The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

by Justin Pollard

  Octavian finally met these would-be Eastern emperors not on land but off the coast of Actium in Greece. The sea battle was brief and bloody, and within a few short hours Antony and Cleopatra were fleeing for the distant safety of Alexandria’s walls. Her ships entered the great harbor as tradition dictated, to the strains of victory songs and garlanded with flowers, but not even she could hide this defeat. She had come home for the last time, to the city that had made her, but not in triumph as she had hoped, and she would never leave its walls again. There was to be no sanctuary.

  Many of the Roman generals who had supported Antony now began to defect—some no doubt just gauging the way the political wind was blowing, others now overtly opposed to this “un-Roman” dalliance with a woman they considered no more than an unreliable Eastern princess. In their eyes Cleopatra had brought Rome nothing but trouble—trouble for Pompey, trouble for Julius Caesar, trouble for Mark Antony, and now trouble for them.

  In the spring of 30 BC Octavian’s armies began to march on Alexandria. Antony managed one final victory in the outskirts of the city by the hippodrome, but when he returned to the battlefield the following day, his fleet and cavalry went over to the enemy. On August 1, when Octavian walked into Alexandria, the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end.

  With Octavian on his way to the palace, Cleopatra retired to her mausoleum, sending a note to Antony to say she was already dead. Hearing this, he fell on his sword in despair. The blow was not immediately fatal, however, and he was still writhing in agony when word came that Cleopatra was not dead. In his last moments he asked to be carried into her presence so he might die in her arms. Tied to a cord and hauled up through a high window (for Cleopatra would not open the door for fear of betrayal), he finally gained admittance to the tomb, and that last wish was granted.

  Cleopatra did not immediately follow him to the grave. She was flushed out of her mausoleum after Octavian managed to get one of his guards in through the same window as the dying Antony. She immediately tried to stab herself, but Octavian’s orders were that she be taken alive, and she was overpowered and brought to him only wounded. Perhaps Cleopatra at least thanked him for being granted the chance to bury Antony with royal honors, but she can have held out little hope that more kindness awaited her than being paraded through the streets of Rome in Octavian’s triumph to the jeers and scorn of a crowd he had taught to hate her.

  Seeing death as the only noble way out, she then tried to starve herself but was persuaded against this after threats were made against her children. Finally, after a meeting with Octavian on August 10, she persuaded him that she now wished to live, and he dropped his guard. She had bent one last great Roman to her will. Two days later she was dead. Plutarch describes her last moments:

  After her bath, she reclined at table and was making a sumptuous meal. And there came a man from the country carrying a basket; and when the guards asked him what he was bringing there, he opened the basket, took away the leaves, and showed them that the dish inside was full of figs. The guards were amazed at the great size and beauty of the figs, whereupon the man smiled and asked them to take some; so they felt no mistrust and bade him take them in. After her meal, however, Cleopatra took a tablet which was already written upon and sealed, and sent it to Caesar, and then, sending away all the rest of the company except her two faithful women, she closed the doors.

  Plutarch, Life of Antony, in Parallel Lives, 85

  As soon as Octavian opened the tablet he must have known that it was too late, for in it she begged the Roman to bury her alongside her beloved Antony. He quickly dispatched messengers to her, but they arrived to find her lying dead upon a couch, her body carefully arrayed in state by her two female servants Iras and Charmion. Iras was herself in the last moments of life as they burst in, while Charmion, also in the throes of death, was trying to arrange a diadem on her mistress’s head. One of the messengers turned on her: “ ‘A fine deed, this, Charmion!’ ‘It is indeed most fine,’ she said, ‘and befitting the descendant of so many kings.’ Not a word more did she speak, but fell there by the side of the couch” (Plutarch, Life of Antony, in Parallel Lives, 85).

  No one can be sure if Cleopatra died from the bite of an Egyptian asp in that basket of figs, as was reported at the time, or from some other poison which, like many rulers of her day, she must have carried about with her. But the story of the asp provides an appropriate death for a queen of Egypt and the only Ptolemy ever to have learned Egyptian.

  She had been perhaps the most Egyptian ruler of all her dynasty, using her inquisitive Greek mind to look deep into the past of her adoptive home for clues to a future free from Roman domination. She had even beguiled a Roman general into joining her on that journey—an Osiris to play alongside her tragic Isis. But the great days of Egypt she looked wistfully back to had been little more than a memory when Alexandria was founded, and the Egyptian temples she built along the Nile were more an homage to the stories of long-dead pharaohs she had read of in the library than the signs of a resurgent Egypt.

  Now at thirty-nine years old she was dead and finally resting next to her beloved Antony. As for her children, Caesarion, in many ways the only true heir of Egypt and Rome, was hunted down by Octavian’s men and killed. He was about fourteen years old. Her children with Antony did survive, although they were forced to walk alongside her picture, in which she was portrayed with the asp still clinging to her arm, in Octavian’s triumph in Rome. Only Cleopatra Selene appears again in the history books after that, married to King Juba II of Mauritania, where she transformed his minor capital of Caesarea into a little Alexandria, complete with sculptures of her illustrious ancestors and even its own small library.

  Back in the real Alexandria that library and the city that held it were now Roman possessions. The Ptolemaic dream was dead, but Alexandria’s story was still far from over.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE CLOCKWORK CITY

  Your worship is your furnaces,

  Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,

  Have molten bowels; your vision is

  Machines for making more machines.

  Gordon Bottomley, “To Ironfounders and Others”

  The Alexandria that awoke the day after Cleopatra’s death was changed but not destroyed. Having been defeated in war, the city might have expected to be erased entirely from the face of the ancient world, as Carthage was in 146 BC, as an example to others who might dare to defy Rome.

  But this was not to be Alexandria’s fate. Octavian limited his revenge to stripping the city of its governing body or senate and founding his own city of Nicopolis (named after a city in Epirus opposite the site of the battle of Actium) in what was then the suburb of Ar Rama. Further humiliation would be unnecessary and, far more important, entirely counterproductive. Egypt was potentially too wealthy, Alexandria was too much of a prize, and what was more, Rome itself was also changing. The Roman province of Egypt—as it now was—had been conquered by a republic, but the general at its head had no intention of maintaining the political traditions of Cicero. He was the first of a new breed of Roman ruler, one who professed republicanism in the name of Octavian, but practiced power as the first emperor—Augustus. Egypt had been where his stepfather, Julius Caesar, and his erstwhile friend, Mark Antony, had looked for the money to conquer the world, and it would be where he would consolidate his rule, taking the Ptolemies’ inheritance as his personal fiefdom.

  Alexandria fascinated the new emperors of Rome in two ways. Economically, it was the port through which 20 million bushels of wheat were annually exported from the Nile Valley—enough to feed the unemployed and restive city mob back in Rome. More important, it was the center of the intellectual world, an Egyptian city founded on Greek thinking and now ruled by Rome. In its library lay the practical works by men such as Archimedes that had helped Rome build an empire, as well as many others, perhaps yet unread and untapped. And whereas the republic may have had less time for the higher arts, emperors, like pharaohs
, could be seduced by their association with the great literary names from history and legend whose works filled the colonnades of the library. That was indeed a prize.

  Alexandria was the most extraordinary city on earth, as Julius Caesar and Mark Antony had learned, and as Augustus was now finding out. Around the roads and gates laid out so long ago by Dinocrates, extraordinary buildings now stood. From just south of the Canopic Way the Paneium gave a stunning view across the city. This was itself an astonishing structure, a man-made hill in the shape of a fir cone around which a path spiraled up to a temple dedicated to Pan on the summit. From here the city lay spread out before a visitor. Across the wide granite-paved street lay the Soma, the tomb of Alexander, where the embalmed Conqueror of the World still lay in a crystal coffin (though not the original gold casket, which had been melted down) surrounded by the tombs of the Ptolemies. Through the hazy sides of the sarcophagus one might just have made out the scar where the great man’s nose had been recently reattached after Augustus had accidentally broken it off when he demanded to touch this sacred relic. Away to the west, beyond the porticoes of the gymnasium, stood the great temple of the Serapeum, with its own library and stadium where annual games celebrated the power of Ptolemy’s invented god.

  Off in the distance to the north lay some of the city’s most famous buildings, laid out in stately fashion around the harbor. Most impressive of all, after the palaces themselves, were the enormous grounds and buildings of the Sebasteum (or Caesarium), begun by Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony but finished by Augustus as a celebration of his victory.

  Here stood “Cleopatra’s Needles”—the three ancient obelisks Augustus had brought there from Heliopolis, which now stand one on London’s Embankment, one in New York’s Central Park, and one in Paris’s Place de la Concorde. Their setting in the Sebasteum is described by Philo, a Jewish scholar living in the city in the first century AD, as

  huge and conspicuous, fitted on a scale not found elsewhere with dedicated offerings, around it a girdle of pictures and statues in silver and gold, forming a precinct of vast breadth, embellished with porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways and wide open courts and everything which lavish expenditure could produce to beautify it.

  Philo of Alexandria, The Embassy to Gaius, 15

  Beyond stood a more sober and sadder sight. By the temple of Poseidon, where arriving sailors gave thanks for their safe passage across the sea, Mark Antony had built a small promontory out into the harbor. At the end of this stood the Timonium. This temple, built after Antony’s defeat at Actium, was named after the misanthropic Timon of Athens, who had been an Athenian lord, wronged and mistreated by his friends, who henceforth hated and mistrusted all mankind. He had withdrawn from Athens and lived alone in the wilderness, and Antony, abandoned by his Roman friends, had wished to imitate him. The depths of such despair might be gauged from the epitaph on Timon’s tomb, which Callimachus, quoted in Plutarch, says read:

  Timon, hater of men, dwells here; so pass along;

  Heap many curses on me, if thou wilt, only pass along.

  Plutarch, Life of Antony, in Parallel Lives, 70

  Older and happier buildings also crowded around the harbor and foremost among these was the museum in whose portico Eratosthenes had placed his astrolabe. This remained a lively and extensive institution, with its dining halls, colonnades, and gardens, in part of which roamed the exotic animals of the scholars’ private zoo. In the first century AD there would be a sea change here, inspired not by the pure philosophy of Greek thought but by practical problems of engineering, which would make this the only modern city in the ancient world.

  The fascination with engineering that so failed to impress Archimedes now began to absorb the scholars of the museum. Rome was a physical empire, not an empire of the mind, and it wanted scholars to find practical solutions to their most pressing problems: conquering and ruling the world. The result would be advances in architecture and engineering that would remain unparalleled until the Renaissance: the first use of concrete; concrete that set underwater; aqueducts; metropolitan sewage systems; high-rise buildings; and, in Alexandria, very nearly a revolution.

  Among the new breed of inventors who now walked the corridors and gardens of the museum and library, one stood out—Hero—and the revolution he nearly started eighteen hundred years too early was an industrial one. Hero was at one level exactly the type of scholar who had worked at the museum and library for centuries. He was a great geometer; his work Metrica (which was lost until 1896) dealt with theoretical problems of geometry, finding the areas and volumes of two- and three-dimensional geometric shapes and reiterating an ancient Babylonian method for estimating square roots which is still used in computing today. But at another level Hero was something new. His purpose in studying at the museum and library was practical. Hero professed none of Archimedes’ distaste for engineering but set out to collect the greatest examples from antiquity and add his own to them. For him theory was just a preliminary to practice. Pappus, an Alexandrian mathematician working around AD 320, considered Hero a “mechanician.” His school, he tells us, divided mechanics into theory and practice. The theory included the study of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics, while the practice included metalwork, architecture, carpentry, painting, and any other manual skill. It seems Hero had these skills in perfect balance, and in Pappus’s view, that put him among another group—the wonder-workers.

  The ancients also describe as mechanicians the wonder-workers, of whom some work by means of pneumatics, as Hero in his Pneumatica, some by using strings and ropes, thinking to imitate the movements of living things, as Hero in his Automata and Balancings, . . . or by using water to tell the time, as Hero in his Hydria, which appears to have affinities with the science of sundials.

  Pappus, La collection mathématique, book 8

  In fact, in Alexandria in the first century AD, Hero was the greatest of the wonder-workers. He was a designer and builder of automatons—automatically operated machines—with which he delighted and bemused the people of the city. The machines he built used gravity, pressure, heat, and water to power devices that appeared to operate without human intervention. They would have surprised and bewildered an eighteenth-century European as much as they did Romans and Alexandrians. In his great book the Pneumatica he explained the purpose of his lifework:

  By the union of air, earth, fire and water, and the concurrence of three, or four elementary principles, various combinations are effected, some of which supply the most pressing wants of human life, while others produce amazement and alarm.

  Hero of Alexandria, Pneumatica, introduction

  Simple machines had been a part of Alexandrian life for centuries before, usually seen in the clanking automatons of the great Ptolemaic parades of the early kings. The museum had been collecting peculiar machines, tricks, and unusual natural objects since its very inception. Ever since Alexander ordered his people to send any strange novelty to Aristotle that he might use it in his teaching, the collection of books had gone hand in hand with the collection of “things” in the museum. But before now these were perhaps considered little more than novelties or, at best, talking teaching aids. But in Roman Alexandria, the construction of such novelties now blossomed and expanded. For a moment it looked as though Aristotle’s own dream of a mechanized world was about to come true:

  For if every tool were able to complete its own task when ordered—or even anticipate the need—just as the statues of Daedalus supposedly did, or the tripods of Hephaistus which Homer says “entered of their own accord the assembly of the gods”—or shuttles could pass through the loom by themselves, or plectra play the harp, master craftsmen would have no need of assistants, and masters no need of slaves.

  Aristotle, Politics, book 1, chapter 4

  If there was a man to take Aristotle at his word, it was Hero. As with so many of the great Alexandrians, we know very little about his private life, but thankfully some of his works survi
ve, either as original texts or as comments and discussions in the works of later engineers and mathematicians. In these books he describes the machines he built and the practical skills he learned in the process, and we also gain a sense of his delight at producing devices which filled their audience with wonder.

  The machines that Hero built were the wonders of their age—indeed, they would have been the wonder of many ages since—and their deployment about the city made it appear to visitors to be literally a place of miracles. Some were for the home, simply there as entertainments for dinner parties. Others whirred and clanked away in theaters, producing amazing special effects. But the most likely place to find one of Hero’s machines was where magic and miracles were only to be expected—in the temples.

  Religion in Egypt was a booming business in the early Roman Empire. The Roman view of religion was surprisingly relaxed. Provided that the imperial cult was acknowledged—more a matter of allegiance than belief—most Roman citizens and subjects were free to worship whatever deity they wished. This liberal approach made cities like Alexandria the home to hundreds of cults, from the traditional Roman and Greek pantheons and the worship of the Ptolemaic Serapis, to the uniquely Egyptian mystery cults of Isis and Osiris, to the Mithraism so beloved by the army officer corps, and even the ecstatic Eastern castration cult of Cybele. Within the city, the temples of Isis and Osiris vied with those of the deified Ptolemies, Zeus, and Jupiter for the devotion (and the money) of adherents. Attracting enough worshippers to any one, when there were literally hundreds to choose from, required a miracle, and that’s exactly what Hero could provide.