Some have suggested that the mechanism was Geminus’s very own. Certainly the discovery in the cold waters off Antikythera proved he was not just being fanciful in his description. Others have even claimed the mechanism may have been built by the great Archimedes himself, who is recorded in antiquity as having built a model for “imitating the motions of the heavenly bodies.”
One final suggestion takes us back to Athens and the Tower of the Winds. No crank handle was ever found with the Antikythera mechanism, and Derek de Solla Price suggested it may have even been automatic rather than hand turned. If so, it is not taking a great step to imagine Ctesibius’s water clock dripping away at the top of this tower providing the constant power to turn the mysterious, miraculous wheels of the Antikythera mechanism, whirring quietly away below, beautifully mimicking the movements of the heavens so Athenians could tell the time, and know the date and the positions of all the heavenly bodies at that moment.
But if such a miraculous device did grace the Tower of the Winds, it was marking out the last days of its inventor’s world. In Alexandria the political climate was changing, and a series of immature and ineffectual royal Ptolemies would prove unable to protect themselves, their city, their country, or the scholars who succeeded Archimedes and Ctesibius. The life of Archimedes epitomizes the dichotomy of academic life in the Hellenistic world. Under the patronage of Hiero, king of Syracuse, Archimedes found the time and money to turn his supremely brilliant mathematical mind to questions of pure theory, but only in between solving the more practical problems of his employer. The emergent world order—that of the Romans—had even less time for theory. They had demonstrated this fatally when they encountered the engrossed theorist Archimedes somewhere in a street in Syracuse in 212. There Rome triumphed, and Archimedes’ last problem was solved not with mathematics but with the point of a sword.
Archimedes’ last wish was upheld by the Romans, however, and he was buried in his home city in a tomb bearing the epitaph he had himself chosen. It was not the list of conquests favored by Roman generals, nor the hereditary titles on the graves of kings. Instead, Archimedes chose a diagram of a cylinder circumscribing a sphere with a note describing how the sphere would be exactly two-thirds of the circumscribing cylinder in both area and volume. It was a proof Archimedes had discovered himself and, in his view, vastly more important than odometers, siege engines, and even mechanical computers. It was what his life work had been for—a very Alexandrian epitaph. To the Romans, and indeed even the Romanized Greeks of Syracuse of later years, however, it must have seemed strangely irrelevant. Their age was one of practical action, in which the theories devised in the library of Alexandria had little place. Even Archimedes’ tomb was left to fall into ruins and become overgrown and forgotten, along with his name. In fact it would only be the idle curiosity of the Roman orator Cicero that would eventually bring it back to light, as Cicero himself describes. He tells us that while he was quaestor of Syracuse in 75 BC (some 137 years after the philosopher’s death) he sought out the tomb of an “obscure little man” called Archimedes, but the native population, either still terrified of their Roman masters or simply forgetful, knew nothing about it. Eventually he found his way to an old cemetery by one of the city gates, choked with brambles and thorns, where he remembered
having heard of some simple lines of verse which had been inscribed on his tomb, referring to a sphere and cylinder modelled in stone on top of the grave. And so I took a good look round all the numerous tombs that stand beside the Agrigentine Gate. Finally I noted a little column just visible above the scrub: it was surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder. I immediately said to the Syracusans, some of whose leading citizens were with me at the time, that I believed this was the very object I had been looking for. Men were sent in with sickles to clear the site, and when a path to the monument had been opened we walked right up to it. And the verses were still visible, though approximately the second half of each line had been worn away.
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, book 5, chapter 23
So one of the most famous cities in the Greek world, and in former days a great center of learning as well, would have remained in total ignorance of the tomb of its most brilliant citizen, had a man from Arpinum not come and pointed it out. Roman rule had changed Syracuse and its people, and that process of change was now rippling across the Mediterranean.
If even the great Archimedes could be all but forgotten in just over a century in his physical home, what of the fate of his fellow philosophers at his spiritual home, the great library? Dangerous times were coming to Alexandria, and neither books nor their authors would be spared.
CHAPTER TEN
A GREEK TRAGEDY
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills.
It is not the effort nor the failure tires.
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
Sir William Empson, “Missing Dates”
Ptolemy III’s successor was not the new Rameses his father had hoped for. By the time he came to the throne at about twenty years old in 222 BC, it was clear that he had neither the military genius of a Macedonian king nor the mental sophistication of an Egyptian pharaoh.
This alone was no reason to fear for Egypt’s future. The new pharaoh had inherited a stable administration and stable borders. Provided he could maintain this balance—the Egyptians’ beloved maat—and avoid external trouble, there was reason to think that Ptolemaic rule would continue at least to appear glorious. But what made Ptolemy IV’s succession different was not the usual threats and maneuvers from abroad, but something much closer to home. When the young pharaoh took the Egyptian throne he was not alone. Standing in the shadows was another man, a man who was not simply the king’s adviser but his puppeteer.
The man in the shadows was a court official called Sosibius, and the classical historian Polybius is quite blunt about his role in what was about to unfold: “Sosibius . . . appears to have been a dextrous instrument of evil who remained long in power and did much mischief in the kingdom” (Polybius, Histories, book 15, chapter 25).
The problem had begun long before Ptolemy IV took the throne, when it became clear that he would rely on favorites for everything, being unable or unwilling to take any role in the running of his household or the state himself. Many previous pharaohs had of course relied upon court officials to administer the country on their behalf, but all had at least the knowledge and instincts to choose their proxies well. Ptolemy IV was inexperienced, lazy, and a very poor judge of character, and the result was that on his taking the throne Sosibius became Egypt’s first minister. Ptolemy, convinced that the running of the state was now in hand, then retired to indulge in the lavish festivities of the court and the pleasures of the royal bedchamber.
Sosibius kept a tight exclusion zone around the pharaoh, ensuring that all the information he got from the outside world came through him. In doing so he carefully created an atmosphere of suspicion and fear in which those who threatened him or his control over the pharaoh could be denounced and neutralized in a moment. The cull had begun, as in so many previous Ptolemaic reigns, with the death of the new king’s immediate family—those best placed to challenge his rule. Within months of his accession, his uncle (his father’s brother) was dead, then his younger brother was “accidentally” scalded to death with boiling water while taking a bath, and finally his mother perished, most probably poisoned. Sosibius had a hand in all these killings, and the move served him well. Not only could he claim to have removed those who might envy the king his throne, he had in the process left Ptolemy alone, without friends or family for support or advice. Ptolemy was now entirely under Sosibius’s spell. “The murdered is well disposed” (Zenobius, Proverbs, book 3, no. 94) became a saying in Alexandria at the time. While stripping away Ptolemy’s support, Sosibius was also careful to build his own. Aiding and abetting him was a courtier called Agathocles, who was probably a boyhood friend of the young king’s, and who cemented his hold on the kin
g by way of his sister, Agathoclea, who became the royal mistress.
Hearing only the whispers of his ministers and mistress, Ptolemy began his reign confident of his own security. He flattered himself that his summary action against his relatives had secured his throne, while news from the Near East that two of his main foreign enemies, Antigonus and Seleucus, had died, leaving children on their thrones, further boosted his sense of invulnerability. The result, as Polybius tells us, was predictable:
Secure therefore in his present good fortune, he began to conduct himself as if his chief concern were the idle pomp of royalty, showing himself as regards the members of his court and the officials who administered Egypt inattentive to business and difficult of approach, and treating with entire negligence and indifference the agents charged with the conduct of affairs outside Egypt, to which the former kings had paid much more attention than to the government of Egypt itself. . . . This new king, neglecting to control all these matters owing to his shameful amours and senseless and constant drunkenness, found, as was to be expected, in a very short time both his life and his throne threatened by more than one conspiracy.
Polybius, The Histories, book 5, chapter 34
The first signs of trouble seemed relatively unimportant. During the reign of Ptolemy III an exiled Spartan king by the name of Cleomenes III had taken asylum in Alexandria, where he continued to make a nuisance of himself, constantly plaguing the new king with requests for a ship and a small army so that he could retake his native land. But Ptolemy IV, who on his accession took the almost ironic name Philopator (“he who loves his father”), refused to assist. Cleomenes was not a man to be rebuffed, however, and he began attempting to recruit an army in the city himself. At this news Sosibius panicked, suspecting that the Spartan king might turn the mercenaries currently employed by the Egyptian state against him, so he had Cleomenes imprisoned. In sheer desperation, when Philopator was visiting the delta town of Canopus, Cleomenes and his colleagues managed to escape and, running through the streets of Alexandria, tried to incite the mob to turn against the pharaoh. But despite their shouts that they had evidence that the king had murdered his mother, a very popular woman in the city, and despite the fact that the claim was probably true, the usually restive city mob failed to rise up. In despair Cleomenes and his men took the Spartan way out of what was becoming an impossible situation and killed themselves with their own knives. The Spartan’s wife and children, entrusted to the care of Ptolemy, fared equally poorly and were soon put to death on Sosibius’s orders.
If Ptolemy and Sosibius had been wrong in thinking they could keep their private affairs from the Alexandrian public and men like Cleomenes, they were also mistaken in their assessment of their foreign rivals. A far more serious threat was now emerging in the form of the young Antiochus III, ruler of the Seleucid Empire. Unlike his counterpart in Alexandria, this young man kept himself fully informed of all the news from his rival kingdoms, and so soon realized that the young Ptolemy was both weak and ensnared by a corrupt and self-serving court. He wasted no time. Gathering a strong army, he invaded Syria, rolling up the Ptolemaic possessions in the Near East almost a far as Palestine, Egypt’s front doorstep, before the Egyptian army could muster. In the blink of an eye the conquests of Philopator’s father were lost and the way to Egypt looked open.
Fortunately for Ptolemy Philopator, Antiochus’s campaign encountered much stiffer resistance as it moved south toward Egypt proper, with several cities withstanding his sieges for months. As Antiochus’s army got bogged down, Sosibius called for and got a cease-fire for four months. It was a desperate gamble but it worked, buying time so that he and Agathocles could gather an army to resist the invasion of Egypt itself.
In an attempt to fool Antiochus into believing he would sue for peace, Sosibius built up Egypt’s army secretly at Alexandria. Negotiations for the cease-fire and all other diplomatic traffic were rerouted from the capital to Memphis during the winter of 219-218 BC as recruits from all over the Mediterranean were gathered, drilled, and formed into fighting units in Alexandria. Paying for this huge mercenary army naturally put a heavy burden on the Egyptian peasantry, but Sosibius planned to utilize his own population in another, entirely novel way. Whereas in the past the Ptolemies had fought their wars with local and imported Macedonian and other foreign troops, this time Sosibius decided to recruit and train a local phalanx of Egyptian troops, armed and drilled in Macedonian style. The twenty-thousand Egyptians of the phalanx would be led personally by Sosibius and would play a decisive role in the forthcoming battle, and beyond.
At the end of the cease-fire in 218 BC, Antiochus resumed his conquest of southern Syria, but the revitalized Egyptians put up sufficient resistance to check him in the Bekaa Valley, in what is now Lebanon, and to hold on to Damascus and Sidon. This bought enough time for Sosibius to bring his new weapon into play.
By the spring of 217 BC the Ptolemaic secret army was ready and was led to battle by Ptolemy IV. According to Polybius the army included 70,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry, and 73 African elephants. Against him Antiochus fielded 62,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry, and 102 Indian elephants.
The two armies met outside the small town of Raphia, modern-day Rafah near Gaza, setting up camp opposite each other, where they sized each other up for five days. On the fifth day, June 22, 217 BC, Ptolemy moved his troops out of camp to take up battle positions, and Antiochus immediately followed suit. Both sides placed their strongest, handpicked phalanxes in the center, with elephants and cavalry on each wing. Ptolemy, his sister Arsinoe, and their retinue took a place on the left flank, opposite Antiochus and his horse guards on their extreme right. At the same moment, Ptolemy and Antiochus gave the signal for their elephants to charge, and the battle began. According to Polybius, Antiochus’s Indian elephants outweighed and outfought the smaller African forest elephants of Ptolemy’s army, and many of the latter turned and fled into their own ranks, breaking the line of Ptolemy’s left wing and causing enormous confusion. Still the forces facing each other on Ptolemy’s right wing held back, waiting. Polybius tells us:
When he [Echecrates, Ptolemy’s general] saw the cloud of dust being carried in his direction, and their own elephants not even daring to approach those of the enemy, he ordered Phoxidas with the mercenaries from Greece to attack the hostile force in the front, while he himself with his cavalry and the division immediately behind the elephants moving off the field and round the enemy’s flank, avoided the onset of the animals and speedily put to flight the cavalry of the enemy, charging them both in flank and rear. Phoxidas and his men met with the same success; for charging the Arabs and Medes they forced them to headlong flight. Antiochus’ right wing then was victorious, while his left wing was being worsted in the manner I have described. Meanwhile the phalanxes, stripped of both their wings, remained intact in the middle of the plain, swayed alternately by hope and fear.
Polybius, The Histories, book 5, chapter 85
An overconfident Antiochus now pressed home his advantage on the right wing, assuming that both the center ground held by the phalanxes and the left wing were as victorious as he had been, and hence believing that the battle was as good as won. But at that moment Ptolemy, who had taken shelter within his own phalanx, suddenly rode forward, urging his men on. This stunned the enemy and rallied Ptolemy’s own troops in the center. Lowering their sarissas—eighteen-foot-long double-pointed pikes—the phalanx under Ptolemy’s general Andromachus and the Egyptian phalanx under Sosibius advanced together in full charge. The Syrians facing them resisted briefly, but soon crumbled under the overwhelming pressure and turned and fled. Antiochus, not yet the great general he would one day become, was forced to dash for cover behind the walls of Raphia and console himself with the solace of all bad workmen who blame their tools rather than themselves: “He retired to Raphia, in the confident belief that as far as it depended on himself he had won the battle, but had suffered this disaster owing to the base cowardice of the rest” (Polybius,
The Histories, book 5, chapter 85).
Polybius reports that Antiochus left behind on the battlefield more than 10,000 infantry dead and 300 cavalry also killed, with a further 4,000 men taken prisoner. Ptolemy had lost about 1,500 foot and 700 horse, as well as 16 elephants dead and most of the rest captured. Ptolemy, so it seemed, was as victorious as his father had been. But this would be the last time Asia would see a pharaoh ride out to battle in person.
The next few, heady months were spent reoccupying Syria, after sending Sosibius to Antioch to negotiate punitive peace terms with Antiochus. In the meantime the young Ptolemy occasionally laid siege to or sacked a town to keep up the pressure on the negotiations. Finally, on October 12, 217 BC, Philopator returned in triumph to Egypt, rewarding his victorious army with three hundred thousand pieces of gold and sending abundant gifts to the temples of Egypt, to thank the gods for his great victory. On the face of it, he seemed to be repeating the pattern of all his ancestors, setting off while still young to score a resounding victory in Asia and reestablishing the Near Eastern buffer zone. Surely now he was entitled to the abundant leisure he so craved. Unfortunately for the Ptolemies, back in Alexandria, the perfect setting for his decadence had already been created, ironically enough, in the halls of the museum.
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria Page 18
