E. M. Forster

“ Love as a cruel and wanton boy flits through the literature of Alexandria as through the thousands of terra cotta statuettes that have been exhumed from her soil; one tires of him, but it is appropriate that he should have been born under a dynasty that culminated in Cleopatra.
Literature took its tone from Callimachus—a fine poet, though not as fine as his patrons supposed. He began life as a schoolmaster at Eleusis (the modern Nouzha) and then was called to the Mouseion, where he became Librarian under Euergetes. ”

“ It is the cause of the Universe that we know. All that we grasp through the senses was created by it—the Gods of Greece, etc. in the first place, then the demi-gods and demons, then, descending in the scale, ourselves, then animals, plants, stones; matter, that seems so important to us, is really the last and feeblest emanation of the All Soul, the point at which creative power comes to a halt.—And these three grades, the “One,” the “Intellectual Principle,” and the “All Soul,” make up between them a single being, God; who is three in one and one in three, and the goal of all creation. ”

“ ROSETTA. Rosetta and Alexandria are rivals; when one rises the other declines. Rosetta, situated on the Nile, would have dominated but for an overwhelming drawback: she has, and can have, no sea-harbour, because the coast in this part of Egypt is mere delta; the limestone ridges that created the two harbours of Alexandria do not continue eastward of Aboukir. Alexandria required organising by human science, but once organised she was irresistible. It is only in an unscientific age that Rosetta has been important. ”

“ The palace at Alexandria became a nursery, where four clever children watched the duel that was proceeding between Pompey and Caesar beyond the seas. Pompey was their guardian, but they had no illusions, either about him or one another. All they cared for was life and power. Cleopatra failed in her first intrigue, which was directed against her husband. He expelled her, and in her absence the duel was concluded. Pompey, defeated by Caesar, drifted to Egypt, threw himself on the mercy of his wards, and was murdered by their agents as he disembarked. ”

“ Cyril’s wild black army filled the streets, “human only in their faces,” and anxious to perform some crowning piety before they retired to their monasteries. In this mood they encountered Hypatia who was driving from a lecture (probably along the course of the present Rue Nebi Daniel) , dragged her from the carriage to the Caesareum, and there tore her to pieces with tiles. She is not a great figure. But with her the Greece that is a spirit expired—the Greece that tried to discover truth and create beauty and that had created Alexandria. ”

“ The Temple and the Tower stand out on the height, which is golden with marigolds in spring time; and near the top of the ascent the sea appears through a gap, deep blue, and beating against a beach of snowy sand. The flowers can be amazing, colouring the earth in every direction. The ruins are supposed by the Bedouins to be the palace of Abou Zeit; they really mark the Ptolemaic city of Taposiris, whose name is preserved in the modern Abousir.
Taposiris must have been built soon after Alexandria (about 300 B.C.) , and it is instructive to compare the two towns. ”

“ If the eye that ventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure or weak, then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some resemblance to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the first Beauty unless itself be beautiful. ”

“ We face him as a God of power, who may temper his justice with mercy, but who does not stoop to the weakness of Love, and we are well content that, being powerful, he shall be far away. That old dilemma, that God ought at the same time to be far away and close at hand, cannot occur to an orthodox Mohammedan. It occurs to those who require God to be loving as well as powerful, to Christianity and to its kindred growths, and it is the weakness and the strength of Alexandria to have solved it by the conception of a link. ”

“ There was a massacre, which he stayed by sheathing his sword; the Mosque of Amr or of Mercy was built upon the site. As governor of Egypt, he administered it well, but his interests lay inland not on the odious sea shore, and he founded a city close to the fort of Babylon—Fostat, the germ of the modern Cairo. Here all the life of the future was to centre. Here Amr himself was to die. As he lay on his couch a friend said to him: “You have often remarked that you would like to find an intelligent man at the point of death, and to ask him what his feelings were. ”

“ He needed a capital for his new Egyptian kingdom, and to link it with Macedonia that capital had to be on the coast. Here was the very place—a splendid harbour, a perfect climate, fresh water, limestone quarries, and easy access to the Nile. Here he would perpetuate all that was best in Hellenism, and would create a metropolis for that greater Greece that should consist not of city-states but of kingdoms, and should include the whole inhabited world.
Alexandria was founded.
Having given his orders, the young man hurried on. He never saw a single building rise. ”

“ From the terrace, View of the circular bay with its fantastic promontories and breakwaters; the coast to the right is visible as far as Aboukir, whose minaret peeps over a distant headland; to the left are the Montazah woods; beneath, down precipitous steps, a curved parade. Beautiful walks in every direction, and perfect bathing. On the promontory to the right is a kiosk, and at its point are some remains of buildings or baths—fragments of the ancient Taposiris Parva that once stood here; some of them form natural fishponds. ”

“ Heraclius was furious and recalled him to Constantinople. But the mischief had been done; all Egypt, with the exception of Alexandria, had been abandoned to the heathen.
Alexandria was surely safe. In the first place the Arabs had no ships, and Amr, for all his courage, was not the man to build one. “If a ship lies still,” he writes, “it rends the heart; if it moves it terrifies the imagination. Upon it a man’s power ever diminishes and calamity increases. Those within it are like worms in a log, and if it rolls over they are drowned.” ”

“ This gives his philosophy a frigid timid air, and obscures its real sublimity. Only once or twice does he break loose, and declare that the path to truth lies not through allegory but through vision. “Those who can see” he exclaims, “lift their eyes to heavens, and contemplate the Manna, the divine Logos. Those who cannot see, look at the onions in the ground.” After his death, the Jews of Alexandria accomplished no more in philosophy. They had stated the problem. ”

“ And here is the great difference between Plotinus and Christianity. The Christian promise is that a man shall see God, the Neo-Platonic—like the Indian—that he shall be God. Perhaps, on the quays of Alexandria, Plotinus talked with Hindu merchants who came to the town. At all events his system can be paralleled in the religious writings of India. He comes nearer than any other Greek philosopher to the thought of the East.
Porphyry, the pious disciple of Plotinus, was himself a philosopher of note, and the Neo-Platonic School continued to flourish all through the 4th cent. ”

“ The Temple of Serapis.
The idea that one religion is false and another true is essentially Christian, and had not occurred to the Egyptians and Greeks who were living together at Alexandria. Each worshipped his own gods, just as he spoke his own language, but he never thought that the gods of his neighbour had no existence, and he was willing to believe that they might be his own gods under another name. The Greeks in particular held this view and had already identified Osiris, god of the world beyond death, with their Dionysus, who was a god of mysteries and also of wine. ”

“ A typical Alexandrian theologian, occupied with the favourite problem of linking human and divine, Arius thought to solve the problem by making the link predominately human. He did not deny the Godhead of Christ, but he did make him inferior to the Father—of like substance, not of the same substance, which was the view held by Athanasius, and stamped as orthodox by the Council of Nicaea. Moreover the Arian Christ, like the Gnostic Demiurge, made the world;—creation, an inferior activity, being entrusted to him by the Father, who had Himself created nothing but Christ. ”

“ The god Hercules, whom he loved and who loved him, was heard passing away from Alexandria one night in exquisite music and song.
Arrival of Octavian. He is one of the most odious of the world’s successful men and to his cold mind the career of Cleopatra could appear as nothing but a vulgar debauch. Vice, in his opinion, should be furtive. At his approach, Antony after resisting outside the Canopic Gate (at “Caesar’s Camp”) retreated into the city and fell upon his sword. He was carried, dying, to Cleopatra, who had retired into their tomb, and their story now rises to the immortality of art. ”

“ Islam, strong through its abjuration of Love, was the one system that the city could not handle. It gave no opening to her manipulations. Her logoi, her emanations and aeons, her various Christs, orthodox, Arian, Monophysite, or Monothelite—it threw them all down as unnecessary lumber that do but distract the true believer from his God. The physical decay that crept on her in the 7th century had its counterpart in a spiritual decay. Amr and his Arabs were not fanatics or barbarians and they were about to start near Cairo a new Egypt of their own. But they instinctively shrank from Alexandria ”

“ But he did not hate the Greeks, no, he admired them immensely and desired to be treated as if he was one, and his next exploit was to lead a crusade against Greece’s traditional enemy, Persia, and to defeat her in two tremendous battles, one at the Dardanelles and one in Asia Minor. As soon as he conquered Syria, Egypt fell into his hands, and fell willingly, for she too hated the Persians. He went to Memphis (near modern Cairo) . Then he descended the Nile to the coast, and ordered his architect Dinocrates to build round the nucleus of Rhakotis a magnificent Greek city. ”

“ He spread beyond the city, beyond Egypt, and shrines to him arose all over the Mediterranean world. Osiris-Apis-Dionysus-Zeus-Aesculapius-Pluto may seem to us an artificial compound, but it stood the test of time, it satisfied men’s desires, and was to be the last stronghold of Paganism against Christianity.
The Temple stood on the old citadel of Rhakotis, where “Pompey’s Pillar” rises to-day. It was in the midst of a cloister, and colonnades connected it with each of the cloister’s sides. The architecture was Greek: a large hall, and, at the end, the shrine with the god’s statue. ”

“ Material prosperity based on cotton, onions, and eggs, seems assured, but little progress can be discerned in other directions, and neither the Pharos of Sostratus nor the Idylls of Theocritus nor the Enneads of Plotinus are likely to be rivalled in the future. Only the climate only the north wind and the sea remain as pure as when Menelaus the first visitor landed upon Ras-el-Tin, three thousand years ago; and at night the constellation of Berenice’s Hair still shines as brightly as when it caught the attention of Conon the astronomer. ”

“ But it is very different to the Christian Trinity, and even more difficult to understand. The first and highest grade in it he calls the One. The One is—Unity, the One. Nothing else can be predicated about it, not even that it exists; it is more incomprehensible than the Jehovah of Philo; it has no qualities, no creative force, it is good only as the goal of our aspirations. But though it cannot create, it overflows (somewhat like a fountain) , and from its overflow or emanation is generated the second grade of the Trinity—the “Intellectual Principle.” ”

“ As they reach the top, the lake seems to be covered with white and crimson ice, in the midst of which are pools of blue and green water, and trickling streams of claret, and tracts that blush like a rose. When the scene is in mirage, its strangeness passes belief. A bird looks as big as a man, and the lump of salt it perches on shows like a boat of snow. The finest of these lakes is just to the left of Bir Hooker. ”

“ The great library of Alexandria had been burnt in the Caesarian war, and the queen began a new collection which she attached to the Serapeum. Here for four hundred years was the most learned spot on the earth. The Christians wiped it out. In 391 the Patriarch Theophilus (p. 50) led a mob against the temple, sacked it, and broke the statue of the God. It is impossible that the books should not have perished at the same time: they were arranged in the cloisters that surrounded the temple (see below) so that the mob had to pass them to reach its central prey. ”

“ Is Praxinoe at home?
Praxinoe. Oh my dear Gorgo, it’s ages since you were here. She is at home. The wonder is that you’ve come even now. (calls to the maid) . Eunoe, give her a chair and put a cushion on it.
Gorgo. Oh it does beautifully as it is.
Praxinoe. Sit down!
G. My nerves are all to bits—Praxinoe, I only just got here alive ... what with the crowd, what with the carriages ... soldiers’ boots—soldiers’ great-coats, and the street’s endless—you really live too far. ”

“ O Queen that lovest Golgi and Idalium and Eryx, O Aphrodite that playest with gold—lo from the everlasting stream of Hades they have brought thee back Adonis.... A bridegroom of eighteen or nineteen years is he, his kisses are not yet rough, the golden down being yet on his lips.... Thou only, dear Adonis, so men tell, visitest both this world and the stream of Hades. ”

“ Love, mythological fancies, decorative treatment—he liked these things too, but he backed them with a width of experience and a zest for it that Callimachus and Apollonius never knew. While they are “Classics” who have to be studied, Theocritus appeals to us at once; his Fifteenth Idyll, describing life in the Greek Quarter at Alexandria, is as vivid now as when he wrote it. The dialogue with which it opens can be heard to-day in any of the little drawing rooms of Camp de César or Ibrahimieh. Praxinoe, a lady of the middle classes, is discovered seated, doing nothing in particular. ”

“ Would Rome, before she could annex Egypt, fall to pieces herself? There were signs of it. The victorious republic had absorbed more plunder and more ideas than she could conveniently digest. She had always found it particularly difficult to digest an idea. Rival Ptolemies had contended in Alexandria. But rival Romans were now contending in Rome. Might it be possible to play off against one the other, and so win through to safety? The scheme commended itself to the Alexandrians. It also occurred to the daughter of the bankrupt Ptolemy XIII, a beautiful and amusing princess called Cleopatra. ”

“ The seat of the Jews was Jerusalem, where they had evolved their cult of Jehovah and built him his unique temple. But as soon as Alexandria was founded they began to emigrate to the lucrative and seductive city, and to take up their quarters near the modern Ibrahimieh. Soon a generation arose that was Greek in speech. The Hebrew Scriptures had to be translated for their benefit, and seventy rabbis—so the legend goes—were shut up by Ptolemy Philadelphus in seventy huts on the island of Pharos, whence they simultaneously emerged with seventy identical translations of the Bible. ”