The Classical World (39 page)

Hadrian, too, visited the Museum in Alexandria: typically, he insisted on asking the inmates questions which they could not possibly answer. The presence of scholars had dignified the Ptolemies’ public image, but then too the relationship between kings and ‘talent’ had not been easy. Conspicuously, Alexandria produced no historians and in the shadow of its royal family, it produced almost no philosophers, either. Instead, the Ptolemies attracted witty gossip and were given graphic nicknames by their Greek subjects. They certainly had their oddities, as we can still see from the portraits on the vessels of faience which were used in their cult. As their great modern connoisseuse has pointed out, they show us ‘generals, scholars, predatory and patient wives, nervous girls, debauchers, compulsive eaters, savage slayers. Such, we realize, were the Ptolemies and we feel that we would recognize them still on the colonnaded streets of Alexandria.’
⁷
Their ‘luxury’ made them unmistakable. Some of the kings were reckoned to be excessively fat, so much so that a tunic had to cover them; two men, serving as walking sticks, had to support one of them when he set foot on the ground. But even the fat kings could be ruthless. In 145
BC
the obese Ptolemy VIII turned on the Greek intellectuals in the city, persecuted them and drove these bright sparks out of Alexandria. Independent minds are never truly safe with a king.

In this context, freedom did not have the scope of the freedom which classical Athenians had known. The kings maintained courtiers and favourites who depended on them. In the 190s, after a military crisis, they resorted to an old Macedonian habit and extended ever more ‘titles of distinction’ to their entourage in order to flatter them.
In the first years of Alexandria the Greek citizens did begin by having a political council and an assembly. So did Egypt’s other new city, Ptolemais. But Alexandria’s council was then abolished, probably in the mid-second century
BC
, and its assembly never included all the city’s male residents. In Ptolemais, in the 240s
BC
, we hear of ‘disorderly behaviour’ in public meetings, especially during elections to office. As a result, the presiding magistrate’s hold on public business was strengthened. In Alexandria, meanwhile, the city had an ‘overseer’; the citizens were enrolled in demes, as in Attica, but the demes’ names honoured the Ptolemies and their god Dionysus. From the 270s
BC
onwards, the royal family was honoured with a dynastic religious cult: it was a useful bond for the many courtiers who came to the king from so many different Greek communities. Alexandria’s non-citizen population, including the Egyptians, did not even have the Greek citizens’ limited degree of political freedom. From 203
BC
onwards Egyptians took part in uprisings under Ptolemaic rule, so much so that the ‘savagery’ of the Egyptian ‘mob’ became notorious to Greek outsiders. But these rebellions were often for or against a particular prince in the Ptolemaic house. Freedom was not even a promise for the Egyptians, and their ‘mob’ did not riot to get it; rather, they rioted within a royal system which they accepted.
⁸

Justice was arguably more accessible, both to Greek and non-Greek. The Alexandrians had courts of law in their city, and these courts did serve all residents, not just the restricted ranks of the Greek citizenry. We know something of their recognized body of laws, including the laws on perjury and on sales: they are related to laws which are known in older Greek cities, including Athens. Here, too, Aristotle’s pupils and their researches may have helped Ptolemy I to draw up a new code. But the kings could also proclaim other laws by edict, and this ‘law’ then took precedence over the city code. Beside the city-courts there were royal officials who also dispensed justice according to their own lights.

Outside Alexandria, in Egypt proper, courts of Greek or Egyptian law were available both to Greeks and to Egyptians, and it was up to them which type of law they chose to use. But here, too, the king’s edicts took precedence over all other rulings: as a result, there was the possibility of acquiring a judgement issued by the king himself or by
one of his officials which would have greater authority than a local court’s decision. It is in Ptolemaic Egypt, therefore, that we have the best evidence for the change which Macedonian royal dominance, since Philip, had brought about in the previously classical Greek world, the giving of justice by an individual’s response and its soliciting by individuals’ written petitions. Surviving petitions on papyrus extend to the most intimate problems of family life, even to such a case as the ungrateful foster-daughter who had grossly neglected her mother, the petitioner. According to her mother, she had taken up with a boyfriend, the ‘bugger’ (literally), and was ceasing to honour the promises she had made on her mother’s behalf.
⁹
These vivid petitions were addressed to the king himself, but usually they went no further than to the officials who were in charge of each district of Egypt. The exceptions were those which could be forced on the king’s attention while he travelled on one of his tours round Egypt’s temples and townships. On these expensive occasions, as both sides realized, the king was exposed to the hazards of a royal progress. In October 103
BC
we find a Ptolemy telling his local commander at Memphis to be sure to see that the ‘amnesty’ which he has recently proclaimed is in force before he himself arrives. Otherwise, people will go on pestering him with their existing grievances.
¹⁰
Justice had begun to depend on access, but access was not to be had for the asking.

The New World

In India, Megasthenes says, the Brahmans do not share their philosophy with the wives they marry, in order that if the women are wicked they may not communicate any of their unpermitted secrets to the profane public, and if the women are serious they will not promptly abandon their husbands. For nobody who considers with disdain pleasure or hard work, life and death too, is willing to be subjected to another person. A serious man and a serious woman, however, are people like that…         Megasthenes (who visited India,
c.
320–300
BC
)
,

as quoted in Strabo,
Geography
15.1.59

For a long while, the house of my ancestors flourished
Until the unopposable force of the three Fates ruined it…
So I, Sophytos… of the family of Naratos
…

Received money, which can multiply, from another and left
my home

Resolved never to return, until I had gained the highest pile of
riches.

That is why, going for trade to many cities, I gained a vast
fortune, without damage.

Much praised, I have now returnedto myland after countless years
And my return was a joy to my friends…
At once I rebuilt the decayed house of my fathers
With new funds, bigger and better
…

From the Greek verse-inscription of Sophytos, son of
Naratos (a non-Greek name), on his
stele
at Kandahar,
c.
135
BC
(first published in 2004)

After Alexander, the Greek language was the language of power all the way from Cyrene in north Africa to the Oxus and the Punjab in north-west India. It was the main language of culture, and not only in big Alexandria. In what is now Afghanistan, on the banks of the river Oxus, Greek settlers put down roots and developed the big city at Ai Khanum. The first settlers here had probably included veterans whom Alexander dismissed in 329/8
BC
. One of the them may have been the very man, Cineas, who was commemorated with a hero-shrine inside the city. It was then inscribed with moral precepts which were attributed to the former Seven Wise Men of Greece. They had been brought all the way from Delphi by one Clearchus, surely the man known as a pupil of Aristotle. The Greek gods received cult from the new settlers in some very distant landscapes, but there was no attempt to impose them on non-Greek subjects. The polytheist Greeks made something, too, of gods which they found in Asia already, identifying them with Heracles, their hero, or giving them a familiar feature: they added Macedonian hats to one of Asia’s favourite votive-figures, the potent male rider on his potent horse.
¹

Within the former Persian Empire, a wide horizon had already been spanned by Aramaic, the language used by secretaries all the way from Egypt to India. This separate horizon did not close with Alexander’s conquests: Aramaic literature continued to have a broad perspective, some of which survives in many Christian Bibles’ books of Jewish stories, composed in the new Greek age. Greeks, however, were more keen to understand their vast new world. With Alexander, they measured its roads and then put up ‘distance-markers’ along them. They sought out its mines and noted their potential; they observed its new flora and fruits: one type of wheat in the East was said to have been so strong that when Macedonians ate it they burst apart.
²
Despite these local observations, Alexander and his staff had usually underestimated Asia’s size and, quite often, Alexander had been lost. How far east did India really go? Was the Caspian Sea a landlocked lake? These questions began to be explored in the decades after his death, when the most remarkable journey of all was made westwards, beyond Alexander’s conquests. Pytheas, a Greek from Marseilles, travelled north past the Bay of Biscay, explored the coast of Britain and commented on a thick ‘lung’ which confronted him: it was probably a
fog-bank in the northern latitudes.
³
Pytheas was aware of the latest Greek astronomy, and went very far north, as his calculations prove; he probably went north-east to Norway, rather than north-west to uninhabited Iceland. He wrote up his travels, but their careful observations seemed incredible to many later critics. Pytheas had seen a world which Alexander had never even imagined.

It would be quite wrong to think that Greeks in the long-established Greek cities were disoriented by these new horizons or by the royal courts and kingdoms which were so much grander than their own citizen-bodies. The decades after Alexander’s death are a fertile era in Greek thought and culture which grow directly out of the previous classical age. Comedy returns to view for us in the romantic ‘sitcom’ tales of family life composed by the Athenian Menander. At Athens, too, philosophy developed three new schools, the last three of importance in ancient history. In one of them, Epicurus discussed profound questions of perception, ethical aims and sensations: his ‘School of the Garden’ was not at all the pleasure-seeking Epicurean centre of later legend. Zeno, from Cyprus, wrote on the ideal state, on norms of conduct and the nature of knowledge and obligation: his ‘School of the Colonnade’ (or
Stoa
) became known as the Stoics. Pyrrho contested the very grounds of knowledge and certainty and founded the Sceptics. For each of these philosophers, freedom was an individual’s freedom, from fear or passion or deception: it was not a freedom to vote as one citizen in a free democracy.

It was later said that Pyrrho had accompanied Alexander and, after seeing so much, had concluded that nothing could be known at all. In fact, these philosophies were reacting not to Alexander, but to previous philosophers, especially the challenge of Plato. Zeno’s ideal state answered Plato’s horrible utopia; Epicurus engaged with the pre-existing scepticism of fourth-century Greek thinkers. The new thinkers were not propounding a new global state or a new emphasis on private withdrawal and ethical relativism in a new multi-cultural world. For, all around them, the Greek civic communities were still vigorous. The new foundations in Asia were not filled with rootless settlers, lost in a new landscape. What we know of them suggests that the citizens sustained their unity through the familiar Greek practices of intermarriage with one another or with the particular compatriots
of their own civic subgroup. Family structures held firm, and old and new city-states were not pulled apart by some new ‘Hellenistic individualism’ or cosmopolitan ethos. Admittedly, they now had to cope with royal edicts and the threat of royal armies or unreliable royal ‘friends’. But the citizens did not lose their strong sense of community and local political engagement. They attended their exclusive gymnasiums, whether in Macedonia or Syria or Egypt, social centres which were the citizens’ privilege.‘Gyms’ were no longer only centres of naked exercise. Here, the young were given lectures and cultural events. The gymnasium was a focus of civic life, passing on Greek values and learning. Beyond these training-centres, civic festivals and games continued. In the third century
BC
artistic and athletic festivals multiplied in the Greek and Asian Greek cities (except, curiously, in Syria). Again, these occasions brought city-states together for traditional Greek pursuits, celebrating Greek values.

What Greeks in the city-states lacked was a level of personal luxury comparable to the royal society around the kings. We have a marvellous letter written from Macedon, perhaps
c.
300
BC
, where the Macedonian author Hippolochus says he had just been at a wedding-feast.
⁴
He describes for an Athenian reader the dazzling display of silver and gold, the female musicians (‘to me they looked stark naked, but some said they were wearing tunics’), the female fire-eaters and jugglers (also naked), the huge helpings of wild boar and the activities of a grandson of one of Alexander’s heavy-drinking courtiers (his nanny’s son) who also drank massively and was rewarded with a cup of gold. The twenty guests received astoundingly valuable presents. ‘You think yourself happy,’ the author tells his friend in Athens, ‘listening to the propositions of [Aristotle’s pupil] Theophrastus and eating wild thyme and those fine bread rolls. But we have taken away a fortune from a single dinner and are looking for houses, farms or slaves to buy with the proceeds.’

In the recipient’s same Athens, we can draw a similar contrast around a basic pleasure of life: gardening. Between
c.
310 and 290
BC
the Theophrastus whom this letter mentioned so honourably wrote the two texts which qualify him as the father of botany. Theophrastus had heard reports from Alexander’s soldiers; he had read the first historians’ books about Alexander’s conquests and their strange flora,
but he also knew stories about trees in Sicily and south Italy and had even picked up details about the varying habitats of trees in Latium, near Rome.
⁵
He had no idea of the chemical properties of soil or the sexual reproduction of plants, the aspect which is the basis of their modern classification. But he did observe plants very closely, and they were not just dried specimens, or plants reported by friends and previous writers. Theophrastus gave an exact account of the cherry’s flowers and fruits which depended on prolonged observation across the seasons. He discriminated between the habits of wild and cultivated pears. He must have studied these subjects in his own garden, which he later bequeathed in his will, specifying it as his resting place. Theophrastus is the first man to have literally buried himself in the garden. He even cultivated dandelions, correctly observing their seed-heads but finding them ‘bitter and unfit for eating’.
⁶