Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  Oxyrhynchus lay at the southern edge of the Fayum district of Egypt, and in Hellenistic and Roman times was the regional metropolis and a fairly substantial city. Still it lay far from the Mediterranean and the center of things: it was no Alexandria or Antioch, but only a provincial center. Yet thanks to the work of modern archaeologists, beginning in 1896 with exploration by the Oxford scholars Grenfell and Hunt, Oxyrhynchus is now in many respects the best known city of the ancient world. During ten years of excavations, from 1896 to 1906, Grenfell and Hunt unearthed the city’s rubbish dumps and in them found a vast trove of ancient papyri, waste-paper essentially that had been discarded on the desert fringe of the town and thanks to the arid climate had never decayed. The vast bulk of these papyri, over ninety percent, contain documents of all sorts—letters, wills, petitions, land registers, contracts, and so on—which shed an extraordinary light on the social life, economic life, and administration of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, giving us unique glimpses into the lives of ordinary people living during these times. But the remaining ten percent or so are of interest here: literary papyri giving us an insight into the reading habits of the citizens of Oxyrhynchus.

  Citizens of Oxyrhynchus, to judge by these literary papyri, read widely. There are fragments of religious texts, magical works, novels, rhetorical exercises, essays of various sorts, and in general an array of contemporary writings: contemporary to the readers of Oxyrhynchus, that is. But the bulk of the literary papyri fall into two categories: texts by classical Greek authors—the likes of Homer, Herodotus, Euripides, Plato, Demosthenes, and dozens of others of the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE; and scholarly texts explaining the writings of the classical Greeks to Hellenistic and Roman readers—commentaries, treatises on language and style, lexica, and so on. All of this material has been extensively studied, to give us a clear insight into the reading habits of Roman-era Greek citizens. And in addition to the material from Oxyrhynchus, papyri from other towns and villages of the Fayum region have been found and studied, showing that Oxyrhynchus was typical in its reading practices. Lucian’s picture of the well educated reader is validated: we can discern circles of readers in the Fayum who read together, shared texts and commentaries, and commissioned books that they could go on to read together, very much like modern book clubs in many respects. Hellenistic culture was alive and thriving in the Fayum of Roman times, and this is hardly likely to be unique to that rather provincial region.

  One of the most fascinating finds by Grenfell and Hunt was made during their last excavation season, at the beginning of 1906. Excavating one of the dump sites, they found a basket of sorts containing a large collection of fragments of book scrolls. Piecing these together, they found that the basket had contained at least twelve different texts, representing some of the great works of classical Greek literature: writings by Plato, Demosthenes, Thucydides, Pindar, and Euripides, for example. It was clear that they had here a portion of some citizen’s personal library, discarded for unknown reasons, but evidence of his literary taste. Thanks to the fact that the most immediately sensational find was a large part of the text of a lost play by Euripides—the Hypsipyle—the collection is generally known as the Hypsipyle library or archive. This Oxyrhynchite was, in short, the opposite of Lucian’s “ignorant book-collector”: we might call him the “discerning book-collector”. His collection was not just of original classic works; very characteristically of his time, he also had a commentary on Thucydides and a treatise on literary style. And several of the literary works had extensive annotations by readers in the margins. Hellenistic culture, the culture of the book, could not be better illustrated than by this clear evidence of personal book collections and circles of readers in Roman middle Egypt.

  In the end, however, Hellenistic culture in its classic form could not survive. In the same excavation season in which Grenfell and Hunt found the Hypsipyle library, and evidently found in close proximity to it, was a harbinger of the future. Oxyrhynchus papyrus no. 840 is a fragment of a Christian gospel. It is not from one of the canonical gospels: it tells a story of an encounter between Jesus and his disciples and a Jewish priest in the temple of Jerusalem. Jesus and the priest debate the meaning of purity, in a manner similar to debates found in the Gospel of Mark and elsewhere, but very different in detail. Christianity, that is to say, was on the rise in Roman Egypt by the third century CE, and the triumph of Christianity was to spell the beginning of the end of Hellenistic culture in its fully-fledged form of the years 300 BCE to 300 CE.

  CHAPTER 8

  Aftermath: the Lingering Impact of Hellenistic Culture

  THE ADVENT OF CHRISTIANITY AS AT FIRST THE DOMINANT AND THEN the only permitted religion in the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, and three centuries later the arrival of Islam as the religion of most of the peoples of western Asia and north Africa, radically changed the culture of what had been the Hellenistic world. For instance, the need to remain true to the doctrinal tenets of these overarching religions severely restricted what was open for debate on a variety of topics, and how any debates were to be conducted. Life centered around the church and the mosque was not the same as life had been under the more informal religiosity of ancient “paganism.” And the customs and outlooks that the new religions imported from the Jewish and Arabic societies and cultures in which they had their roots were certainly very different from the customs and outlooks of the preceding Greco-Roman culture. But despite all the changes of focus and outlook, all the restrictions on debate and lifestyle that accompanied the dominance of the two new religions, the Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world did not simply die out. However much that culture might be changed and restricted, its influence was still felt in the Christian and Islamic cultures of late antique and medieval times. We must consider how and in what ways the high culture of the Hellenistic world continued to inform aspects of later Christian and Islamic cultures.

  1. A LATE ANTIQUE DIALOGUE AT ALEXANDRIA

  When the great Muslim conqueror ‘Amr ibn al-’As entered Alexandria as victor in the year 640 CE, or AH 20 by Muslim reckoning, he found a city no longer in its glory days, but still a great and bustling metropolis, a hub of trade and culture. ‘Amr was by all accounts a cultured man himself, a member of the old Quraysh aristocracy of Mecca and a successful trader before his conversion to Islam in 629 (AH 8). As governor of Egypt—at first under the caliph Umar, and later again under the Umayyad caliph Mu’awiyah—he had a reputation as a fair-minded man, a respecter of the Christian faith and church, and an admirer of the culture he found in Egypt. He recommended to the caliph Umar, we are told, that Alexandria—the Hellenistic and Roman capital of Egypt—continue as the capital city of the province. When Umar refused this advice, ‘Amr built a new city at the base of the Nile delta, near modern Cairo, called al-Fustat, which became one of the great cities of the medieval world. But he still admired Alexandria, enchanted by the many palaces, public baths, and theaters, and spent much time there. In his wanderings about the ancient and beautifully built city, we hear that he became aware of some old men who went every day to a venerable porticoed building where they spent hours poring over rolls of papyrus. He was intrigued and inquired into the identity of these old men, and the purpose of their activity. He learned that the chief of these men was named John Philoponus, and that he was a scholar, Christian theologian, and philosopher. The building he worked at was what was left of the great library of Alexandria, commissioned and built nine hundred years earlier under the first Ptolemy and his son and heir Philadelphus. ‘Amr determined to meet John Philoponus and learn more about him and his activities, and about this mysterious library. And so began, we are told, a most unlikely friendship.

  The story of this friendship, and of the fate of the great library, is retailed in a medieval document called the “Dialogues of ‘Amr”. According to the tradition, ‘Amr took to visiting John Philoponus frequently, delighting in the old man’s conversation. John was, in the eyes of the orth
odox church, a heretic: his arguments concerning the unity implicit in the trinity, and the unity of the conjoined human and divine natures in Jesus, clearly smacked of the notorious monophysite (single-nature) heresy. Such ideas appealed to ‘Amr who of course rejected, as a Muslim, the idea of a three-person deity; but to orthodox Christians John’s arguments were anathema and still aroused their ire centuries later. In the ninth century the Byzantine patriarch Photios forgot his usually measured language and roundly abused John for his treatise On the Trinity:

  His arguments are not only blasphemous, but utterly unsound and feeble, and he shows himself unable to give even a superficial coloring of truth to his fallacious arguments against the true faith. Inventing natures, substances and godheads, like the insolent babbler that he is, he pours forth a stream of blasphemy against the Christian faith … (Photios Bibliotheca 75).

  Photios continues in this vein, with words such as puerile, insolent, weak, and silly, and broadens his field of fire to encompass all of John’s writings, which he denounces as derivative, falsified, spurious, and degenerate. In contrast to Photios, ‘Amr found John a man of wisdom and taste, a man whose conversation was charming and enlightening. But we may guess that they did not discuss Christian theology much; for much more than as a theologian, John Philoponus achieved fame as a philosopher, and especially as a commentator on Aristotle. For John was one of the leaders of the late antique Alexandrian school of Aristotle commentators, including his master Ammonius and his successors, the enigmatic David, Elias, and Stephanus.

  John, however, was more than a mere admirer and commentator on Aristotle: he was an inventive thinker in his own right. As a Christian, he could not agree with Aristotle’s theory of the eternity of the universe, and wrote extensively arguing against it and in favor of creation. More importantly, he critiqued Aristotle’s ideas of dynamics and perspective, arriving at different views that came close to discovering the principle of inertia: his ideas on mass and motion influenced no less a scientist than Galileo. And in his ideas on perspective he conceived of space as an immaterial medium in which material objects exist in three dimensions, influencing later thinkers like Pico della Mirandola and Leon Battista Alberti. It is no wonder, then, that ‘Amr reportedly found John fascinating. When their friendship was firmly enough established, John dared to bring forward a topic that was troubling him: the future of the library. He explained to ‘Amr the history and nature of the library and its vast collection of books and, while acknowledging that all this now belonged to ‘Amr as conqueror, expressed the hope that he and his fellows would be permitted to maintain the library and continue their work. ‘Amr, however, decided that making a judgement once and for all on the fate of this collection of non-Islamic material was not for him to do: he referred the matter to the caliph Umar in Mecca. After weeks of anxious waiting, the judgement of Umar arrived: if what was in these books was also in the Qur’an, then they were unnecessary; if what was in them went against the Qur’an, they were undesirable. Either way, they should be burned. And so, with great reluctance, ‘Amr ordered that the books of the library should be used to stoke the fires of the bath-houses of Alexandria; and the friendship between him and John Philoponus came to an end. It was said, according to the learned Muslim historian Ibn al-Kifti, that it took six months to burn all the books.

  All this makes a charming and, in its way, rather tragic story; but it is not history. In truth, John Philoponus lived and flourished in the sixth century (he died around 570), not in the seventh, and the meeting and friendship between him and ‘Amr is pure legend, as is the burning of the library books on the orders of Umar. But behind the legend lies an interesting truth: the notion of the Muslim leader ‘Amr being intrigued by a Greek philosopher like John Philoponus is indicative of a very real fascination the Muslim elites felt for Hellenistic philosophy, science, medicine, and mathematics. Far from burning the books of Hellenistic culture, the Islamic world in fact in many cases preserved them, translated them into Arabic, and used them as the basis for creating an Islamic high culture. John Philoponus’ own commentaries on Aristotle were in fact translated into Arabic. In Arabic John is known as Yahya al-Nahwi (John the Grammarian), and his writings among others helped to form the foundation of an Islamic school of philosophy, drawing its inspiration from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, which flourished between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. It took a few centuries for Islamic thinkers to translate and absorb the writings of the Hellenistic world they had taken over; and there were areas of Hellenistic culture—drama, poetry, and oratory for example—that held little interest for them. But in the ninth century the great Muslim intellectual al-Kindi founded the study of Greek philosophy as an Islamic pursuit, arguing that rational philosophy and theology are compatible with each other (though theology is to be preferred), promoting the study of Aristotle and Plato, and beginning a long tradition of great Islamic scholars of philosophy and science.

  The achievements of Islamic philosophy and science are not as well-known as they should be. Greek mathematics had achieved some very great heights: for example, Archimedes’ work on conic sections is foundational to Newton’s development of differential calculus, and Euclid’s handbook of geometry was still the basic text for learning geometry into the twentieth century. But Greek mathematics had always labored under a very clumsy system of numeration. In taking up Greek mathematics and pondering the ideas and concepts expressed, Islamic mathematicians came up with a number of improvements that changed mathematics for the better: al-Khwarizmi’s introduction to the Mediterranean world of the Hindi numbering system, with the zero and the other decimal numbers, for example. More importantly, al-Khwarizmi is widely recognized as one of the founders of the mathematical discipline of algebra. Al-Khwarizmi, who was active early in the ninth century at the great “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikma) established in Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, wrote a book entitled Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala (Compendious book on calculation by restoration and balancing). The book proposed the fundamental algebraic method for solving polynomial equations, and the term “algebra” of course comes from al-jabr. The Alexandrian Greek mathematician Diophantus had already proposed a theory of equations of sorts, but al-Khwarizmi’s work went much further in establishing how to construct and solve equations, both linear and quadratic. Islamic thinkers, that is to say, did not just borrow ideas from Greek culture: they developed and improved them. The same is true in medicine and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest medieval medical expert and writer, for example, was the early eleventh-century Muslim doctor and philosopher Ibn Sina, known in the west mostly by the Latinized form of his name, Avicenna. His Canon of Medicine, developed from Greek medical ideas admixed with Indian and Persian medicine and Ibn Sina’s own observations and experience, became the standard medical encyclopedia for the Islamic world and, in Latin translation, for western Europe too. But it is above all in philosophy that the influence of Hellenistic culture was felt in the Islamic world.

  The example set by al-Kindi was followed by a succession of remarkable Islamic philosophers, of whom only the most important can be noticed here. A foundational figure is al-Kindi’s successor, al-Farabi, who came to be known as “the second master” (Aristotle being the first). Born around 873 in the eastern part of the Islamic world, perhaps in modern Kazakhstan, al-Farabi spent the bulk of his active life in Baghdad, at the “House of Wisdom” that was one of the cultural beacons of the medieval world. Both an influential commentator on Aristotle and a Neoplatonist, al-Farabi strove to gather and develop the ideas of the “two philosophers” (i.e. Plato and Aristotle) for Islamic audiences. Among his most influential works were his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which Ibn Sina credited with having a profound impact on his thought, and his Al-Madina al-fadila, a treatise on the ideal state in the manner of Plato’s Republic. Al-Farabi’s work and influence played a major role in ensuring the preservation of the writings of Aristotle and Plato, not just
in the Islamic world but in the Christian west too. Thirty years after al-Farabi’s death in 951 was born one of the greatest Muslim philosophers, the above mentioned Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Like Farabi, Ibn Sina was born in the eastern, Iranian part of the Islamic world, but unlike Farabi he spent his whole life in that region, in cities such as Bukhara, Balkh, Isfahan, and Hamadan. Making his living primarily as a doctor, Ibn Sina was also one of the most prolific and widely influential Muslim philosophers. His writings on logic, ethics, and metaphysics gave rise to a philosophical movement called “Avicennism” after him, which influenced not only many Islamic philosophers but also such key western thinkers as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. He died of a serious illness at the relatively young age of fifty-eight, refusing to moderate his activities until the end, telling his friends that he preferred “a short life with width to a narrow one with length.”

  Probably the best known of the Islamic philosophers, thanks to his major impact on western Christian philosophers such as Aquinas and the scholastics, was the great Andalusian sage Ibn Rushd, better known in the west as Averroes. Born in 1126 at Cordoba in the Islamic province of al-Andalus in southern Spain, Ibn Rushd represents the western end of the Islamic world and the great cosmopolitan cultural center that Cordoba was in this era. Probably the greatest of the medieval commentators on Aristotle, he was hugely influential via Latin translations of his commentaries in re-introducing Aristotle’s works and thought into the Christian world, and helped to spark the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance in medieval Europe. Ibn Rushd was a determined rationalist, and one of his most important works is the Fasl al-Makal, the “Decisive Treatise” in which he showed that reason and revelation do not contradict each other, but are merely alternative ways to arrive at the truth. Aquinas was to adapt Ibn Rushd’s thought on this into his own defense of rationalism alongside theology. In addition, Ibn Rushd wrote an important work defending philosophy itself, the Tahafut al-Tahafut (Incoherence of the Incoherence). The Persian philosopher and mystic al-Ghazali had written, after a spiritual crisis in which he abandoned his career in philosophy to become a Sufi mystic, an attack on philosophy called Tahafut al-Falasifa (The Incoherence of Philosophy). Ibn Rushd’s defense of philosophy, declaring the incoherence of al-Ghazali’s argument, may be his most original work, though it failed in the end effectively to counteract al-Ghazali’s influence.