Alexandria and the Hellenistic World

by Moya K. Mason

Our good life in Alexandria was brief, but how potent were the perfumes, how splendid the bed on which we lay, and to what sensual delights did we give our bodies to? -- an Alexandrian poet

Today, Alexandria is the chief port and second largest city in Egypt with a population of over three million. It has a pleasant Mediterranean climate with sandy beaches, making it a favourite tourist attraction - the Egyptian Riviera. It is now characteristically Egyptian with numerous mosques, palaces, monuments, parks, and gardens.

Egypt was invaded by the Arabs in 642 AD and since then, Islam has been the official religion of the country. The bulk of foreign trade passes through the port of Alexandria, and excellent railroads and highways connect it with Cairo, the modern capital.⁽¹⁾

But for more then two thousand years, Alexandria was the largest city in Egypt and its capital for almost half of that time. It is back to its beginning that will help to answer the many questions of why it became what it did - an attraction for so many people of all races, creeds, and professions. As Michael Wood said, "it was the first city of the civilized world in size, elegance, riches, and luxuries:⁽²⁾ where one could obtain anything imaginable to fill the needs of the body and soul. As its famous Pharos lighthouse was a welcome sight for weary travelers, Alexandria itself seemed to have acted as a beacon for merchants, curious tourists, religious prophets, and most importantly: the finest intellectual minds of the times. It was almost as if a spiritual force beckoned from the small fishing village of Rhacotic, asking to be chosen by Alexander the Great. It was said that he had a vision as he slept one night,⁽³⁾ a vision in which he learned the location for his new "megalopolis,"⁽⁴⁾ a capital for his empire. Maybe it was there in Rhacotic that deep in the recesses of his mind that Alexander could see the possibility of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity coming together as one. People living together with tolerance for one another's cultural and religious ideologies; living a life of freedom. Maybe that is a bit fanciful as there's no evidence from the known facts of his life that suggest he entertained such ideals!

Alexander the Great

Plutarch tells of Alexander going to Egypt and liberating the Egyptians from Persian rule which they had put up with since the 6th century occupation. When he had freed them, the aristocracy welcomed him as their Pharaoh, which probably had a great effect on him, for they had given him the position of ruler for the oldest civilization in the world.⁽⁵⁾

Alexander the Great and Persian King Darius, Battle of the Issus River

But Alexander did not live to see his well-planned city take root and reach its phenomenal heights. Ptolemy I, his trusted friend and general took his corpse there "to set the seal on the new capital,"⁽⁶⁾ insisting that Alexander would have wanted it that way. Ptolemy later had a mausoleum built in the city's center called the Sema, where Alexander's body was eventually placed in a golden sarcophagus.⁽⁷⁾ By doing so, Ptolemy also elevated his own level of prestige as Alexander's possible successor. But as time went by, many wars were fought amongst the Diodochi and it became evident after the battle of Ipsus that the great Hellenistic monarchs were destined to share in Alexander's conquests. Ptolemy's base was Egypt, and it was there that he and his descendants were to go on to build their capital into the greatest Greek colony of the ancient world. It was no longer the polis but the cosmopolis that epitomized the Hellenistic world.⁽⁸⁾ The polis "was [now] simply a 'hometown,' it was no longer the supreme norm of thought and culture."⁽⁹⁾ In Alexandria there was a great fusing of so many cultures, a great city built on the foundation of a tiny village to become the capital for Alexander's empire. This concept of "cosmopolitan" developed side-by side with the Macedonian rulers: the world state, the mega-state, was proposed by them.⁽¹⁰⁾

Ptolemy I Soter commissioned the great Rhodian architect Dinocrates to lay out Alexandria on a modern rectangular grid system. Its two principal streets may have intersected at the Sema and were said to be over hundred feet wide,⁽¹¹⁾ "paved with gold."⁽¹²⁾An area called Brukhion was in the center of Alexandria and was the Ptolemies' Royal City that eventually covered over a square mile.⁽¹³⁾ There were temples, theatres, palaces, administrative buildings, a coin mint, the King's residence, a zoo, and its famous Museum and Library.⁽¹⁴⁾ A great university grew around the museum and attracted many scholars, including Aristarchus of Samothrace, the collator of the Homeric texts; Euclid, the mathematician; and Herophilus, the anatomist, who founded a medical school there. Much of the city was built out of exquisite stone. Where did all the wealth come from to build and protect such magnificence?

Ptolemy I was an intelligent man with good administrative skills. The excellent port and dock facilities were the foundation of all his prosperity, with two harbors capable of accommodating the largest ships of the day.⁽¹⁵⁾ Egypt had enormous surpluses in grain to be exported all over the Mediterranean world, besides the valuable cash crop of papyrus that was used as a writing material. It also had gold mines between the Nile and the Red Sea coast, which yielded large quantities of the precious metal. The gold could be beaten into shape or cast in molds.⁽¹⁶⁾ It was exports that were to lay the foundation of wealth for the Lagid dynasty: Egyptian exports, as well as raw materials that were discovered in other parts of Africa. As Michael Grant said, "Alexandria made one set of fortunes by exporting ... and another by its maritime trading all over the near and middle east."⁽¹⁷⁾ Ptolemy was also a very experienced general and since so much prosperity grew from his businesses, he was rich enough to have one of the finest mercenary armies of the time, and a fleet that was hard to surpass. The army also kept a tight control on the Egyptian peasants,⁽¹⁸⁾ who lived in grinding poverty. There was not very much for them to look forward to. The Hellenistic monarchs like Ptolemy were very greedy and ruthless. They considered themselves great kings, even gods.

In the Hellenistic age we get a sense of universalism in politics and a corresponding sense of individualism. It was a time of universalism and individualism as the world expanded, linked by a common language (Greek). As the world expanded, people got lost internally, and began the search for themselves. With the uncertainty of the time and the conflict that came with it, people began to look within themselves for peace of mind. The average male no longer had and direct say about political issues, nor could he be a member of an army because mercenary armies were now the norm. So he began to look at moral issues, to the well-being of his soul. With traditional political religions no longer adequate, the common person turned to magic and mystery religions, with salvation or soteria as the object of their religious practises.⁽¹⁹⁾ Thousands of papyri containing magical potions and spells have been found in Egypt. When one reads Pharmaceutria, an idyll by Theocritus, their belief in magical spells can easily be seen:

The Greeks who came to Alexandria were very open-minded to the local gods as well, and a strange synthesis emerged in Greek Egypt. Ptolemy had even invented a new god named Serapis, who was a combination of the Egyptian god Osiris and the Bull god Apis. But the greatest Egyptian deity was Isis and her cult went far beyond the borders of the 'Land of the Nile' and spread throughout Europe. She was Osiris' mother and consort, "the glory of women." In Hellenistic Alexandria she even became identified with Arsinoe II, wife of Ptolemy II, and with later Ptolemic queens. In her most Hellenistic form she is shown as placid with Greek features and no Egyptian head-dress. Isis' iconography of "Mother of all things" became attached to the character of the Mother Mary, while the figure of Christ took over the figure of Osiris. The Hellenistic religions became the building blocks of Christianity.⁽²¹⁾

The Jewish community in Alexandria was large and they had their own separate quarter in the city overseen by an ethnarch, plus they had their own council under the Ptolemies. It was around the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus that the Alexandrian Jews began the translation of their Bible into Greek. This version is known as the Septuagint and was very important because it made their religion more accessible to many Jews who found reading the original very difficult and also accessible to people of other faiths, who were curious about the foundation of the Jewish religion.⁽²²⁾ Greeks and Jews constituted the majority of the people living in Alexandria in its heyday, but there were also many thousands of Egyptians and many Asiatics:⁽²³⁾ a melting pot of people from all over the ancient world. The importance of having these many cultural and religious ideologies coming together was that Christianity arose out of the Hellenistic movements of magic and superstition, philosophy, mystery religions, and Judaism. It was the Hellenized/Gentilized Jewish philosophy typified by St. Paul and Philo of Alexandria - the fusion of Jewish and Greek thought that formed the basis of modern Christianity, through Clement and St. Augustine.⁽²⁴⁾ As Michael Wood observed during his visit to Alexandria:

Down here in the catacombs of Alexandria you can still enter that weird and wonderful world where Egyptian, Greek, Jewish, Oriental religions and magic met and intermingled ... One can see human figures in Ancient Egyptian poses with Greco-Roman faces ... guardian serpents carrying Hermes, the Greek guide of souls, with Medusa's head pictured above.⁽²⁵⁾

Many of the people living or visiting in Alexandria during those early days felt they were living in Paradise. So many had come from small, rural areas and no longer had to be concerned with the political or military aspects of their poli. Life had opened up in a lot of ways for a Hellenistic kosmopolites in terms of travel and individual satisfaction of the soul. Alexandria was the first great city of its time and people from everywhere went there for their own personal reasons. It was a land of opportunity where anything was possible: the best wine, the most pungent of spices, the finest clothing, wealth which could not be imagined, luxurious foods, games, theatre, and the most beautiful women of the world. One poet writes of two women discussing why one of their husbands has vanished. He had gone to Alexandria on business and after ten months had not returned home.⁽²⁶⁾ The attractions of the city were intoxicating for some and they did not want to leave, but it was also a very dangerous and crowded place. The city is described as bustling, crowded, and very rich! In Theocritus' idyll The Festival of Adonis, Alexandria is described as exhausting:

The people! The Chariots! Everywhere, men in cloaks and hobnailed boots. The road seems longer each time I call on you ... How shall we manage to find our way through this mob? ... Get off my feet, sir! [a man says] I'm caught like you in the crowd.⁽²⁷⁾

One can also read of a man who killed a cat for some reason and before the day was over, he was dead and his horse was burnt to the ground.⁽²⁸⁾ Law enforcement could be carried out by the mob, and in such cases, not even the king could change a person's fate. Cats were very sacred to the Egyptians and though other ethnic groups may not have felt the same fondness for them, it did not matter. Respect had to be shown or consequences came.

So it was against this backdrop of excitement and power that another sector of the ancient population came: the scholarly and intellectual men who found their place in Alexandria's famous Museum and Library, and the Ptolemic patronage that went hand in hand with it. The top minds of the day could concentrate on their research and not have to worry about going to war or how they would feed themselves. Centers of cultural activities in the Hellenistic time no longer centered around Athens, but instead, in the capital cities of the great Hellenistic kings. The center of the earth for Greeks was no longer Delphi: the center had shifted dramatically. In the center now stood the individual. It was the Macedonian lust for culture, a lust that found its roots in the Greek perception that Macedonians were barbaric and somehow did not possess the same mental abilities as they did. Some Macedonians - surely the royal family felt that they were Greek and just as advanced. They now had the wealth to prove it and somehow felt that by possessing the written works of great intellectuals, that they could somehow possess their very souls.⁽²⁹⁾ The literary scholars of the time escaped into this elitist world to find their own ataraxia⁽³⁰⁾ with people of similar imaginations and preoccupations. There are so many questions: who were these special, gifted men who were lucky enough to experience this spiritual and scholarly fraternity? What was their legacy? What were the Museum and the Library of Alexandria?

Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle's advised Ptolemy on the Library. The library of Aristotle actually provided the model for it.⁽³¹⁾ Strabo tells us that Aristotle taught the kings of Egypt to establish a library. He is referring to the Peripatetic influence on both the Library and Museum, "with emphasis on the collection and comparison of material, rather than on abstract philosophies in the tradition of the Academy."⁽³²⁾ The library was founded by Ptolemy I, but his contribution was overshadowed by the magnificence of his son, Philadelphus.⁽³³⁾

The founding of the library in 295 BC can be looked on as the turning point in bibliography and book keeping. The library became the center of Hellenistic literature and literary life. There can be no doubt that many of the copies of ancient writers still survive to this day and owe their preservation to the fact that copies were made and stored at the Library of Alexandria. The role of the people who ran the library was to collect a copy of every single book ever written. They collected copies of classical writers, collated them, and came up with a text that was as close as they could get to the original material.⁽³⁴⁾ In the third book of Galen's Epidemics, he says that Ptolemy became so obsessed with the collection of books that he proclaimed that any books found on ships docking in Alexandria were to be collected and copied. The originals would be kept by him and the copies given to the owners. These books were subsequently labeled "from the ships."⁽³⁵⁾ Books were mostly purchased at the huge book markets in places like Athens and Rhodes. Galen also tells the amusing anecdote of Ptolemy asking the unsuspecting Athenians for a lend of the standardized texts of their tragedies so he could have them copied. Ptolemy was asked to put a deposit of fifteen talents on the transaction, which he did willingly. Ptolemy never did return the originals, but gave the Athenians back the copies.⁽³⁶⁾ Fifteen talents was nothing to such a wealthy man; Ptolemy and his descendants were to spend much more on attracting and keeping the men who graced the halls of their cultural establishments.

The monarchs wanted poets in their courts and libraries, and scholarly people working on scientific research for them. Membership in the circle of scholars depended on court patronage. One could apply for it by writing an ode to the king as Theocritus did for Ptolemy and then for his son, or a person could be sought after by the king.⁽³⁷⁾ If the Macedonian rulers set out to prove to the Athenians that they were as culturally advanced as they were, it seems likely that they also tried to lure away the most important intellectuals from them. The monarchs collected books and scientific information, and they also collected people. Theophrastus turned down the job as the first head librarian, but his pupil Demetrius of Phalerum accepted it. Other writers like Zenodotus of Ephesus, who pioneered critical analysis, said that Demetrius only helped set up the library. What is important to emphasize is that the Alexandrian experience was the first evidence of widespread scholarship, and studies became a life-long occupation for the men who worked there.⁽³⁸⁾ Their job was to collect books and copy them; to criticize and comment on the books; to punctuate; and to preserve them. Out of their work came the canonization of books, the first bibliographies and biographies, and advanced the formulated concepts of grammar and metre, making them sciences. Callimachus' Pinakes or Catalogues were models of organization. In the one hundred and twenty books he took inventory of all the manuscripts, which was a landmark compilation because to 'preserve' the books, he first had to find out how many were there. A lot about the number of books in the Alexandrian Library remains hazy, and some information dubious. The Alexandrian Scholars were the first to divide Homer's works into twenty-four books. Did they count the twenty-four books of the Odyssey as one book or twenty-four? Different perceptions may account for many of the discrepancies. But we do know that men like Aristophanes of Byzantium worked there and spent his life reading and re-reading every book in the library. He alone must have been able to detect many of the blatant plagarisms of the day. The great polymath Eratosthenes, whose map of the time was more detailed than any other before it; Didymus, the Biblioleths, who was said to have written 3500 books; and the great scholar Athenaeus also worked at Alexandria.⁽³⁹⁾ But the great stars of Hellenistic Alexandria were the poets, whose work became very scholarly.

Callimachus of Cyrene, besides being the author of the Pinakes, and the chief librarian, also divided literature into the categories we use today, and wrote poetry. His style of poetry was the popular two to five line epigram, and he disliked long poems, calling "a big book a big evil."⁽⁴⁰⁾ One of his colleagues at the time was Apollonius Rhodius, who wrote very long epic poems; his most famous was written in four books and was entitled Argonautica, "making him the first poet to use romantic love as the central theme for an epic poem."⁽⁴¹⁾ Theocritus of Syracuse wrote poems, epigrams, mimes, and his famous idylls.⁽⁴²⁾ During his life he had lived both in the country and in urban settings, and tried to bring both ideologies together to present the realistic experience that so many were confronted with. Michael Grant calls "Theocritus ... his own unique person, [who] combined the greatest contradictions of the age: its urge to see things as they truly were and its counter-urge: to withdraw from this reality into the peace of mind that is invulnerable to its blows."⁽⁴³⁾ But one man epitomized the extent to which Alexandrian poetry went to impress the readers, and his name was Lycophron. His job was to produce texts on comedies, but also wrote poetry - his most famous being a two thousand line epic called Alexandra. His peers could understand his multiple allusions to mythological characters and events by studying it because poetry had come to be an esoteric art form. The struggles of the Diodochi discouraged the writing of any poetry that was not purely fictional. The monarchs liked to be entertained and immortalized by poetry, but it was no longer wise to write on political themes. So the poets wrote for themselves and their colleagues and poetry became an educated game. No longer could playwrights make fun of political issues either, or poke fun at their powerful kings. In the Hellenistic Age, the two types of drama: comedy and tragedy came together as one. The new Comedy of Menander was born, and was based on the lives of fictional neighborhood characters, which climaxed with the 'happy ending' motif.⁽⁴⁴⁾

The Library seems to have formed a complex with the Museum,⁽⁴⁵⁾ which was the most famous temple of the Muses. Strabo writes that the Museum was part of the royal gardens and had a large house where common meals could be shared. The Museum had a priest in charge of it, and enjoyed financial freedom.⁽⁴⁶⁾ It was a college of elite scholars who received grants or pensions to study. They, like the librarians might be expected to teach the occasional member of the royal family, but basically it was a research position. The sheer amounts of knowledge collected and uncovered on Alexander's journeys opened up a whole world of facts. Theophrastus is famous for his eighteen book history on botany which came directly out of the expeditions and which still forms the foundation of botany today. He also wrote a book called the Characters which seems to have been the first work of psychology. This collection of thirty male character sketches reflect the Hellenistic world and its move towards realism. Menander seems to have used this work in writing his entertaining plays.⁽⁴⁷⁾

History as a pseudo-science was an invention of the Hellenistic Age. The first real historian was Polybios, who wrote a massive history on how the Greeks and Romans met and on the causes of the Macedonian Wars. His style was not elegant and was therefore not preserved in its entirety, but we still have six books more or less intact. The scientific writings that were saved constituted the best written, not the most factual. Science was promoted by the Hellenistic kings because of the military inventions and competitions amongst each other. In Alexandria, Archimedes the mathematician and astronomer discovered specific gravity and did a lot of work on hydraulics, inventing the hydraulic pump. Euclid wrote a thirteen book mathematical textbook called The Elements, and developed geometry into a science. The astronomer Aristarchus of Samos wrote On the Size and Distances of the Sun and Moon, being the first to say that the earth went around the sun.⁽⁴⁸⁾ In the world of medicine, Herophilos and Erasistratos followed Aristotle's empirical methods in doing their work in comparative anatomy. Their empirical knowledge was achieved by the dissection of living people, mostly prisoners. The scientific contributions of the Museum were 'far-reaching': applied science, optics, psychology, applied medicine, botany, hydraulics, engineering, and mechanics. The development of mechanical engineering was especially used for building machines of war, toys, and gadgets used in moving statues of gods to attract visitors and money for temples. This technology, therefore, became useful for religious purposes and as a source of entertainment. Although science eventually became fossilized under the Stoics, and scientific discoveries were frowned upon - the invention and creation of those Alexandrian machines were destined to play a great role in the Industrial Revolution of the future.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Forgeries were a problem in Alexandria as in other Hellenistic capitals because the kings were afraid their libraries would lose out on important manuscripts, and therefore, preferred to pay the large sums of money instead.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Some even believed that the scholarship undertaken in Alexandria was excessive, as Timon wrote in his Satirical Poems, "in this populous Egypt of ours, there is a kind of bird-cage called the Museum where they fatten up any amount of pen-pushers and readers of musty tomes who are never tired of squabbling with each other."⁽⁵¹⁾ But it was not only the intellectuals who graced the halls of the Alexandrian Library and Museum, it was the very Ptolemic kings who financed these institutions - for they too were educated and wrote books on many subjects.⁽⁵²⁾ During this great time of intellectual work, it seems that no schools of philosophy had a lasting foothold in Alexandria, since the kings seemed to offer patronage to very few philosophers,⁽⁵³⁾ but in many ways the Ptolemies and Alexandria preserved the works of the Classical culture: 'Athenian Culture.' There was so much physical and spiritual upheaval in the Hellenistic Age that these men of science and literature needed a safe haven to pursue their life's work: the Ptolemies gave this to them. If it had not been for them, Athenian Culture might have died. Eighty percent of our ancient literature would not exist without the Alexandrian Library -- a staggering legacy to the Western World!

As this essay tried to show, Alexandria was an important city of the ancient world. During its three earliest centuries, it was perhaps the leading cultural center of the world, housing people of different religions, and different philosophies. It was once the center of the Hellenistic Empire and the center of scholarship and commerce in the ancient world. Mathematicians and other intellectuals flocked to Alexandria, with the main attraction the Alexandrian Library. Alexandria was in its day the intellectual capital of the world and famous for the extensive library, which in the 3rd century BC was said to contain 500,000 volumes. The Museum was a center of research, with laboratories and observatories, and had scholars such as Euclid and Erasthosthenes working there. Alexandria was also a center for biblical studies and where the Old Testament was shaped. As an important trading post between Europe and Asia, it profited from the easy overland connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Alexandria was an entity onto itself, a superstructure, which was quite different from any other city of its time. A curious capital that became not only the largest Greek city of the time, but more than anything else, a very important centre for culture.

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