In 333 BC Alexander III, king of Macedon, whose claims to Greekness were treated with some scepticism down in Athens, wreaked vengeance on the Persian kings who had posed such a threat to Greece in past centuries, by defeating a massive Persian army at the battle of the Issos, beyond the Cilician Gates. Yet he did not pursue the Persian king, Darius III, into the Persian heartlands. He well understood the need to neutralize Persian power along the shores of the Mediterranean, and marched south through Syria and Palestine, where he ruthlessly took charge of the Phoenician cities that had in the past provided Persia with its fleets; Tyre resisted him for seven months, much to his fury, even after he built the great mole that for ever after joined the island city to the mainland. Once he had captured Tyre, most of its inhabitants were slaughtered, enslaved or crucified.1 He bypassed Jerusalem, choosing the road through Gaza, since his real target at this stage was Egypt, ruled by a Persian satrap for nearly 200 years, since the days of Cambyses, and his conquest of this land transformed not just Egypt but the entire eastern Mediterranean. The result of his victory was that Egypt was turned around, looking outwards to the Mediterranean rather than inwards to the Nile valley.2 In 331 BC he decided to found a city on the northernmost edge of Egypt, on a limestone spur separated from the alluvial lands of the interior by a freshwater lake – a city next to rather than actually in Egypt, as its designation in later Latin documents as Alexandria ad Aegyptum, ‘Alexandria on the way to [or ‘next to’] Egypt’, affirms. This sense that Alexandria was more a city of the Mediterranean than of Egypt would persist for over two millennia, until the expulsion of its foreign communities in the twentieth century. For much of that period it was the greatest city in the Mediterranean.
Alexander’s motives certainly included his own glorification.3 He had recently been crowned as Pharoah in the ancient capital of Lower Egypt, Memphis, and after visiting the site of Alexandria he held an interview with the god Zeus Ammon; thereafter he liked to think that he was the son of this god rather than of the remarkable Philip II of Macedon whose own conquests in Greece had laid the basis for Alexander’s empire. He was obsessed with Homer’s works, and (according to Plutarch) Homer appeared in his dreams and reminded him of a passage in the Odyssey that described an island off the coast of Egypt called Pharos, possessed of a fine harbour. He understood the potential importance of Alexandria as a centre of trade, and his biographer Arrian insisted that he was closely involved with its planning: unfortunately there was not enough chalk to hand with which to draw on the soil an outline of the city walls, so one of Alexander’s architects suggested using barley meal instead, even though it had to be taken from the supplies the Macedonian soldiers were carrying with them. In the end it was flocks of birds attracted by the flour that marked out the boundaries of the city.4 As in other new cities of the Mediterranean world the streets were laid out in a grid pattern that still to a significant extent survives, even though the broad avenues of early Alexandria have narrowed greatly, and little survives of the ancient city above the water line – nothing at all of the city as it was in the late fourth century BC. What was exceptional was its sheer scale: three miles (five kilometres) from west to east, and about half that from north to south: a long, narrow city, said to have resembled in shape a Greek cloak, or chlamys.5 Its harbours featured prominently in the plans, separated from one another by a long mole that linked the new city to the island of Pharos of which Homer had spoken.
Alexander soon left Egypt behind, marching triumphantly through Persia towards India, and dying in Babylon eight years after the foundation of Alexandria, aged only thirty-two.6 His dream of a Hellenic-Persian empire, bringing together the high cultures of two great nations, also died, and his empire was divided up among three competing generals, in Macedonia and Greece, Syria and the East, and Egypt. It was the dynasty of generals who took charge of Egypt that brought to fruition his dream of founding a great city on the edge of Egypt. Ptolemy I Soter (‘the Saviour’) assumed power as Pharaoh in his own right, fusing Hellenic and Egyptian ideas of rulership and government; statues of the Ptolemies represented them in a highly traditional style as Pharaohs (with an occasional concession to Greek hairstyles), and they built temples to Egyptian gods in archaic Egyptian styles.7 It became customary for the Ptolemies to marry their sisters, as the Pharaohs had long done, a practice that did not appeal to the Greeks. But Alexandria also became one of the liveliest centres of a reinvigorated Greek culture that spread across the Mediterranean. What is distinctive about ‘Hellenistic’ culture is that it was not the preserve of Greeks; Hellenistic styles of art reached Carthage and Etruria, and Hellenistic ideas captivated Jews, Syrians and Egyptians. Hellenistic culture has often been treated as a demotic debasement of the classical culture of ancient Athens, characterized by florid styles of art and architecture – a sort of ancient Greek baroque. Yet it was the Hellenistic world, and Alexandria in particular (rather than Hellas itself), that produced some of the most famous names in Greek science and culture: the mathematician Euclid, the inventor Archimedes, the comedian Menander, followed in the early Roman period by the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and the physician Galen. Alexandria was of fundamental importance in the spreading of this new, open, version of Greek culture across the Mediterranean; it became the lighthouse of Mediterranean culture.
Particularly striking was the mixture of innovation and tradition in the religious policy of the Ptolemies. The early Ptolemies were men of extraordinary ambition, energy and inquisitiveness, open to many cultures and far-sighted in their management of the Egyptian economy. It was they, rather than Alexander the Great, who made Alexandria into the vibrant city it became. Ptolemy I Soter (d. 283/2) and Ptolemy II Philadelphos (d. 246) drew to Alexandria a mixed population of Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians and Jews. Many of the Jews arrived as loyal soldiers, greatly enamoured of Alexander the Great; ‘Alexander’ remained ever after a favourite name among Jews. They, of course, possessed their own distinctive cult, and the Ptolemies had no wish to interfere with it; a significant area of eastern Alexandria, known as Delta, became the focus of Jewish activity, and the first large Jewish settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean came into being. The ancient Israelites had mainly been a landlocked rural people, hemmed in by the Philistines and other peoples who lived along the coast. For this reason they have not featured prominently in the history of the Mediterranean up to this point. But with the founding of Alexandria, Jewish beliefs and culture began to spread slowly across the Mediterranean. Philo emphasized the role of Moses as lawgiver, and stressed the ethical value of the divine commandments handed down by Moses. The combination of a powerful ethical message with a structured system of law, as well as the intellectual appeal of monotheism, brought Judaism increasing numbers of converts and sympathizers over the next few centuries. Later Jewish tradition would characterize this era as one of opposition, often violent, between Hellenism and Judaism, culminating in the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid rulers of Syria and Palestine in the second century BC. Yet these rulers signally failed to uphold the tradition of respect for Judaism that their Ptolemaic rivals in Egypt understood so well: the Seleucids tried to suppress Jewish practices such as circumcision and to offer pagan sacrifices in the Temple. The festival of Hanukkah, which commemorates the Jewish revolt, came to be treated as a celebration of the decisive rejection of Hellenic ways. The revolt certainly gave expression to anti-Hellenic sentiments, but these sentiments themselves reveal how Hellenized most Jews had become – criticized for attending games and learning Greek philosophy. Greek, rather than Aramaic (the patois of the Jews of Palestine), was so widely spoken among the Alexandrian Jews that, as will be seen, a Greek version of the Bible was prepared. Moreover, in the first two centuries of`Alexandria, Greeks and Jews lived side by side in harmony. The Jews commemorated the Ptolemies in the dedicatory inscriptions of their many synagogues, loudly praising the dynasty without conceding the claim made in pagan temples that the Ptolemies were ‘divine’.8
To the rest of the population, and especially the Greeks, Ptolemy I offered a new cult, that of the god Sarapis. Sarapis was partly of Egyptian origin, a fusion of the bull god Apis and the resurrected god Osiris (hence, indeed, the name, [O]sir-apis). But Sarapis acquired many of the characteristics of Greek gods as well: elements of Dionysos, of Zeus and – in parallel to the attributes of Osiris – even of Hades, the god of the Underworld. He was also linked to the Greek god of healing, Asklepios. He was often portrayed carrying on his head a grain measure, which signified his link to the fertility of Egypt and its growing trade in grain. This thoroughly eclectic figure could thus be represented in Greek or Egyptian styles.9 When the Ptolemies erected a great temple to Sarapis, the Sarapeion or Serapaeum, at the god’s supposed birthplace of Memphis, it was decorated with what have been described as ‘purely Greek’ sculptures, though the Serapaeum in Alexandria was surrounded by sphinxes in full Egyptian style, of which several still survive. Sarapis proved popular in Alexandria: ‘the operation of creating a new deity, bizarre though it may seem to us, probably did not appear so at the time’.10 For the Greeks did not regard their own gods as exclusively Hellenic, and could accept that they manifested themselves in different guises to different peoples. Thus the invention of Sarapis formed part of a process by which the Egyptian gods were accommodated to Greek observers. The Greek question was not ‘How are your gods different from ours?’ but ‘How are your gods the same as ours?’ The eclectic nature of Sarapis also reflected the sense that there were no sharp boundaries between the twelve Olympian gods, and that their personification (for example in Homer’s works) was a way of making sense of a great jumble of divine attributes, an attitude that was also sometimes expressed by making Sarapis into the senior among a trinity of Greek or Egyptian gods. This culminated in much later attempts to portray Sarapis as the one true God of the Universe, in outright competition with the Christians of Alexandria.11
The second important innovation under Ptolemy I and II was the building of their great lighthouse on Pharos island; the word ‘Pharos’ survived in Greek, Latin and the romance languages with the simple meaning of lighthouse. It was immediately classed as one of the great wonders of the world, along with the Colossus of Rhodes, of which more shortly: both these monuments proclaimed the glory of the cities where they stood, but also emphasized how that glory was founded in significant measure upon trade. The lighthouse formed part of the early plans for Alexandria; work on the structure began in 297 BC and building lasted until 283. In part it was built out of necessity: shoals lay close to shore, invisible at night and hard to track by day. It was essential to make approaches to Alexandria safer if the city were to achieve its potential as a centre for trade across the Mediterranean. The massive structure the Ptolemies commissioned stood 135 metres (440 feet) above the waves; the building was constructed on three levels, the lowest part square tapering upwards to a platform on which stood an octagonal tower crowned by a circular colonnade, with a massive statue of Zeus at the very top. Great mirrors cast a light many miles out to sea – forty miles, at a reasonable guess. How the lighthouse was illuminated is a mystery. For, even though parts of the structure were re-used in the much smaller but impressive Mamluk fortress that was constructed on the site in the late fifteenth century, and even though sizeable fragments of the lighthouse have now been exposed by underwater excavations, the exact appearance and manner of operation of the Pharos remain elusive.
The building of the lighthouse and indeed of Alexandria was possible only because the Ptolemies had gained control of massive resources. Their achievement lay not just in capitalizing on those resources, but in magnifying them as Alexandria developed its trade. In fact some observers insisted that the wealth of Alexandria was derived at least as much from the Egyptian hinterland as from the Mediterranean: the geographer Strabo opined that ‘the imports to the city by way of the canals greatly exceed those by sea, so that the lake harbour was far richer than that on the sea’, though he was writing several centuries after the golden age of Ptolemy I and II, at the start of the first century AD.12 The city looked two ways, linking Egypt to the Mediterranean as never before; and links beyond the Mediterranean – through the Red Sea to India – ensured Alexandria’s role as the prime entrepôt between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which it would maintain with only occasional interruptions for two millennia. The Ptolemies possessed an acute sense of how to sustain the vigour of the Alexandrian, and Egyptian, economy. They knew that command of the sea routes did not simply depend on Alexandria. They worked hard to bring the cities of Phoenicia under their control, at the price of conflict with their rivals the Seleucids. If they were to maintain an effective fleet they would need to extend their political control far from Egypt, into lands rich in timber: Cyprus, Lebanon and southern Anatolia; equally, without such a fleet they would not be able to hold these lands.13 A naval race began, and not just the size of the Egyptian and Syrian fleets grew, but the size of their ships. In the fourth century both sides could sometimes mobilize over 300 ships, and the Phoenician shipyards transformed the cedars of Lebanon into a substantial fleet for the Seleucid kings; under Ptolemy II a fleet of 336 warships included 224 quadriremes, triremes and smaller vessels, but it also included many monster ships – 17 quinquiremes and still larger ships identified by the supposed number of oarsmen on each bank: 5 ‘sixes’, 37 ‘sevens’, 30 ‘nines’, 14 ‘elevens’, and so on up to 2 great ‘thirties’. Later, Ptolemy IV Philopator (d. 204) would build a ‘forty’, which may have been a massive catamaran.14 Whether these names really reflect the number of rowers, or were simply a way of indicating ‘even larger than the last large ship’, is a moot point. The ‘forty’ of Ptolemy IV never entered battle, and was probably not fit to do so; on the other hand, it amply displayed the wealth and magnificence of the Greek Pharaohs of Egypt. Its length was over 130 metres, its width over 16 metres, and it is said to have been crewed by 4,000 oarsmen and over 3,000 marines and auxiliary crewmen. Simply providing food and water for such a ship would have necessitated a small fleet of supply boats.15 Yet massive size was not all about display. A ship’s ram of the second century BC found underwater near Atlit in Israel is 2¼ metres long and weighs 465 kilograms.16
In addition to timber for the fleet, the Ptolemies needed to find sources of gold, silver, tin and iron, the last of which had been strangely neglected in Egypt during the long centuries when Hittites, Philistines, Greeks and Carthaginians enthusiastically made weapons and implements out of iron. Maybe this was because the soil of Egypt was so tractable after the Nile floods that there was little call for heavy ploughs shod with iron. On the other hand, there did exist a flourishing metal industry, and exports of gold, silver and bronze plate became one of the strengths of Alexandria, along with the export of textiles, pottery and – a particular speciality – glass.17 Papyrus was another Egyptian speciality that had been in demand in neighbouring lands since the era of Wenamun, in the eleventh century BC; now, Egyptian papyrus was ever more widely diffused across the Mediterranean. One of the most enthusiastic markets for these goods was Carthage, which used the Ptolemaic weight standard for its coins; Carthage was valuable to the Ptolemies because Spanish and Sardinian silver was funnelled through the city.18 There were also close relations with Rhodes, which in the third century BC was as important a hub of trade as Alexandria. Alexandria thus established itself as one of the major business centres of the entire Mediterranean; its strength rested not just on the extraordinary achievements of the early Ptolemies, but also in the way it rapidly became integrated into the Hellenistic trade network.
One of King Ptolemy II’s administrators, named Apollonios, appears in a series of papyri from the Egyptian desert. Among them is a ship’s manifest of the middle of the third century BC, recording a cargo sent to Apollonios’ household from Syria to Alexandria, and it provides rich evidence of the variety of goods that were being traded: nuts from the Black Sea, always a favourite on Mediterranean trade routes; cheese from Chios; olive oil, figs, honey, sponges and wool. There was also wild boar meat, venison and goat’s meat aboard. But what filled most of the hull was wine – 138 amphorae and 6 half-amphorae of ordinary wine, and 5 amphorae plus 15 half-amphorae of sweet dessert wine.19 This commerce was carefully and accurately taxed. The Ptolemies inherited from the Pharaohs a tight system of control of trade that they had no intention of relaxing. Ships arrived at designated ports and their cargoes were closely examined. It was an ancient system of commercial taxation that continued under the Romans, Byzantines and Arabs: ad valorem taxes, representing a percentage of the estimated value of the cargo, sometimes as much as 50 per cent (on wine and oil), sometimes merely a third or a quarter; taxes were levied not just at the ports but at internal customs stations along the Nile, as goods moved up to Alexandria.20 Although this forced up the price of goods by the time they reached the quayside at Alexandria, demand for Egyptian grain and other products was generally so strong that these goods could still find purchasers in the eastern Mediterranean. In addition, the Alexandrians profited handsomely from their role as middlemen in the trade linking the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Although in the past, at Naukratis and elsewhere, Greek merchants had been able to tap into this trade, the scale of contact was now vastly enlarged. Gold, frankincense and myrrh were three of the prized items carried up the Red Sea. In 270/269 Ptolemy II Philadelphos reopened a canal that linked the Nile Delta with the lakes to the west of Sinai (now traversed by the Suez Canal), and created a maritime route into the Red Sea. Indian goods became familiar in Alexandria, while the Ptolemies profited from access to African and Indian elephants for their army.21 An Egyptian papyrus lists the cargo of a vessel named the Hermapollo, which had arrived from India carrying 60 cases of spikenard, 5 tons of general spices, and 235 tons of ivory and ebony.22 The great Mediterranean spice trade had been founded, and Alexandria would remain its most important centre even beyond the opening of the Cape route to the Indies by the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century.
The product that came to dominate the business of Alexandria was, however, grain. This was partly so that the city itself could be fed. Channels had been constructed linking Lake Mareotis, behind Alexandria, to the Nile Delta, so access to grain was unproblematic. But the Ptolemies were well aware that there was always room on the international markets for grain; Athens might look to the Bosphorus for supplies, but Rhodes was keen to buy Egyptian wheat for itself and for its many trading partners.23 The Ptolemies found themselves in an exceptionally strong position because they inherited a regime according to which most of the land in Egypt was the possession of Pharaoh. They were thus able to charge the peasants a steep rent and to demand as much as half of what was produced, for the fertility of the soil after the Nile floods did not make such demands entirely unreasonable. New opportunities arose on the export market: a series of invasions of the Black Sea region, by Celtic and Scythian tribes, was endangering the sources and supply route on which Athens and other Greek cities had been relying for food. Seeing a chance of enriching themselves from the grain trade, the Ptolemies worked hard to increase the quality and quantity of grain production. They also extended the areas under cultivation and encouraged the use of iron implements as a way of improving efficiency and yields: ‘so extensive a use of iron in Egyptian agriculture almost amounted to a revolution’.24 Irrigation was improved, and among the contraptions used to water the land appeared the Archimedes screw, still favoured by Egyptian fellahin, and known in those days as the kochlias, or ‘snail’.25 The Persians had introduced a new type of wheat, superior to traditional Egyptian varieties, and the advantages of this were seized upon while Alexander was still alive. The cultivation of vines was greatly extended on the shores opposite Alexandria, and some good wines were apparently produced; more important, perhaps, was the development of an oil industry, since before the Ptolemies olive trees had not been widespread in Egypt. In doing all this, the Ptolemies laid the foundations of a new prosperity that would last until the Byzantine period.
The Ptolemies had no difficulty spending their income. The glorification of the dynasty was achieved by seizing the body of Alexander the Great as it was being carried through Syria and burying it magnificently somewhere in the centre of Alexandria (hunting for the site has long been a favourite Alexandrian pastime). But Alexandria was a living city, and its greatest buildings were not surprisingly those attached to the massive palace complex on its northern side. There the Ptolemies created a linked pair of institutions that confirmed their deep dedication to scholarship and, at the same time, their determination that whatever they did should be the biggest and best: the Mouseion, or ‘museum’, and the Library of Alexandria, where the papyrus of Egypt was used to build the greatest collection of literature the world had ever seen. The idea of a Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses, was not new (there were famous Athenian models on which to draw, and Ptolemy I relied on the advice of a learned Athenian, Demetrios of Phaleron), but the scale of this enterprise, its longevity and its influence were all exceptional. This was not simply a cult centre where music, philosophy and the arts were graciously cultivated. It was an Institute of Advanced Study, an All Souls College, where scholars, largely free of teaching duties, could devote themselves fully to literature, science and philosophy. According to Strabo there was even a Common Room and the members dined together; the institution possessed an endowment and a priest appointed by the king presided over the community.26
The second great scholarly institution, the Library, is also quite mysterious. It was not a public library, though access was clearly granted to serious scholars, and there were side rooms where scholars could hold discussions and work side by side. Its origins lay in a decision by Ptolemy I to ‘equip the library with the writings of all nations so far as they were worthy of serious attention’.27 Although it has been claimed that the Mouseion was concerned with Greek learning, it is clear that the Library, at any rate, extended its interests far beyond the Greek world, though it is likely that most non-Greek texts were translated before they were deposited – chronicles of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Hebrew Bible, Indian tales. Under the direction of Demetrios of Phaleron (c. 350–c. 280) and his capable successors, the Library was accommodated somewhere within the great palace complex of the Ptolemies, though there soon developed a ‘daughter library’ at the Serapaion which seems to have been more accessible, even if its collection was perhaps a tenth of the size of that of the main library, 42,800 papyrus rolls as against 400,000 ‘mixed’ books and 90,000 ‘unmixed’ books in the central depository.28 Some of the rolls held several texts, but longer works (of which the Alexandrian poet Kallimachos famously said mega biblion, mega kakon – ‘big book, big evil’) were divided into separate scrolls. The evidence suggests, though, that the question of quality competed with that of quantity. The Ptolemies were determined to lay their hands on the best possible texts of the great authors: they hoodwinked the Athenians into sending their master copies of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophokles and Euripides for copying, and then retained them, even though that meant sacrificing an enormous deposit in silver.29 Meanwhile the scholars of the Mouseion concentrated many of their energies in classifying and editing the great poets of archaic and classical Greece, such as Sappho and Pindar, neglecting both lesser-known, but very capable, classical writers and their own talented contemporaries such as Kallimachos, whose works have often had to be recovered from small papyrus fragments found in the desert sands of Egypt.30 Thus the Mouseion and the Library were of crucial importance in the creation of a canon of great classical writers, and the sanctification of archaic and classical Greece as the great age of literary production, at the expense of Hellenistic Alexandria itself.
It would be a mistake to disparage the literary productions of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Kallimachos of Cyrene and Apollonios of Rhodes served on the staff of the Library of Alexandria, and Kallimachos devised a cataloguing system for the Library. But they also composed work of lasting significance: Kallimachos was famous for his epigrams, while Apollonios’ great contribution was an epic in the Homeric mould, the Argonautika, which recounted Jason’s adventures in search of the Golden Fleece and his love affair with Medea. But his style did not parody that of Homer: he had an unusual ability to present events as if he were an observer, addressing the audience directly, and his rather ornate style has charm. His description of the Mediterranean waters through which Jason supposedly passed, and of the European river system beyond, betrays the influence of contemporary Alexandrian geographers and ethnographers, even though he could never quite escape the influence of Homeric geography, with the result that Roman commentators laughed at his errors.31
The Alexandria Library was unique in size and comprehensiveness, but it had its rivals. The kings of Pergamon on the coast of Asia Minor amassed their own library; anxious to prevent it from growing, Ptolemy II is said to have placed an embargo on the export of papyrus to Pergamon. But the librarians of Pergamon came up with a solution: the use of animal-skin parchment (pergamenon) as a writing surface.32 On the other hand, the Alexandrian collection grew quickly and then slowly declined. Wear and tear, illicit removal of texts (borrowing was forbidden) and periods of relative neglect meant that, even when Julius Caesar set alight some warehouses storing books on the quayside at Alexandria – probably an off-site library deposit of some sort – the Alexandria Library had passed its peak.33 Although its destruction is traditionally associated with the Arab invasion in AD 642, it is generally accepted that by then there was little left to destroy, and, sadly, no original material from this great library now survives.34
The clearest proof that the Ptolemies were not closed to the wisdom of other peoples lies in the much repeated report by ancient authors that Ptolemy II commissioned a translation of the Hebrew Bible.35 A famous story tells how seventy-two wise Jews were sent to Alexandria by the High Priest in Jerusalem, placed in seventy-two cubicles and ordered to translate the Pentateuch in isolation from one another. They emerged with seventy-two identical translations, the ‘Septuagint’, or ‘Seventy’.36 In fact, the Septuagint emerged gradually over several decades, and it met the needs not just of the curious Ptolemies and their scholars but of the Alexandrian Jews, who increasingly were Greek-speaking; it is not even clear that the great philosopher Philo had much command of Hebrew. Interestingly, the Septuagint was based on a Hebrew text that differed at several points from the standard, ‘Masoretic’ text of the Hebrew Bible preserved by the Jews, and included apocryphal material discarded in the Jewish Bible. Some of this material, such as the book known as ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’, betrays strong influences from Hellenistic philosophy – further proof that the Jews of Alexandria were not isolated from Hellenistic culture, but greeted it with enthusiasm. The Septuagint was one of the great contributions of Alexandria to the cultural history of the Mediterranean, adopted by the Christians of Constantinople as the text of the Old Testament; indeed, Byzantine Christianity preserved much more of Alexandrian Jewish culture than the Jews themselves, including the voluminous works of Philo.
It would be easy to produce a catalogue of the remarkable Greek scholars who studied in Ptolemaic Alexandria. Some of the most influential are also the murkiest: was Euclid a man or a committee of mathematicians? In the third century, Eratosthenes, who worked out with remarkable precision the diameter of the earth, served as librarian of Alexandria; another innovative scientist was Aristarchos, who deduced that the earth revolves around the sun, though he was not taken seriously, and his influence waned further in the Roman period when another Alexandrian, Claudius Ptolemy, published his own very influential description of the earth in which it remained at the centre of the universe. There was a vibrant medical tradition in Alexandria; understanding of the human body was enhanced by the practice not just of autopsy but of dissecting condemned prisoners while still alive. Archimedes probably spent only a relatively short part of his long life (287–212 BC) in Egypt, but he maintained contact with Alexandrian mathematicians such as Eratosthenes.37 His career serves as a reminder of the fascination of the Ptolemaic court with ingenious machines. One of these has been recovered from the Mediterranean seabed off the island of Antikythera, and appears to be a mechanical model of the universe.38 Alexandrian science was of more than local interest. The discoveries and inventions of many of these figures were of lasting importance, and provide further proof of the great vitality of Hellenistic culture, of which Alexandria established itself as the capital.
Alexandria cannot be considered in isolation. Its commercial success depended on links to the eastern Mediterranean, and at least as far west as Carthage. There was another place in the eastern Mediterranean that also filled the vacuum left by the decline of Athens as a great maritime and commercial power: Rhodes, whose island aristocracy of Greek origin managed to maintain its independence from competitors even though the world beyond was fast being divided up among the Macedonian generals. The Rhodians successfully resisted an attempt by the Seleucid king Demetrios to seize their island in 305; he brought 40,000 men from Syria and harried Rhodes for a year, but in the end their determination forced him to withdraw – the first in a series of famous sieges of Rhodes. This victory was commemorated by the construction of a gigantic statue of the sun-god Helios, who bestrode the harbour of Rhodes, the famous Colossus, completed by about 280 BC. The Rhodians even managed to create their own territorial dominion in the eastern Aegean islands and on the coast of Asia Minor, which became an important source of goods and manpower.39 They had great need for manpower because they launched large fleets and expended much energy clearing the seas of pirates, whose appearance was the inevitable consequence of the decline of Athenian sea power. In 206–203 BC the Rhodians worked hard to suppress pirates based in Crete.40 The Rhodians dedicated themselves to the principle that no single power should dominate the seas where they navigated; they aimed to preserve a balance between competing forces. Thus, although they enjoyed close commercial and political ties to Ptolemaic Egypt, they were willing to support the Seleucids if the Egyptian navy threatened to dominate the eastern Mediterranean. All this was achieved without trying to build the preposterously vast vessels beloved of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. One Rhodian favourite was the triemiolia, an adaptable version of the trireme that was able to make use of sail power and oar power at the same time, making these ships ideal for chasing pirates; the Rhodians also employed an early type of Greek fire, combustible flares lobbed from poles on to the decks of enemy ships.41
Although the Ptolemies had created such an imposing war fleet, the commercial traffic of Alexandria was dominated by the ships of Rhodes, which could reach Egypt in only three or four days when the wind was behind them, while even in winter return traffic to Rhodes was on the move, if much more slowly.42 Diodoros wrote: ‘the Rhodians derived the majority of their revenues from the merchants sailing to Egypt’; he added: ‘one could even say that their city was sustained by that kingdom’.43 It was the Rhodians who shifted most of the Egyptian grain that was despatched northwards, and it was from Rhodes that large quantities of wine arrived in Egypt, for the Rhodians had developed extensive vineyards all over their island; the physical evidence for this trade survives in the stamped handles of over 100,000 Rhodian amphorae, discovered in and around Alexandria.44 These wine jars can also be found on sites throughout the Aegean, up into the Black Sea, and westwards in Carthage and Sicily. Ancient sources provide an estimate of the annual value of Rhodian trade around 200 BC: 50,000,000 drachmai, based on a 2 per cent tax which was levied on incoming and outgoing traffic, and which produced 1,000,000 drachmai each year.45 A web of Rhodian bankers existed across the eastern and central Mediterranean; they advanced credit, oiling the commercial networks of the Mediterranean. The weight standard of Rhodian coinage was adopted by towns and islands in the Aegean. All this earned appreciation rather than enmity: when Rhodes was devastated by an earthquake in 227 or 226 BC, offers of aid arrived from rulers in Sicily, Egypt, Asia Minor and Syria.
The other important centre of trade and banking in the Hellenistic world was Delos, which was at first used by the Rhodians as a clearing house for their regional trade.46 From 168 BC onwards, the Romans, who had been imprudently fighting the king of Macedon to a stalemate, started to interfere in the trade networks of the Aegean. They began to treat the Rhodians not as allies (and valued trading partners) but as a satellite, expecting Rhodes to place its fleet at the service of Rome in its conflict with the kings of Macedon. In reprisal against Rhodian lack of enthusiasm, the Roman Senate encouraged a more submissive ally, Athens, to take charge of Delos, on two conditions: the native population must be expelled and the island must function as a free port. Delos was repopulated by a merchant community, including many south Italians who ensured links with the west were maintained and enhanced; its population grew to an estimated 30,000 around 100 BC. Business was dragged away from Rhodes, which experienced sharp decline; the commercial income of Rhodes is said to have quickly fallen to 15,000 drachmai. Delian success in trade boosted the already strong reputation of its sanctuary. Excavations on Delos have uncovered large commercial areas, which were unfortified, since they were protected by the island’s sanctity. There were several agorai or marketplaces for the Italian merchants, containing not just colonnades, porticoes, shops and offices but shrines dedicated to the gods merchants favoured, such as Poseidon, master of the sea, or Hermes, the messenger god. The Italians encouraged the trade in perfumes and unguents, and indirect links were forged through Syria to the Nabataean trade routes that penetrated to sources of frankincense and myrrh in Arabia. There was also a busy trade in slaves, victims of the piracy that became more threatening by the end of the second century, with the resurgence of the Cilician pirates in the east (a reflection, surely, of the decline of Rhodes, which had policed the waters off Anatolia so effectively). By Roman times Delos was being described as ‘the greatest emporium on the whole earth’.47
Although its fortune was built to some extent on the misfortune of Rhodes, the success of Delos is further proof of the way in which, during the third and second centuries BC, the eastern Mediterranean networks of trade and business became increasingly integrated into a coherent, well-managed system, first under the hegemony of Rhodes and then under that of Delos. Delos brought in new partners, enlarging the network to include the merchants of Puteoli in the Bay of Naples. The Hellenistic world was politically fragmented into three main units – Greece, Syria and Egypt – and yet what was beginning to emerge was a single domain of trade. One element was missing: the great city of Carthage had disappeared from the map in the middle of the second century BC. It is now necessary to step back in time and examine how this happened, and how the backwoodsmen of Rome came to dominate even Greek waters before 100 BC.