One of the first to send Ptolemy word of his support for the project was, perhaps not surprisingly, Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum. Theophrastus had been Aristotle’s close friend, both in Macedonia and later in Athens. Indeed, Aristotle had given him that name, meaning “divine speaker,” because of his graceful conversation; when he had first come to study philosophy he was simply Tyrtanius from Lesbos.
Theophrastus had also been a close friend of Aristotle’s nephew, the historian Callisthenes, and must have shared his master’s discomfort at his arbitrary and ultimately fatal treatment at the hands of Alexander. The depth of the friendship between the two scholars of the Lyceum can be seen from Aristotle’s will, in which he appointed Theophrastus as guardian to his children as well as confirmed him as his successor. And Theophrastus did not disappoint his old friend. At the Lyceum he became renowned as a brilliant polymath, and in a lifetime of scholarship he surveyed nearly every branch of knowledge, producing works which were still consulted well into the Middle Ages. Hailed as a “Father of Botany,” Theophrastus developed Aristotle’s empirical approach to the study of nature by means of observation, collection, and classification, making him perhaps history’s first true scientific researcher.
An example of his practical approach to problem solving comes in the story that he invented the “message in a bottle.” He had been considering the problem of where the water in the Mediterranean Sea came from and believed that it must flow into the basin from the Atlantic Ocean. To test this he sealed a message in a bottle, asking its discoverer to send news of where he or she had found it, and threw it into the sea to see where the currents would take it. We do not know if he ever received a reply, if his bottle was lost, or if it is still lying on some forgotten Mediterranean beach awaiting discovery.
At the Lyceum, Theophrastus had become a star, an international scientific celebrity, attracting students from all over the ancient world. At one time he is said to have had two thousand pupils. During his thirty-five-year tenure there he became so popular with the Athenians that when the old charge of impiety was brought against him he, unlike Socrates and Aristotle before him, simply brushed it off and continued teaching. Besides his great works on botany, Theophrastus also wrote treatises with titles like On Fire, On Sweat, On Swooning, On the Difference of the Voices of Similar Animals, and On Signs of Weather. His book On Stones is the oldest known work on geology. When he died he was granted a public funeral, and Diogenes Laertius tells us that “the whole population of Athens, honouring him greatly, followed him to the grave” (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Theophrastus, chapter 11, in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers).
No doubt remembering the privilege of his own education from Aristotle, Ptolemy was quick to invite Theophrastus to become tutor to his own son (also called Ptolemy)—not that that was the only attraction to having the philosopher in the city. For Theophrastus was not simply the inheritor of Aristotle’s philosophical legacy. In his will Aristotle left all his personal library—his collection of books by other authors, his own published works, and, critically, his unpublished lecture notes—to his friend.
But Ptolemy’s hopes of securing both Theophrastus and the collections of Aristotle were to be disappointed. Athens was still the home of the Lyceum, still the great hope of Greek philosophy, despite the terrible treatment many of her finest sons had received at the citizens’ own hands. So the news came back that the great philosopher and the library of Aristotle would not be moving to Alexandria. In his place Theophrastus sent the seeds of a new academy in the form of his most brilliant pupil, Strato of Lampsacus. If anyone could infuse the future Ptolemy II with a love of learning, it would be Strato. Another polymath whose interests spread to all areas of life, he wrote three books on
Kingly Power; three on Justice; three on the Gods; three on Beginnings; and one on each of the subjects of Happiness, Philosophy, Manly Courage, the Vacuum, Heaven, Spirit, Human Nature, the Generation of Animals, Mixtures, Sleep, Dreams, Sight, Perception, Pleasure, Colours, Diseases, Judgements, Powers, Metallic Works, Hunger, and Dimness of Sight, Lightness and Heaviness, Enthusiasm, Pain, Nourishment and Growth, Animals whose Existence is Doubted, Fabulous Animals, Causes, a Solution of Doubts, a preface to Topics; there are, also, treatises on Contingencies, on the Definition, on the More and Less, on Injustice, on Former and Later, on the Prior Genus, on Property, on the Future.
Diogenes Laertius, Life of Strato, chapter 4, in
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
Strato would be to Ptolemy II what Aristotle had been to Alexander, or at least that was his father’s hope. But just as Strato was stepping ashore in the Great Harbor to take up his position at court, another Athenian, albeit a refugee, and another friend of Theophrastus was also making his way toward Alexandria, and he would begin to formalize Ptolemy’s grand plan to make Alexandria the intellectual center of the world. Demetrius of Phalerum understood philosophy from both sides, having walked with Aristotle through the stoas of the Lyceum but also having ruled Athens and attempted to put those theories into practice. His arrival in Alexandria had been fortuitous for Ptolemy, giving him the opportunity to ally a well-known statesman and philosopher to his new cult of Serapis. We do not know if he came from Athens bearing copies of the books of Aristotle and the Peripatetic school. We do not know if he brought some of the strange objects from the museum that Alexander had ordered sent to his old tutor. But what he certainly brought with him was an idea. Demetrius knew that the fame of Athens was not its democracy, but its philosophers. He knew the center of a city, the center of a state, should be more than a palace, a parliament, or an armory. It should be a museum—literally the “place of the Muses,” goddesses of poetry, music, dance, and the liberal arts and sciences, where these subjects should be both taught and extended by observation and experiment, and all manner of knowledge contemplated. Here the greatest minds could come to have their great thoughts, where strange and wonderful things could be studied and considered, and where all the ideas of every thinker who had come before could be consulted in a single collection of books. This was the true key to being master of the world, and if Ptolemy sought greatness then he would have to create the greatest museum.
Ptolemy was inspired. He had probably already been collecting the books he required to write the great history of Alexander he was planning. He still possessed Alexander’s own campaign diary as well as the works of his other historians, including the unfortunate Callisthenes. Now Demetrius challenged him to supplement these with other works, any works, for everything might add some detail or throw light into some dark corner of the tale. Demetrius recommended that the king gather about him all the books about kingship he could muster, along with books on the geography of the lands they had crossed, on their ancient and recent history, and on the customs of the various peoples the Macedonians had encountered in their Asian campaigns.
Soon the shelves of the palace were filling with books (the term bibliotheka literally means “bookshelf ”), and by 300 BC they were overflowing.
So the area around the recently completed royal residence had become a building site again, this time for dormitories and assembly halls, laboratories, observatories, and zoological gardens. The city of the mind, like the dream of Alexander, was being turned from an idea into a physical reality. The huge wealth of Egypt, Ptolemy’s wealth, was being focused in a new direction. The museum and library of Alexandria, two of the greatest institutions the world would ever know, were under construction.
It was into this inspired chaos that one of the most famous names from all antiquity was about to step, a man whose personal life is all but lost to us but whose name is still known in just about every school and college across the world. We have little idea when Euclid of Alexandria was born, or when he died (the most educated guesses suggest he was born around 325 BC and died sometime about 265 BC); Alexandria was where he chose to work, and his impact on mathematics catapulted the city
into the scientific stratosphere. For at least 750 years after his death, if you wanted to be anything in mathematics, you simply had to study the subject in Alexandria. His book the Elements remained a standard text on geometry well into the twentieth century, even providing the basis of some of the calculations that NASA needed to put a man on the moon. Even now the knotty problems Euclid set his Alexandrian students remain the bane of schoolchildren and the delight of mathematicians. It is also now reckoned that his Elements is the most translated, most published, and most studied book in existence after the Bible. Since its reintroduction into Europe in AD 1482, having been lost in the West for nearly the whole medieval period, at least a thousand different editions of the work have been published.
Our only glimpse of this extraordinary man comes from the writings of Proclus, a Greek philosopher and head of the Athenian Academy, writing around AD 450, some seven hundred years after his subject’s death. Therefore, even this scrap cannot be relied on for its accuracy; but in its recollection of one personal story it may perhaps hold an echo of the man himself. “They say that Ptolemy once asked him if there was a shorter way to study geometry than the Elements, to which he replied that there was no royal road to geometry” (Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s “Elements”).
Given the near-complete absence of information on Euclid’s life, Proclus had to do some detective work to discover even this. He tells us that parts of the Elements are based on the work of his predecessors Eudoxus and Theaetatus and that Euclid was younger than Plato’s circle, but older than Eratosthenes, while the mention of Euclid’s name by Archimedes, who Proclus knew was writing during the reign of Ptolemy II, helped him to narrow down the date. Even this is debatable, however, as some scholars believe the mention by Archimedes was inserted into his works after his death. Indeed, other scholars have gone on to doubt the very existence of the man at all, arguing that his name was a cover for a team of mathematicians working in Alexandria who took the name from the philosopher Euclid of Megara, who had lived a century earlier.
However, the only evidence for this assertion is that there is some stylistic variation in different sections of his book. Given that correct academic procedure in those days consisted of gathering up your predecessors’ findings and working on from there, this provides a perfectly adequate explanation for the stylistic variation in the Elements. So, regardless of whether he was one man or many, the simple fact is that from the earliest days of Alexandria there emerged one of the most important books of all time produced by one (or more) of the first great minds of the city and who, under the name “Euclid,” would go down in history as perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time.
What, then, was this great work about? The obvious answer to the question is of course geometry, but that is far from a summary. The thirteen books of the Elements open with a series of definitions and five propositions. Some seem deceptively simple: The first is merely that it’s possible to draw a straight line between any two points. To the points and lines are added circles, and then the existence of other geometrical objects is deduced from these. Proposition 4 states that all right angles are equal. This may seem obvious, but underlying this bland statement is the assumption that space is homogeneous—a figure is independent of its position in space. In short, Euclid was defining space—the whole canvas of the mathematical universe on which geometry could then be inscribed.
The famous fifth proposition is concerned with parallel lines and states that only one line can be drawn through a point parallel to a given line. It was only when this postulate was dropped in the nineteenth century that non-Euclidean geometry could emerge.
Books 1 through 6 of the Elements explore planar geometry—triangles, parallels, circles, and the like. Books 7 through 9 deal with number theory; book 10 deals with “irrational numbers”; and finally books 11 through 13 deal with three-dimensional geometry, the last being concerned with the five regular polyhedra (multisided 3-D figures). This book was used extensively by Johannes Kepler as he struggled to unravel the workings of the solar system in the seventeenth century AD.
Like so many of his contemporaries, Euclid didn’t stop at mathematics. Other surviving books include the Elements of Music and his Optics, which is the first extant work on perspective. The intriguing Book of Fallacies has sadly not survived, but Proclus describes it:
Since many things seem to conform with the truth and to follow from scientific principles, but lead astray from the principles and deceive the more superficial, [ Euclid ] has handed down methods for the clear-sighted understanding of these matters also. . . . The treatise in which he gave this machinery to us is entitled Fallacies, enumerating in order the various kinds, exercising our intelligence in each case by theorems of all sorts, setting the true side by side with the false, and combining the refutation of the error with practical illustration.
Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s “Elements”
Euclid was, according to Proclus, a Platonist, and it was this philosophy, the philosophy that would come most to represent Alexandrian thought, that drove the “Father of Mathematics” to devote his entire life to the exploration of those forms and ideas which Plato saw as underlying the untidy jumble of the observed world. Plato had himself said that “the knowledge of which geometry aims is the knowledge of the eternal” (Plato, Republic, book 12, chapter 52).
For Euclid, mathematics was not simply an abstract idea but a method for seeking out the harmonies of shape which revealed the sublime, even divine, forms of creation. In his Elements Euclid began to set down a method by which Plato’s world could be explored and in doing so set Alexandria on a journey of discovery far beyond anything taken by the ships which came and went each day through the Great Harbor.
Years before, it is said, Plato had a motto written above the door to the Academy: “Let no one ignorant of mathematics enter here.” Now Euclid was showing the reason why.
Euclid’s work remained pivotal to the development of the European intellectual tradition for at least two thousand years, and one of the reasons for its longevity was that it was coherent and substantially accurate. For the story of Alexandria this is of critical importance. Here, in the reign of the first Ptolemaic pharaoh, his protolibrary and museum were invested with a completely trustworthy compilation of a major science which generations of succeeding scholars could call upon, not just for academic study but as a means of enhancing their own work. Then as now scholars returned again and again to the shelves holding Euclid’s works to compute, test, and verify their own research, in fields ranging from physics to geography and astronomy. The Elements is, even today, an anchor of mathematics, first dropped over two millennia ago into a sea of ignorance from the ship of Alexandria.
Mathematics was not the only early love of Alexandrians, however. Another great area of exploration in these early days of the museum was medicine.
It was Alexandria’s geographical and cultural position that would make it so pivotal in the development of medicine. Here in Egypt, Greek scholars could draw upon a complex body of Egyptian traditions and practices regarding the preservation of the human body after death by mummification. Whereas in the classical world Greece, Rome, and the states of the Near East maintained strong taboos on the study of the dead, for thousands of years the Egyptians had done their best to preserve corpses through mummification, which, of course, required an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the human body and a high level of skill in dissection.
Mummification entailed the removal of the brain and all the soft organs of the body cavity except the heart (which was considered the center of intelligence and feeling) and was standard practice at the time of the Macedonian conquest. Now in Alexandria two young scientists, Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos, seized upon this breach of normal mortuary taboo and began to explore the human body in minute detail, thus founding the great Alexandrian tradition of anatomy and physiology.
Though hum
an dissection was still anathema to Greeks, here in Alexandria such things were hugely more open. Not only were the two physicians allowed to carry out their work (some say they were master and pupil, others that they headed rival schools), they were actively encouraged and even given live condemned prisoners to vivisect. The scene must have been disturbing and bloody, but it was taking them into another world, one that was secret and unknown. Guided by the mortuary technicians with their centuries of experience in mummifying the dead, these Greeks were now opening up the world of the living body, seeing for the first time into the machine that housed the soul, discovering by experiment its form and function.
Their progress was amazing. Casting aside the magical and mystical beliefs and superstitions of their predecessors, Herophilus first described the linked functions of the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system, rightly relocating the center of thought from the heart to the brain. He went on to distinguish correctly between motor and sensory neurons and to establish the link between the eye and the brain in the optic nerve. As well as making detailed observations of the physiology of the eye, he explored and described all the internal organs—heart, liver, pancreas, intestines, and reproductive organs. He was also the first to distinguish between veins and arteries, to show that blood rather than air flowed through these vessels, and to examine the valves of the heart in detail. This in turn led him to link the heart to the pulse and to use the latter diagnostically. Through his extensive (and public) dissections he established the heart as not the center of feeling but the center of the circulatory system, thereby anticipating William Harvey’s “discovery” of the circulation of the blood by nineteen hundred years.
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria Page 9