The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (32 page)

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 for 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.

The early days of Roman rule had promised much to the Jews. Augustus had favored them, as had his successor, Tiberius; but on Tiberius’s death the appalling potential of imperial power became all too evident with the accession of the emperor Gaius, known today by his childhood nickname, Caligula, or “Little Boots.” If we take the Roman historian Suetonius at his word, Caligula’s rule was marked by arbitrary executions, forced suicides, and increasing megalomania. If his prefects and governors wished to keep their jobs (and their lives) they had to go to any length to please him. In Alexandria the man with that unenviable job was Avillius Flaccus, prefect of Egypt. In an attempt to ingratiate himself with the emperor he turned to three notorious marketplace rabble-rousers, Lampo, Dionysius, and Isodorus, who suggested that persecution of the Jews, who had refused to worship Caligula as a god, would increase his popularity with the city mob and hence secure his position.

As the flames of anti-Semitic feeling were fanned, the Jewish community asked Herod Agrippa, a Jewish king in Palestine and a family friend of Philo’s, to intercede on their behalf. It was his arrival in the city that sparked the first outrages. Gathering in the gymnasium, the mob began ridiculing the king. They had found a man in the marketplace whom Philo describes:

 
This poor creature, dressed by the mob as Herod, was paraded through the streets. When the mob reached the theater, it demanded that a statue of Caligula be placed in the synagogue, claiming that the Jews had failed to honor the divine emperor as they should. Not having a statue of Caligula at hand, they dragged an old, corroded statue of a charioteer from the gymnasium.

The prefect did nothing to stop this desecration; indeed, he issued a statement denouncing Alexandria’s ancient Jewish population as foreigners with no legal rights. An orgy of looting ensued while the Jews were rounded up and forced into a small part of the Delta district. Philo explains their plan: “After driving these many myriads of men, women and children like herds of cattle out of the whole city into a very small portion as into a pen, they expected in a few days to find heaps of dead massed together” (Philo of Alexandria,
The Embassy to Gaius,
124).

Those Jews who were caught searching for food outside this ghetto were beaten and stoned. Even Philo’s own privileged class did not escape: Members of the Jewish governing body were rounded up and scourged like common criminals in the theater, and some were even crucified.

Eventually the situation calmed, and Flaccus found to his dismay that the pogrom had not had the desired effect. The extremely irrational (or perhaps calculating) Caligula had decided, for the moment, that this was not what he wanted, and when two of the governor’s henchmen, Lampo and Isodorus, saw this change of heart, they were quick to condemn Flaccus to their paranoid emperor. Orders were soon sent for his arrest, and after exiling him on a barren Aegean island, Caligula eventually tired of him altogether and soldiers were sent to murder him.

Alexandria had shown itself to be a tinderbox; at one level the most cosmopolitan city on earth, it was always teetering on the brink of a dramatic descent into racial violence. Even with Flaccus gone the peace in the city remained fragile. Caligula had once more turned against the Jews, threatening to destroy the temple in Jerusalem if they persisted in refusing to worship him. If he did, all Jews in the empire would overnight become fair game for their persecutors. Alexandria was on tenterhooks, and in the following year both Jewish and anti-Jewish delegations headed for Rome to plead their case directly before the emperor; the Jewish group was headed by Philo himself. After months of prevarications the highly unstable Caligula agreed to meet Philo, but ominously began the interview with: “Are you the god-haters who do not believe me to be a god, a god acknowledged among all other nations but not to be named by you?” (Philo of Alexandria,
The Embassy to Gaius,
353).

Fortunately for the Jews of Alexandria, Caligula seemed indifferent to the situation in the city and offered the anti-Jewish faction no more than he had offered Philo. In AD 41, on January 24, Caligula’s assassination finally brought the sorry episode to an end. His successor, Claudius, ordered that the Greeks of the city show toleration to the Jews and that the violence stop forthwith. He did not want to be considered a god in his lifetime and he did not want his statue erected in the synagogue. Peace had been restored. But Roman Alexandria had shown another, ugly face which would change the whole complexion of the city.

Philo died peacefully in AD 50 or 55. He had witnessed a haunting warning of what was to come in the city, but he had also experienced the heights of philosophical ecstasy still accessible in the gardens and porticoes of the museum. And it was in those still-quiet groves that another great Alexandrian would soon rise to prominence, a man who would show that if the city’s body was beginning to look diseased, its mind was still as healthy as ever.

Claudius Ptolemy looked beyond the confines of his turbulent city to the world outside, the whole world, and the heavens beyond that. His works would become the cornerstone of science until the Renaissance, and their influence is still seen today.

As with his illustrious antecedent Euclid, we know almost nothing of the life of Claudius Ptolemy. His name suggests that he was a Roman citizen of Greek extraction, as citizens usually took Roman first names. Though some have argued that he was born in the Egyptian town of Ptolemais (hence his surname), there is no solid evidence to support this claim. Nor is there any evidence that he was connected to the royal Ptolemies, though this mistake was made repeatedly in subsequent centuries and he is often portrayed with a crown and scepter. It is pretty certain, from the caliber of his work and the detail of the material he makes reference to, that he was educated and spent his working life in Alexandria, where a few years before his birth the Roman emperor Claudius, having brought peace to the streets, considerably expanded the museum. It is possible that while there he was either tutored by or received patronage from a man by the name of Syrus, to whom all his major works are dedicated, but this man has yet to be identified.

In the true Alexandrian tradition, Claudius Ptolemy was an extraordinary polymath, writing about mathematics, music, astronomy, astrology, optics, philosophy, geography, and cartography. But also in his work is a hint as to how the museum was changing. His books, magnificent as they are, are mainly syntheses. Where Ptolemy does venture into unexplored realms he is often wrong in his interpretation; indeed, there is even the suggestion that he made up data to match his hypotheses. However, there is no questioning the lucidity of his style and the clarity of presentation, and it is these which would carry his work and his name down the centuries. At the beginning of his mammoth work on astronomy, he tells us:

 
Ptolemy was nothing if not comprehensive. In this massive work he suggests a complex mathematical model for the workings of the universe. And he produces a star catalog listing 1,022 stars in forty-three constellations, which is, incidentally, 22 more stars than Tycho Brahe could manage at the end of the sixteenth century. Ptolemy clearly considered his book to be a practical manual, not merely a reference work, and he wanted it used by and distributed to as wide a portion of the population as possible, and in doing this he became one of the world’s first popular publishers. Having finished the main work, he collected together the tables of practical use to astronomers which are scattered throughout it and published them in a slim volume known as the
Handy Tables.
He then decided to write a popular account for lay readers, a sort of paperback version, called
Planetary Hypothesis.

The
Almagest
is the second-most important and longest-lasting scientific textbook of all time, after Euclid’s
Elements;
it held sway in the classical, then Arabic, and finally Western European world until Kepler unraveled the true movements of the “wandering” planets in 1618. But there is a problem. Whereas Euclid’s work is substantially correct, Ptolemy’s is not. In his researches in the library Ptolemy overlooked or ignored the observation by Aristarchus that the sun lies at the center of the solar system, and chose instead a geocentric model. Perhaps to be fair to him, Aristarchus’s work may not have been there, destroyed in the fire started by Julius Caesar. Even if it had survived, other great men like Archimedes had dismissed the idea, so Ptolemy can perhaps be forgiven for doing likewise. Instead, using Aristotle’s vision, along with data collected by the Babylonians and his illustrious Greek predecessor Hipparchus, as well as with some basic trigonometry, Claudius Ptolemy concocted what was by then a conventional view of the universe, with the earth static at its center and the sun, moon, planets, and fixed stars revolving steadily around it.

Observing that the planets do not move smoothly across the sky in one direction but sometimes appear to backtrack, Ptolemy ironed out these eccentricities by introducing the notion of “epicycles,” little pirouettes the planets performed when they appeared to retreat along their paths. With this system, even previously unobserved erratic planetary behavior could be explained with the addition of a new epicycle or two. The addition of this catchy little device meant that cosmology became stuck in the rut of an earth-centered universe, a view which became so ingrained that it became pure dogma, to the point where, according to Arthur Koestler, on February 23, 1616, the church’s qualifiers (theological experts) in Rome gave their decision concerning two propositions put to them: