The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (9 page)

 
 
For some time Ptolemy had been preparing his Egyptian subjects for an announcement. He had been encouraging his family to live in a more overtly Egyptian manner, adopting Egyptian modes of dress, attending traditional rituals, and even going as far as to contemplate the father-daughter and brother-sister marriages which had been common among the great dynasties of the New Kingdom some seven hundred years before.

He didn’t want to be seen by his new hosts as a foreign ruler, another Cambyses. He was not, however, simply going native. Egypt offered his family some things money could not buy—history, tradition, and a civilization so old that it made the Hellenistic world look like an afterthought—but he also had something to offer it. He was holding out the prospect of Egypt’s becoming the center of the world once again.

Ptolemy had a dream of a new kind of city and country, a place of universal knowledge where the thoughts of the greatest minds could be turned to the creation of the perfect state, under the benevolent eye of a dynasty of rulers who would gain wealth, fame, and immortality from their patronage of this greatest of human projects. If Ptolemy could cherry-pick the highlights of that ancient culture and fuse them with the modern thinking of his Greek world, then he would be more than both. He would look like an Egyptian but speak like a Greek (indeed, he and most of his descendants refused to learn the Egyptian language). He would be something new, the founder of not just a new dynasty but a new kingdom.

And so the final, logical stage in Ptolemy’s progress from childhood friend of Alexander to pharaoh was put into motion. As the new cult of Serapis was built up in Alexandria, so the traditional role of Memphis was run down. Along with the decline in religious importance, the main arms of administration were also moved from the old capital to the new city. From here the state was reorganized. Registers of houses, land, slaves, cattle, and taxpayers were ordered to be drawn up in every village, then summarized and returned to what was now officially the new capital—Alexandria.

Then in early 304 BC Ptolemy set the seal on his achievements by sending out another declaration to the people of Egypt. The days of Persian domination—of foreign domination—were in the past. Egypt had awoken, stirred by a new leader. He was to be no longer their satrap, but their savior—Ptolemy Soter—the first in a new dynasty of Greek pharaohs who would oversee the greatest explosion in thought and innovation the world has ever known. And at its heart would be Alexandria.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LEGACY OF ARISTOTLE

Aristotle,
Metaphysics

 
 
I
f it was Egyptian religion and Macedonian tactics that placed Ptolemy on the throne of Egypt, it would be Greek thought that kept him there. The state he envisaged ruling was unlike anything else in the ancient world—a country of the mind built in an alien land from the rubble of Alexander’s empire.

Ptolemy simply didn’t share Alexander’s ambition to rule the world, as he had seen how hopeless the idea really was. What he did share with his old friend was glimpses of a way in which at least a single country might be governed. Ptolemy and Alexander had been close as children and young men; indeed, the rumor in the Egyptian court was that the two men were half brothers following a liaison between Ptolemy’s mother, Arsinoe, and Philip II (after which she was quickly married off to the minor nobleman Lagus). The story was almost certainly false, but it served the new pharaoh well to be thought of as related to the founder of the new city and as a man in whose veins the blood of the god Alexander flowed. But what Ptolemy had learned of government in the Macedonian court had not come from watching Alexander’s father, whose autocratic rule would end with his assassination, or from observing the increasingly tyrannical government of Alexander’s final years. Instead, it came from the man whom Philip had employed to educate his son and who had by default educated Ptolemy as well. He was Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world, and it was to memories of his tutelage that Ptolemy turned when he thought about bringing his new kingdom to life.

Aristotle had always been there in the background, in the calmer, more considered parts of Alexander’s and Ptolemy’s minds, and through this his influence spread far beyond his own writings and into his pupils’ actions. He’d informed Alexander’s whole way of thinking, promoting a love of investigation and discovery which not only drove the conqueror across vast physical territories but encouraged his journeys into all areas of knowledge. Alexander was a great devourer of books, often running out of material on campaigns and frantically sending for more. He read histories, scientific treatises, the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus—everything from his precious “casket copy” of the
Iliad
(as corrected by Aristotle) to the dithyrambic odes of Telestes and Philoxenus. He also liked to put his knowledge to use, as Plutarch describes:

 
So great was Aristotle’s influence on him that, if we are to believe Plutarch, he was often heard to say that he loved and cherished his tutor no less than if he had been his own father, “giving this reason for it, that as he had received life from the one, so the other had taught him to live well” (Plutarch,
Life of Alexander,
in
Parallel Lives,
8).

It was an interesting distinction—two fathers, one for a physical life and one for the life of the mind—but it was a conception that would finally bear fruit not in Alexander’s empire but in Ptolemy’s Alexandria. Ptolemy had his physical kingdom, his throne, his army, his defenses, and in those he was the inheritor of at least a part of Alexander’s world. Now he would combine that physical inheritance with an intellectual one and create something unique. In this Aristotle might claim to be the true father of Alexandria, closer than the rumored links between Ptolemy and Alexander, and more a father to his pupil’s city than to the man himself.

Aristotle, the man on whose thoughts Alexandria’s intellectual foundations—and hence the intellectual foundations of the whole Western world—were built, was himself a member of a great dynasty, connected not by blood or marriage but purely by thought and reason. He was the heir to a revolution in philosophy, building on the work of his old master, Plato, who in turn had built his philosophy on the foundations of his tutor—Socrates, whom the eighteenth-century classicist John Lemprière characterized as “the most celebrated philosopher of all antiquity” (Lemprière,
Classical Dictionary Writ Large,
p. 588).

Philosophers, literally “lovers of wisdom,” had guided and shaped the Greek intellectual world from at least the time of Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, but with the coming of Socrates (469-399 BC), Plato (429- 347 BC), and Aristotle (384-322 BC) came a subtle shift in approach. Whereas many of the early philosophical questions were concerned with the nature of reality, of the world and universe, and the role of the divine in the greater scheme of things, the new notion initiated by Socrates was more concerned with the philosopher’s own role in the world, in how to live correctly and set an example for others. Ethics and morality began to extend the fundamental concerns of philosophy, and so philosophy became not simply speculation but a practical tool of government and a cornerstone of civilization.

As a young man Socrates had distinguished himself as a soldier, fighting in three major battles and being decorated for saving the life of a wounded friend. These expeditions with the military were, however, the only occasions on which this unusually sedentary philosopher ever left Athens. After the campaigns he led a highly ascetic life, going barefoot and without a coat in the winter. He had no interest in money or material goods and claimed that he was not paid for his teaching, though as he had no other means of financial support this seems unlikely.

Socrates was a controversial figure with new and sometimes startling things to say, so he made enemies as well as attracted friends and followers. His methodology was to initiate a series of questions to an individual or a group to reveal the extent of their knowledge (or ignorance), seeking to expose contradictions in their beliefs. This was all well and good when addressing pupils or followers, but when this method was applied to people who thought of themselves as important, perhaps even great, Socrates’ proven ability to show that they in fact knew nothing easily caused offense. Writing in his
Lives of the Philosophers,
Diogenes Laertius explains:

 
Not that Socrates initiated these dialogues out of spite or arrogance. He always maintained that his own philosophical strength was rooted in the fact that he at least knew that he himself knew nothing. He was merely frustrated that others thought they really did know and understand the world and each other.

While his reputation grew—the oracle at Delphi declaring that there was none wiser in the land—so too his concerns with ethics and the right ways to live inevitably drew him and philosophy into the political arena, where, during a period of considerable political instability, he could hardly avoid being seen as taking sides. In the 390s BC his enemies finally brought charges against him, alleging that he had corrupted the Athenian youth, made innovations in the religion of the Greeks, and ridiculed their gods. As was the practice in Athens, where there were no professional judges, Socrates was summoned to answer the charges before a full jury of 501 citizens elected by ballot. The jury expected Socrates to put up an eloquent, self-effacing defense and finally sue for forgiveness, but this went entirely against the grain of his moral philosophy. Instead, he challenged the whole foundation of the trial and the supposed justice upon which it was based. He complained that these were trumped-up charges supported by false witnesses, which was almost certainly true, and his eloquence almost won the jury over. In the end he was found guilty by only three votes.

The next step in this “people’s trial” was rather unusual. Instead of handing down a set sentence for the crime, the jury was required to ask Socrates how he himself considered he should be punished. But Socrates was still not prepared to humble himself before his accusers, and, perhaps buoyed by the close vote in the trial itself, he suggested that because he had so helped to develop the intellectual caliber of the people, he should be granted free meals for life and pay a very modest fine. The jurors were not in a joking mood, however, and the mocking of their judicial process turned them savagely against him. The motion to put him to death immediately was passed by 441 to 60.

He was duly sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, though his execution was delayed for thirty days by a local religious festival. Pressed by his followers to change his mind, he is said to have exclaimed, “Would you then have me die guilty?” He died aged seventy in 399 BC.

In holding firm to his beliefs to the point of death, Socrates had a phenomenal impact on the Greek mind and Greek civilization. The philosophy of Pythagoras had not concerned itself with how a society should operate. But after Socrates philosophers would interest themselves in the state and politics. Their subject had taken on a moral dimension and become something worth dying for.

Lemprière summarizes his achievements with admirable clarity:

 
There is one other aspect of Socrates’ death well worth noting. This is simply that it happened at all. That a philosopher should be put to death for holding views and expressing them orally (he did not set his views down in writing) merely because they were different from currently accepted norms attests to how seriously this new philosophy was being taken. Indeed, the shift in emphasis from metaphysical to moral philosophy which Socrates pioneered had the effect of making philosophy’s subject area even more politically loaded than it had been, to the point where Socrates’ immediate successors became actively engaged in working out the ideal form that not just individuals but entire societies should take.

Ten years or so before his death, it is said, Socrates had a dream one night. A young bird fell exhausted into his lap, and then in front of him it grew at great speed into a fully fledged swan and flew away. The next day Plato appeared at Socrates’ school and asked to enroll as a pupil. He stayed with Socrates right through until his death, though he says he was not present when his master swallowed the poison.

 
 
After his master’s death Plato decided to travel, visiting Sicily several times and venturing as far as Egypt, in search of the basic tenets of Pythagorean philosophy, which he knew had their origins there. Once he had satisfied himself that he understood their essence, he returned to Athens and went about establishing his own school. The remains of that school can still be found today in what is now a suburb of Athens but was then a sacred grove of olive trees on the outskirts of the city. Here low stone foundations still mark the site of one of the city’s gymnasiums, along with a cluster of earlier buildings, one of which is claimed as the original home of the legendary hero who gave his name to this place—Academus. This was where Plato founded the Academy; the word itself has since become synonymous with learning and centers of education around the world. It was here that he undertook to teach young Greek men how to rule. The school attracted pupils from across the Mediterranean world, and its work extended far beyond the confines of politics. From its foundation, perhaps as early as 385 BC, it would last, intermittently, until AD 529, when its final closure by the emperor Justinian is said by many to mark the very end of antiquity.