The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

by Justin Pollard

  When Ptolemy looked back down to earth, however, he saw another challenge. Having completed his mammoth task on the heavens, he felt, like Socrates before him, it was time to bring his philosophy from the heavens down to earth.

  That earth began for Ptolemy with Alexandria itself. Here in the markets were people from all over the earth, and piled in the warehouses along the waterfront were exotic goods gathered from as far as any traveler had ever reached. It was in part as a response to this cosmopolitanism that Ptolemy decided that the traders and explorers venturing out from this crossroads of the civilized world, which the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom called “the conjunction of the whole world,” needed a new guidebook: a book that would take them to the very edges of the known world, and perhaps beyond.

  Ptolemy’s Geography is composed of eight books. Its intention was simple: to make and draw an account—an atlas—of the entire known world, and to construct maps which accurately reflected the texts. But as always, before proceeding to the work in hand it was necessary to review all the existing sources on the subject, evaluate their relative accuracy, and to devise and develop the necessary mathematical techniques for both the written geography and the accompanying cartography.

  The idea of measuring the world (agreed by then to be spherical in shape) by dividing it into vertical and horizontal lines had been used by Eratosthenes when he made his astonishingly accurate measurement of the earth’s circumference, but it was Ptolemy who developed this idea into the notions of longitude and latitude, divided into degrees and minutes. With this framework established, the next question was how to make the most accurate assessment of the positions of the major cities, rivers, lakes, and mountains of the known world. Ptolemy realized that as winds vary, so the speeds of ships fluctuate; further variations are caused by the effects of tides and currents, so simply logging times traveled at estimated speeds would not necessarily produce accurate positioning. Similarly, travelers proceeding on foot or horseback rarely traveled in a straight line or at a constant speed. He preferred Eratosthenes’ method, measuring the angle of the sun’s shadow at midday to estimate where a traveler might be longitudinally. This data he chose to combine with all the known reports from mariners, traders, travelers, and explorers, to come up with a list of more than eight thousand localities, each uniquely pinpointed by its own longitude and latitude.

  His next problem was that of projecting the spherical world (of which he knew that only about half was known) onto a two-dimensional piece of paper, to produce a map. In book 1 of the Geography he shows us precisely how he planned to do it, dividing the hemisphere of the known world into eighteen “meridians” of 10 degrees each, the longitudinal lines converging on the North Pole, and at their widest at the equator. The remaining task was therefore to transfer the eight thousand plotted locations onto the grid-planned page and fill in the details of the map.

  Ptolemy’s Geography was lost from the fall of Alexandria until about AD 1300. When a copy of the great work was found it was in Arabic, and the world map, the twenty-six regional maps, and the sixty-seven maps of smaller areas were all missing. But the text was so detailed and comprehensive in explaining how to make the projections onto paper that enthusiastic cartographers found the maps relatively easy to reproduce. What then did they see as they put his world atlas together?

  The first thing they must have noted was its sheer extent. Stretching from Iceland to China, it really did cover all of the Old World. Admittedly there were several oddities—much of India was not there, replaced by an enormous version of Sri Lanka named “Taprobana,” and Africa below “Ethiopa” appeared to go on indefinitely, as did China as the easternmost point on the map. But most of Europe, North Africa, and the Near and Middle East were much as we see them today. Egypt and the Nile; the details of the Red Sea and Arabia; the Aegean Islands; Cyprus; the leg, high-heeled boot, and football of Italy and Sicily; the square box of the Iberian Peninsula; and France, Germany, and Denmark were easily identified. The British Isles grew an interesting extension jutting out from eastern Scotland, but the southwestern limb of the Cornish Peninsula was there, as were Wales, the Isle of Man, and a plausible outline of Ireland. Considering that Ptolemy constructed this map in the late second century AD and Britain was much more than a thousand miles away by sea, the accuracy of his work is truly astonishing.

  Little wonder then that Claudius Ptolemy has come to be known not just as the last, and perhaps the greatest, of the classical astronomers, but as the father of geography too.

  Claudius Ptolemy’s achievement was to lay out a whole system by which the world, the universe, and indeed the fates of men might be known. In it he hoped to live up to the ideals of Alexandrian philosophy, ideals which had been known to Eratosthenes, Callimachus, and Aristarchus before him. In this, for all its failings, Ptolemy’s work was a spectacular success. What he could never have known as he wrote, however, was that his system would provide the framework for a new age, the Christian age, which was already sparking to life in the streets around him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DAWN OF THE ICONOCLASTS

  Now, says Solomon, defend wisdom, and it will exalt thee, and it will shield thee with a crown of pleasure.

  Clement of Alexandria, Stromata

  For Ptolemy, Philo, and the Alexandrian philosophers in whose footsteps they trod, spiritual enlightenment came from two interconnected sources. It was in the unending search for wisdom which might allow them to see beyond the sordid, material world to Plato’s. Coupled with this was a personal code by which their bodies and minds might be in a suitable condition to search out such truths. This path was by no means easy, requiring moderation and temperance, a willingness to shun the obvious temptations of the physical world and to strive to find divinity in ideas alone. As such it was a path suitable only for the chosen few. Neither Philo nor Ptolemy believed that just anyone could enjoy the insights they had received. They were the highest link in the human portion of the Great Chain of Being, with the privilege, and perhaps the duty, of understanding the world on behalf of lesser humans—the uneducated, the women, and the children.

  In second-century Alexandria, however, a new force was stirring which took a radically different view of man’s (and woman’s) destiny. During Ptolemy’s lifetime access to this protoreligion had been largely by word of mouth, with just a few accounts of the life and works of the new man-god in circulation. However, those stories had not died out as so many other religious tales had, and now, just a century after his crucifix-ion at the hands of the Roman authorities, tales were rife that the Messiah had emerged among the Jews. His appeal lay partly in the fact that he had renounced the Great Chain of Being: He hadn’t said that the poor and downtrodden must accept their place in society, however meek. In fact he had said the reverse, something radical and dangerous—he had said that the meek were going to inherit the earth.

  Christianity, as preached by Jesus and passed on by his disciples, was a truly revolutionary doctrine, which, for all its overt pacifism—“turn the other cheek, love thine enemies”—clearly challenged directly the established social order. In a world dominated by the brute force of the Roman Empire, powered by slavery, awarding most of its inhabitants, particularly women, second-class status at best, the evangelizing zeal of Christianity, preaching damnation for the rich and powerful and salvation for the meek and oppressed, was almost certain to catch on. The highly publicized persecutions and martyrdoms of its early adherents only added fuel to the fires of this passionate new faith.

  Alexandria, with its free and tolerant attitude to intellectual debate, as well as its burgeoning population of the downtrodden—slaves, Egyptians, and women from across the known world—was perfectly positioned to become the first great center for Christian study. It would be here that the new teachings would be refined, formalized, and shaped into the first proselytizing religion the world had ever known. This would also be the stage on which Christianity’s main opponents voiced their opinion
s. In the streets these academic disputes between rich and poor, Jews, Christians, and pagans, would increasingly be fought out not only with words but with lives.

  The most penetrating and comprehensive assault on Christianity came from a man named Celsus, who wrote a book titled The True Word or The True Discourse around the time of Claudius Ptolemy’s death in the mid-170s. It gives us a unique insight into what some of the wealthy and educated ruling classes in Alexandria really thought about this new religion; but also, in the extraordinary story of its survival, the book demonstrates the passions such arguments would arouse and the lengths to which people would go to suppress views that differed from their own.

  Not a single copy of Celsus’s book survives, as every one was ordered destroyed by the Christian emperor Valentinian III and Archbishop Theodosius in 448. Early Christianity took great pleasure not just in the annihilation of anyone or anything deemed to be pagan, but in wiping out any trace of dissent from its own historical records. Paradoxically, this zeal could sometimes protect the very material that the church wished destroyed. About seventy years after he wrote it, a copy of Celsus’s book was sent to the preeminent Christian theologian of the time, a man named Origen of Alexandria, with a request that he refute it. After some hesitation, Origen consented, and wrote his famous treatise Contra Celsus— “Against Celsus.” This work immediately entered the Christian canon as a revered early defense of the faith, and it has been carefully conserved ever since. But Origen did such a thorough job (he was an Alexandrian scholar, after all) that he quoted almost all of Celsus’s book verbatim—how else could he refute him point by point? Indeed, so much did he quote that in the nineteenth century scholars were able to reconstruct 90 percent of the original just from Origen’s rebuttal. In this deliciously ironic way, the greatest early onslaught on Christianity was conserved almost word for word in the church’s own sacred annals.

  We know next to nothing about Celsus as a person, and, just as his book itself is a reconstruction, what little we do know of the man himself has had to be reconstructed from that book. For many years it was thought that Celsus must have been a Roman, living in Rome and hence displaying all the contempt for a foreign peasant religion that we might expect from the then masters of the world. But in his work there are clues to his real origins. His writing clearly shows a deep knowledge of Egyptian customs, something people in Rome had little interest in. His description of Judaism is also unusual for a Roman, not dealing with the Western tradition but instead speaking of the idea of Logos, the Word. This is a unique aspect of Oriental Judaism and one we have heard expressed before by Philo. So all indications are that if we had gone looking for Celsus in the second century we would have found him not in Rome but at the museum in Alexandria.

  His True Word consists of a preface followed by an attack on Christianity, first from a religious, Jewish point of view, then from a philosophical standpoint. This is followed by a detailed refutation of Christian teaching and an appeal to Christians to renounce their faith and return to the pagan fold of the True Word (Logos). Celsus opens his attack by accusing both Christianity and Judaism of arrogant “separatism” in that both claim a special relationship with God as chosen races that casts them as superior to the rest of society. This, Celsus claims, is false. In reality all peoples share the same relationship with divinity. In fact, he suggests that the evidence of how Christian and Jewish peoples have fared in the world might be taken to imply that God actually was prejudiced against them. The Christians were, after all, a persecuted people, and the Jews still had no homeland. These seemed to Celsus odd rewards for “chosen” peoples.

  Turning then to Christ and his teachings, Celsus begins by attempting to set the record straight with regard to the virgin birth. Pointing out that there are many examples of divine inseminations of mortals in Greek mythology which the Christians have crudely copied, he gives his own stark version of what he imagines were the real events. Jesus was

  born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her substance by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; . . . after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child.

  Origen, Against Celsus, 1.28

  He then moves on to provide his explanation of how Jesus, from this unpromising beginning, went on, thanks to the superstitious Egyptians, to return to Palestine with a religious mission. Celsus claims he became a servant in Egypt in order to raise money and there learned some “miraculous powers”—the sorts of tricks that Egyptians loved and were famous for. He was so pleased with these that when he returned home he declared himself a god.

  Celsus maintains that on his return, however, Jesus was not able to persuade his fellow countrymen of his divinity, merely attracting a following of ten or twelve infamous publicans and fishermen—hardly company fitting for a god. Celsus goes on to claim that Jesus failed to keep his promises to the Jews, and even failed to sustain the loyalty of his followers. Of his claims to have predicted his own death, Celsus asserts that this was merely fabricated by his followers, like the story of the resurrection, another trope which appears so often in Greek mythology. If Christ rose from the dead, he asks, why did he show himself only to his disciples and not to his persecutors?

  It becomes clear that Jesus does not measure up to Celsus the Platonist’s notion of divinity. Using Philo’s term “Logos” to mean the executor of God’s will, he piles on the sarcasm:

  The Christians put forth this Jesus not only as the son of God but as the very Logos—not the pure and holy Logos known to the philosophers, mind you, but a new kind of Logos: A man who managed to get himself arrested and executed in the most humiliating circumstances.

  Celsus, On the True Doctrine, 64

  Celsus goes on to attack both Christians and Jews even for claiming that theirs are separate religions when in fact Christianity derives directly from Judaism. His view is that because the Jews revolted against the Egyptians, and the Christians against the Jews, sedition lies at the root of both traditions. He complains too of the lack of any cohesion or agreement among the many fledgling Christian cults which were flourishing at the time, claiming that they have almost nothing in common except the name.

  But it is the way that he has seen Christianity spreading through Alexandria and the empire that most baffles Celsus. Alexandria is a city of wisdom, where men dedicate their lives to study so that they might understand the true nature of divinity. Study draws men further up the Great Chain of Being, yet Christian evangelists seem to ignore this, shunning the well educated and concentrating their efforts on the lowliest and most ignorant parts of society. Why is it, Celsus asks, that it is

  only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women and children of whom teachers of the divine word wish to make converts. . . . For why is it an evil to be educated and to have studied the best opinions, and to have both the reality and the appearance of wisdom? Why should it not rather be an assistance, and a means by which one might be better able to arrive at the truth?

  Origen, Against Celsus, 3.64

  His view is that the Christians have added nothing to the wisdom of the ancients and in fact have often distorted and perverted the tenets of the great classical thinkers. Philosophy, he maintains, clearly distinguishes between true wisdom and mere appearance, whereas the Christians demand that adherents believe what they don’t understand and evoke the authority of their discredited leader as endorsement. Even Christ’s apparently new doctrine of the resurrection he dismisses as a mere corruption of the ancient doctrine of the transmigration of the soul. This lies at the very heart of Celsus’s concern. In his view, rationality—the logic of the museum scholars—is the path to understanding the divine. But Christianity does not require his sort of wisdom; it does not demand that its adherents spend their days in the philosophy lecture halls. In
stead, it requires only one thing from them, one thing that anyone of any social standing can give and the one thing that can really threaten his world order: faith.

  In this Celsus sees a terrifying future, where the knowledge that he stands for counts for nothing and the dangerous masses might threaten the established social order. Under Christian rule, he believes, the lower classes would rise up, fired not by a new love or understanding of philosophy, but inspired by a blind and unquestioning faith that actually revels in the ignorance of its adherents. With this antiacademic group in control there would then be no rule of law, and the classical world would be reduced to barbarism. What would follow would be chaos and the end of the world as Celsus knew it.

  Prophetic words these, as we shall see as Alexandria’s fate unfolds.

  But Celsus believes he has a cure. Having identified the rotten worm within the apple, he appeals to the Christians to forsake their errant ways and return to the fold of true Platonic paganism. Some commentators consider that this was his intention all along, that his aim was a reconciliation and return to the true path, as is acknowledged in some passages of Origen’s rebuttal. Celsus declares that his desire is to help all men, and bring them all to the ideal of a single religion.

  Celsus has done, certainly in his own view, a classic Alexandrian analysis of Christianity, and found it wanting. Like so many scholars before him, he gathered the information, and sifted and ordered it, before applying the test of his own logic to it. In studying Christianity, which yet had a shortage of texts, Celsus must have spent long hours not in the library but in the market, talking to the evangelizing Christians as they sought converts. It must have made for some nervous and heated exchanges, but at the end of the day Celsus still hoped that they would return to the old order. In his mind this new religion was subversive but not yet truly dangerous. In the end the Great Chain of Being would reestablish itself, so he could afford to treat the Christians he met not as enemies but more as errant children. They should turn away from thoughts of liberation and return to their established place in society. But Celsus had overlooked one key issue, the issue of faith.