The Romans already had a source of cheap and plentiful labor in the form of slaves, and the Ptolemaic administration was particularly well suited to their use. If machines had replaced slaves, where would the slaves have gone? What would they do? No one wanted another Spartacus. For an elite whose wealth was based on land, such a device simply wasn’t in their interests.
And so Hero’s greatest invention was condemned to be no more than a party novelty, just another description of a marvelous mechanical engine in a book in the vast Alexandrian library. The Romans had no real need for his work, so their interest in the contents of the world’s greatest library lay not in the abstractions of Plato and Aristotle or in Hero’s experimental physics. They were interested in the construction of siege engines and artillery, in the laying out of roads and cities, in harvesting the vast resources of their new conquests. The mechanical delights of wine dispensers and Antikythera mechanisms had their place, but a machine that undermined the whole base of their society—slavery—certainly did not.
Therefore, the complexion of the library and museum was changing. What had been very much a “Royal Society” of selected scholars paid for by the Ptolemaic state was becoming a teaching institution where young nobles might finish their education. More and more it became obsessed with gathering, collating, and revising information rather than speculating and creating new ideas. So the Roman era ushered in a period of decline in the study of pure philosophy and literature. Alexandria would never see another Archimedes or Apollonius; but something new was flowing into the spiritual void left by the seeming prosaism of Roman world domination.
What people on the streets of the city were now talking about was religion, emerging from the museum and combining in the streets with the more personal and powerfully held beliefs of those who now flocked here for education and enlightenment. A new age was dawning in which old religions would undergo radical reinterpretations and new cults would emerge which, in the crucible of Alexandria, would bring the ancient world to an end and set history on a new path.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
URBI ET ORBI
Behold now this vast city; a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection
John Milton, Areopagitica
While Alexandria may have looked little different, perhaps even improved, by Roman rule, the change in her fortunes had not left the minds of her inhabitants unaffected. As part of the Roman imperial project, Alexandrians were no longer their own masters, and what was decided in far-off Rome could have a direct effect on life in the city. A new era was dawning, an era of radical thought and new religions, many of which would take root in the city. In time the change would affect all parts of the population, but in the first years of the first century AD no one would be affected more than the Jews.
By the first century AD the population of Alexandria had risen to about 1 million people, and many, perhaps a fifth of this number, were Jewish. Since the days of Persian and then Macedonian rule this group had grown both in numbers and importance until the quarter of the city they mainly gathered in, known as Delta, was the largest Jewish community in the world outside Palestine. A cornerstone of the growth of the city, they had become Hellenized, writing and speaking and, since the writing of the Septuagint, even reading their holy books in Greek. They were, however, a population apart, without the automatic right of citizenship enjoyed by their Greek neighbors and so always vulnerable in times of crisis.
In Hero’s days, the single most powerful Jew in Alexandria was Alexander Lysimachus—his names, both Greek, a testament to Hellenization. He was in charge of collecting all customs dues on goods imported from the East, and became one of the richest men in the ancient world. So powerful had he become that he could marry one of his sons to the greatgranddaughter of Herod the Great. The other son, Tiberius Julius Alexander, had risen to extreme prominence in Rome. Renouncing Judaism, he became the first procurator of the province of Judea, and later prefect of all Egypt. But Alexander senior also had a brother, a man little interested in money, power, and worldly affairs. His name was Philo, and he would go down in history simply as Philo of Alexandria.
Philo is important to our story because he spent his whole life writing in Alexandria. Not many of his extensive works deal specifically with town life, but because he drew on his own experiences, he cannot help but give us a glimpse of the people of the city. In doing so he introduces us to an Alexandria missing from the records of geographers and philosophers and looks beyond the marble walls and ornamental gardens into the minds of its inhabitants.
Philo was born around 20 BC into one of the wealthiest and most privileged Jewish families in the city. As such, he was able to enjoy many of the liberties of citizenship, and at fourteen years of age he would have been taken to the Serapeum, where a priest would have shorn his long childhood hair and enrolled him as an ephebos—a young man suitable to receive the most select education available. He would then have set out on the encyclia, the secondary education program that included grammar, rhetoric, music, dialectics, geometry, and astronomy. As a physical counterpart to these mental exertions he would have been required to walk across from the lecture halls to the great gymnasium, where he would learn boxing and wrestling, the main sports of the day. In the extensive grounds here he would also have practiced the javelin and the discus, built his strength with the punching bag, and mixed with the other gilded youths who cooled their tired muscles in the fountains of the gymnasium’s grounds. Outside his studies, he would also have become acquainted with some of the delights of his city, such as the theater, reached, according to Polybius, by a covered gallery that wound from the water gardens known as Meander (after the winding river in Asia Minor), past the wrestling arena. Here he would have seen the classical plays he quotes in his own books and watched the politicians working the crowds. He and his friends would have bet on the outcome of the races in the hippodrome before retiring to their own clubs for an evening of banqueting.
This youthful regime was an entrée into a life of great privilege, and Philo, a believer in the Great Chain of Being that linked everyone and everything in order from the lowliest animals (and humans) up to God, knew he stood near the top, looking down over all but the mightiest leaders. His time as an ephebos probably also granted him full citizenship, marking him out from the ordinary Jews of the city. This gave him further rights—the right to marry as he chose and, most important, an exemption from the Roman poll tax. One of the most noticeable effects of Roman rule was an increase in taxation, particularly in Egypt, and a parallel increase in the brutality with which taxes were collected. Tax collectors were required to remit a certain figure to Rome, and Rome had no interest in how the collector went about gathering it, or what he did with any surplus. This made the tax collector a powerful and terrifying figure, as we see from the horror that Jesus’ decision to dine with one provokes in the New Testament. Tax collectors were not suited bureaucrats; they were thugs, sadists, and bullies. Philo records one case he witnessed in the marketplace in Alexandria. A man owing tax had fled to avoid paying, and in response the collector seized his closest family members—the elderly, women, and children. These he then set about publicly torturing:
He filled a large basket with sand and having hung this enormous weight by ropes round their necks set them in the middle of the marketplace in the open air. . . . They sank under the cruel stress of the accumulated punishments, the wind, the sun, the shame of being seen by passers-by and the weights suspended on them.
Philo of Alexandria, De Specialibus Legibus, book 3, chapter 160
The family would remain in the marketplace until the money was found, the tax evader returned, or they died. Either way the Alexandrians would know better next time than to run from him. We do not know what happened to the family Philo saw. He tells us that many cast pitying glances at them but, tellingly, fails to mention anyone coming to their aid. Such horrors were just a normal part of life under Roman
rule.
Not being liable for the poll tax put Philo apart. He would never know the terror of the tax collector’s call, never be humiliated in the marketplace—he was a man of position. But in the leisure hours that such privilege brought him, Philo was not wasting his time. At some point as a young man, it seems, he turned back to his Jewish roots, and he began applying the skills he had learned in the encyclia to analyzing his own religion.
Above all Philo was devoted to the Hebrew stories of his ancestors, in particular the revelatory teachings of the prophet Moses. He believed passionately that Moses was the original perceiver of divine wisdom and that his doctrine formed the basis of Greek classical philosophy, actually referring to him as “the summit of philosophy.” When Philo compares Greek and Jewish scholarship he cannot help but give precedence to Moses over all others, and even when he is quoting Plato he has to add the caveat “but Moses said the same thing as Plato, only earlier and better” (Philo of Alexandria, De Specialibus Legibus, book 4, chapter 110).
This was not an entirely original position—something similar had been attempted in the first century BC by an unknown author in a work known as The Wisdom of Solomon. But ever since the Septuagint had been translated and Hebrew mythical thought came face-to-face with Greek philosophy, it had seemed inevitable that a figure would emerge who would try to develop a philosophical justification for Judaism in Greek terms. Philo was the man for the job, and set about it in great earnest. It would prove to be the happiest time of his life:
There was once a time when, by devoting myself to philosophy and to contemplation of the world and its parts, I achieved the enjoyment of that Mind which was truly beautiful, desirable, and blessed; for I lived in constant communion with sacred utterances and teachings, in which I greedily and insatiably rejoiced.
Philo, On the Unchangeableness of God,
Loeb Classical Library, volume 3, pp. 1-6
Philo’s works are generally divided into three groups. In the first he concentrates on a detailed analysis and paraphrasing of the biblical texts, with titles like On Joseph, The Life of Moses, On the Creation of the World, and On the Migration of Abraham. In much of this writing, Philo employs allegorical techniques to interpret the biblical stories, some of them very profound. For example, in his great Commentary on Genesis he argues that the whole of Genesis is a metaphor for the history of the soul, from its formation at the dawn of the perceivable world to its fall, followed by its mature development as wisdom after its restoration through repentance.
Interspersed among these biblical exegeses are more abstract pieces, where Philo the classically trained philosopher comes to the fore, with titles like On the Virtues, On Drunkenness, On Flight and Finding, On the Unchangeableness of God, and On Dreams. In these works it is almost as if Philo is saturating himself with Jewish mythology, wanting to ingest and absorb every tiny nuance of the text. It has even been claimed that he sometimes spent hours contemplating a single word from the Bible. And all the time with one foot in the traditions of the great synagogue and the other in those of the museum, Philo was comparing and contrasting Moses with Plato, the Septuagint with the works of Socrates and Aristotle, the classical world with the Jewish.
This process becomes much more transparent with the second series of his works, his philosophical treatises, such as On the Liberty of the Wise, On the Incorruptibility of the World, On Providence, and On Animals, where he discusses man’s relations to the natural world. Here he is deliberately abstracting the messages he has found in the Bible and codifying them in moral, ethical, and spiritual terms; that is, he is subjecting them to the same sort of rational treatment and thought processes which we find in the classical Greek philosophers. It is as though Philo has made a magnifying lens from Alexandrian philosophy and through it is now minutely inspecting the Jewish books of law. The result was a modernizing of Jewish law which, quite by accident, also laid out the philosophical foundations for a new religion, one Philo himself would undoubtedly have had little time for, and one which was still barely struggling into existence: Christianity. And he did this in an extraordinarily thorough and creative way.
Philo, a firm believer in the Great Chain of Being, began by placing God at the apex of his philosophical landscape. But his God is so totally infinite and all-pervasive that no individual creations can be attributed to him. Instead, Philo states that God is creativity itself. God is in a permanent state of creation; his executor is a separate entity. In The Wisdom of Solomon the unknown author had called this entity Sophia, or “Wisdom.” Philo decided this entity was Logos, the “Word” of God.
God is continuously ordering matter by his thought. His thinking was not anterior to his creating and there never was a time when he did not create, the “Words” themselves having been with him from the beginning. For God’s will is not posterior to him, but is always with him, for natural motions never give out. Thus ever thinking he creates, and furnishes to sensible things the principle of their existence, so that both should exist together: the ever-creating Divine Mind and the sense-perceptible things to which beginning of being is given.
Philo, De Presidentia, 1.7
This whole idea is a modification, albeit a major one, of the Platonic doctrine, with God constantly generating the forms or ideas which then compose individual entities in the world, and actually brings the cosmic structure closer into line with the Jewish notion of angels and archangels as God’s messengers, beings which Socrates calls “Daemons,” a word later corrupted into “demons” by the Christians. In another passage Philo provides a splendidly Alexandrian analogy for this process when he compares it to planning a city in the mind of the builder:
Now we must form a somewhat similar opinion of God, who, having determined to found a mighty state, first of all conceived its form in his mind, according to which form he made a world perceptible only by the intellect, and then completed one visible to the external senses, using the first one as a model.
Philo, De Opificio Mundi, 19
It is hard to believe that, coming from such an erudite man who was brought up in and felt such passionate affection for Alexandria, there is not the smallest hint of Alexander and his lines of barley flour in this analogy. But from the theoretical perspective what Philo did was introduce the Greek concept of the Logos—the Word—into Jewish religious thought, and thus provide the foundation of Christianity in which Christ himself could be seen as a manifestation of the divine Word.
Philo had created the philosophical space in which the early church fathers would grow Christianity, apparently almost by accident, yet there is a possibility that Philo had closer links with this developing sect than first appears. We should bear in mind that Philo was alive at the same time as Christ, and that the New Testament documents were written in Greek by Jewish intellectuals who were part of the Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman world (even though they had, of course, converted to Christianity). Unlike Judaism, Christianity is a proselytizing religion, and the desire of the apostles to at least approach one of the most important figures in Hellenized Judaism seems highly plausible. Scholars have in fact argued that there are echoes of Philo, echoes of Alexandria, to be found in the writings of Saint Paul; in the Gospels, especially the book of John; and in the Epistle to the Hebrews.
There are also hints of early Christian practice in another of Philo’s fascinations, with the contemplative, communal life. Philo, though believing that a family life was best for most people, was intrigued by religious groups that lived communally. He wrote about the Jewish Essenes of Palestine, now known to have been the guardians of the Dead Sea scrolls. But it was a community closer to home that most interested him. One of Philo’s most popular works was a book called Contemplative Life. In it he describes a community of hermits, the Therapeutae, who lived on a low hill just outside Alexandria, on the banks of Lake Mareotis. This group held everything in common and spent their lives in rigorous religious study. Each member had a cabin in which was a room set aside fo
r the study of sacred texts. Here they would study from dawn to dusk, six days a week, without food or drink, until they reached a state of religious ecstasy. On the seventh day they would gather together for holy service in their great hall before returning to their books.
The community Philo describes is clearly a Jewish one, but he hints that other such communities also existed, and these would seem to provide the model for the early Christian monastic groups, particularly the Nitrian monks of the Egyptian desert who would one day play such an important role in the life of Alexandria itself. It was the view of the Greek Christian historian Eusebius that the Therapeutae were in fact a community of early Christians, and he speculated that Philo himself may have been a Christian. This was certainly not the case, but what Philo did, in his rigorous synthesis of Greek and Jewish philosophy, was to delineate the landscape in which Christianity could develop. As such, Eusebius’s claim that so great a philosopher must be a Christian is perhaps understandable, and we should at least be grateful to Eusebius for helping to preserve Philo’s philosophy, whatever his reasons. By contrast, the Jewish and Greek establishments seem to have been less impressed with Philo’s work, either ignoring or dismissing it. He describes their depressing reaction when he explained his revelations to them, “the sophists of literalness,” as sneering and staring at him superciliously.
Philo was not to spend his whole life in simple contemplation, however. As one of the most influential Jews in the city, he had, whether he liked it or not, to take a part in civic affairs. For all its intellectual tolerance, Alexandria was still extremely volatile politically, even under the Romans. The populace was acutely divided by class, race, and creed, and anarchy was never more than a stone’s throw away for the Alexandrian mob. It must have been a harsh comedown for Philo—from the ecstasies of contemplation to the real, dirty, racist, violent, and fearful world of street life. This would be the dangerous stage on which the battle for the hearts and minds of Alexandrians would be fought, and it was here that Philo would feel the grip of Roman rule.
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