Hero of Alexandria

“ A rich cradle, an illustrious country, in the judgment of men! It is natural that thy children should reverence thee like a mother, Alexandria, and I was begotten in thy magnificently adorned breast. But the ascetic despises nature, the mystic scorns appearances, the Christian regards his native land as a place of exile, the monk is not of this earth. I have turned away my heart from loving thee, Alexandria. I hate thee! I hate thee for thy riches, thy science, thy pleasures, and thy beauty. Be accursed, temple of demons! ”

“ O royal Harmachis, let not the luxury and beauty of Alexandria poison thy sense; for in their deadly air, Faith perishes, and Religion cannot spread her heavenly wings. When the hour comes for thee to rule, Harmachis, cast down this accursed city and, as thy fathers did, set up thy throne in the white walls of Memphis. For I tell thee that, for Egypt, Alexandria is but a splendid gate of ruin, and, while it endures, all nations of the earth shall march through it, to the plunder of the land, and all false Faiths shall nestle in it and breed the overthrow of Egypt’s Gods. ”

“ This was very unlike Ptolemy, who was a wise, clear-headed man, with much of Alexander’s spirit of teaching and improving people under him, and who ruled so as to make himself much beloved in Egypt, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Palestine. The new city of Alexandria was his capital, and under him and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus it grew to be a great merchant city, and also a school of art, science, and philosophy almost as famous as Athens, and with a library containing all the chief books in the world, including the Old Testament. ”

“ It is a dynasty much censored by historians, but the Egyptians, who lived under it, were more tolerant. For it had one element of greatness: it did represent the complex country that it ruled. In Upper Egypt it carried on the tradition of the Pharaohs: on the coast it was Hellenistic and in touch with Mediterranean culture. After its extinction, the vigour of Alexandria turns inwards. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Alexander, having left a garrison in Gaza, turned his arms toward Egypt; of which he made himself master without opposition. Here he formed the design of visiting the temple of Jupiter, which was situated in the sandy deserts of Lybia at the distance of twelve days' journey from Memphis, the capital of Egypt. His chief object in going thither was to get himself acknowledged the son of Jupiter, an honor he had long aspired to. In this journey he founded the city of Alexandria, which soon became one of the greatest towns in the world for commerce. ”

“ We can picture to ourselves how it must have startled the refined Græco-Egyptian world of Alexandria when occasionally some man, long lost to society and forgotten by his friends, reappeared in the streets and squares of the city, with attenuated limbs and mortified countenance, with a dark hair-cloth tunic for his only clothing, with a reputation for exalted sanctity and spiritual wisdom, and vague rumours of supernatural revelations of the unseen world; like another John Baptist sent to preach repentance to the luxurious citizens ”

“ Alexandria! the sea, the men, the colossal marble Pharos whose mirror saved men from the sea! Alexandria! the city of the eleven Ptolemies, Physcon, Philometor, Epiphanes, Philadelphos; Alexandria, the climax of all dreams, the diadem of all the glories conquered during three thousand years in Memphis, Thebes, Athens, Corinth, by the chisel, the pen, the compass, and the sword! Still farther away, the Delta, cloven by the seven tongues of Nile, Saïs, Boubastis, Heliopolis ”

“ The inferior officers must have fulfilled their duties more faithfully than their superiors or the whole land would have been plunged in anarchy and destruction. The laws were administered, industry and commerce flourished, and Alexandria continued to be a large, populous and busy city, full of life and animation and adorned with many magnificent buildings. The Pharos steadily cast its beneficent light across the waters to be a guide to mariners; the Temple of Serapis, on its high platform, called attention to the worship of the gods ”

“ His reputation was so great among the Alexandrians that they are said to have requested him to open a school for teaching the Aristotelian philosophy in their city. [3] He did great service to his fellow-citizens in Alexandria on their being besieged by the Romans in a.d. ”

“ After the exploits of Athanasius the Patriarchate of Alexandria became very powerful. In theory Egypt belonged to the Emperor, who sent a Prefect and a garrison from Constantinople; in practise it was ruled by the Patriarch and his army of monks. The monks had not been important so long as each lived alone, but by the 4th cent., they had gathered into formidable communities, whence they would occasionally make raids on civilisation like the Bedouins to-day. One of these communities was only nine miles from Alexandria (the “Ennaton”) , others lay further west, in the Mariout desert ”

“ Fifteen hundred years ago, in Alexandria, when our religion was both young and lusty, it attempted to, and succeeded in, destroying everything that reminded the world of the glory and liberty of ancient Rome and Greece. ”

“ The orders of a king cannot give enduring greatness to a city; but Alexander's keen eye and marvelous brain saw at once that the site of Alexandria was such that a great commercial community planted there would live and flourish throughout out succeeding ages. He was right; for within a century this new capital of Egypt leaped to the forefront among the exchanges of the world's commerce, while everything that art could do was lavished on its embellishment. ”

“ Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian capital in the number of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring commercial spirit, in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and art: in the citizens there was a lively sense of their own national importance, and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any rate a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their street riots regularly and heartily. ”

“ 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 first Ptolemy began it, and the second completed it, at a total cost of 800 talents. It is the prototype of all lighthouses (q.v.) in the world. A temple of Hephaestus also stood on Pharos at the head of the mole. In the Augustan age the population of Alexandria was estimated at 300,000 free folk, in addition to an immense number of slaves.
III. History.—Founded in 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, Alexandria was intended to supersede Naucratis (q.v.) as a Greek centre in Egypt, and to be the link between Macedonia and the rich Nile Valley. ”

“ Alexander next passed on to Egypt, where he built, at the mouth of the Nile, the famous city that still is called by his name, Alexandria; indeed he founded cities everywhere, and made more lasting changes than ever did conqueror in the short space of twelve years. He then hunted Darius into the mountain parts of the north of Persia, and after two more victories, the Greeks found the poor Persian king dying on the ground, from wounds given by his own subjects. So the soft silver of Persia yielded to the brazen might of Greece. ”

“ And then there was the mausoleum of Alexander, there were the courts of justice, the theatres, the baths, the temples, the lines of shops and houses—all on a scale of grandeur and completeness which has never been surpassed by any city of the world. Such a city necessarily attracted men. Alexandria was fitly called the "many-peopled," whether the epithet referred to the actual number of citizens or to the varieties of tongue, complexion, and costume that thronged its streets. ”

“ The glory of Alexandria in the olden time was the Serapeum, sacred to the worship of Serapis, a god originally worshipped in Sinope, and brought to Alexandria by the Emperor Ptolemy—worshipped p. 128eventually by the Romans as the Supreme Being, the beneficent Lord of Life and Death. It is clear the Ptolemies—at one and the same time Egyptian Pharaohs and Greek princes—felt the need of a real and presiding deity for the great city, with its enormous population, not only from Greece and its colonies, but from all the nations and tribes of the Mediterranean and the East. ”

“ At war with England, he saw himself gaining at England’s expense an Oriental realm and reviving the power of Alexander the Great. In him, as in Mark Antony, Alexandria nourished imperial dreams. The expedition failed but its memory remained with him: he had touched the East, the nursery of kings.
Leaving Alexandria at once, he marched on Cairo and won the battle of the Pyramids. Then an irreparable disaster befel him. He had left his admiral, Brueys, with instructions to dispose the fleet as safely as possible, since Nelson was known to be in pursuit. ”

“ Romans and Greeks, Arabs and Copts, Christians, Jews, and Gentiles mingled here on common ground. But the life was essentially Byzantine. The vast population was provided in unexampled profusion and magnificence with theatres, baths, and places of amusement. A forest of ships, guarded by the ancient Pharos, ever congregated in its safe and spacious harbour, from whence communication was maintained with [240] all the seaports of the empire. And Alexandria was thus a European, rather than an Egyptian, city. ”

“ Even learned Alexandrians, after witnessing some of my experiments in mesmerism and the magic mirror, opined that the stranger was a manner of holy man gifted with preternatural powers. An old man sent to offer me his daughter in marriage—​my sanctity compelled me to decline the honour—​and a middle-aged lady offered me a hundred piastres (nearly one pound sterling) to stay at Alexandria and superintend the restoration of her blind left eye.
After a month pleasantly spent in the little garden of roses, jasmine, and oleanders, I made in early June a move towards Cairo. ”

“ To other popular historians I need not refer the student, save, by anticipation, to the list of authorities which will be furnished in the concluding volume of this series. [3]
Let us reflect, then, upon the epoch to which we have now come. The intense sufferings, labours, and intellectual as well as moral struggles, of the three heroic centuries, are closing, and Alexander of Alexandria is the grand figure of the period. Diocletian is preparing to let loose upon the sheep of Christ the ferocious wolves of the tenth persecution. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Among ancient texts on physiognomy, however, perhaps the most famous was the Sirr-el-asrar, or Secreta Secretorum, which was ascribed to Aristotle. Its origin, like that of other pseudo-Aristotelic writings, seems to have been Egyptian. When the conquests of Alexander the Great had opened the way for a new relation between East and West, Egypt, and especially its capital, Alexandria, became the focus of a new philosophic influence. ”

“ At the rumour of their Primate's determination, the Christian fanatics rose by swarms from every corner of Egypt, and hurried into Alexandria to be present at the work of demolition. From the arid solitudes of the desert, from their convents on rocks and their caverns in the earth, hosts of rejoicing monks flew to the city gates, and ranged themselves with the soldiery and the citizens, impatient for the assault. At the dawn of morning this assembly of destroyers was convened, and as the sun rose over Alexandria they arrived before the temple walls. ”

“ When, after the three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of the Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents and readings with the true odium gammaticum, and kings plunged deeper and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty, till the flood came, and swept them all away. Cleopatra, the Helen of Egypt, betrayed her country to the Roman ”