Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  As we swung into Alexandria’s harbor we joined ships from many lands coming in and sailing out. On the harbor’s piers hundreds of stevedores were loading and unloading merchandise from the far corners of the empire.

  The Isis bumped up against the heavy wooden pier into a noisy crowd of city officials and curious onlookers. The city was astir with speculation that the Isis was bringing it the next emperor. We disembarked and had to rely on the centurions we’d brought along to make our way through the noisy crowd. The city’s highest officials stepped forward and after an embarrassment of smiles and bowing told us with some pride that the day before the Nile had risen a palm’s height. No one, not even the city’s oldest residents, could remember the river rising so rapidly in one day. This they said meant the great Nile itself was endorsing Vespasian’s cause.

  Between banquets and strategy sessions I found time in the coming days to explore the city. I was told it was not safe to enter the cramped, derelict Jewish quarter to the northeast or the squalid Egyptian quarter to the west. It was the city center I spent most of my time in, the part they called the Brucheum, the Greek quarter in which the palaces, administrative buildings, and official temple of the Caesars were found, and where so many important scenes of our own history had been acted out. It was here in Alexandria’s palace that Julius Caesar and the last Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra met and joined forces, and here surrounded by an Egyptian army for half a year they were virtual prisoners. Here their son Caesarion was born. Caesar’s assassination and the murder of Caesarion left Cleopatra without a future. In the struggle for power which followed she chose to attach herself to Mark Antony. Their plan to unite the Roman and Egyptian empires, with one capitol in Rome and the other here in Alexandria was shattered at Actium when Octavian defeated their naval forces. Antony fled from Actium to Alexandria, to spend his last moments with his queen. Here by her side Antony committed suicide, and here Octavian captured Cleopatra, hoping to bring her back to Rome and parade her in a triumph. Though she was watched over night and day, her servants managed to smuggle her a poisonous snake, and in killing herself she stymied Octavian’s plans. Before he left Octavian declared Alexandria a provincial capitol.

  Since the day he left, almost exactly ninety-nine years ago, the praefectus Aegypti, governor of all Egypt, has resided here. Of all our provinces none is more important than Egypt, an ancient land which has fed us in body and spirit. Without a steady flow of Egyptian grain our people would starve. Meanwhile our upper classes, growing fat on Egyptian wheat, have become addicted to all things Egyptian, decorating their walls with Nilotic murals, worshiping at temples of Isis, and gormandizing on exotic Egyptian foods. They even come to float the Nile as tourists, to see for themselves the country’s ancient monuments, as Caesar and his new queen Cleopatra had when he first conquered Egypt. It was on that cruise that their son Caesarion was conceived.

  When Octavian left Egypt on his way to becoming Augustus he left troops behind to repair the irrigation dams and canals along the Nile. By rebuilding the country’s infrastructure he was also building the base of his own principate. Though the dependence on Egyptian grain tied Rome to the fate of the eastern provinces, it has been a prosperous marriage. Last year, when Nero was still emperor, Egypt supplied Rome with six million artabae of grain.

  Along with the alien weed seeds brought in with the grain which took root in Italian soil and would forever change our country’s landscape, the Egyptian pantheon of gods also hitchhiked into Rome. Though many of our men who lived and worked here regarded Egyptians as lazy scofflaws, or even worse thieves or bandits, there developed in Rome an admiration for all things Egyptian. Egyptian sculpture, paintings, ceramics, mosaics, and especially the dark and exotic gods and goddesses whose worship dated back three thousand years or more were all the rage. In some Italian cities the worship of Isis has come to over-shadow worship of our official pantheon. Isis, whose sistrum can be heard in every Roman city and whose searching out, finding and re-membering the scattered parts of her brother Osiris seems almost as well-known now as the story of Remus and Romulus. Our connection to Egypt is, like the great river itself, both broad and deep.

  When Vespasian arrived the strategoi, the provincial governors of all the thirty nomes of Egypt, came to meet the famous general. Vespasian complained to me of wasting days in receptions and banquets, from which he had to carve out time for political and military strategy sessions. Jewish pirates had begun operating audaciously from the Judean port of Joppa, harassing supply ships and sinking smaller troop carriers. The Roman navies, with their largest fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, had already come over to Vespasian’s cause. A substation of the Misenum fleet was situated in Alexandria, to protect the flow of grain. The pirates were temporarily unemployed during our blockade of grain shipments to Rome, and when Vespasian ordered grain shipments resumed their deprivations became unbearable. We decided, and Vespasian agreed, to send half the fleet out to protect the ships.

  A few days after opening the flood-gates of grain accumulating in Alexandria’s warehouses a steady stream of heavily-laden ships began making their way toward Rome. As grain prices fell Vespasian’s reputation rose. He was clearly enjoying his new role, from the sweeping strategic planning to the details of its implementation. But it was traditional for local officials, out here in the provinces as much as back home, to rely on extravagant banquets, gifts and lavish sycophantic praise to influence authority. As Vespasian’s star rose to prominence in the political heavens, the procurators, subprocurators, strategoi and every small-town mayor were drawn to him like iron to a lodestone and their facile fawning was something he never stopped complaining about.

  Alexander’s father Philip had Aristotle appointed his son’s tutor, and as he traveled across the world the great general sent a stream of letters, pressed plants and caged animals back to Athens. They had a falling out, though, near the end of Alexander’s life, when he declared himself divine. Aristotle of course was right. His student may have conquered the known world, but mortal that he was the frontier of death was outside his control. Only thirty-two when Alexander died and was buried in Babylon, Aristotle outlived his student. Ptolemy Soter, who inherited Alexander’s conquered territories, had his friend’s body brought to Egypt to be entombed in the city named for him. The tomb he designed was not a grand edifice to a general’s conquering might, but a simple crypt placed at the center of a large circular hall, approached through a sort of spiral labyrinth. The impression left on visitors was not one of awe in the face of Alexander’s earthly power, but of the powerlessness which even he experienced in the face of death. Walking the walkway toward Alexander’s tomb was a kind of quiet spiritual journey.

  It was in Ptolemy’s Soter's Library that I would spend many happy hours, surrounded by statues and busts of prominent philosophers and authors, many of whom studied here: Euclid and Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Eristratus, and Hipparchus. The Library held the world's most complete collection of books, said to number a half-million rolls of papyrus. A descendant of Ptolemy Soter, Ptolemy Philadelphus, asked all the great men of his time to make copies of all the books they owned and had a law passed which required any ship entering Alexander’s harbor to declare what books they carried, and to hand over for copying and translating into Greek any books not already in the Library.

  Roll after roll of papyrus, in many hands and languages, representing the written knowledge of many cultures from all directions, lined the Library’s walls. I explored the many rooms of the Library, some of them lecture-halls, some reserved for scholarly research. I watched a full-time staff of some twenty men busily cataloging and filing most recent acquisitions. In another room papyri were being translated into Greek, the language Alexander had made the lingua franca of the literate world, the language of the poet and artist, politician and philosopher. I was told that in this room almost two centuries ago it had taken seventy-two Jewish scholars seventy-two days to translate their Pentateuch into the Greek Septuagin
t, which for the first time opened the study of their religion to non-Jewish scholars. Other scriptures had been translated here too. I was shown the complete works of the Persian mystic Zoroaster which came to more than two million lines of text. The catalog of the Library, first accomplished by the Cyrenean poet Callimachus, filled a wall of some 120 scrolls of fine script.

  It was said that Julius Caesar was the first man to read quietly to himself. Though that was how I read, silent reading was still not commonplace: as I walked through the cool rooms of the Library I moved through a constant steady susurrant muttering, like the whisper of the sea on the rocks of Alexandria's Harbor of Safe Return.

  The tomb, the Library and the Mouseion were located on the grounds of the royal Ptolemaic palace, so the Library was not open to the public. Claudius, the most scholarly of our emperors, ordered that the most popular of the books in the Library be copied and deposited into a public library, just outside the palace’s walls. Though Claudius’ library contained only a fraction of the Library’s holdings, he opened a window of learning to the city’s ordinary residents. Alexandria had become the most literate, recondite city in the empire. In its many taverns, where Egyptian beer outsold her poor excuse for wines, the names of Aristotle, Socrates, Callimachus and Eratosthenes were heard as often as the most popular gladiators and actors.

  I could barely contain my excitement. Vespasian gave me a few days off. I used up a day and a half in the Claudian library with Lucius at my side, where we took careful notes from Theophrastus, Neleus, Hipparchus, Sosigenes, and others. Most of the books I either owned or knew how to find in Rome. But there were a few I hadn’t seen before, and Vespasian ordered copies be made for me. I convinced him to take time out and visit the Library. We met one morning outside the Library’s entrance, where it was written: “Here is the soul cured.”

  Vespasian was a more practical man than I and more political, but almost as much a lover of learning. We started up the long walk, stopping now and then to examine the labels on the ends of scrolls protruding from their niches. Each label had the book’s author, title, and a brief abstract, in Greek, of its contents. There were authors and works neither of us had heard of. The rows of scrolls seemed to go on forever. I was almost dizzy imagining the treasures they held. We’d not exchanged a word since entering the Library. I whispered to Vespasian that if I had a year with nothing else to do, I knew where I’d spend it.

  I had with me a short list of books I particularly wanted to find, most importantly several lesser-known works of Aristotle. This was not a cut-and-dry question, however. The library, in its enthusiasm to own all the works of all the great writers, sometimes mistakenly accepted books which claimed to be what they were not. I asked and was shown the section of the Museion devoted to Aristotle. There were one hundred forty-six different books here, and the question of which were actually written by Aristotle was not so easily answered. I lifted a label. Author: Aristotle. Title: Nerinthus. No, I thought, not by Aristotle. Menexenus, Symposium, nor them. It was not until the eighth book that I recognized a legitimate Aristotle: On the Various Senses of Words.

  Carefully I pulled that scroll from its niche and with Vespasian’s help unrolled it. I scanned the text, which seemed as far as I could tell a fair copy of the work. But there was no knowing which copies were most authentic. Aristotle was the empire’s most popular author. You could buy a half-dozen different versions of this particular work at bookstores and stalls on the streets of Rome and all across the empire. All claimed to be authentic. Though the differences might be simple spelling mistakes, sometimes a copier would miss an entire line, or unable to read or understand some lines, would simply make things up.

  “It’s quite good,” I remarked as I replaced the scroll. “But you know, it’s not what they have that bothers me as much as what they don’t have. How many of his works are already lost?”

  “What we have we should be thankful for,” Vespasian suggested. “What we don’t have, let’s not worry about.”

  But the one thing I especially wanted to find were the pages of The Constitution of the Cyrenaics which held Aristotle’s description of the plant silphium. We found the Library’s copy of this work, but it was a version I was familiar with and said nothing about silphium. If Aristotle knew of a hidden tract of silphium somewhere in the hills of Cyrenaica, until we found that passage it would remain only a rumor.

  But obscure Aristotelian texts didn’t have the same attraction to Vespasian as they did to me. Interesting as the Library was, there were campaigns to plan, the foundation of an empire to be built. Taking me by the arm he headed me out of the Library towards more mundane duties. But as I followed, reluctantly, I knew I couldn’t rest until I rediscovered the missing Aristotle. Then, I thought, my body as well as my soul might be cured.

  Alexandria’s streets swarmed with men and women from all parts of the world. Most were swarthy, thin Egyptians. But there were Greeks and Jews, Arabs from the desert, dark Ethiopians and Cyrenians, lighter-skinned Gauls and lithe and graceful Indians from the banks of the Ganges. Administrative center, intellectual mecca, busiest port on the continent, and behind all this a vital, teeming commercial city, Alexandria sprawled on the isthmus between Lake Mariotus and the sea-harbor watched over by the great Pharo, home to shops and factories of every kind: fine jewelry, glass and pottery-wares, ironwork, textiles and clothing, woodwork, shoes and boots, and religious statuary, and especially known for its sculptured grotesques, fashioned of terracotta, bronze and ivory. These little figures of misshapen dwarfs and deformed half-human monsters had a brisk trade in the city’s open-air markets. I found the primitive little brutes equally repulsive and fascinating

  Home to the world’s largest and most famous Library, Alexandria also had more new and used bookshops than any other city in the world. Most were in the Greek quarter, around the Bructeum and Library, though there were many scattered elsewhere. Tiberius Alexander, an amateur book-collector, told me where to find the best. I often spent my few free hours quietly browsing, unrolling papyrus after papyrus, some carefully wrapped in rich purple vellum, some merely tied with cotton string so old it fell apart on touch.

  One afternoon Lucius and I were in the Egyptian quarter, noisy and full of smells, and distressingly chaotic. I stopped at a market-stall to purchase a handful of the sweet white figs I’d come to love. I wandered down the narrow streets, Lucius at my side muttering about the questionable characters who surrounded us and whose language, he insisted, was the natural language of criminals. I told him not to worry. This was not Judea. Here though we might not be loved at least we weren’t hated. I carried directions Tiberius Alexander had given me to a bookstore said to specialize in ancient manuscripts. We managed of course to get lost trying to find it, and several times after long minutes of walking found ourselves exactly where we’d already been, facing a maze of narrow streets running off at odd angles between rundown mud-brick shops and tenements, rich with the smell of urine and garbage. Lucius despaired of ever getting out.

  By the time we found the bookstore the afternoon was already slipping away. Twilights were short here in the desert, the torpid evening turning quickly to night. Afraid of being caught in this quarter after dark, Lucius stood near the door, as though hurrying me. I immersed myself in the store, pulling old scrolls off the shelves, carefully unrolling papyrus after papyrus, the dry dust rising in little clouds that started me into fits of coughing. I found several Ciceroes, translated into what I thought was Coptic, but written in the Greek alphabet. I discovered obscure cookbooks for Phoenician recipes in Aramaic; in elegant uncial Greek an oration of Hyperides, which I set aside to purchase; a short history of the Serapeum at Alexandria, written by an unknown local historian in anxious, crimped Greek cursive. It only required a reading of the first few lines to see that the narrative was self-inflated and full of errors. I rummaged through a plague of natal horoscopes, lengthy demonstrations in Greek of the astrologist’s imagination. Why anyone would b
e interested in purchasing Alesterion’s casting of a minor Egyptian official’s natality, already eighty years dead, was beyond understanding. It seemed a full third of the scrolls were horoscopes. Our search for Aristotle was getting nowhere, and I could see Lucius’s patience was near its end. By now, except for the owner, we were alone in the store.

  I leaned over to replace a horoscope which supposed to relate the height of the Nile at Wady Halfa to the period of the planet Venus back into the niche from which I’d pulled it. But it resisted. I bent farther and slipped my hand slowly behind the papyrus, afraid of encountering a scorpion or one of Egypt’s many poisonous spiders. But instead my hand touched, far back into the shelf, a second papyrus, bent over and caught there for who knows how many years. I pulled it out impatiently, straightened and opened it. The hand of the papyrus was in minute, uncial scratchings, and the afternoon light had begun to fade. I strained to read: