Ptolemy I, his son and grandson ploughed money into developing Alexandria, which quickly became the largest city in the Mediterranean world, with an estimated population of between a quarter and half a million inhabitants by 200. But, despite its dazzling facilities, the links to Lake Moeris and the Nile beyond, and the constant influx of traders, Alexandria ad Aegyptum or Alexandria-next-to-Egypt was always seen as a city somehow apart from Egypt proper. The old pharaohs, recognising the dangers of isolation, had spent many months travelling up and down their long, thin land, visiting temples, administering justice and generally reminding their people of their presence. The Ptolemies, seemingly content to live apart from the majority of their people, did not. In consequence, while the people of the Nile Valley gradually lost any sense of personal connection with their monarchs, the people of Alexandria developed an abnormally close relationship with their kings, and a fine disregard for anyone who lived outside their city. Initially this was a blessing: the Alexandrians of the third century were, broadly speaking, prepared to work with their royal family and to respect their policies. But the Alexandrians of the second and first centuries considered themselves to be kingmakers.10 Volatile and prone to riot, they murdered the supporters of Ptolemy IV, drove out Ptolemies IX and XII, and killed Ptolemy XI. Ultimately, in their determination to reject any form of Roman interference, the Alexandrians drove their kings further into the Roman embrace.
An Egyptian visitor to Alexandria would have felt that he or she had stepped into another world. Egyptian cities invariably lay inland, sandwiched between the Nile and the desert, but long, thin Alexandria had two wide fronts, one opening on to Lake Moeris and one opening on to the Mediterranean Sea. While Thebes and Memphis were hot, dry and dusty, Alexandria had salty sea breezes, a cooler climate and winter rains, and, unlike the rest of Egypt, Alexandria did not flood in the summer. Traditionally the Egyptians built their houses and palaces from mud brick and their temples and tombs from stone. With mud brick plentiful and cheap, towns and cities grew organically, sprawling along rivers and canals without any overall plan. But walled Alexandria was a planned city of straight, wide streets and gleaming white stone buildings (the local limestone plus, perhaps, some imported marble) decorated with elegant touches of pink and grey granite. As the water in Lake Moeris was not suitable for human consumption, drinking water was supplied by a canal that, stretching from the Canopic branch of the Nile, emptied into over 700 vast underground cisterns connecting directly to the elite houses.
Alexandria’s main thoroughfare, ‘Canopus Street’, was a colonnaded processional way covered with awnings, running west to east from the Necropic Gate to the Canopic Gate. At right angles to Canopus Street ran ‘Soma Street’. The grid system allowed the city to be divided into five districts named after the first five letters of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon); this in turn gave the residents of Alexandria easily comprehensible addresses. The precise boundaries of these districts are now unclear, although Josephus quotes Apion in asserting that the Delta district, the Jewish quarter, lay in the eastern part of the city near the Palaces, and it seems that there were also substantial numbers of Jews living in Beta. The Greeks lived in the city centre, while the Egyptians lived in the western quarter in the area of the old Rhakotis.
Strabo lived intermittently in Alexandria from c. 25–20. His Geography therefore provides us with a near-eyewitness view of Cleopatra’s city, and is worth quoting at length:
… the city has very fine public sanctuaries and ‘The Palaces’, which form a quarter or even a third of the entire enclosure [the city]. For each of the kings added some adornment to the public dedications [shrines and statues] and also added privately further residential blocks to those already existing, so that now, in the words of the poet, ‘From others grow’; but all are continuous to each other and to the harbour and what lies outside it. Within ‘The Palaces’ lies the Museion, which has a covered walk and an exedra and a block in which are the refectory and mess of the scholars who belong to the Museion … The monument known as the Sema [Soma] is also part of ‘The Palaces’. This was an enclosure containing the tombs of the kings and of Alexander …11
From this regrettably vague description we may develop a tentative plan of Ptolemaic Alexandria. ‘The Palaces’ (Bruchion), effectively an extensive elite town within the city, occupied the north-east sector, and included the now sunken peninsula of Lochias and island of Antirrhodos. Here were the spacious villas of the Greek upper classes, interspersed by temples and public gardens, and here too were the ‘Inner Palaces’, an even more exclusive area incorporating the Museion (or Museum: a research centre inspired by Aristotle’s Athenian Lyceum and dedicated to the nine Muses), the Soma, and the private residences and harbour of the kings. If Strabo is correct in his assertion that each Ptolemy built a new palace, creating a larger and more luxurious residence than those of his predecessors, this area must have been a warren of under-used royal buildings, colonnades and gardens. Alexandria suffered a devastating series of earthquakes in AD 365, 447 and 535. At roughly the same time – no one is quite sure when it occurred – subsidence estimated at between thirteen and twenty-three feet removed the ancient coastline and submerged much of the ancient city. Today all the palaces and Ptolemaic royal tombs, Cleopatra’s included, lie under the waters of the harbour.
Strabo’s description of Alexandria outside the Palaces is even less precise, but we can deduce that the public facilities – the gymnasium, law courts and agora or marketplace – lay in the centre of the city, while the main theatre lay between the agora and the Palaces, with the hippodrome just outside the city walls. Alexandria’s working and middle classes lived in suburbs in the south and west of the city, and on the island of Pharos. Beyond the city walls there were cemeteries to the east and west. Here too was the Nemeseion, a temple dedicated to Nemesis, the Greek goddess of divine retribution, built by Julius Caesar to honour Pompey’s severed head.
The Heptastadion, a man-made causeway seven stades long (a stade was approximately 600 feet in length), ran from the city to Pharos Island, dividing the Eastern or Great Harbour (Megas Limen) from the less important Western Harbour (Eunostos or ‘Harbour of Happy Returns’) and the naval dockyard (Kibotos or ‘The Box’). Two arched bridges punctuated the causeway and allowed ships to pass from one harbour to the other. Offshore, on Pharos Island, shone the great white stone lighthouse that was included among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Standing over 330 feet tall, the lighthouse tower was ‘dedicated’ – either designed or financed – by Sostratos of Knidos, working initially for Ptolemy I and then for his son. Strabo tells us that the tower was made of marble and had many tiers, although the shortage of local marble suggests that it is more likely to have been made from polished limestone, while contemporary illustrations suggest that it had just three tiers: a rectangular tower, topped by an octagonal tower, topped by a cylindrical tower. On the uppermost tower stood a statue of Zeus Soter (Zeus the Saviour) and a beacon whose ever-blazing light was focused by gigantic polished bronze mirrors. However, although we have several descriptions of the lighthouse, the precise arrangement of the top tower, the all-important beacon, the statue(s) and the mirrors or lenses is not yet understood. We do know that the lighthouse was completed in c. 280 and stood firm until the Middle Ages. In AD 796 the ruined uppermost tower collapsed; a century later a mosque was built on top of the second tower. In AD 1303 Alexandria was hit by another series of major earthquakes that inflicted further damage on the lighthouse. In AD 1326 the traveller and scholar Ibn Battuta visited Pharos and noted that the lighthouse was damaged but more or less intact. Returning twenty-three years later: ‘I visited the lighthouse again, and found that it had fallen into so ruinous a condition that it was not possible to enter it or climb up to the door’.12 Today the fort of Sultan Qait Bey, built in AD 1477, stands in its place.
Strabo makes it clear that the Museion was a part of the wider Palaces complex. Included wit
hin the Museion was the world-famous library: an institution that could boast every book ever written in Greek, plus many foreign books in translation. The library even included a unique Greek version of the Jewish Torah, which was known as the Septuagint after the seventy Jewish scholars who had been summoned to Alexandria to work on the translation. To ensure that the library kept up to date, all visitors to Alexandria were required to hand over their own scrolls to the library copyists; the library then kept the original scroll, while its owner was presented with a hasty copy. This relentless collecting explains how, in its heyday, the library came to house upwards of half a million papyrus scrolls.
Within the precincts of the Museion the Hellenistic world’s finest scholars, many of them in receipt of government salaries, slept in dormitories, ate in dining halls and strolled through communal pleasure gardens. Relieved of the tiresome obligation to earn a crust, they were free to concentrate on the work that brought glory to Alexandria and the Ptolemies. This freedom came at a price – the scholars were expected to offer their services as and when required to the royal family, and Timon of Phleius perhaps spoke for many when he described them as ‘cloistered bookworms, endlessly arguing in the bird cage of the Muses’ – but many thought this the price worth paying. The writers of the Museion made important advances in Greek literature and language: from Alexandria came the pastoral mode (Theocritus: Idylls); a reinvention of the epic (Appollonius: Argonautica); and the development of literary theory and criticism (Callimachos, Zenodotus and Aristarchus). The Alexandrian doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus dissected and even, so it was whispered, vivisected condemned prisoners supplied by the Ptolemies, and in so doing developed a new understanding of anatomy and the workings of the brain and the pulse. Euclid wrote his thirteen-volume Elements, Eratosthenes drew maps and calculated the circumference of the earth, Aristarchus tentatively suggested that the earth might revolve around the sun, and Ctesibius developed the art of ballistics. And so it continued, with just one major hiccup. In c. 145–44, during the turbulent reign of Ptolemy VIII, the scholars were unceremoniously expelled from Alexandria, and Alexandria’s reputation as a centre of learning plummeted.
1. Alexander the Great: this marble head, supposedly recovered from Alexandria and probably carved after his death, originally formed part of a larger composite statue. Although king of Egypt, Alexander appears as a Classical rather than an Egyptian monarch.
2. Ptolemy XII ‘The New Dionysos’. Father of Cleopatra VII. This marble head, again part of a larger statue is probably re-carved from the portrait of an earlier Ptolemy.
3. The mystical god Dionysos; a threat to the Classical gods of Mount Olympus, and an inspiration to Ptolemy XII.
4. A late Ptolemaic papyrus detailing privileges to be granted to Publius Candidus. Some scholars have argued that the scribbled word ‘ginestho’, ‘let it be so’, at the end of the document is written in Cleopatra’s own hand.
5. Limestone stela showing Cleopatra dressed in the kilt and crown of a male king of Egypt, offering to the goddess Isis and her infant son. Below, written in Greek, we can read the queen’s name.
6. Portrait head of unknown provenance, believed to be Cleopatra VII. The queen wears a melon hairstyle, a curled fringe and a broad diadem.
7. Most experts accept this marble portrait as Cleopatra VII. The queen again wears a ‘melon’ hairstyle and diadem; a curious stone lump on the forehead may be the remains of a crown or uraeus.
8. ‘Cleopatra restored’; two very different statues have been joined together to make one queen.
9. Originally identified as Arsinoë II, this unlabelled black basalt statue of unknown provenance is today more widely accepted, because of the triple uraeus, as an Egyptian-style Cleopatra VII.
10. Faience head of a Ptolemaic queen recovered from Naukratis, often identified as the powerful Arsinoë II, inspiration to Cleopatra VII.
11. Cleopatra II or Cleopatra III? This restored portrait demonstrates that Ptolemaic women were not afraid to present a forceful, even masculine, face to the world.
12. Romans relaxing on the Nile: fragment of mosaic recovered from Palestrina, Italy.
13. Ptolemy II, his face wiped blank by the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, stands beside the new Library of Alexandria.
14. Mosaic once believed to depict Berenice II as the personification of Alexandria. The city-queen wears a ship on her head.
15. Julius Caesar: a green basanite bust with modern eye inlays carved after Caesar’s death from Egyptian stone. Note the thinning hair.
The Ptolemies valued the Museion as an obvious and internationally acknowledged manifestation of their city’s superiority. But it would be a mistake to imagine ancient Alexandria as a dull city dedicated to dry scholarship and reading. It was first and foremost a port, and the harbours and the marketplaces were hives of activity as Egypt’s own products (wheat, papyrus, linen, stone, glass, perfumes, drugs and spices) were joined with exotic goods from Africa, Asia and India, to be loaded on to large merchant ships and relatively small state-, temple- and privately-owned sailing boats. Away from the ports the streets teamed with a vibrant cross-section of life: itinerant traders and their customers, sailors, tourists, fortune seekers, soothsayers, musicians, thieves, prostitutes and many, many more. There were large glass, papyrus and linen factories, whose workers were formed into tradesmen’s guilds, and smaller workshops owned by potters, carpenters, weavers, bakers and undertakers.
The concept of tryphe – boundless, ostentatious luxury as a manifestation of power – underpinned the Alexandrian court. Years of dedicated eating and drinking had rendered Ptolemies VIII, IX and X spectacularly obese. Proud of his appearance, and of the luxurious over-consumption that it represented, Ptolemy VIII ‘Potbelly’ celebrated his excesses, and scandalised Roman visitors, by dressing in the filmiest of robes that left nothing to the imagination. It cannot have been a pleasant sight, as ‘his body had become corrupted by fat and a belly of such size that it would have been hard to measure it with one’s arms’.13 The symposium, or male after-dinner drinking club, was a flourishing Greek bonding ritual. Groups of wealthy men reclined on couches to drink wine, tell riddles, play childish games (a very popular game included flicking wine from a cup) and listen to music performed by slaves and prostitutes. Although the wine was mixed with water, the evening was quite likely to disintegrate into what today we might classify as an orgy of drinking. This did not matter overmuch. Immoderate drinking might be considered a tribute to Dionysos. It might even be beneficial to the system. Athenaeus, citing the respected Athenian physician Mnesitheus, advises us that:
It happens that those who drink a great quantity of unmixed wine at banquets often receive great injury from so doing, both in their bodies and minds; but still occasional hard drinking for some days appears to me to produce a certain purging of the body and a certain relaxation of the mind … Of all methods of purging, that which is caused by hard drinking is the most advantageous, for then the body is, as it were, washed out by the wine … But when you are drinking hard you should guard against three things – against drinking bad wine, against drinking unmixed wine, and against eating sweetmeats when you are drinking. And when you have had enough do not go to sleep until you have had a vomit, moderate or copious as the case may be, and when you have vomited, then go to sleep after you have taken a slight bath.14
Excessive drinking naturally led to a great deal of casual sex: sex with fellow drinkers, sex with high-class prostitutes (hetairai), sex with flute girls and boys, sex with anyone, it seems, apart from wives. The Ptolemaic court allowed its men a great deal of sexual licence and even Ptolemy II, a twice-married man so devoted to his second wife that he deified her, was an inveterate womaniser:
The second king of Egypt, Ptolemy Philadelphos by name … had a great many mistresses – namely Didyma, who was a native of the country and very beautiful; and Bilistiche; and beside them, Agathoclea; and Stratonice, who had a great monument on the seashore
near Eleusis; and Myrtium; and a great many more; he was a man excessively addicted to amatory pleasures. And Polybius, in the fourteenth book of his History, says that there are a great many statues of a woman named Clino, who was his cupbearer, in Alexandria, clothed in a tunic only, and holding a cornucopia in her hand.15
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