Alexandria and Her Schools. Charles Kingsley

kept together, and advised its partition among the generals, taking care to obtain himself the lion’s share; not in size, indeed, but in capability.  He saw, too (what every man does not see), that the only way to keep what he had got was to make it better, and not worse, than he found it.  His first Egyptian act was to put to death Cleomenes, Alexander’s lieutenant, who had amassed vast treasures by extortion; and who was, moreover, (for Ptolemy was a prudent man) a dangerous partisan of his great enemy, Perdiccas.  We do not read that he refunded the treasures: but the Egyptians surnamed him Soter, the Saviour; and on the whole he deserved the title.  Instead of the wretched misrule and slavery of the conquering Persian dynasty, they had at least law and order, reviving commerce, and a system of administration, we are told (I confess to speaking here quite at second-hand), especially adapted to the peculiar caste-society, and the religious prejudices of Egypt.  But Ptolemy’s political genius went beyond such merely material and Warburtonian care for the conservation of body and goods of his subjects.  He effected with complete success a feat which has been attempted, before and since, by very many princes and potentates, but has always, except in Ptolemy’s case, proved somewhat of a failure, namely, the making a new deity.  Mythology in general was in a rusty state.  The old Egyptian gods had grown in his dominions very unfashionable, under the summary iconoclasm to which they had been subjected by the Monotheist Persians—the Puritans of the old world, as they have been well called.  Indeed, all the dolls, and the treasure of the dolls’ temples too, had been carried off by Cambyses to Babylon.  And as for the Greek gods, philosophers had sublimed them away sadly during the last century: not to mention that Alexander’s Macedonians, during their wanderings over the world, had probably become rather remiss in their religious exercises, and had possibly given up mentioning the Unseen world, except for those hortatory purposes for which it used to be employed by Nelson’s veterans.  But, as Ptolemy felt, people (women especially) must have something wherein to believe.  The “Religious Sentiment” in man must be satisfied.  But, how to do it? How to find a deity who would meet the aspirations of conquerors as well as conquered—of his most irreligious Macedonians, as well as of his most religious Egyptians?  It was a great problem: but Ptolemy solved it.  He seems to have taken the same method which Brindley the engineer used in his perplexities, for he went to bed.  And there he had a dream: How the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus (somewhere near this present hapless Sinope), appeared to him, and expressed his wish to come to Alexandria, and there try his influence on the Religious Sentiment.  So Serapis was sent for, and came—at least the idol of him, and—accommodating personage!—he actually fitted.  After he had been there awhile, he was found to be quite an old acquaintance—to be, in fact, the Greek Jove, and two or three other Greek gods, and also two or three Egyptian gods beside—indeed, to be no other than the bull Apis, after his death and deification.  I can tell you no more.  I never could find that anything more was known.  You may see him among Greek and Roman statues as a young man, with a sort of high basket-shaped Persian turban on his head.  But, at least, he was found so pleasant and accommodating a conscience-keeper, that he spread, with Isis, his newly-found mother, or wife, over the whole East, and even to Rome.  The Consuls there—50 years B.C.—found the pair not too respectable, and pulled down their temples.  But, so popular were they, in spite of their bad fame, that seven years after, the Triumvirs had to build the temples up again elsewhere; and from that time forth, Isis and Serapis, in spite, poor things, of much persecution, were the fashionable deities of the Roman world.  Surely this Ptolemy was a man of genius!

      But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making gods.  He had to make men; for he had few or none ready made among his old veterans from Issus and Arbela.  He had no hereditary aristocracy: and he wanted none.  No aristocracy of wealth; that might grow of itself, only too fast for his despotic power.  But as a despot, he must have a knot of men round him who would do his work.  And here came out his deep insight into fact.  It had not escaped that man, what was the secret of Greek supremacy.  How had he come there?  How had his great master conquered half the world?  How had the little semi-barbarous mountain tribe up there in Pella, risen under Philip to be the master-race of the globe? How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of Salamis and Marathon, held out triumphantly century after century, against the vast weight of the barbarian?  The simple answer was: Because the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere brute force.  Because mind is the lord of matter; because the Greek being the cultivated man, is the only true man; the rest are βάρβαροι, mere things, clods, tools for the wise Greeks’ use, in spite of all their material phantom-strength of elephants, and treasures, and tributaries by the million.  Mind was the secret of Greek power; and for that Ptolemy would work.  He would have an aristocracy of intellect; he would gather round him the wise men of the world (glad enough most of them to leave that miserable Greece, where every man’s life was in his hand from hour to hour), and he would develop to its highest the conception of Philip, when he made Aristotle the tutor of his son Alexander.  The consequences of that attempt were written in letters of blood, over half the world; Ptolemy would attempt it once more, with gentler results.  For though he fought long, and often, and well, as Despot of Egypt, no less than as general of Alexander, he was not at heart a man of blood, and made peace the end of all his wars.

      So he begins.  Aristotle is gone: but in Aristotle’s place Philetas the sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus the grammarian of Ephesus, shall educate his favourite son, and he will have a literary court, and a literary age.  Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his time, the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, poet, warrior, and each of them in the most graceful, insinuating, courtly way, migrates to Alexandria, after having had the three hundred and sixty statues, which the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled down again.  Here was a prize for Ptolemy!  The charming man became his bosom friend and fellow, even revised the laws of his kingdom, and fired him, if report says true, with a mighty thought—no less a one than the great public Library of Alexandria; the first such institution, it is said, which the world had ever seen.

      So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and completed by Philadelphus; or rather two libraries, for while one part was kept at the Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which, as far as we can discover, Pompey’s Pillar alone remains, one column out of four hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and the Museum.  Philadelphus buys Aristotle’s collection to add to the stock, and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more honest methods.  Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with emulation, commences a similar collection, and is so successful, that the reigning Ptolemy has to cut off his rival’s supplies by prohibiting the exportation of papyrus; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth transcribed on parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, which thus has its name to this day, from Pergamus.  That collection, too, found its way at last to Alexandria.  For Antony having become possessor of it by right of the stronger, gave it to Cleopatra; and it remained at Alexandria for seven hundred years.  But we must not anticipate events.

      Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple of the Muses, with all due appliances, in a vast building adjoining the palace itself, under the very wing of royalty; and it must have porticos, wherein sages may converse; lecture-rooms, where they may display themselves at their will to their rapt scholars, each like a turkey-cock before his brood; and a large dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician.  For Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow.  Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five “dialectical daughters” behind him, to be thorns in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as “emancipated women;” a class but too common in the later days of Greece, as they will always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and crumbling to pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what they are, and what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings.  But to return: funds shall be provided for the Museum from the treasury; a priest of rank, appointed by royalty, shall be curator; botanical and zoological gardens shall be attached; collections of wonders made.  In all things the presiding genius of Aristotle shall be worshipped; for these, like Alexander, were his pupils.