There was never anything like the great library and museum before, nor has there been since: the single place on earth where all the knowledge in the entire world was gathered together—every great play and poem, every book of physics and philosophy, the key to understanding . . . simply everything. loc: 114
All that remains is perhaps 1 percent of the works that were once lodged there, the chance survivors of that shipwreck of human achievement. loc: 122
If the Renaissance was the “rebirth” of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its original birthplace. Our politics may be modeled on Greek prototypes, our public architecture on Roman antecedents, but in our minds we are all the children of Alexandria. loc: 168
by joining this island to the mainland with a causeway, two great harbors would be created, making the safest and largest anchorage on the whole of the north coast of Egypt. loc: 197
In 333 BC the Athenians had allowed Egyptian merchants to buy land for a temple to their goddess Isis, wife of the god of the underworld, Osiris. There were also Greek merchants living in Egypt and adopting elements of its religion, particularly the worship of Isis, which in the following centuries would spread across the Mediterranean and, under Roman rule, reach as far as Britain. loc: 279
Egypt’s position, directly across the Mediterranean from Greece, with a major river navigable far into the south. A pharaonic canal cut between that river and the Red Sea would provide access to the Indian Ocean for a ruler with the ambition to attempt a conquest of India—a loc: 289
In terms of trade it was simply a perfect location. loc: 300
from this meeting grew the idea that Alexander was not the son of Philip of Macedon but the son of the god Ammon himself. loc: 350
Between the pharaoh and the temples not only was the economy organized, but, in Egyptian eyes, the relationship between humans and gods was also managed. The ruler of Egypt was seen as Horus, the son of the god Osiris and the mediator between the worlds of the everyday and the divine. loc: 374
Through his interaction with the temples and his performance of the kingly rites in those temples, a state of harmony (maat) was maintained in the world—the stars would continue to circle in the heavens, the Nile would flood once a year, and so life in Egypt would go on as it had for thousands of years. loc: 376
When Babylonian astronomers predicted inauspicious times it was the custom for the priests to release a convict and place him on the throne as a “substitute king” in place of the real ruler. Then, any bad luck that befell the kingdom during this ominous time would fall on the shoulders of the criminal, not the king and hence the state. When the danger passed, the criminal would be executed, taking his ill fortune to the grave with him. loc: 400
He further suggests, as does Arrian, that some thought the poisoning to have been carried out at the instigation of Aristotle, who feared that the king’s imprisonment of the chronicler Callisthenes for complaining about the king’s growing arrogance signaled that Alexander’s success had made him uncontrollable. loc: 418
Alexander had a half brother, Philip III Arrhidaeus, who was the son of Philip II and Philinna of Larissa, but he seems to have been simpleminded and incapable of taking on sole rule loc: 426
A few months after Alexander’s death his Bactrian wife, Roxana, gave birth to his son, loc: 428
So it came to pass that the heirs of the greatest ruler of the ancient world were a fool and a baby. loc: 429
Ptolemy, realizing full well that it was now each man for himself, left immediately for Egypt, the richest and most self-contained part of Alexander’s empire. loc: 445
Ptolemy knew what he had to do. He had to take for himself a part of Alexander’s empire he could rule and defend alone. And the jewel he would set in that new nation’s crown was the gold-clad body of Alexander himself. loc: 464
Ptolemy knew the Egyptian people had to be treated carefully if he was to retain their loyalty in the dangerous years ahead. As such he made no pretense of kingship, made no bid for the pharaonic throne so recently vacated by his friend and master. Instead he contented himself with the old Persian title “satrap”—effectively making himself governor of Egypt. loc: 494
Perdiccas, one of Alexander’s faithful bodyguards, had, according to some ancient sources, been given Alexander’s ring on his deathbed—as close as the great man came to nominating an heir. Since then he had done his best to try to hold the whole of his old master’s dream together—to keep the empire as one entity. loc: 553
As the funerary cortege wound its way across Asia Minor back toward Macedon, Ptolemy struck, possibly in or near Damascus. Seizing control of the somber procession, he ordered it to turn south down the Mediterranean coast and across Sinai into Egypt. loc: 559
Ptolemy had decided that Alexander would quite literally be the centerpiece of the new Egyptian empire he planned to rule, loc: 564
Having stolen the body of Alexander he had finally severed his links with Perdiccas, showing clearly that he had no belief in the maintenance of Alexander’s empire as one coherent entity. loc: 568
His burial in an Egyptian-style tomb was also of the greatest importance. This spoke to Egyptians, telling them that Egypt—long-suffering, invaded, and despoiled Egypt—was what had mattered most to Alexander and that the greatest general for centuries, perhaps of all time, had known that his spiritual home was here in the greatest of ancient civilizations. loc: 582
the job of an architect also included suggesting how a town should function, what the structure of its government should be, and how its citizens should work together for the common good. loc: 610
The most important work, however, was to create the two sea harbors and for this major engineering work was necessary. This took the form of a 600-foot-wide mole, or causeway, stretching between the mainland and the island of Pharos, which divided the bay in half. As this land bridge was seven times the length of a Greek stadium (around 4,200 feet) it was known as the heptastadion. loc: 630
The city had been laid out not in three “classes,” as Hippodamus had suggested, but in three main ethnic districts: the original village site of Rhakotis became the native Egyptian quarter, the Brucheum was home to both Greek immigrants and the Greek rulers of the city, and a Jewish quarter was populated with both local Jewish residents and traders and a large population (some report it as one hundred thousand people) of captives, loc: 671
The reason people from across the ancient world were settling here was trade. Alexandria was rapidly becoming the entrepôt of the world. Sited between two harbors, the city stood at the crossroads of the ancient world, where the fine art and technology of the Greek city-states could be traded for the vast food resources of the Nile Valley, the treasures of Africa, and the luxuries of Asia. loc: 686
many reckon it to be the first city of the civilized world, and it is certainly far ahead of all the rest in elegance and extent and riches and luxury. The number of its inhabitants surpasses that of those in other cities. loc: 691
His sharp financial practices had been overlooked for years by rulers eager to line their own coffers, but Ptolemy now turned with righteous indignation on the man who had built Alexandria for him. The financial wizard who, more than any other person, had actually turned Alexander’s orders into architectural reality was charged with embezzling the staggering sum of eight thousand Egyptian talents. loc: 724
As a result Cleomenes was tried, found guilty, and promptly executed. loc: 728
made himself hugely popular in Egypt for bringing “justice” to bear on a man who had bled the country dry. loc: 730
the regent attacked Egypt with the full might of the Macedonian army—Indian elephants, mahouts, and all. loc: 736
Perdiccas sent wave after wave of attackers, having the advantage of numbers. The battle (and Ptolemy’s personal heroics) lasted all day, but in the end Perdiccas was forced to call off the assault and retreat to his former camp. loc: 754
In the late spring of 321 BC a mutiny broke out among those same Macedonian troops who had once conquered the world, and Perdiccas’s own officers assassinated him. loc: 761
By the end of the fighting, which lasted until nearly the end of the century, Alexander’s dreams lay in ruins—his mother, wife, half brother, and infant son all murdered. In their place stood three families. loc: 763
By 321 BC the wealthy but isolated city of Cyrene, lying between Egypt and Tunisia, had fallen to him. loc: 769
He did not replace tyrant Spartan rule with a dictatorship of his own but with a liberal constitution. loc: 772
Ptolemy pushed on farther west beyond Cyrene to take control of the profitable trans-Saharan trade routes bringing gold, ivory, and slaves from Central and West Africa. To the east and north he seized Palestine and parts of Syria, as well as Cyprus and the Aegean islands of the Cyclades. This gave him control of lucrative trade routes but, more important, created a buffer zone where he could contest disputes with his Persian and Macedonian rivals, leaving the Egyptian heartland stable and free from warfare for generations to come. loc: 777
The Apis bull had been a powerful symbol in Egypt since the very first dynasties well over two thousand years earlier. Originally it had represented the power and will of the pharaoh himself, later being thought to represent the god Ptah, whose center of worship was at Memphis. By Ptolemy’s day, however, the animal had come to represent the incarnation of Osiris, the lord of the dead, loc: 791
From now on the bull would live like a king, appearing to an adoring public during the seven days of the annual Apis festival, loc: 835
The Apis rituals were a link with that unimaginably long Egyptian history that this country’s people held so dear, and Ptolemy saw that this could make or break his attempt to rule successfully here. loc: 843
Alexander had also been a foreigner, but in lifting Persian dominion he had gained favor in Egypt. To keep that favor, however, his successors would have to “walk like Egyptians.” loc: 865
For Ptolemy it was different. He could declare himself a Greek king—a basileus—indeed, that was an essential part of making his claim to Egypt as one of the successors of Alexander. But that title meant precious little to the Egyptians he intended to rule, loc: 874
What Ptolemy needed was a means of combining Greek and Egyptian religious traditions in a way that would leave him a king in Greek eyes but a god in Egyptian ones—no loc: 877
He began by encouraging Greeks to write Aegyptica—Egyptian histories which drew on the centuries-old traditions of the priests of Memphis and Thebes. Of course this required the active cooperation of those priests. loc: 886
This cultural exchange program between Greek and Egyptian scholars had a number of benefits. Not only did it provide Ptolemy with detailed information about how Egypt was run, but it gave his Greek academics access to the centuries of scientific (particularly astronomical) and religious thinking of the Egyptians. It also encouraged exchange the other way, helping to Hellenize the priestly caste in the temples and make them look more favorably on Greek rule. loc: 894
The plan the two devised was to create a new cult based in the temple that stood over the tombs of the Apis bulls in which a personification of those dead animals could be worshipped as Osorapis—a fusion of the god of the dead, Osiris, and the living bull, Apis. loc: 902
His Serapis was represented not in Egyptian form with combined human and animal elements, but as a benign, bearded man, seated on a throne and wearing the crown of fertility (the modius). To represent his power over the dead, the power of Osiris, the three-headed dog of the Greek underworld, Cerberus, crouched at his right knee. In his left hand he held aloft a wand similar to the staff of the Greek god of healing, Asclepius. In fact his image must have looked remarkably similar to Zeus, but this was Zeus imbued with thousands of years of Egyptian religious power. loc: 907
the new god Serapis had to combine many of the best features of a number of gods. Importantly, he was cast as a god of healing, a deity who had a practical everyday value that would bring him into the lives of anyone who was (or knew someone who was) sick. This power was indicated by his Asclepius-like staff, which indicated to the Greeks this facet of his being. For the Egyptian audience he was equated in this to Imhotep, the supposed architect of the first pyramid who was later worshipped as a god of healing. loc: 918
These healing powers and his association with the dead Apis, and hence Osiris, god of the netherworld, also gave him different powers that would appeal to the Alexandrian audience. He was a god who stood outside the realms of fate, beyond the fickle chances of the everyday world. He was a god who had beaten death, like Osiris. As such he could see into the future and hence could be appealed to as an oracle, loc: 925
In the Hellenistic world the afterlife was a dull, gray place—a dusty land of regret where the dead looked back in sorrow at what they had, and hadn’t, done in life. For the Egyptians it was quite the opposite. Egyptians looked forward to death as a time and place where the very best in life was made eternal. loc: 932
To compensate for the negative image that Serapis’s associations with death created in Greek minds, he was also cast for them as a Dionysian character. He was an ebullient, festive god, filled with life and the love of life, who indulged in banquets and festivals: a Bacchic figure who, in the knowledge that a Greek afterlife was much less fun than an Egyptian one, encouraged his followers to seize the day and enjoy this life to the full. In short, he was all things to all men and women. loc: 938
Demetrius of Phalerum had been a philosopher of the Peripatetic school, a pupil of Aristotle, and an Athenian statesman. His ten-year rule in Athens had brought peace to the city loc: 942
Demetrius then put his considerable lyrical skills to use in composing the first of his paeans, in which he demonstrated his gratitude for the god’s intervention. loc: 951
Eleusinian mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone. loc: 957
Ptolemy managed to persuade one of these clan members, Timotheus from the Eumoplid family, to support his new god Serapis. loc: 960
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 loc: 972
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. loc: 979
He was to be no longer their satrap, but their savior—Ptolemy Soter—the first in a new dynasty of Greek pharaohs loc: 984
CHAPTER FOUR THE LEGACY OF ARISTOTLE loc: 986
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 loc: 994
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. loc: 996
the new notion initiated by Socrates was more concerned with the philosopher’s own role in the world, in how to live correctly loc: 1029
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. loc: 1030
The philosophy of Socrates forms an interesting epoch in the history of the human mind. The son of Sophroniscus derided the more abstruse inquiries and metaphysical researches of his predecessors, and by first introducing moral philosophy, he induced mankind to consider themselves, their passions, their opinions, their duties, actions and faculties. From this it is said that the founder of the Socratic school drew philosophy down from heaven upon the earth. Lemprière, Classical Dictionary Writ Large, pp. 588-90 loc: 1070
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. loc: 1079
Plato founded the Academy; loc: 1089
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. loc: 1092
His philosophy was based on the physics of Heraclitus, who held that everything was in a state of continual flux and that change was the ultimate reality; his metaphysics he took from the Egyptian Pythagorean school, and his ethics and morals from his master, Socrates. loc: 1095
It was this thought that electrified Ptolemy—bringing together the productive, the practical, and the theoretical in one state. loc: 1140
It was by combining the three that Ptolemy hoped to create a new model city in Alexandria and a new country beyond. It would feed and be fed by productive knowledge—the ships in the Great Harbor and the markets beyond. It would be governed by practical knowledge in the application of the very best and most efficient forms of government and administration. And set at its heart would be the world’s greatest center for Plato’s third species—theoretical knowledge—which seeks out the truths of the universe and reaches out for the perfect forms of God and soul that lie behind the chaos of the everyday world. loc: 1145
But Aristotle came increasingly to place value on the knowledge he gained through his senses, making him an empiricist, trusting what he could see and test, ignoring or dismissing speculation. Here, then, lay the path which would lead directly to the “scientific” method, loc: 1176
Writing up his findings in On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle lays bare the fundamentals of all scientific inquiry, stating boldly that facts can be established only by observation and that theories are valid only insofar as they are supported by observed facts. loc: 1183
he created a model of the philosopher as a man of knowledge and wisdom in all fields, loc: 1189
imprisonment and subsequent death of Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes loc: 1200
campaign of all time, had proved to be an outspoken critic of some of Alexander’s decisions, particularly his adoption of Persian customs, which alienated his Macedonian troops and commanders. In response Alexander accused him of treachery and threw him into prison, loc: 1201
Alexander sent many books and treasures back to Aristotle from the libraries of Babylon, Persia, and India. loc: 1217
Aristotle, who had inherited wealth from his father, had become an avid collector of books. He collected them on any subject and in any language; it didn’t matter what they were about, it just mattered that he had a copy—a copy of everything. loc: 1221
Aristotle was the founder of modern empirical science, the first man to attempt to study and systematize the things he observed around him, loc: 1225
Here, in the sanctuary to the Lycian Apollo, he established a school and research institute that was to become the prototype of all subsequent educational institutions: the Lyceum. loc: 1227
Here also resided his great collection of objects, which inspired his thoughts and demonstrated his theories. This was the first museum in Western history, loc: 1232
the first attempt to gather all written knowledge in one place, the first true, if private, library. loc: 1235
CHAPTER FIVE CITY OF THE MIND loc: 1248
At the Lyceum he became renowned as a brilliant polymath, and in a lifetime of scholarship he surveyed nearly every branch of knowledge, loc: 1267
Theophrastus developed Aristotle’s empirical approach to the study of nature by means of observation, collection, and classification, making him perhaps history’s first true scientific researcher. loc: 1268
At the Lyceum, Theophrastus had become a star, an international scientific celebrity, attracting students from all over the ancient world. loc: 1275
In his place Theophrastus sent the seeds of a new academy in the form of his most brilliant pupil, Strato of Lampsacus. loc: 1289
Demetrius knew that the fame of Athens was not its democracy, but its philosophers. He knew the center of a city, the center of a state, should be more than a palace, a parliament, or an armory. It should be a museum—literally the “place of the Muses,” loc: 1306
We have little idea when Euclid of Alexandria was born, or when he died (the most educated guesses suggest he was born around 325 BC and died sometime about 265 BC); Alexandria was where he chose to work, and his impact on mathematics catapulted the city into the scientific stratosphere. loc: 1325
the simple fact is that from the earliest days of Alexandria there emerged one of the most important books of all time produced by one (or more) of the first great minds of the city and who, under the name “Euclid,” would go down in history as perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time. loc: 1347
For Euclid, mathematics was not simply an abstract idea but a method for seeking out the harmonies of shape which revealed the sublime, even divine, forms of creation. loc: 1375
Euclid’s work remained pivotal to the development of the European intellectual tradition for at least two thousand years, and one of the reasons for its longevity was that it was coherent and substantially accurate. loc: 1380
The Elements is, even today, an anchor of mathematics, first dropped over two millennia ago into a sea of ignorance from the ship of Alexandria. loc: 1385
for thousands of years the Egyptians had done their best to preserve corpses through mummification, which, of course, required an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the human body and a high level of skill in dissection. loc: 1391
Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos, seized upon this breach of normal mortuary taboo and began to explore the human body in minute detail, thus founding the great Alexandrian tradition of anatomy and physiology. loc: 1395
Herophilus first described the linked functions of the brain, spinal cord, and nervous system, rightly relocating the center of thought from the heart to the brain. He went on to distinguish correctly between motor and sensory neurons and to establish the link between the eye and the brain in the optic nerve. loc: 1403
He was also the first to distinguish between veins and arteries, to show that blood rather than air flowed through these vessels, and to examine the valves of the heart in detail. loc: 1407
they were the first to establish a new concept of the causes of disease and illness. loc: 1415
illnesses had natural causes and should therefore be addressed by secular, scientific means. loc: 1417
The Persians had relied heavily, and successfully, on large numbers of Jewish administrators to run Egypt on their behalf. Ptolemy I had continued this program during his early wars, bringing as many as one hundred thousand Jewish prisoners from Israel to Egypt loc: 1435
Demetrius told the king that twenty thousand books had been collected so far and that he had set a target of increasing this to fifty thousand as quickly as possible. He then added, almost as an aside: “It has also been notified to me that the customs of the Jews are worthy of transcription and of a place in your library” loc: 1450
Demetrius was suggesting gathering a group of the finest Hebrew scholars from Jerusalem to come to Alexandria, where each would produce his own translation, all of which could then be compared to produce one synthesized and corrected Greek version. loc: 1472
After exactly seventy-two days all of these scholars then emerged simultaneously with their Greek translations. Each one was identical. And so the legend of the creation of the awesomely authentic Septuagint, as it is still known, was born. loc: 1486
Aristeas, whoever he was, was making a point that both men would have understood: that the mysteries of the world lie not, as Alexander thought, over the horizon in yet unconquered territories, but in the minds of his own subjects. loc: 1506
CHAPTER SIX GREEK PHARAOHS loc: 1521
It’s a clear indicator of the intellectual tide of the times that Ptolemy I, one of the most powerful individuals in the world, chose to crown his achievements not by basking in luxury, but by writing a book. loc: 1528
Following his father’s lead, Ptolemy II acted swiftly and decisively. He was crowned pharaoh of Egypt in the ancient capital of Memphis on January 7, 282 BC, without any real challenge; yet with the cold calculation that his family would become famous for, he promptly had two of his half brothers murdered, loc: 1542
The young Ptolemy threw himself into the development of the Egyptian economy with gusto and in the process created the most sophisticated planned economy until the formation of the Soviet Union loc: 1553
the creation of a state-run banking system with local branches throughout the towns and villages of the country, all reporting back to the central bank in Alexandria. loc: 1564
massive state-aided infrastructural loc: 1568
Nearly all the grain produced by farmers was taken into the royal treasury in the form of tax. loc: 1569
most productive agricultural land in the known world, loc: 1573
Though all land was nominally owned by either the state or the temples, Ptolemy reserved the right to present land to individuals, from which they could collect substantial revenues. loc: 1588
Egypt’s agricultural surpluses were the driving force behind her international trade, whose volume rose enormously under Ptolemy II. But the state also maintained tight control of all of Egypt’s manufacturing industries, loc: 1593
Besides papyrus, oil, and linen production, Alexandria itself was becoming renowned for the production of books for export and for works of art. loc: 1602
Alexandria was already a major shipbuilding center, and the pharaoh maintained fleets for commerce as well as defense in both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, linking the two with a canal that ran via the Nile to Alexandria itself. loc: 1610
from a Greek perspective a basileus must demonstrate his power and success through lavish displays which often bordered on megalomania. loc: 1622
A pharaoh had to perform the vital religious rituals which ensured that maat—harmony or stability—remained in Egypt, so one of his greatest financial obligations was toward the temples. loc: 1660
Ptolemy I and his son knew that their positions ultimately depended on retaining harmonious relations with the Egyptian priesthood, as the priests influenced the will of the people. Temple building eased this pressure by investing state funds in the priestly caste and by reminding the guardians of Egyptian religion that their new Greek masters respected and needed them. loc: 1668
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, loc: 1687
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. loc: 1717
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. loc: 1726
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.” loc: 1730
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. loc: 1774
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. loc: 1778
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. loc: 1783
this most practical of buildings that should stand as a tribute to the son—the great lighthouse on the island of Pharos. loc: 1789
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. loc: 1803
for a building of forty stories’ height to survive for more than fifteen hundred years in an active seismic zone was little short of miraculous. loc: 1851
CHAPTER SEVEN THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES loc: 1854
As part of a peace treaty between the Ptolemies and the rulers of the Seleucid dynasty of Syria, Ptolemy II’s daughter Berenice had been married to Antiochus II Theos, who had agreed to repudiate his previous wife, Laodice. loc: 1870
By the time Ptolemy had raised an army and stormed across Egypt and up into the Middle East, news was emerging that Laodice had arranged the murder of Berenice and her son. Infuriated, the pharaoh raged through the region in a campaign that left the whole area stunned. loc: 1874
Aristarchus came from Samos, birthplace of perhaps the most famous philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer of all time—Pythagoras. loc: 1901
Thales made his great leap. He asserted that earthquakes were the result of waves, disturbances in the water on which the earth floated, and not the acts of irate gods. loc: 1920
In attributing a natural phenomenon to mechanics and not gods, he took the universe out of the hands of divinities and claimed, extraordinarily, that everything was understandable, knowable. loc: 1923
Pythagoras grew up on the small island but also traveled extensively with his father, visiting Tyre, where he was taught by Chaldean magi from Babylonia, renowned for their knowledge of astronomy and astrology, loc: 1963
It was on his travels, the sources tell us, that he encountered both Thales and his pupil Anaximander loc: 1966
There are so many close parallels between the society which Pythagoras later set up in Italy and the operation of the Egyptian priesthood that we can assume that it was in Egypt that he developed his ideas for his own school. loc: 1970
Ten years after he arrived in Egypt, the country was invaded by Cambyses II, king of Persia, and Pythagoras was captured and sent to Babylon. loc: 1973
he gladly associated with the Magi . . . and was instructed in their sacred rites and learnt about a very mystical worship of the gods. He also reached the height of perfection in arithmetic and music and the other mathematical sciences taught by the Chaldeans. loc: 1976
he reestablished the school with an inner circle known as the Mathematikoi who lived in the school, had no possessions, were vegetarians, and lived according to the strict regime prescribed by the master. loc: 1984
At its deepest level reality is mathematical in nature. • Philosophy can be used for spiritual purification. • The soul can ascend to union with the divine. • Certain symbols have special, mystical significance. loc: 1986
Noting that vibrating strings produce harmonious tones when the ratios of their lengths are whole numbers, he went on to arrange the universe into similarly harmonic groups of spheres, even claiming that the Music of the Spheres really existed, loc: 1994
The Pythagoreans’ universe was one of absolute mathematical perfection. loc: 1999
Pythagoras set the stage for the objective study of astronomy. loc: 2005
Trained in Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens, Strato took his master’s passion for the rational study of nature a step further by claiming that there was no need for any divine explanation of the universe. loc: 2026
His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, loc: 2057
duty of the Greeks to indict Aristarchus of Samos on charges of impiety for putting in motion the Hearth of the Universe loc: 2069
Copernicus published his revolutionary heliocentric model of the universe just before his death, loc: 2102
in the original handwritten manuscript there were several references to Archimedes’ The Sand Reckoner, which of course contained his summary of Aristarchus’s book on the heliocentric universe. These references have, however, been systematically removed from the printed version of the text, and no mention is made either of Archimedes’ book or of Aristarchus. loc: 2106
CHAPTER EIGHT THE LITTLE O loc: 2117
bound into the Alexandrian world, having been conquered by Ptolemy I, but one with a reputation for freethinking, encouraged by the liberal constitution that the first Greek pharaoh had granted it. loc: 2125
As a Skeptic, Arcesilaus taught his pupils to argue both sides of a question, to see a problem from other angles, and then to remain “skeptical,” that is, to withhold judgment. In arguing against the Stoics, some of whom Eratosthenes also counted among his friends and tutors, the Skeptics proposed that one cannot rely entirely upon one’s senses and that the Stoical view that truth came from clear perception followed by certainty was wrong. loc: 2135
At the moment Eratosthenes stepped ashore in the Great Harbor of Alexandria, one of the brightest periods in the city’s history began. loc: 2148
Eratosthenes became not only a member of the museum, but the librarian of the great library, following the death (or possibly the retirement) of Apollonius of Rhodes. loc: 2156
The boundaries of art and science had not yet been fenced off, and a great mind could wander freely. loc: 2161
In his Platonicus Eratosthenes set out the whole mathematical system that, as he saw it, underlay Plato’s philosophy. loc: 2197
Of course the idea that the earth was a globe had profound implications. It implied that there was something that made us, and everything else on the planet, stick to its surface—something we now call gravity. It also implied that there were two ways of getting from any one place to another—by going in opposite directions—and this meant that the whole nature of geography had to be changed. loc: 2250
If the earth was a sphere, then he wanted to know just how big that globe was. loc: 2254
Hence on that summer’s day when a ray fell vertically at Syene, the fact that it cast a shadow in Alexandria meant the earth was angled away from it at that point. Having measured this angle (which he could do using Pythagoras’s theorem, since he knew the height of the gnomon and the length of the shadow), and knowing the distance between the two cities, he could then turn to the works of Euclid in the library and find the method to calculate the circumference of the sphere. loc: 2279
Using just a stick, a well, and a royal pacer, he had proved the earth was a globe and measured its circumference to within 318 kilometers (198 miles) of its true diameter while never leaving Egypt. loc: 2293
he then used it to calculate the angle of the earth’s tilt at 23 degrees 51 minutes. Its true value is 23 degrees 46 minutes. loc: 2301
creating a detailed drawing of Egypt as far south as Khartoum and correctly hypothesizing that the annual Nile flood was caused by rains in unknown hills far to the south where the Nile had its source. loc: 2312
while there were specialists who might outclass him within a field, Eratosthenes knew all the fields and was almost as good as the best in each of them. loc: 2347
Having discovered in 194 BC that he was beginning to lose his sight, this visionary thinker realized that he would soon no longer be able to read the collections in the library he had tended and enriched. Without this there was nothing. Unable to continue his work, he chose to starve himself to death. He was around eighty-one years old. loc: 2355
CHAPTER NINE THE “EUREKA” FACTOR loc: 2368
Archimedes was an engineer and an inventor, though he would not have thanked any of his contemporaries for saying so. In his mind all that mattered was the beauty of mathematics and the exploration of pure thought. To him the mechanical marvels for which he is still famous were just toys, demonstrations of principles. loc: 2387
Ptolemy III had begun his somewhat unscrupulous and manic collection policy, which included seizing all books arriving in the port of Alexandria for compulsory copying. Usual policy was to return the copy and keep the original—in case anything had been missed. loc: 2455
All ships leaving the two harbors were searched, and any books found on board which had not been surrendered for copying were confiscated. Nobody removed information from Alexandria. loc: 2458
the Athenians finally relented and released their manuscripts of the complete works of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles for copying. They never received their copies or saw the originals again. loc: 2464
Hiero called on Archimedes to use against his enemy. Plutarch tells us that Archimedes turned his mind to creating wonderful siege engines which employed the mathematics he so loved to perform similar apparently superhuman acts. Great catapults were designed to rain stones upon the legions who foolishly believed themselves to be out of range. When Roman ships approached the harbor walls, cranes were swung out which either dropped huge rocks on their ships to sink them or hooked them out of the water, loc: 2498
Romans could terrify Greeks with numbers and brutality—their strength was their army; Greeks, however, could panic Romans with their minds. Their strength was in books—their arsenal, a library in Alexandria. loc: 2509
The mechanism was a hugely sophisticated analog computer for calculating the movements of the planets, the rising and setting times of stars and constellations, and the phases and movements of the moon—a complete mechanical calendar and model solar system in a box. By turning a crank handle that would have been on the outside of the wooden box it was possible to calculate the time, day, month, season, and year. It even corrected for errors in the old Egyptian calendar, which, without leap years, lost a quarter of a day each year. The Antikythera mechanism had a special “slip dial” that could be adjusted for that. loc: 2638
CHAPTER TEN A GREEK TRAGEDY loc: 2696
Ptolemy III’s successor was not the new Rameses his father had hoped for. By the time he came to the throne at about twenty years old in 222 BC, it was clear that he had neither the military genius of a Macedonian king nor the mental sophistication of an Egyptian pharaoh. loc: 2700
The man in the shadows was a court official called Sosibius, loc: 2707
Ptolemy IV was inexperienced, lazy, and a very poor judge of character, and the result was that on his taking the throne Sosibius became Egypt’s first minister. loc: 2713
he had in the process left Ptolemy alone, without friends or family for support or advice. Ptolemy was now entirely under Sosibius’s spell. loc: 2722
A far more serious threat was now emerging in the form of the young Antiochus III, ruler of the Seleucid Empire. Unlike his counterpart in Alexandria, this young man kept himself fully informed of all the news from his rival kingdoms, and so soon realized that the young Ptolemy was both weak and ensnared by a corrupt and self-serving court. loc: 2749
Sosibius decided to recruit and train a local phalanx of Egyptian troops, armed and drilled in Macedonian style. loc: 2762
Antiochus’ right wing then was victorious, while his left wing was being worsted loc: 2782
Lowering their sarissas—eighteen-foot-long double-pointed pikes—the phalanx under Ptolemy’s general Andromachus and the Egyptian phalanx under Sosibius advanced together in full charge. The Syrians facing them resisted briefly, but soon crumbled under the overwhelming pressure and turned and fled. loc: 2788
Ptolemy III had given his most gifted scholar-writer, Callimachus of Cyrene, the immense task of cataloging the ever-increasing mountain of books accruing in the library. loc: 2806
Running to 120 separate books, it was a comprehensive survey of all the books held in the great library, along with biographical and bibliographical details of the authors—in short, a survey of all known classical literature up to the time of its compilation. loc: 2809
Back at court the king and his favorites became ever more detached from the reality of life in Egypt and the political situation outside. The young king duly set about building his own literary court, but even here something was clearly different from his father’s day. In the place of the Aristarchus and Eratosthenes of previous years the court now, according to an early-twentieth-century biographer of the Ptolemies, “swarmed with literary pretenders, poets, grammarians, whores, buffoons, philosophers” loc: 2860
Ptolemy’s court had pretensions to be the museum, but in fact it was a mockery. loc: 2870
The great victory Sosibius had orchestrated contained a poisonous seed. That seed lay in the heart of Sosibius’s greatest achievement, among the native Egyptian troops he had raised and trained to fight for their pharaoh. They had seen the magnificence of the Greek Ptolemaic court, they had seen the plunder, and now they had returned to the reality of life in their country. Many of these highly trained warriors made their way back to the heartland of the ancient capital of Thebes (modern Luxor), only to find their families in extreme poverty and much of the land in disrepair. loc: 2871
There was only one conclusion: Ptolemy IV Philopator was not a god-king, he was a foreign impostor; and when the situation in the countryside failed to improve, a full-scale rebellion broke out in Thebes in 206 BC against the “false gods” of the Alexandrians. loc: 2878
nationalism was rife. Upper Egypt, backed by the kings of Nubia, now effectively seceded from the north, and the rebels declared their leader, an Egyptian named Herwennefer, their pharaoh in 206 BC. loc: 2888
The Nile Valley and the Fayyum were the great breadbaskets of Egypt, and with them in rebel hands the Ptolemies’, and Alexandria’s, revenues plummeted. loc: 2891
There were few tears shed for the death of the king, but the people were immediately suspicious about Arsinoe’s death. How had she come to die simultaneously with her husband, and what, or who, had killed her? loc: 2928
Agathocles was determined to continue as sole guardian of the new king and proxy ruler of the nation. loc: 2933
Loathing of Agathocles had spread throughout the streets of Alexandria loc: 2938
On his death, still young, there were no brothers to succeed him, no adult kings-in-waiting who might take the court in hand and reassert royal power. They had all been killed on Ptolemy V’s succession, and the only real achievement of his short life was the siring of a son of his own, another child pharaoh to take on the mantle of political impotence on loc: 2976
Few rulers of the Near East believed any pharaoh would last long, and without a real leader in Egypt they grabbed every opportunity to erode his empire. The descendants of Alexander’s other generals—the Seleucids in Persia and Syria, and the kings of Macedonia—took back all of Egypt’s territories in the Aegean, Asia Minor, and Palestine. loc: 2980
CHAPTER ELEVEN THE LAST PHARAOH loc: 2985
Between the death of Ptolemy IV and the accession of Ptolemy IX the Roman state had patiently watched 150 years of Egyptian economic decline. loc: 3009
by the time she ascended to the throne in 51 BC, Egypt was already lost. As far back as 80 BC her father, Ptolemy XII, had been little more than a puppet of the Roman dictator Sulla, having formally allied himself with Rome. loc: 3021
her personal magnetism, which even Roman sources are forced to admit, came from a mind and personality molded in what was still the intellectual capital of the world. loc: 3042
In 49 BC, when Julius Caesar’s power-sharing arrangement with his ally Pompey collapsed, the seeds of Roman civil war were sown, and Egypt, feeling forced to back one side or the other, had provided ships, grain, and money for Pompey’s cause. It proved a mistake, and now, following his defeat at the battle of Pharsalus, loc: 3057
Cleopatra had been expelled from Alexandria. Ptolemy was now camped at Pelusium with his army, ready to bring his co-regency, and his sister’s life, to a bloody end, loc: 3062
Ptolemy thought that assassinating Caesar’s enemy would make him Caesar’s friend, loc: 3079
Caesar could now play the avenging Roman angel while conveniently ignoring the fact that it had been he who had driven Pompey to his death. Instead of taking the war away from Egypt, as Ptolemy had hoped, Caesar ordered his troops to land and occupy Alexandria. loc: 3086
He was fifty-two years old, she was not yet twenty-two, but in a single night she persuaded him to make her queen again. loc: 3096
Potheinos had summoned the royal army to besiege Caesar in Alexandria, knowing him to have come to Egypt with only a small force. loc: 3122
as the ships erupted in flames, burning canvas and rope spiraled into the sky and were blown across the city. First the warehouses on the wharves caught alight, then the dockyards themselves. At this point, Plutarch tells us in a single, bald sentence, “this spread from the dockyards and destroyed the great library” loc: 3153
By the time the fire was out, one source reports, some four hundred thousand papyrus scrolls had been lost. It was not the end of Alexandria’s library, but the great library itself would never recover its former importance, loc: 3159
The library, for all its learning, was vulnerable, and increasingly would now be seen not only as an asset, but as a liability. loc: 3172
Mithradates of Pergamum, Caesar’s general, was now just outside Pelusium, with Cleopatra’s own troops and contingents from Judea and Nabatea. Caesar rushed to join them, and in the ensuing battle Ptolemy XIII lost his life, apparently drowned in the Nile. When Caesar returned to Alexandria he was the victor, loc: 3182
Egypt was now, in essence, a Roman protectorate, loc: 3189
For many Romans this proved that the great Caesar’s head had been turned by a mere girl. They commented that the Alexandrine War, unlike his other victories, was an unnecessary diversion, and one he undertook not for the glory of Rome but out of his love for Cleopatra. loc: 3195
After this brief first meeting Antony returned the compliment by spending the whole of the following winter with her in Alexandria. For a moment it seemed that together they could do more than save Egypt. For a wonderful, willfully blind moment it seemed they could inherit Alexander’s dream. The Alexandrians loved Antony, loc: 3234
The following summer, as if to seal the deal, she bore him twins: Alexander Helios (the sun) and Cleopatra Selene (the moon). In return he gave her the one present every Ptolemy coveted. loc: 3245
Pergamum: library of some two hundred thousand volumes, the second largest collection of books on earth. loc: 3249
An overconfident Antony suffered a crushing defeat on his expedition against Parthia, leading many of his senior military commanders to doubt both his judgment and his motives. loc: 3262
He then proclaimed his own son by Cleopatra “king of kings” and allotted to him further territories, including the vast expanses of Armenia, Parthia, Media, Syria, and Phoenicia. In short, he had claimed half the known world. loc: 3270
The resolution of the Roman senate against him and his Egyptian queen (who was now, thanks to Octavian’s brilliant propaganda, known in Rome as “the ruinous monster”) made war inevitable. loc: 3272
Octavian finally met these would-be Eastern emperors not on land but off the coast of Actium in Greece. loc: 3275
his fleet and cavalry went over to the enemy. On August 1, when Octavian walked into Alexandria, the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end. loc: 3285
Back in the real Alexandria that library and the city that held it were now Roman possessions. The Ptolemaic dream was dead, but Alexandria’s story was still far from over. loc: 3325
CHAPTER TWELVE THE CLOCKWORK CITY loc: 3327
20 million bushels of wheat were annually exported from the Nile Valley—enough to feed the unemployed and restive city mob back in Rome. loc: 3342
the center of the intellectual world, loc: 3343
advances in architecture and engineering that would remain unparalleled until the Renaissance: the first use of concrete; concrete that set underwater; aqueducts; metropolitan sewage systems; high-rise buildings; loc: 3382
in Alexandria in the first century AD, Hero was the greatest of the wonder-workers. He was a designer and builder of automatons—automatically operated machines—with loc: 3400
the vast majority of his work was simply of novelty value. loc: 3571
Romans already had a source of cheap and plentiful labor in the form of slaves, and the Ptolemaic administration was particularly well suited to their use. If machines had replaced slaves, where would the slaves have gone? What would they do? loc: 3598
What had been very much a “Royal Society” of selected scholars paid for by the Ptolemaic state was becoming a teaching institution where young nobles might finish their education. More and more it became obsessed with gathering, collating, and revising information rather than speculating and creating new ideas. So the Roman era ushered in a period of decline in the study of pure philosophy and literature. loc: 3607
CHAPTER THIRTEEN URBI ET ORBI loc: 3616
Philo was born around 20 BC into one of the wealthiest and most privileged Jewish families in the city. loc: 3638
He believed passionately that Moses was the original perceiver of divine wisdom and that his doctrine formed the basis of Greek classical philosophy, loc: 3672
For example, in his great Commentary on Genesis he argues that the whole of Genesis is a metaphor for the history of the soul, from its formation at the dawn of the perceivable world to its fall, followed by its mature development as wisdom after its restoration through repentance. loc: 3688
deliberately abstracting the messages he has found in the Bible and codifying them in moral, ethical, and spiritual terms; that is, he is subjecting them to the same sort of rational treatment and thought processes which we find in the classical Greek philosophers. loc: 3698
God is creativity itself. God is in a permanent state of creation; his executor is a separate entity. loc: 3705
Philo decided this entity was Logos, the “Word” of God. loc: 3707
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, loc: 3773
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. loc: 3784
Claudius Ptolemy: His works would become the cornerstone of science until the Renaissance, loc: 3801
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. loc: 3811
The Almagest is the second-most important and longest-lasting scientific textbook of all time, after Euclid’s Elements; loc: 3828
But there is a problem. Whereas Euclid’s work is substantially correct, Ptolemy’s is not. loc: 3830
His follow-up work, the Tetrabiblos (“The Four Books”), is concerned with the impact which the heavens have upon individual personalities and worldly affairs—that is, astrology. loc: 3858
his work was the first attempt to gather and systematize the mechanism by which the universe operates, loc: 3902
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. loc: 3915
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. loc: 3945
CHAPTER FOURTEEN DAWN OF THE ICONOCLASTS loc: 3951
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. loc: 3973
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. loc: 3978
Contra Celsus— loc: 3988
Origen did such a thorough job (he was an Alexandrian scholar, after all) that he quoted almost all of Celsus’s book verbatim—how loc: 3989
Celsus sees a terrifying future, where the knowledge that he stands for counts for nothing loc: 4050
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. loc: 4051
Celsus reached this appreciation of God’s nature via the classical Platonic route. His ideas of divinity were to be found through philosophia, the love of wisdom, in which the philosopher refined himself in an attempt to reach closer to God through the purity of his spirit. What Jesus and his followers preached was not philosophia but credo: belief. loc: 4074
Didascalia, would go down in history as the first school of Christian religion in the world and the home of the first translation of the New Testament from Aramaic and Greek into Coptic, the language of the Christian Egyptians. loc: 4094
Clement stayed with Pantaenus until 189, when the dean was selected to go on a mission to India (in fact probably southern Arabia), and Clement took his place in the Didascalia. loc: 4107
So education at the Didascalia under Clement’s tutelage was truly eclectic, which fitted precisely with his own highly educated and open-minded personality and philosophy. loc: 4119
Under his guidance Alexandrian Christians brought intellectual rigor to its doctrines and adapted it to all classes of people, and in so doing they attempted to proclaim a world philosophy capable of being understood by all loc: 4125
Protrepticus or Exhortation, aims to win pagans to the Christian faith; the second set, the Paedagogus or Instructor, sets out to teach the convert how to live a proper Christian life; the third part’s full title is Titus Flavius Clement’s Miscellaneous Collection of Speculative (Gnostic) Notes Bearing Upon the True Philosophy. It has come to be known as the Stromata, or Tapestries, and aims to provide the raw materials from a huge range of sources from which the trained disciple can gain a higher knowledge of the Christian mystery. It is perhaps the boldest literary undertaking in the history of the church and certainly the largest and most valuable record of early Christian thought loc: 4140
In 202 the emperor Septimius Severus, a North African himself, ordered a purge of the Alexandrian Christians. In the ensuing persecution the seventeen-year-old Origen saw his father martyred, engendering in him a lifelong hatred for the Romans. loc: 4212
Clement’s flight proved to be a decisive moment in the history of early Christianity and the history of his home city of Alexandria. loc: 4216
A church born into purges and persecutions found his message too Hellenistic, too open to other philosophies, loc: 4220
CHAPTER FIFTEEN INTO THE SOFT MACHINE loc: 4228
On his accession Marcus Aurelius had immediately taken his adoptive brother Lucius Verus into the emperorship with him, for the first time splitting the primary role in the empire between two people. loc: 4243
Avidius Cassius’s experience of imperial rule in the form of an ineffectual co-emperor had given him unusual ambition. loc: 4261
proclaimed himself emperor, possibly encouraged in this by Marcus Aurelius’s own wife, Faustina. loc: 4264
Fearing the emperor’s retribution, one of Avidius’s own centurions turned on him and stabbed him to death. loc: 4275
Alexandria was still the obvious place to finish an education in medicine in the second century, not simply because of its great heritage of physicians and anatomists but because in Alexandria, thanks to its Egyptian heritage, it was still possible to do there what could not be done elsewhere: dissect the human body. loc: 4303
These experiences gave Galen a passion for dissection, loc: 4309
he developed 130 of the 150 basic surgical techniques that are still in use today loc: 4348
The canon itself is a collection of works purporting to contain secret wisdom and known collectively as the Hermetica loc: 4442
It involved in essence the transformation of the body into spirit in the quest for immortality. loc: 4457
Alchemical initiation was a reduction of the self to Materia Prima, the fluid, shapeless fundamental state of chaos, a time of darkness and night, symbolically corresponding to the meltdown of metals from solid to liquid form. Rebirth meant entering the cosmic creation, being admitted, as it were, to the “high church” of the scholar/philosopher/mystic as the Filius Philosophorum, son of the lovers of wisdom. loc: 4459
Newton was one of the first great men of science, but few realize that his occult work, his alchemical studies, gave him the keys to the biggest breakthrough in his life. Alchemy insists that there are unseen, invisible forces at work in the universe, capable of acting on objects at a distance. loc: 4476
CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE ASCENDANCY OF FAITH loc: 4491
Now absolute ruler of the Roman Empire, Caracalla soon showed his true colors. There followed an appalling bloodletting in Rome in which all of Geta’s supporters and their families—men, women, and children—were slaughtered, one contemporary observer putting the figure at twenty thousand dead. loc: 4524
From his reading of the histories of Alexander he had also come to believe that Aristotle had taken a part in his hero’s murder, so Caracalla persecuted Aristotelian philosophers, arguing that their books should be burned and ordering the abolition of their communal dining room in the museum in Alexandria. loc: 4534
“the fury of Caracalla.” The young men seized during the looting were taken to the city walls and systematically slaughtered. Within a few hours the flower of Alexandria’s youth, some twenty-five thousand young men, lay dead. loc: 4555
From then on the city would be a focus of discontent and rebellion, and thus an almost irresistible magnet for rebellious generals and would-be emperors, loc: 4564
Diophantus of Alexandria, loc: 4571
By adapting Babylonian techniques and concentrating on arithmetic rather than geometry he invented a whole new area of mathematics, where numbers were replaced with symbols, allowing problems to be solved for any number, not just specific instances. As such he has become known as the “Father of Algebra,” loc: 4572
Ammonius set up his own school of philosophy. He taught only orally, and like Pythagoras, he bound his advanced students with a vow of secrecy, loc: 4612
formally adopted as the founder of Theosophy by the spiritualist medium H. P. Blavatsky when she founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. loc: 4614
absolute deity, utterly transcendent and indescribable, loc: 4624
universal ethical basis within all metaphysical systems, and that in essence all philosophies and religions shared this universal ethical and spiritual foundation. loc: 4627
Ammonius also posited that the best way to understand all sacred myths, legends, and mysteries was to interpret them by analogy, loc: 4630
Because Ammonius himself left no written testimony, the title of “founder” of the pagan movement that became known as Neoplatonism is usually given to Plotinus, although his own ideas were certainly born out of what he heard from Ammonius in those secret lectures. loc: 4637
He insisted that “to rise up to very truth is altogether to depart from bodies. Corporeality is contrary to soul and essentially opposed to soul” loc: 4643
In the Enneads we can look into the mind of the last great pagan philosopher of antiquity. loc: 4668
At the top of this hierarchy is the One, beyond all categories of being and nonbeing. It is totally indivisible and even unthinkable. It is both self-caused and the cause of everything else in the universe. Thought cannot be applied to the One, as that would imply a distinction between the thinker and the object being thought of. The One is both thinker and thought. The One is the source of the world, not through any act of creation, though, as activity cannot be ascribed to this unchangeable idea. From this One then come “emanations” which are, of necessity, less perfect than the One, and which make up our universe. loc: 4671
The first of these is Thought or Intellect (Nous). loc: 4676
Intellect is the home of all of Plato’s forms, the repository of the cognitive identity of all things and the way we recognize things to be as they are, by perceiving them in ideal type. Intellect thus provides the principle or essence of all things. And from Intellect emanates the Soul. loc: 4677
Soul is related by analogy to Intellect in the same way that Intellect is related to the One; that is, put crudely, Intellect is the sum of all the Souls in existence. Beneath Soul is mere matter, the stuff of the universe, including our own bodies, which Plotinus so despised. loc: 4679
Plotinus departs from Plato by splitting it in two. His view is that in all things, and especially people, there is an upper Soul, which remains pure, divine, and untarnished eternally; and there is a lower Soul, which, though it is actually divine, may become tarnished and forget its divine origin as it provides the motivation for material beings (in our own cases our bodies) to find their way through the trials of a conscious life. In Plotinus’s view the way to discover our upper Soul and restore our tarnished lower Soul is through ethics. The keys to human salvation are thus the cultivation of Virtue, which refreshes the Soul with divine Beauty; the practice of “dialectics” (debate), which reveals the true nature of Souls; and finally through Contemplation, which is the proper occupation of the purified Soul. loc: 4682
Enneads reemerged in 1492 as one of the driving forces behind the writings of the Italian Renaissance philosophers and in the works of humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More. loc: 4697
Origen, or more properly Origenes Adamantius, was born and brought up in Alexandria as a Christian loc: 4714
The pogrom which had taken his father’s life was the one that led Bishop Clement of Alexandria to abandon the catechetical school and seek refuge in Palestine, so the next year Bishop Demetrius appointed Origen as the new dean of the school, at just eighteen years old. loc: 4725
Origen accepted the notion of the Holy Trinity, but he gave it a hierarchy. As in Plato, God the Father is the One, the omnipotent, all-encompassing, purely spiritual being. God the Son, however, is a product of the One, equivalent to Logos or Wisdom (Sophia) in Neoplatonism, the first emanation. The Holy Spirit, third element of the Trinity, emanates from the Son and is related to the Son as the Son is to the Father. loc: 4757
An absolutely central tenet of Origen’s theology is the resurrection of all beings, even ultimately the devil, his argument being that God would not create anything, even Satan, if he did not want all of creation to be saved at the end of time. loc: 4775
By the time of his death Origen had done a thoroughly Alexandrian job on Christianity. In so doing he portrayed his religion for the Hellenistic world as a faith with a philosophy, not simply another localized cult. loc: 4795
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE END OF REASON loc: 4804
In an age when the church was obsessed with schism and heresy, arguing over the exact interpretation of the nature of God, Arius was almost deliberately provocative, backing schismatic causes and twice getting himself excommunicated while still just a presbyter. loc: 4817
Arius proposed that God the Father was the only God and that Christ was created by him, not an integral part of him. loc: 4838
In the end the Christian emperor Constantine, who had himself converted to Christianity, at least nominally bringing the Roman Empire with him, decided to intervene. loc: 4849
in 325 a weary Constantine ordered the bishops to gather in council at Nicaea to decide once and for all what the official church did and did not believe. The result was the Nicene Creed, still used in churches today. In it there was no place for Arianism. Patriarch Alexander seemed to have won and Arius was banished. loc: 4864
credit for Alexander’s apparent triumph at Nicaea must go to his deacon Athanasius. loc: 4867
Under a series of weak emperors the fortunes of pro-and anti-Arian factions waxed and waned, during which time Athanasius was alternately feted and denounced, expelled and reconciled. loc: 4886
having spent a lifetime fighting for the view of Christianity that he had heard agreed to at Nicaea—a fight which would gain him the titles “Doctor of the Church” and “the Father of Orthodoxy.” On these foundations would be built the medieval Catholic Church, but they would be laid in the ruins of the city he had ruled. loc: 4902
the Christian patriarch Theophilus came to power in Alexandria in 385. In his eyes the paganism of Theon and the members of the museum was not simply harmless hocus-pocus but a threat, like any belief that deviated from the patriarch’s orthodox views. loc: 4936
The empire was Christian, and for Theophilus that could mean only the destruction of paganism altogether. In June 391 an opportunity came to do just that: The news reached Alexandria that the emperor Theodosius had banned all pagan practices. loc: 4939
The focus of Theophilus’s attack would not be the museum itself but the Serapeum, home to the ancient Ptolemaic cult of Serapis and the location of the “daughter library.” loc: 4941
a group of pagans now fearfully barricaded themselves inside, under the unlikely command of a cabal of philosophers. loc: 4944
When the running battle came to the attention of the Christian emperor he ordered his representatives in Egypt—the praefectus augustalis (prefect) and the dux aegypti (military commander)—to intervene. The pagans were ordered out of the Serapeum, and the Christian mob flooded in. loc: 4958
So we must presume that the Serapeum library was destroyed. One thing alone is certain: If it was kept there or elsewhere, the daughter library was never heard of again. loc: 4973
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN HYPATIA loc: 4987
rough seas now buffeted what had once been the intellectual safe haven of the museum. Indeed, Theon is the last name we can definitely associate with the institution that has been at the center of our story since the earliest days of the city. He is its last known member, the last in that roll call of the most brilliant names in antiquity. But it is his daughter who will always be associated with its fall. loc: 4992
From the late 380s Hypatia had formed her own such school in the city, attracting the sons of some of the most influential and wealthy men in the empire. Among them she lectured in the subjects her father had taught her—ethics, ontology, astronomy, and mathematics—but to a smaller and more select group she also taught philosophy, including the ancient pagan ideas of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle as well as the Neoplatonism of Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus. loc: 5021
But Hypatia’s “family” were not all they appeared. These were not, as they have so often been characterized by later writers, the last of the old guard. She was a pagan—true—or at least she was a Neoplatonist, but astonishingly, perhaps half of her students were Christians. loc: 5050
That she avoided such trouble during Theophilus’s antipagan campaigns tells us that her Hellenism was cultural rather than religious, centered on the raison d’être of the museum, the pursuit of knowledge, and the self-knowledge that leads to understanding. loc: 5088
Theophilus’s death left a dangerous power vacuum. And into that vacuum exploded his nephew Cyril. loc: 5106
This was not to be an election decided by debate or even a vote. Three days of street fighting ensued, after which, on October 17, a triumphant Cyril was installed as patriarch. loc: 5111
Just as the state had become involved in an ecclesiastical struggle (although bearing in mind the violence of the struggle, it had actually had little choice), so now, as patriarch, Cyril believed he had a right to a say in the secular administration of the city. loc: 5113
“Cyril immediately therefore shut up the churches of the Novatians at Alexandria, and took possession of all their consecrated vessels and ornaments; and then stripped their bishop Theopemptus of all that he had” loc: 5125
Since his election campaign, Cyril had skillfully used the Christian mob in the city and groups of radical Nitrian monks from the desert to stir up trouble. He now stationed his people in the theaters to goad the Jewish population into taking violent action. loc: 5133
Authorizing the looting of Jewish sites, he then ordered the expulsion of the entire Jewish population, who, as Socrates Scholasticus notes, had been there since the days of Alexander. loc: 5148
Cyril’s provocation had now brought Orestes to the breaking point. Seeing his power eroding before him, the prefect decided finally to try to face Cyril down and rebuffed his overtures of peace. loc: 5160
Hypatia’s support for Orestes was a thorn in Cyril’s side. loc: 5199
Cyril circulated a rumor that she was a practitioner of black magic—a sorceress who was “devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music” loc: 5204
The job of the Parabolans was, in theory at least, to help ill and destitute Christians in the city to find a place in hospitals or almshouses, but under recent patriarchs they had become almost a private army. These poorly educated but fervently religious young men obeyed the patriarch without question and were only too happy to put their imposing presence (there were eight hundred of them) and any degree of force necessary behind his commands. loc: 5212
they surrounded her and dragged her from her chariot. In the street this most modest of women had her tribon torn from her and was stripped naked, loc: 5222
Her torn and mutilated body was then carried beyond the walls to a place called Kinaron, where her remains were burned on a bonfire—a witch’s death. loc: 5225
The last of the Alexandrian Hellenes was gone. loc: 5226
Cyril carefully portrayed the death of Hypatia as a fight between Christians and pagans, distancing himself in the process from the real cause of the tension, his attempt to seize power from a Christian prefect. loc: 5231
CHAPTER NINETEEN THE SHIPWRECK OF TIME loc: 5241
In the streets violent religious extremism and an associated rise in ethnic tensions were fanning the flames of nationalism. Customs were changing, shunning the “foreign” Greek influence of Hypatia’s Hellenism, loc: 5247
After Theon we no longer hear of the work of the museum, loc: 5252
The fate of the libraries of Alexandria is one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world. loc: 5259
Knowledge has always been the enemy of extremism, and for the most radical elements among Alexandria’s Christians, the books in the Serapeum were a threat. So they simply destroyed them. loc: 5279
Of the few books that had survived from the great library, some had recently reappeared in Constantinople, and these were taken east by the banished Nestorius and his followers, out of the reach of the book burners and into the Syrian Desert, where they were once again lost to Western scholarship. loc: 5297
In 639 Omar I ordered his general, Amr ibn al-Asi (better known as simply Amr), west to conquer in the name of Islam. Damascus, Syria, and Jordan had already fallen, and Egypt would be next. loc: 5315
Amr conquered Egypt with just four thousand cavalry. The Byzantine viceroy Cyrus, who was also patriarch of Alexandria, was found hiding in the citadel of Babylon (a Roman fortress in Cairo) and rapidly offered his country’s capitulation. loc: 5317
The city had become a minor irritant in the Muslims’ conquest of Egypt, and its repeated calls on the Byzantine Empire for military help created unwanted friction. The solution of the Muslim general charged with bringing the city back to heel was simple: He tore it down. loc: 5354
In time the caliph wrote back with bad news: “Touching the books you mention, if what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required: if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore” loc: 5371
even if the enemy was wrong, there was a ring of truth to the idea that religious bigotry had after a thousand years of enlightenment finally dragged Alexandria into oblivion. loc: 5378
EPILOGUE A Distant Shore loc: 5390
As the monk Maximos Planudes lifted the copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia from the tomes piled around the book dealer’s stall in Constantinople, that day back in 1294, one piece of the wreckage of Alexandria began a new journey. loc: 5398
From Florence that map found its way to Rome, to the Apostolic Library of the pope, then the most powerful man on earth. And from there copies made their way across Europe, to the palaces and castles of the princes of Christendom. loc: 5402