The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

by Justin Pollard

  This clinical excision cleared the way for Arsinoe II to take a step that would outrage Greek society but which, to the Greeks’ great surprise no doubt, ingratiated her with the native Egyptian population. Seeking a throne for the third time, she proposed marriage to Ptolemy, her full brother. Ptolemy now had to choose. Stay true to his Greek roots and shy away from what any Macedonian would certainly have considered incest, or take the opportunity to consolidate his power, free from the influence of alien wives or suitors, and make Ptolemaic rule an entirely family affair. Fortunately for both of them, they lived in a country with a two-thousand-year precedent for this. Egyptians not only approved of incestuous royal marriages, they preferred them. Royal incest fitted into their religious cosmology and had been widely practiced by pharaohs at the height of Egypt’s power. Though her motives were Greek, Arsinoe could not have made a more Egyptian move, so she took a throne for the third time as wife and queen to her brother, the couple taking the epithet “Philadelphus” (brother-loving).

  On her death at the age of fifty-four, in July 270 BC, she was deified by her husband, but she bore him no children during their marriage, so Ptolemy had his children by Arsinoe I declared as children of his second, divine wife and heirs to the throne.

  Reaction in the museum to the announcement of the two Ptolemies’ incestuous marriage must have been mixed. It was an idea that sat very uneasily in Greek minds, as did many aspects of this Greco-Egyptian rule. Yet clearly ruling in a manner that to Egyptians at least seemed correct was working, and most Greeks could be practical enough to turn a blind eye to something they might consider unsavory but could see was profitable. As such the museum trod carefully, its members rarely explicitly commenting on this alien custom.

  Indeed, the interest of the museum’s scholars was by now, perhaps deliberately, drifting away from the bloody cut and thrust of politics toward the more uplifting arena of poetry. The leading intellectual figure at the time was Theocritus (c. 300-c. 260 BC), an extremely important and influential poet who was the originator of a new form of poetry known as the “pastoral idyll.” Greek poets preceding him were mostly interested in storytelling, in character and action, not in the intrinsic beauty of nature. Theocritus totally altered that by creating little pictures of rustic life cast in dramatic form. These could be very naïve:

  Sweeter, shepherd, and more subtle is your song Than the tuneful splashing of that waterfall Among the rocks. If the Muses pick the ewe As their reward, you’ll win the hand-raised lamb; If they prefer the lamb, the ewe is yours.

  Theocritus, Idylls 7

  Theocritus’s idylls and bucolics were immensely influential, right through to the eighteenth century AD and beyond, forming the basis for works like Milton’s Lycidas, Shelley’s Adonais, and Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis. He also wrote extensively about love, often taking up the quintessentially Greek theme of the love of an older man for a youth:

  Art come, dear youth? Two nights and days away!

  (Who burn with love, grow aged in a day.)

  As much as apples sweet the damson crude Excel; the blooming spring, the winter rude;

  In fleece the sheep her lamb, the maiden in sweetness

  The thrice-wed dame; the fawn the calf in fleetness;

  The nightingale in song all feathered kind—

  So much thy longed-for presence cheers my mind.

  To thee I hasten, as to shady beech,

  The traveller, when from heaven’s reach The sun fierce blazes. May our love be strong,

  To all hereafter times the theme of song!

  Two men each other loved to that degree, That either friend did in the other see A dearer than himself. They loved of old Both golden natures in an age of gold.

  Theocritus, Idylls 12

  Whether Theocritus’s brief mention of the “thrice-wed dame” could possibly be an aspersion on Arsinoe II is unclear, but we do know that Theocritus was shrewd enough to write openly only in fulsome praise of the incestuous royal marriage, and cast it as the act of divine siblings like Isis and Osiris, which won him much praise and doubtless handsome rewards from his royal patrons.

  Another court poet was not so prudent, however. Sotades was also in Alexandria at the time, but his was a very different reputation. Known as “Sotades the Obscene,” he is remembered for having invented his own meter for the obscene subject matter of his poetry. Sotades is sometimes credited with inventing the palindrome, where a phrase reads the same both forward and backward, and a Sotadic verse has the opposite meaning when read backward. Almost none of the work of this colorful character has survived, though both Plutarch and Athenaeus noted one line from the satirical poem he wrote about the royal marriage. They said it read: “You are pushing the peg into an unholy hole.” It did not amuse his royal patron. According to Plutarch, Ptolemy had Sotades the Obscene thrown into jail. According to Athenaeus, however, Sotades escaped from prison and fled, but he was eventually caught by Ptolemy’s admiral Patroclus on the island of Caunus. Patroclus did not bother returning him to his master for punishment but simply had him sealed up in a lead coffin and tossed into the sea.

  A third scholar at the museum at the time was Lycophron. He was a tragedian and the only member whose name has survived from a group of seven (sometimes eight) tragic poets of the time known as the Pleiades. However, Ptolemy chose to give him the task of arranging and cataloging all the comedies in the library. This he dutifully did, and he subsequently produced a tract on the subject, On Comedy, which is now lost. In fact, only one of his works has survived, a poem in 1,474 iambic lines entitled Alexandra or Cassandra, which deals with the fortunes of Troy and the Trojan and Greek heroes after the war, ending, appropriately enough for his audience, with a reference to Alexander the Great. It is so riddled with bizarre, little-used words and words invented by Lycophron himself that even in his own lifetime he became known as “Lycophron the Obscure.” Being hard to understand can be a blessing in a violent and highly charged court, however, and Lycophron the Obscure lived to tell more of his enigmatic tales, which became immensely popular in court during the Byzantine period.

  But even as his obsequious court poets sought to immortalize their sovereign in verse, Ptolemy II set his sights on more concrete edifices to his glorious reign. His three greatest Alexandrian commissions began with the rebuilding of the museum, which had expanded piecemeal under his father’s rule but had long since outgrown its original premises. In place of the old dormitories and assembly halls, he commissioned a magnificent range of buildings right alongside the royal palace on the waterfront, with expansive lecture theaters, the library and great assembly halls, observatories, and plant and animal collections. Finished in white marble and designed to harmonize with the royal palace, it must have been the envy of all the other princes of the time. At this complex’s heart stood the museum itself, where the greatest minds in the world could meet and talk and think and write, the first integrated scientific research complex in the world.

  To provide fuel for their thoughts, there was the great library—a place where all the works of the ancient world could be stored and ordered, available to any of the scholars to consult, provided of course they had royal permission. Constructed on the waterfront in the royal district known as the Brucheum, it quite early on became known as the “mother library” whose “daughter” was to be found in the Serapeum. Linked to the museum by a white marble colonnade, the mother library contained at least ten large interconnecting rooms or halls, each dedicated to a specific area of learning, such as rhetoric, theater, poetry, astronomy, and mathematics. The walls of each hall were broken up by series of alcoves where the papyrus scrolls were stored. Off the main rooms were smaller ones where scholars could read, write, or discuss their work, and participate in special studies. It was to be a sanctuary for thought in a violent age, and carved over its entrance was a simple inscription: “A Sanatorium for the Mind.”

  Ptolemy’s third great building project may also have been conceived in his fath
er’s time but only came to fruition now. If the museum and library stand as testament to the father, it is perhaps this most practical of buildings that should stand as a tribute to the son—the great lighthouse on the island of Pharos. Ptolemy II would no doubt have also been delighted to find that it was this, rather than his father’s library or museum, that would go down in history as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and become Alexandria’s most illustrious icon.

  The man credited with building the lighthouse (although we are not sure if he was the donor or the architect) was Sostratus the Cnidian, a famed architect and builder who is also credited with having constructed a “hanging garden” in his hometown of Cnidus in Caria and a clubhouse in Delphi where his fellow citizens could meet. The task Ptolemy now set him was to solve one of Alexandria’s most persistent problems. Built on an almost totally flat coastline, the harbor at Alexandria was hard to locate from vessels several miles out to sea. And there was a further danger. Those ships unwise enough to stray too close to the shore searching for the anchorage would find themselves in dangerous shoal waters, studded with reefs and sandbanks where all but the most skillful captain might founder. Even with the harbor in sight, the most dangerous reef lay hidden across the entrance itself. Those ships might find themselves wrecked on the shores of Pharos, where the notorious inhabitants of the Port of Pirates could easily pick them off.

  There was thus a pressing need to construct some sort of navigational mark that sailors approaching the city could use as a guide, preferably both day and night. In short—a lighthouse. It seems likely that this solution had already been agreed to when Sostratus was summoned by Ptolemy, but aided by the mathematicians of the museum and works from the library, Sostratus was able to propose a structure on a scale that even a Ptolemy could not have expected.

  The great lighthouse was to be constructed in granite and limestone blocks faced with white marble. Its total height would be at least 400 feet—that is, about the height of a modern forty-floor skyscraper. Erected on a solid base, it would have three levels. The first level would be square and would house all the workers needed to fuel and operate the great light. The second floor would be octagonal in shape, decorated with exquisite statuary, which stared out across sea and city and where the people of Alexandria might come to enjoy the breathtaking views. The third level would be circular and crowned with an enormous reflector, quite probably of parabolic shape (another first in scientific design) and made of polished brass. Finally atop this would stand a huge bronze statue of Poseidon, god of the sea, leaning on his trident.

  The light was designed to operate both day and night. During the day it was simple enough to just reflect the rays of the sun out to sea, but at night something more was required. For this a circular shaft ran up the center of the entire building, which enclosed the spiral staircase that gave access to the higher floors. Up the middle of this could be winched the piles of resinous acacia and tamarisk wood that provided the fuel for a great bonfire whose light was reflected far out to sea each evening by the great mirror.

  Though wildly exaggerated claims have been made for both the height of the lighthouse (1,500 feet!) and the visibility of the light (500 miles!) the consensus is that it was visible from about thirty miles out to sea. The location for the lighthouse was obvious, on the island whose name would come to stand for lighthouses everywhere—Pharos. Here it would be most conspicuous, not least to the wreckers and pirates who called the island home. Strabo, who saw the lighthouse in the late first century BC, gives us its location:

  Pharos is an oblong island, very close to the mainland. The [eastern] extremity of the isle is a rock, which is washed all round by the sea and has upon it a tower constructed of white marble with many stories and bears the same name as the island. This was an offering by Sostratus of Cnidus, a friend of the king’s, for the safety of mariners, as the inscription says: for since the coast was harbourless and low on either side and also had reefs and shallows, those who were sailing from the open sea thither needed some lofty and conspicuous sign to enable them to direct their course aright to the entrance of the harbour.

  Strabo, Geography, book 17, chapter 1

  The building project took twelve years to complete and was said to have cost Ptolemy about eight hundred talents, approximately $3 million at today’s gold rates. A story, which may be apocryphal, attaches to its dedication. It’s said that when it came to placing a dedicatory inscription at its entrance, Sostratus knew he would have to dedicate it to Ptolemy and his wife, but was determined that he would not be forgotten himself. So he had his inscription engraved in the stone, then had it plastered over and the dedication to the Ptolemies etched into the plaster. In time, and hopefully long after Ptolemy’s death, the plaster would then eventually decay and fall away, revealing his words: “Sostratus, son of Dexiphanes the Cnidian, dedicated this to the Saviour Gods, on behalf of all those who sail the seas” (recorded in Lucian of Samosata, How to Write History).

  Certainly this is the inscription that Strabo and other classical authors record as being carved into the lighthouse. Whether or not it was what Ptolemy saw at its dedication will forever remain unknown.

  And Sostratus certainly built the lighthouse to last. Surviving several tsunamis and a devastating succession of earthquake swarms, it was still working when the Arabs took the city in AD 642, though about fifty years later the reflector was damaged by an earthquake. Around AD 1165 the Moorish traveler Yusuf Ibn al-Shaikh saw that the building was still in use and confirmed its construction in three levels, adding that the base was constructed of massive red granite blocks, joined with molten lead rather than mortar to strengthen it against the pounding waves. He also gives us a rare glimpse inside the building, describing how at that time the first section housed government offices and a military barracks together with stabling for at least three hundred horses. Above this in the octagonal section, refreshment stalls sold fruit and roasted meats to tourists who had climbed the tower to marvel at the statues that decorated the balconies. Above these a higher balcony gave visitors a panoramic view over the city and the sea beyond.

  The third section had changed its use by al-Shaikh’s day. The cylindrical tower no longer contained the cresset for the beacon fire, but a small mosque now took its place. Perhaps above this, and crowning the whole structure, the colossal statue of Poseidon, god of the sea, leaning on his trident, still looked down on the tourists crowding around his feet.

  However, by the time the fourteenth-century Arab voyager Ibn Battuta, on his way to China, reached Alexandria, the Pharos was in its death throes:

  At length we reached Alexandria [on April 5, 1326]. . . . I went to see the lighthouse on this occasion and found one of its faces in ruins. It is a very high square building. . . . It is situated on a mound and lies three miles from the city on a long tongue of land which juts out into the sea from close by the city wall, so that the lighthouse cannot be reached by land except from the city. On my return to the city in 1349 I visited the lighthouse again and found that it had fallen into so ruinous a condition that it was not possible to enter it.

  Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 47

  A sad end for such an extraordinary monument, yet for a building of forty stories’ height to survive for more than fifteen hundred years in an active seismic zone was little short of miraculous. And way back in those heady days when Ptolemy and Sostratus saw their colossal dream rising on the tiny barren island, they must surely have realized that now Alexandria truly was “the Light of the World.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

  I saw Eternity the other night,

  Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

  All calm, as it was bright;

  And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years

  Driv’n by the spheres

  Like a vast shadow, moved; in which the world

  And all her train were hurled.

  Henry Vaugh
an, “The World,” in Silex Scintillans

  The beacon on Pharos that now drew the traders of the Mediterranean to the world’s greatest emporium was also attracting other travelers. Among the scholars of the Aegean, word was out that Alexandria offered an environment where it was possible to think the unthinkable—to challenge the fundamental and apparently self-evident certainties of the world. The museum and library were fast becoming a new type of institution: a community of the world’s thinkers, working together to decipher the mysteries of the universe—the first true university.

  The grain pouring out of Alexandria’s port continued to fund the work of the scholars now pouring in, giving Ptolemy II the pick of the most brilliant scholars of the age to tutor his son and heir, Ptolemy III. He in turn demonstrated as he grew up that, if anything, he was even more passionate about collecting, copying, and archiving books than his father and grandfather.

  Strangely, it would not be philosophy that provided the foundation for Ptolemy III’s own rule, but war and tragedy. Following the death of his father in 246 BC, Ptolemy III succeeded to the kingdom without opposition, but the death of the old monarch had been seized on elsewhere to foment trouble. As part of a peace treaty between the Ptolemies and the rulers of the Seleucid dynasty of Syria, Ptolemy II’s daughter Berenice had been married to Antiochus II Theos, who had agreed to repudiate his previous wife, Laodice. When news of the pharaoh’s death reached Syria, Antiochus clearly considered himself no longer bound by that peace treaty and returned to his former wife. It was a deadly mistake, as Laodice immediately poisoned her former husband and declared her son the new king. Berenice and her son were bound to oppose this, and called on her brother Ptolemy III for help. War was inevitable.