The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (15 page)

This extensive investment in Egyptian culture had other benefits beyond simply keeping the priesthood and peasantry happy. Under Ptolemaic patronage Egyptian intellectual life flourished. Not just the spoken word but both hieroglyphic and demotic writing blossomed, while the need for translation gave rise to perhaps the most important surviving object from ancient Egypt, the Rosetta stone, whose parallel texts in hieroglyphics, demotic (another, more cursive, Egyptian script), and Greek provided the key to the decoding of the hieroglyphs. And with new styles of writing came new subject matters, including a new Egyptian literary style of romantic tales told in story cycles and featuring the gods, royalty, magic, romance, and the mighty deeds of their warrior heroes.

 
 
Even in this halcyon period there was a much darker undercurrent flowing through the Ptolemaic family arteries. The rule of the Ptolemies, like those in the other successor states to Alexander’s empire, was a family affair, and within that tortuously intermarried and interbred family deadly rivalries were already brewing.

Around 300 BC Ptolemy I had arranged for his sixteen-year-old daughter Arsinoe to marry King Lysimachos of Thrace, who had also been in the entourage of Alexander the Great; a clever tactical move, as, after 285 BC, Lysimachos also became king of Macedonia. Now the Ptolemies could hold out the prospect of inheriting Alexander’s original patrimony, for if Lysimachos and Arsinoe had a son, then Ptolemaic blood would run through the veins of the next ruler of Macedon. There was a problem, however. The king already had an heir, Agathocles, by a previous wife. So Arsinoe, with characteristic Ptolemaic ruthlessness, quickly set about arranging his death. But in the highly interrelated families of the Mediterranean, things were never so simple, and after his murder Agathocles’ widow fled the country and managed to raise a war against Lysimachos in which the king was eventually killed (281 BC).

It was a disaster for Arsinoe, and in the ensuing confusion, Lysimachos’s Thracian throne was seized by Arsinoe’s half brother, who demanded that she marry him. If on the surface this looked like another triumph for the Ptolemies, however, the truth was very different. The marriage to Arsinoe had nothing to do with family beyond gaining access to her children, who the usurper knew were the rightful heirs to Macedon and Thrace. But escaping the marriage proved impossible, and not long after the ceremony, her sons by Lysimachos were duly murdered. With no further need for her, she was expelled from the kingdom. Her half brother had only wanted her hand in marriage so he could kill her children.

This then was the brutalized and vengeful woman who a few months later arrived back at her brother Ptolemy II’s court in Alexandria, around 279 BC. Here she continued to intrigue, this time aiming her venom at the king’s wife, also confusingly called Arsinoe (I). Arsinoe I was, incidentally, the daughter of Lysimachos and thus theoretically Arsinoe II’s stepdaughter-in-law. She had soon arranged for the queen to be accused of plotting to kill the king, and Arsinoe I was sent into exile at Coptos in Upper Egypt. Here a memorial built by an Egyptian called Sennukhrud who was once her steward calls the fallen queen “the king’s wife, the grand, filling the palace with her beauties, giving repose to the heart of King Ptolemy.” But such titles were now just memories for her. Even her loyal steward couldn’t help but give away her true position in society when it came to writing her name, which he wrote without the royal cartouche surrounding it. She might still have called herself queen in far-off Coptos, but in Alexandria she was nothing.

This clinical excision cleared the way for Arsinoe II to take a step that would outrage Greek society but which, to the Greeks’ great surprise no doubt, ingratiated her with the native Egyptian population. Seeking a throne for the third time, she proposed marriage to Ptolemy, her full brother. Ptolemy now had to choose. Stay true to his Greek roots and shy away from what any Macedonian would certainly have considered incest, or take the opportunity to consolidate his power, free from the influence of alien wives or suitors, and make Ptolemaic rule an entirely family affair. Fortunately for both of them, they lived in a country with a two-thousand-year precedent for this. Egyptians not only approved of incestuous royal marriages, they preferred them. Royal incest fitted into their religious cosmology and had been widely practiced by pharaohs at the height of Egypt’s power. Though her motives were Greek, Arsinoe could not have made a more Egyptian move, so she took a throne for the third time as wife and queen to her brother, the couple taking the epithet “Philadelphus” (brother-loving).

On her death at the age of fifty-four, in July 270 BC, she was deified by her husband, but she bore him no children during their marriage, so Ptolemy had his children by Arsinoe I declared as children of his second, divine wife and heirs to the throne.

 
 
Reaction in the museum to the announcement of the two Ptolemies’ incestuous marriage must have been mixed. It was an idea that sat very uneasily in Greek minds, as did many aspects of this Greco-Egyptian rule. Yet clearly ruling in a manner that to Egyptians at least seemed correct was working, and most Greeks could be practical enough to turn a blind eye to something they might consider unsavory but could see was profitable. As such the museum trod carefully, its members rarely explicitly commenting on this alien custom.

Indeed, the interest of the museum’s scholars was by now, perhaps deliberately, drifting away from the bloody cut and thrust of politics toward the more uplifting arena of poetry. The leading intellectual figure at the time was Theocritus (c. 300-c. 260 BC), an extremely important and influential poet who was the originator of a new form of poetry known as the “pastoral idyll.” Greek poets preceding him were mostly interested in storytelling, in character and action, not in the intrinsic beauty of nature. Theocritus totally altered that by creating little pictures of rustic life cast in dramatic form. These could be very naïve:

 
Theocritus’s idylls and bucolics were immensely influential, right through to the eighteenth century AD and beyond, forming the basis for works like Milton’s
Lycidas,
Shelley’s
Adonais,
and Matthew Arnold’s
Thyrsis.
He also wrote extensively about love, often taking up the quintessentially Greek theme of the love of an older man for a youth:

 
Whether Theocritus’s brief mention of the “thrice-wed dame” could possibly be an aspersion on Arsinoe II is unclear, but we do know that Theocritus was shrewd enough to write openly only in fulsome praise of the incestuous royal marriage, and cast it as the act of divine siblings like Isis and Osiris, which won him much praise and doubtless handsome rewards from his royal patrons.

Another court poet was not so prudent, however. Sotades was also in Alexandria at the time, but his was a very different reputation. Known as “Sotades the Obscene,” he is remembered for having invented his own meter for the obscene subject matter of his poetry. Sotades is sometimes credited with inventing the palindrome, where a phrase reads the same both forward and backward, and a Sotadic verse has the opposite meaning when read backward. Almost none of the work of this colorful character has survived, though both Plutarch and Athenaeus noted one line from the satirical poem he wrote about the royal marriage. They said it read: “You are pushing the peg into an unholy hole.” It did not amuse his royal patron. According to Plutarch, Ptolemy had Sotades the Obscene thrown into jail. According to Athenaeus, however, Sotades escaped from prison and fled, but he was eventually caught by Ptolemy’s admiral Patroclus on the island of Caunus. Patroclus did not bother returning him to his master for punishment but simply had him sealed up in a lead coffin and tossed into the sea.

A third scholar at the museum at the time was Lycophron. He was a tragedian and the only member whose name has survived from a group of seven (sometimes eight) tragic poets of the time known as the Pleiades. However, Ptolemy chose to give him the task of arranging and cataloging all the comedies in the library. This he dutifully did, and he subsequently produced a tract on the subject,
On Comedy,
which is now lost. In fact, only one of his works has survived, a poem in 1,474 iambic lines entitled
Alexandra or Cassandra,
which deals with the fortunes of Troy and the Trojan and Greek heroes after the war, ending, appropriately enough for his audience, with a reference to Alexander the Great. It is so riddled with bizarre, little-used words and words invented by Lycophron himself that even in his own lifetime he became known as “Lycophron the Obscure.” Being hard to understand can be a blessing in a violent and highly charged court, however, and Lycophron the Obscure lived to tell more of his enigmatic tales, which became immensely popular in court during the Byzantine period.

But even as his obsequious court poets sought to immortalize their sovereign in verse, Ptolemy II set his sights on more concrete edifices to his glorious reign. His three greatest Alexandrian commissions began with the rebuilding of the museum, which had expanded piecemeal under his father’s rule but had long since outgrown its original premises. In place of the old dormitories and assembly halls, he commissioned a magnificent range of buildings right alongside the royal palace on the waterfront, with expansive lecture theaters, the library and great assembly halls, observatories, and plant and animal collections. Finished in white marble and designed to harmonize with the royal palace, it must have been the envy of all the other princes of the time. At this complex’s heart stood the museum itself, where the greatest minds in the world could meet and talk and think and write, the first integrated scientific research complex in the world.

To provide fuel for their thoughts, there was the great library—a place where all the works of the ancient world could be stored and ordered, available to any of the scholars to consult, provided of course they had royal permission. Constructed on the waterfront in the royal district known as the Brucheum, it quite early on became known as the “mother library” whose “daughter” was to be found in the Serapeum. Linked to the museum by a white marble colonnade, the mother library contained at least ten large interconnecting rooms or halls, each dedicated to a specific area of learning, such as rhetoric, theater, poetry, astronomy, and mathematics. The walls of each hall were broken up by series of alcoves where the papyrus scrolls were stored. Off the main rooms were smaller ones where scholars could read, write, or discuss their work, and participate in special studies. It was to be a sanctuary for thought in a violent age, and carved over its entrance was a simple inscription: “A Sanatorium for the Mind.”

 
 
Ptolemy’s third great building project may also have been conceived in his father’s time but only came to fruition now. If the museum and library stand as testament to the father, it is perhaps this most practical of buildings that should stand as a tribute to the son—the great lighthouse on the island of Pharos. Ptolemy II would no doubt have also been delighted to find that it was this, rather than his father’s library or museum, that would go down in history as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and become Alexandria’s most illustrious icon.

The man credited with building the lighthouse (although we are not sure if he was the donor or the architect) was Sostratus the Cnidian, a famed architect and builder who is also credited with having constructed a “hanging garden” in his hometown of Cnidus in Caria and a clubhouse in Delphi where his fellow citizens could meet. The task Ptolemy now set him was to solve one of Alexandria’s most persistent problems. Built on an almost totally flat coastline, the harbor at Alexandria was hard to locate from vessels several miles out to sea. And there was a further danger. Those ships unwise enough to stray too close to the shore searching for the anchorage would find themselves in dangerous shoal waters, studded with reefs and sandbanks where all but the most skillful captain might founder. Even with the harbor in sight, the most dangerous reef lay hidden across the entrance itself. Those ships might find themselves wrecked on the shores of Pharos, where the notorious inhabitants of the Port of Pirates could easily pick them off.

There was thus a pressing need to construct some sort of navigational mark that sailors approaching the city could use as a guide, preferably both day and night. In short—a lighthouse. It seems likely that this solution had already been agreed to when Sostratus was summoned by Ptolemy, but aided by the mathematicians of the museum and works from the library, Sostratus was able to propose a structure on a scale that even a Ptolemy could not have expected.

The great lighthouse was to be constructed in granite and limestone blocks faced with white marble. Its total height would be at least 400 feet—that is, about the height of a modern forty-floor skyscraper. Erected on a solid base, it would have three levels. The first level would be square and would house all the workers needed to fuel and operate the great light. The second floor would be octagonal in shape, decorated with exquisite statuary, which stared out across sea and city and where the people of Alexandria might come to enjoy the breathtaking views. The third level would be circular and crowned with an enormous reflector, quite probably of parabolic shape (another first in scientific design) and made of polished brass. Finally atop this would stand a huge bronze statue of Poseidon, god of the sea, leaning on his trident.