without fear of grounding.

To the west lay the port of Eunostos in the curve from the other end of the Pharos across the heptastadion and on to the mainland coast. With its wide mouth it made for an apparently much easier approach from the sea, but again the harbor opening was littered with reefs and shoals, making sense for any sailor of the port’s name, Eunostos—the “Port of Good Return.” From here there was also a canal cut across to Lake Mareotis. Finally, there was a third, very small sea harbor, on the far side of the island of Pharos itself, known as the Port of Pirates, suitable for small fishing boats perhaps but, thanks to a string of rocks across its entrance, of no use in Dinocrates’ magnificent plan. Nor was the name purely fanciful. The inhabitants of Pharos and the users of her harbor retained something of a reputation for piracy even as the city began to thrive, and ships approaching and leaving port were warned to give the island a wide berth.

To provide water for the city, another canal stretched from the Nile near the town of Canopus to great underground communal cisterns in the city. For those fortunate to be living in the wealthier sections of the city, the larger private houses were fitted with their own cisterns giving their owners the unique advantage in a desert land of having fresh water “on tap.” Nor were the inhabitants of Pharos forgotten, and an aqueduct carried water for the island from the Nile canal, through the city, and across the heptastadion.

Within these boundaries it was Dinocrates’ task to fit this perfect city, and the results were spectacular. Imagine the traveler whose ship puts in at Alexandria’s Great Harbor in these early days. He would walk along the new wharves and pass south through the Gate of the Moon into the city itself. Ahead lies a 101-foot-wide boulevard known later as the Street of the Soma, or “body,” after the mausoleum of Alexander and the Ptolemaic kings that stood on its flank. Down each side the dazzling white of marble colonnades leads the eye to the southern gate of the city—the Gate of the Sun—and, glittering beyond it, the waters of Lake Mareotis. Here Nile transports laden with Egyptian grain might be seen tying up alongside the marsh harbor, while distant sails carry Greek treasures away to the Nile Valley. Walking down the granite-paved street, our visitor eventually comes to the major crossroads where the great east- west Canopic Way intersects the Street of the Soma. In years to come this will be the chaotic, noisy heart of the city, filled with street philosophers, tradesmen, and hawkers, but for now it is still quiet. To the left along the way, in the far distance, stands the Canopic Gate, beyond which a dusty road leads east toward the Nile and “old” Egypt. To the right the colonnades stretch out to the Necropic Gate at the threshold of the City of the Dead. Beyond lie the gardens and embalming houses in which the inhabitants of this city will be buried in centuries to come, a silent other-world of incense-laden air and voiceless mausolea. Along both these streets and the grid of smaller roads that spread out from them, plots are already being divided up. There will be a theater and a stadium, a riding track, a gymnasium, and a host of temples and shrines. The large space needed for the hippodrome will have to be found outside the city limits, beyond the Canopic Gate, while the royal quarter will quickly fill with ever more lavish palaces and lodges.

Other wonders too would soon come to Alexandria, but with the building of the heptastadion and the laying out of the main roads, the fundamental plan of the greatest city in the ancient world was complete. Plutarch in his
Life of Alexander
commented that the overall shape was, appropriately enough, like that of a military Macedonian chlamys, the Macedonian short cloak—gathered in the middle between the Mediterranean and Mareotis and splaying out to east and west. Long before the lighthouse shone out from Pharos, before the foundation of the library or museum, before even Alexander’s body was entombed in its marble-and-rock-crystal vault, his city was already a miracle. The flour and sand had become marble and granite.

The people who gazed out from their new marble porticoes in the nascent city were as varied in origin and wealth as the peoples Alexander had conquered. The city had been laid out not in three “classes,” as Hippodamus had suggested, but in three main ethnic districts: the original village site of Rhakotis became the native Egyptian quarter, the Brucheum was home to both Greek immigrants and the Greek rulers of the city, and a Jewish quarter was populated with both local Jewish residents and traders and a large population (some report it as one hundred thousand people) of captives, brought here by Ptolemy after he had conquered Jerusalem. Later other districts would follow, but already this blend of European, African, and Near Eastern peoples was unique.

We have no contemporary description of the early city, but later travelers visited and described what this seed would become. Strabo, a Greek geographer, whose name is actually an insulting Roman term meaning “squinty,” visited the city during Julius Caesar’s lifetime and recorded how by his time, every space within the plan laid out by Dinocrates had been filled with buildings:

 
But if it was the whim of Alexander that had founded the city and the will of Ptolemy that made it his capital, it was something more powerful than both of them that made it a success from the start. The reason people from across the ancient world were settling here was trade. Alexandria was rapidly becoming the entrepôt of the world. Sited between two harbors, the city stood at the crossroads of the ancient world, where the fine art and technology of the Greek city-states could be traded for the vast food resources of the Nile Valley, the treasures of Africa, and the luxuries of Asia. By the time Diodorus visited sometime around the middle of the first century BC it was unsurpassed:

 
Alexandria was a commercial success, and once the body of the hero himself was installed as its centerpiece it would gain an electrifying additional significance. It would become a city of God.

 
 
While Alexander’s great plan seemed to be coming together, Ptolemy’s place in succeeding to this patrimony was by no means yet certain. Ptolemy’s retiring to Egypt with the body of Alexander sent out a clear message to any Macedonian generals who might dispute the succession. If Perdiccas or anyone else wanted to reintegrate Egypt into that empire, he would now have to fight Ptolemy for it. Egypt was hence the first fragment to fall away from the Macedonian Empire, beginning a sequence of collapse that would lead to years of internecine warfare.

But in the last remaining days of peace there was one other problem in Egypt to clear up. It was time for Ptolemy to turn to that other festering sore, that other dangerous reminder of the old times. Cleomenes of Naucratis was still a powerful official in Egypt, and still the man in charge of funding the building of Ptolemy’s new city. But as that dream came to fruition, so the potentially dangerous Cleomenes’ usefulness was coming to an end.

It was perhaps an old face from Ptolemy’s childhood, Aristotle, who suggested the solution. Cleomenes had somehow come to Aristotle’s attention, and in the great man’s economic treatise
Oeconomica
he describes at length some of the hyparchos’s more “unusual” methods of raising funds. In one instance he threatened to attack the sacred crocodiles who ate one of his servants, forcing their priests to produce a large quantity of gold in order to buy off his wrath and so protect the sanctity of the reptiles.

In particular Aristotle reports the unique approach he took to funding and filling the new city of Alexandria by persuading the inhabitants of the nearby market town of Canopus to move to the city: “Sailing therefore to Canopus he informed the priests and the men of property there that he was come to remove them. The priests and residents thereupon contributed money to induce him to leave their market where it was” (Aristotle,
Oeconomica,
book 2, 1352a).

Cleomenes was not about to forgo a substantial bribe, so he took the money and left the inhabitants of Canopus in peace, at least for a little while. But in fact the residents of the city had just bought some time while the finishing touches were put to Alexandria. Then Cleomenes returned “and proceeded to demand an excessive sum; which represented, he said, the difference the change of site would make to him. They however declared themselves unable to pay it, and were accordingly removed” (Aristotle,
Oeconomica,
book 2, 1352a).

Aristotle went on to list numerous other cons, tricks, and elaborate extortions by which this rather faithless financial adviser lined the imperial pocket and his own. Whether this information had come to Aristotle from Ptolemy, or whether it was common knowledge, is unknown. Perhaps Cleomenes felt invulnerable enough even to boast of his financial “achievements.” If he did so, however, he was a fool, for Aristotle was writing his death warrant.

Perhaps, standing in front of the beautiful city now growing up around him, Cleomenes thought his work, his reputation, or even his money could protect him. He was quite mistaken. In fact, making money—his great talent—would be his undoing. His sharp financial practices had been overlooked for years by rulers eager to line their own coffers, but Ptolemy now turned with righteous indignation on the man who had built Alexandria for him. The financial wizard who, more than any other person, had actually turned Alexander’s orders into architectural reality was charged with embezzling the staggering sum of eight thousand Egyptian talents. To put that into the context of the day, it was enough money to have paid one of the laborers building the city for over sixty-six thousand years. It was also of course a charge which undoubtedly had a certain ring of truth to it, even if Ptolemy had massaged the exact figures. As a result Cleomenes was tried, found guilty, and promptly executed.