Egypt
Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great during his brief foray into Egypt in 332–331 BC. Although his first act was to have himself crowned pharaoh at MEMPHIS, the country’s traditional capital, he had probably already decided that his conquest needed a new capital, Greek in style, population and orientation. Hence the siting of Alexandria at the western tip of the Nile Delta, about as near to Greece as you can get without losing contact with Egypt altogether. In fact Alexandria was to be known as Alexandria-by-Egypt, rather than Alexandria-in-Egypt, and it is not too far-fetched to see it as an extension of Greece for the government of the adjacent Egyptian territory.
Though Greek sailors were notoriously reluctant to venture out of sight of land, the crossing from Greece to North Africa was one open sea voyage that they were prepared to make. They had been doing so since the Bronze Age, and in the seventh and sixth centuries BC had founded a clutch of little colonies on the coast of Cyrenaica, plus a trading post in the Nile Delta at Naucratis. The founding of Alexandria meant a great increase in such traffic, with most of it being channelled on to a single route, the passage from Alexandria itself to RHODES at the south-east corner of the Aegean. The economic and political connections between the two cities became very close and only started to fade towards the end of the Hellenistic era, the period when the Levant was ruled by Alexander’s successors.
As far as Egypt was concerned, Hellenism meant the rule of the Ptolemies, a dynasty founded by Ptolemy I Soter (‘the Saviour’), the Macedonian general who was governor of Egypt at the time of Alexander’s death. In 313 Ptolemy decided that the building of Alexandria was sufficiently advanced for him to take his court there, and in that year the new capital officially opened for business. However, Ptolemy still went back to Memphis for his coronation as pharaoh. Although he invented a new and ultimately very successful god for Alexandria, named Serapis (see p. 11), he and his successors always remained respectful of Egypt’s traditions and beliefs. The idea of Alexandria as a purely Greek city was to suffer a gradual erosion almost from the start.
Today no visible trace remains of what was once the most celebrated sight of ancient Alexandria, the Pharos, the name given to the lighthouse on Pharos Island. Completed in the early third century BC, the Pharos is the first building of this type of which we know, certainly the first purpose-built one. For the next six centuries it fulfilled its pioneering function, marking the entrance to the Great Harbour by night and, by virtue of its height, by day too. It became the symbol of the city and as such was featured on its coins; it also makes occasional appearances in mosaics and on intaglios. Then, in late antiquity, all mention of it ceases, presumably because it had been wrecked by the seismic upheavals that so drastically altered the harbour area during this period. But this was far from the end of its story: the memory of it survived its downfall, and, as the years passed, and even its ruins crumbled away, it entered the realm of legend. It wasn’t just for its incredible height that it had been accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, said the storytellers. The statue that stood at the top was the real marvel, the work of a master magician who conferred on it the power to spy out ships a day’s sail away. If they belonged to an enemy, the statue would utter a warning cry to the city’s defenders; they reportedly could then use the great bronze mirror that stood alongside the statue as a burning glass, setting fire to any vessels foolish enough to press home their attack. So long as this strange figure stood on its watchtower, the city was safe from its foes – at least those who came by sea. But once it was gone, the world would never see its like again.
What lies behind all these tales? A cynic might say not very much, pointing out that the list of the Seven Wonders was drawn up at Alexandria, and that the Pharos’ place on it probably owed more to local patriotism than to any special features of the lighthouse. Of the various claims made on its behalf, the one most frequently trotted out is its unrivalled height. Arab sources give figures equivalent to 300, even 400 metres, and even today the favoured reconstruction, published by the German scholar Hermann Thiersch in 1909, proposes an overall height of 120 metres. There are two reasons to be suspicious about this. The first is that the Greeks had no experience of tall buildings and it is most unlikely that, at their first attempt, they managed something nearly twice the height of the towers of Notre Dame (sixty-nine metres). The second is that on the coast at Abusir, thirty-two kilometres (twenty miles) to the west of Alexandria, there is an ancient monument thought to be a scaled-down version of the Pharos that consists of three storeys, the first square, the second octagonal and the third circular. The site of the Pharos itself is now occupied by a Mamluk fort whose central keep is thirty metres square. If, as many think, this incorporates the Pharos’ first storey, the complete building would have been about sixty metres high.
There is no doubt about the fame of the Pharos: as a generic word for lighthouse its name still survives in French (phare) and Italian (faro). And there’s no question that the name was first applied to the illuminating structure in Alexandria.
Nonetheless, purely Greek was the way Alexandria began, both in town planning and in population. Immigration from Greece was encouraged by generous subsidies in terms of jobs military and civil, and of land grants. In fact, as is the case with all Greek cities, many of Alexandria’s citizens would have visited their nominal metropolis only on rare occasions, content to live out their days on the farms granted to them when they first arrived. Many of these farms seem to have been in the Fayum, where the Ptolemies launched a big programme of land reclamation. About half the named Alexandrian citizens we know of resided there, and although this conclusion has probably been biased by the fact that the Fayum is a favourite hunting ground for archaeologists, there is no doubt that many Alexandrians not only lived in the country but lived so far away that they would have been unable to play much of a role in the city’s affairs.
Ptolemy I’s ambitions for Alexandria were not just personal and political; he wanted to see it become the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean world. For advice on how to achieve this ambition he turned to Demetrius of Phaleron, an interesting character who had governed Athens for a decade on behalf of King Cassander of Macedon, been expelled when the city fell to Demetrius Poliorcetes, and eventually ended up as a member of Ptolemy’s entourage. Between them, Ptolemy and Demetrius agreed on a two-point programme: (i) to establish a royal library; and (ii) to fund a circle of philosophers, scholars and men of science who would form a permanent academy, to be known as the Museum (named after the Greek muses). The Library would contain a copy of every work of importance to Greek scholarship. The Museum would offer a place to anyone of exceptional status in the world of learning.
There were two possible Athenian models for the Museum: the Academy founded by Plato, and the Lyceum founded by Aristotle. Aristotle’s Lyceum was the more influential as far as the Alexandria Museum was concerned. Plato’s Academy had become a haunt of pure philosophy and not much else. The Lyceum was still following Aristotle’s precept that everything from astronomy to zoology was worth studying and embodied the spirit of inquiry that Ptolemy and Demetrius wanted. The Museum was, after all, a temple of all nine muses.
It is worth stressing that the Museum was a society for scholars, not a museum in our modern sense of the term. Nor was it a university. The members of the Museum could take on fee-paying students if they wanted to, but there was no organized student body. The nearest thing to it today would be a centre for advanced studies, although by present-day standards the Museum would be considered a pretty small affair. It probably had no more than a dozen or so fellows, supported by an equivalent number of clerks and domestics. The premises were certainly simple, with a colonnaded court where the fellows could meet, alcoves where they could chat, and a dining room for communal meals. It is not likely there was any residential accommodation.
The Museum got off to a good start with the appointment of Euclid, the most famous geometrician of his day, who we know was in Alexandria in Ptolemy’s lifetime. The Library presented more of a problem because Demetrius’ connection with Athens and Ptolemy’s provision of funds produced such a huge influx of papyrus rolls that coping with them was almost impossible. Many will have arrived in poor condition, few were labelled adequately and cataloguing them must have been a nightmare. Only then could the real work begin: producing ‘standard editions’ after collating all the various texts. In the reign of Ptolemy II (285–247 BC) the work was far enough along for someone to produce the following statistics:
Catalogued volumes in the Palace Library 90,000 Catalogued volumes in the Outer Library 42,800 Uncatalogued volumes 400,000 The catalogue itself ran to 120 volumes, the equivalent in today’s terms of twelve average-sized books.
Cataloguing was done on a three-tier system, first by subject (law, philosophy, etc.), then by author (arranged chronologically), then by title (arranged alphabetically). Some of the subjects were probably subdivided – drama into tragedy and comedy, for example. This meant that if you wanted to find Euripides’ Medea you had to know that this was a tragic drama and that Euripides lived after Aeschylus and before Lycophron. It might seem easier to us to have arranged the whole catalogue alphabetically, but any educated Greek would have known enough about his authors to find his way around the Library shelves without difficulty. In fact, the remarkable feature of the catalogue was that it had any alphabetical classification at all. So far as we know, no one had ever used the alphabet for this purpose before.
The Library catalogue started off with an emphasis on Greek literature that it never wholly lost. However, the presence of many eminent mathematicians and men of science in the Museum led to its becoming a repository for all important work done in these fields too. As such, it was of interest to Greek scientists everywhere. Archimedes, of ‘eureka’ fame, always kept in touch with the Library even though he spent most of his life in distant Syracuse. Some of his books are dedicated to Alexandrian scholars; all of them would have found a place in the Library.
The head librarian in Archimedes’ day was Eratosthenes, perhaps the most remarkable of all those who held this post. He wrote poetry and literary criticism that was considered more than passable by contemporary critics; he did pioneering work in chronology, establishing the dating system based on the four-yearly cycle of the Olympic Games that was used to the end of the classical period; and he made significant contributions to both arithmetic and geometry. He was also the first systematic geographer, beginning by measuring the size of the earth – the first time this had been done – and working his way through the whole subject, from cartography (he introduced the concept of parallels of latitude) to ethnography.
After Eratosthenes, the calibre of the academic staff of both the Library and the Museum began to decline. Successive Ptolemies had less and less to spend, and although it is not true that later Greek intellectuals had any less to say, they had less to say that was original. By the Roman period, the Museum had become a sort of literary society and the Library was no longer mentioned at all. There was even a story circulating that the best part of it had gone up in flames during the battle between the Alexandrians and Julius Caesar in 47 BC. It is unlikely that this is true, as Claudius Ptolemy (unrelated to the kings), writing in Alexandria at the time of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–38), clearly had access to a vast number of books.
To later ages, Claudius Ptolemy was the ultimate polymath, an authority on astronomy, astrology and geography. As late as the sixteenth century people still settled arguments by turning up the relevant entries in the Almagest, his textbook of astronomy, the Tetrabiblos, his astrological compendium, or, perhaps the most frequently consulted of all, his Geographia. Today we recognize that little of what Ptolemy wrote was new, that he belonged in fact to that characteristic species of library-goer, the encyclopaedist. And we mark him down accordingly. But we shouldn’t be too hard on him because it is through Ptolemy that the work done by earlier geographers and astronomers has come down to us. Because of his writings, the nature of much that was in the famous Library can be reconstructed, even though the place itself has long since perished.
Meanwhile, the Greek landowners who chose an urban lifestyle retained the services of native estate managers, something obviously much more worthwhile in the case of the larger holdings. Such an arrangement amounted to a transfer of wealth from country to town, and such transfers, combined with the revenues lavished on the capital by the early Ptolemies, provided a powerful engine for growth. Alexandria rapidly became the wonder of the Mediterranean, the biggest, most exciting metropolis the world had yet known. If you are looking for the first city with a population ever to reach the 100,000 mark, Alexandria is much the best bet.
Why Alexandria? The answer is that at a time when wealth was still almost entirely agricultural, Egypt was an extraordinarily easy country out of which to wring resources. It had an unparalleled highway in the Nile, a river that put every Egyptian farm in direct communication with the wharves and warehouses of the capital. It had already acquired the habit of yielding up a percentage of its produce to a foreign administration. And the Ptolemies introduced a more effective administration than Egypt had ever had. As a result, they could feed what was, by the standard of the time, a large mega-city and still have a surplus of cereals to sell overseas. The early Ptolemies are said to have had a revenue of 12,000 talents a year, compared to the 1,000 ATHENS earned in its heyday; and even the later Ptolemies, whose grip on the country was comparatively feeble, could still count on 6,000 talents. Alexandria had more than its share of three-star attractions – Alexander’s tomb, the Pharos, the Museum, the Royal Library and the Serapeum (see pp. 11–13) – but the first thing that struck visitors was the city’s sheer size.
Like most big cities, Alexandria soon acquired minority populations. Most notable in what was supposed to be a Greek city were the Egyptians, who crept in almost from the start. Next came the Jews: it was at Alexandria, and for the local community, that Jewish scholars produced the first Greek version of the Old Testament (traditionally seventy of them, each working independently). In fact, by the first century BC it seems to have been the Greeks who had become the minority. The Romans, who usually had a forgiving attitude towards the Greeks, regarded the Alexandrians as a mongrel lot, and looked on them with a cold eye.
The fall of the Ptolemaic kingdom is a romantic tale, in which the fortunes of Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler, were linked first with Julius Caesar, then with Mark Antony, and then, in a final grim confrontation, with Octavian, the future emperor Augustus. With Cleopatra disposed of, Octavian turned Egypt into a Roman province, a status it was to retain for the next 700 years.
That Alexandria was intended to be a big city from the start is clear from the plan: the four residential quarters that gave it its initial shape cover 186 hectares, considerably more than that occupied by the inhabited area of classical Athens. Moreover, we can be sure that Alexandria exceeded its founder’s expectations, for a fifth quarter was added later, bringing the residential zone up to 236 hectares, nearly twice the Athenian total. If densities were comparable to those in Athens, this expanded area indicates an Alexandrian population of 70,000 or so.
In fact densities were probably higher. A twelfth-century manuscript preserves an Alexandrian notitia (census of buildings) of the third or fourth century AD that gives the number of houses in each of the five quarters. Manuscripts are often corrupt, but the consistency of these figures (5,058; 5,990; 2,140; 5,515; 5,593) is convincing and overrides the suspicions raised by the miscalculated total (it should be 24,296 but is given as 47,790). If we assume 3.6 persons per house, the number suggested for Athens, this translates into a population of around 87,500 living at a density of 370 per hectare.
New Gods for Old: Serapis and the Serapeum
In the ancient world, religion was bound up with locality. Each community had its deity, each city its god or goddess. Egypt illustrates this particularly well: there was a god for every nome (county), and the main temple in the county town was reserved for worship of that deity.
The foundation of Alexandria meant that Egypt had acquired a major new locus, one that clearly required a matching addition in the heavens. Ptolemy I, who saw this both as an obligation and as an opportunity, announced that he had had a dream in which an anonymous god dwelling somewhere on the shores of the Black Sea had begged to be brought to Egypt. A ship was sent to find this unhappy deity, and the people of the Black Sea port of Sinope were persuaded to part with one of their cult images, apparently a variant of Pluto, god of the underworld. This image was brought back to Alexandria, where Ptolemy received it with due ceremony.
The arrival of the Sinopean Pluto pleased the Greeks of Alexandria but meant nothing to the Egyptians. So Ptolemy charged Manetho, high priest of Ra at Heliopolis, with finding the newcomer an appropriate slot in the Egyptian pantheon. Manetho quickly discovered that Ptolemy’s deity was the equivalent of the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris. Specifically, he identified him with the form of Osiris worshipped at Memphis, the sacred bull Apis. Between them Ptolemy and Manetho had now come up with a god who met the needs of the dynasty, its capital and the native population of the country. He soon became known as Serapis, an amalgam of Osiris and Apis.
The temple in which the new god was installed was constructed in Rhacotis, the Egyptian quarter of Alexandria. The site was probably chosen because it already had a temple of Isis, the goddess who was now proclaimed to be the consort of Serapis. Greek architects built a serapeum alongside the Iseum, and erected a vast rectangular colonnade enclosing both of them. Within it a special priesthood conducted elaborate rituals designed to promote the welfare of the Alexandrians in general and the Ptolemies in particular.
Serapis has been described as a god designed by a committee, and that, it must be admitted, is not far from the truth. As such, he might be expected to do poorly compared to deities conceived in more mysterious ways. However, Serapis did very nicely, not just in Alexandria but throughout the Mediterranean world. He was considered to be especially effective in medical matters, and it is common to find models of afflicted limbs and diseased organs as votive offerings at his shrines. The most famous of these was not the original Serapeum in Rhacotis but one at Canopus, modern Aboukir, twenty-four kilometres (fifteen miles) to the east of Alexandria. This was the object of an annual pilgrimage by the Alexandrians, during which, according to some authorities, standards of sexual behaviour were looser than they should have been.
With the rise of Christianity, the Alexandrian Serapeum became a bastion of the old pagan way of life. It reputedly housed the ‘Outer Library’, the smaller of the two libraries founded by the Ptolemies. By the fourth century it had probably become the main meeting place of the schools of philosophy and classical studies for which Alexandria had always been famous. As such, it was an object of particular hatred for the Christians, who demanded the right to convert the temple of the god into a Christian church. The prefect of Egypt persuaded the patriarch Theophilus to wait for instructions from Constantinople; the emperor’s reply, granting the patriarch’s request, arrived in AD 391.
The jubilant patriarch wasted no time; brandishing the imperial rescript, he led his congregation out to Rhacotis, into the sanctuary. There he came face to face with the colossal image of the god created by the sculptor Bryaxis seven centuries before. The confrontation is recounted by Gibbon in his twenty-eighth chapter with appropriate irony. After recalling the legend that ‘If any impious hand should dare to violate the majesty of the god, the heavens and the earth would instantly return to their original chaos,’ he describes how an intrepid soldier, bearing an axe, mounted a ladder and aimed a vigorous stroke at the cheek of the statue. The Christians held their breath, but as ‘the cheek fell to the ground, the thunder was still silent, and both the heavens and the earth continued to observe their accustomed order and tranquillity. The victorious soldier repeated his blows; the huge idol was overthrown and broken in pieces, and the limbs of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcass [this must have been the wooden armature of the image] was burnt in the amphitheatre, amidst the shouts of the populace; and many persons attributed their conversion to this discovery of the impotence of their tutelary deity.’
So ended the reign of Serapis, although the event was probably less dramatic than Gibbon has it. A contemporary tells us that when the image of Serapis was toppled, the Christians watching let out such a mighty shout that it was heard in the circus nearby – which suggests that, given the opportunity to measure one faith against the other, many Alexandrians had preferred to spend the day at the races.
If Alexandria had 80,000 to 90,000 people in the fourth century AD, it certainly had more than that in its heyday under the Ptolemies (third to first centuries BC). During that period the island of Pharos had a considerable population (Julius Caesar took 6,000 prisoners there in 48 BC), and so did the palace quarter on the harbour front where the Ptolemies held court until the dynasty was extinguished by Augustus; both these areas were deserted by the time of our census. The same is probably true of Rhacotis – the area to the south of the city that was the site of the Egyptian settlement which antedated it – as it contained the port. In sum, it is a reasonable proposition that Alexandria’s population was well over the 100,000 mark by 200 BC and that it stayed there until the Mediterranean economy fell in the third century AD. Thereafter, the population probably declined, but only slowly, and Alexandria remained the second city of the empire for some considerable period after the foundation of CONSTANTINOPLE.
Many people think that Alexandria’s population was much higher than 100,000. Peter Fraser, whose monumental three-volume study of Ptolemaic Alexandria makes him the man to consult on each and every aspect of the classical city, believes that in the first century BC the city’s population may well have reached 1,000,000. He gets to this figure by taking Diodorus’ statement (of c. 60 BC) that the free population of the city was 300,000 and assuming that Diodorus was referring to the number of free males (children as well as adults) resident in the city. Multiply this by two to get the total free population, then add 400,000 to take account of slaves. For AD 50 he thereby suggests a figure of 1,500,000.
There are various troubles with Fraser’s calculation, however. One is that, to qualify for the perks that made emigration to Egypt worthwhile, Greeks had to register as citizens in one of the three Greek cities of Egypt: Alexandria, Ptolemais (a modest foundation in Upper Egypt) and Naucratis (tiny). The vast majority opted for Alexandrian citizenship, but that doesn’t mean that they all lived there. In fact we know that the citizen rolls (both sexes, and including children) contained the names of many people who resided elsewhere in Egypt. Fraser’s global figure itself is fine for the country as a whole – it seems consistent with a papyrus of c. AD 40 which gives a total of 180,000 male citizens of somewhere (it surely must be Alexandria), or 360,000 citizens altogether – but what this indicates is the number of Greeks living in Egypt (adding 5 per cent to take account of Ptolemais and Naucratis), not the smaller number of Greeks living in Alexandria.
The difference between residents and citizens was still causing confusion under the Late Empire. In the fifth century AD, Eusebius remarked that the Alexandria of his day had fewer people in the age band 14–80 than it had previously in the age band 40–70; this is a roundabout way of saying that the rolls had fallen by two-thirds. However, it doesn’t follow that the city had shrunk by anything like this amount, or indeed that it had shrunk at all, for a fall of this magnitude would have happened automatically once there was no longer any financial incentive for Greeks living away from Alexandria to register as citizens. If it hadn’t happened earlier, this certainly became the case in AD 212 when the emperor Caracalla conferred Roman citizenship on everyone except slaves.