The Rise and Fall of Alexandria
Page 1
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE - FLOUR AND SAND
CHAPTER TWO - STEALING A GOD
CHAPTER THREE - EGYPT REBORN
CHAPTER FOUR - THE LEGACY OF ARISTOTLE
CHAPTER FIVE - CITY OF THE MIND
CHAPTER SIX - GREEK PHARAOHS
CHAPTER SEVEN - THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE LITTLE O
CHAPTER NINE - THE “EUREKA” FACTOR
CHAPTER TEN - A GREEK TRAGEDY
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE LAST PHARAOH
CHAPTER TWELVE - THE CLOCKWORK CITY
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - URBI ET ORBI
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - DAWN OF THE ICONOCLASTS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - INTO THE SOFT MACHINE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE ASCENDANCY OF FAITH
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE END OF REASON
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - HYPATIA
CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE SHIPWRECK OF TIME
EPILOGUE
CHRONOLOGY
APPENDIX
Acknowledgements
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE RISE AND FALL OF ALEXANDRIA
Justin Pollard has worked extensively in both British and American television and has worked closely in developing feature films for directors including Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), Gillies MacKinnon, Sam Mendes, Neil Jordan, and Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice).
Howard Reid worked for the BBC from 1979 to 1991 on many major documentary series, including the Emmy-winning Story of English, and has since worked widely in both British and American television. He has written five previous books, including The Way of the Warrior, coauthored with Michael Croucher.
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Published in Penguin Books 2007
Copyright © Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, 2006
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Map by Jeffrey L. Ward
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For Liz, Wilson, Dudley, and Teän “Ipsa scientia potestas est”
PREFACE
Flotsam . . .
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
On most days in the summer of AD 1295 an Eastern Orthodox monk called Maximos Planudes could have been found in the great market of Constantinople, making his way past the spice sellers and the silk traders to the dusty undercrofts where the book merchants piled their own wares in tottering stacks of parchment. Here were codices and manuscripts in Arabic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, some newly completed, some old. Holy books for all religions, practical treatises, histories, and chronologies. Here too were books still waiting to be written, fresh blank sheets and old volumes that had been scrubbed clean of whatever they once held, ready for a new text.
Walking along the waterfront to the great market, Maximos Planudes might have been reminded of the description in Strabo of Alexandria in the first century AD, which he excitedly called “the greatest emporium in the whole world” (Strabo, Geography, book 17, chapter 13). Constantinople, despite the sack of 1204, had since taken on that mantle, which was why this diminutive monk was spending each day of a hot summer there searching through piles of books and manuscripts.
The book dealers must have taken careful note of this unusual creature in their midst. Monks swarmed through the city, but their interest in books was invariably limited to medieval Greek religious works—the biblical glosses and commentaries, the credulous hagiographies, the missals, Psalters, and breviaries whose attraction was as much in the artistic illumination of their pages as in the illuminating quality of their text. But Planudes was after something different. He spent his hours poring over the dreariest-looking texts, from faded Latin fragments to terse Arabic treatises.
Then one day, sometime that summer, he found it. It certainly wasn’t much to look at, but there in his hands was a fragment from the wreckage. A rare treasure, finally washed up on a distant shore. He had found Claudius Ptolemy’s great lost work on geography—Geographia—written in ancient Alexandria, stored for centuries in her library, and believed (at least in the West) to have perished there.
Rumors had been circulating in Europe that a copy had been seen in Arabic translation, just as Ptolemy’s other great work was already known to Arabic scholars as The Greatest, or, in their language, Almagest. Now, here was its companion. The rumors were true.
The survival of this masterful text was a small miracle in itself. The original copies of the Geographia had been deposited in the library of Alexandria by Claudius Ptolemy himself, and there they had remained in constant use for centuries. It appears that sometime in the fourth century, however, a copy was made to take to the new Roman capital, Constantinople. When the library at Alexandria was destroyed, this copy thus survived. Now, ironically, the very zealotry that had condemned so many of Alexandria’s books would save it. When the patriarch of Alexandria had the patriarch of Constantinople declared a heretic, his followers had taken this copy of the Geographia with them into their desert exile. There it had been translated into Syriac and then later into Arabic. The original copy had of course long since perished, but a few of those Arabic translations survived. The last of those had then, somehow, found its way into a bookseller’s stock and was now in Maximos Planudes’ hands.
The copy of the Geographia the monk now so fiercely bartered for was not complete, at least not in the way that he wished it to be, for there was a text, but no maps. We cannot be sure now that Ptolemy’s original version even had maps, but that was what Maximos Planudes wanted, and having secured his prize he returned to the monastery at Chora, where he began the painstaking task of noting all the details in the text and turning them back into the thing he craved—a series of maps.
Soon a new rumor was flying around th
e Mediterranean: Planudes had a map of the world—Ptolemy’s map of the world. The story came to the ears of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus, who ordered a copy made for himself. Soon others were reconstructing, dividing, and improving the maps. By the fourteenth century, the twenty-six maps of the original version had been divided into sixty-four, and one of these copies was obtained in 1400 by the Florentine patron Palla Strozzi, who persuaded a Byzantine scholar to translate the work from Planudes’ Greek into Latin.
Now the Geographia could at last be read by the academics of Europe, who, thanks to Christianity, retained their knowledge of Latin but had become largely ignorant of Greek. This version, finally finished around 1410, came into the royal courts of Europe at a time when interest in the exploration of the world, an interest that had slept for so long, was finally being rekindled. But none of the Renaissance princes who collected these wonders was more passionate than the pope. If there were new lands to discover, then the papacy wanted to ensure that Catholicism traveled there with the explorers. So the little book that Planudes had discovered years before made its way to the Apostolic Library at the Vatican, along with many of its lavishly illustrated descendants. From the Vatican, copies would then be sent out across Europe.
One of those would change the world.
INTRODUCTION
For Alexandria lies, as it were, at the conjunction of the whole world.
Dio Chrysostom, Orations, 32
Most of us take it for granted that two cities, Athens and Rome, completely dominated the classical world. We are well aware that their achievements had a profound effect on Western civilization. Their legacy is still apparent, from the architecture of our public buildings to the phrasing of our laws. Even democracy itself was, we are told, their gift. But this is, in fact, a distorted view of history, fueled by generations awed by the might of Rome and the ingenuity of Athens, and perhaps a little too keen to take native historians of both cities at their word.
In fact there was a third city that, at its height, dwarfed both of these in wealth and population as well as in scientific and artistic achievement. Largely overlooked by history, this city had a unique soul. While Greece and Rome spread their influence through trade and war, this city set out on another adventure, not at the point of a sword but on the tip of a pen. Its triumph was to be a conquest of the mind—led not by legions of soldiers but by dynasties of scholars navigating on a sea of books.
This city was Alexandria. Within a few generations of its foundation the city was the marvel of its age, but not just for its size and beauty, its vast palaces, safe harbors, and fabled lighthouse, or even for being the world’s greatest emporium, its central market. Alexandria was built on knowledge, and at its heart was not a treasury but the greatest library and museum of antiquity. Encouraged by the ruling Ptolemaic dynasty, this institution became the meeting place and crucible of all the great cultures and minds of the ancient world. It proved an intellectual magnet attracting generation upon generation of the finest scholars, philosophers, poets, and inventors. Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Babylonians, Persians, Gauls, Phoenicians, and Romans flocked here, stimulating huge advances in mathematics, astronomy and astrology, alchemy, optics, medicine and anatomy, grammar, geography, philosophy, and theology—in short, the sum total of the wisdom of the ancient world. In these halls the true foundations of the modern world were laid—not in stone but in ideas.
There was never anything like the great library and museum before, nor has there been since: the single place on earth where all the knowledge in the entire world was gathered together—every great play and poem, every book of physics and philosophy, the key to understanding . . . simply everything. That institution aimed to accumulate every book written, even from as far afield as India, and at its zenith it was said to contain three-quarters of a million scrolls. Here were not only the works of the brilliant scholars of their own time but also those of their illustrious predecessors—of Homer, Pythagoras, and Herodotus, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—names that might otherwise be unknown to us. Other libraries since have held more books; indeed, today the Library of Congress in Washington and the British Library in London hold between them nearly every book printed in the last two hundred years and many more besides. But they are not complete, not least because most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria, and only a handful have been seen since that library’s tragic destruction. All that remains is perhaps 1 percent of the works that were once lodged there, the chance survivors of that shipwreck of human achievement.
The romance of Athens and the might of Rome have overshadowed the Hellenistic civilization spawned by the vast conquests of Alexander. Somehow the people of this place and their extraordinarily modern ideas have fallen down the gap between where classical Greece ended and imperial Rome began.
So our first aim in this book is to look again at Alexandria, to reconstruct the life of the institutions that made it unique—the library and the museum—and to breathe life back into a city that was once the center of the world. Physically there is almost nothing left of ancient Alexandria, but among the drowned ruins in her harbor, in the fragments of the books that survive from her great library, and hidden among the works of later authors lie the keys to this city of wonders.
It was a city of mechanical marvels, of an anatomy school where the circulation of the blood was understood two thousand years before it was previously thought possible, of geographers who knew the earth was spherical and traveled around the sun, of philosophers who even conjectured that everything was made of microscopically small particles called “atoms” (from the Greek atomos—“indivisible”). This was the home of Euclid, the father of geometry, whose books are still in print two thousand years after his death, and of Archimedes, of “Eureka” fame. Here too was the young Galen, the greatest doctor and physiologist of the age; and Claudius Ptolemy, the father of both astronomy and geography; and Apollonius, the author of Jason and the Argonauts. Stranger names, but no less influential, include Eratosthenes, the first man to measure the circumference of the earth; Aristarchus, the first to envisage a heliocentric solar system; Plotinus, a founder of Neoplatonism; Clement of Alexandria, a father of Christian theology; Arius, perhaps the first great Christian heretic; and Philo, the radical Jewish theologian. These are just a few of the host of geniuses who walked and talked, debated and denounced, read copiously, and finally set pen to paper in the great library and museum attached to the royal palaces of Alexandria. And while some of these legions of scholars are still household names, remembered for their mastery of one or two fields of study, it was the declared aim of all to achieve mastery in all fields of study, all branches of knowledge. And some actually achieved this, turning themselves truly into philosophers—“lovers of wisdom”—and reaching intellectual heights never achieved before or since.
The story of each of these characters tells a part of the history of Alexandria, a history peopled by the political giants of the ancient world: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra. Our aim in this book is to explore, within the framework of this turbulent political history, the ways in which human knowledge and understanding developed and evolved in this extraordinary city, to trace the evolution of the “Alexandrian Way,” which stimulated a dramatic acceleration in our appreciation, not just of science and the material world, but also of literature, metaphysics, philosophy, and religion.
To do this we have had to follow the Alexandrian Way ourselves to some extent, by first reading everything we could find on all the people, subjects, and events in Alexandria’s long history—the flotsam and jetsam from the shipwreck of time. We have then laid out those pieces and tried to discover the patterns lying behind them, to fill in the lacunae, the gaps, so that we might explore both the physical and mental worlds of the city and its people.
Wherever possible we have returned to firsthand testimonies
and let the people of Alexandria speak for themselves, not merely to restore voices so often drowned out by Rome and Athens, but to try to convey a sense of what it must have been like to actually be there and experience the journey of discovery that was life “at the conjunction of the whole world.” In their words we can walk again in the corridors of the world’s first and only true “university” and reach out for the long-lost scrolls of the library itself. We can gaze upon the golden mausoleum of Alexander, and discover the cold body of Cleopatra in her quayside palace. We can see the world they knew around them and explore the yet stranger worlds of their minds, in a story that begins with the rise of the Ptolemies—the heirs of Alexander and the last, tragic dynasty in three millennia of pharaohs. We will then pass through the conquest by Octavian into the shadow of the Roman Empire, and end with the triumph of Christianity, the death of the last librarian, and the destruction of the library and the city itself.
In this book we will not only return to the lost wonders of Alexandria, we will also try to enter the “mind” of the city, to discover why it produced such an extraordinary flowering of creativity, knowledge, and understanding. And we will discover that at the core of this dazzling whirlpool of ideas lies the thing you are reading now: the written word. Words encoded in grammars, bound as books, and held in libraries allow the transmission of ideas from one mind to the next over the generations, and the transformation of those ideas into new, fresh thoughts as they travel. While the early Greek scholars and philosophers mostly preferred to establish private schools where their thoughts would be transmitted face-to-face, master to pupil, it was in the great libraries of Alexandria that the real power of the written word burst forth upon generation after generation of scholars who could read—and so hold in their own minds— the voices of the world’s great thinkers, speaking to them across the distant expanses of space and time.