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$Title{History Of Cleopatra, Queen Of Egypt
Chapter III: Alexandria}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Abbott, Jacob}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{alexandria
city
every
ptolemy
books
library
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copies
museum
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$Date{1900}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Cleopatra, Queen Of Egypt
Book:        Cleopatra
Author:      Abbott, Jacob
Date:        1900

Chapter III: Alexandria

     It must not be imagined by the reader that the scenes of vicious
indulgence, and reckless cruelty and crime, which were exhibited with such
dreadful frequency, and carried to such an enormous excess in the palaces of
the Egyptian kings, prevailed to the same extent throughout the mass of the
community during the period of their reign.  The internal administration of
government, and the institutions by which the industrial pursuits of the mass
of the people were regulated, and peace and order preserved, and justice
enforced between man and man, were all this time in the hands of men well
qualified, on the whole, for the trusts committed to their charge, and in a
good degree faithful in the performance of their duties; and thus the ordinary
affairs of government, and the general routine of domestic and social life,
went on, notwithstanding the profligacy of the kings, in a course of very
tolerable peace, prosperity, and happiness.  During every one of the three
hundred years over which the history of the Ptolemies extends, the whole
length and breadth of the land of Egypt exhibited, with comparatively few
interruptions, one wide-spread scene of busy industry.  The inundations came
at their appointed season, and then regularly retired.  The boundless fields
which the waters had fertilized were then every where tilled.  The lands were
plowed; the seed was sown; the canals and water-courses, which ramified from
the river in every direction over the ground, were opened or closed, as the
case required, to regulate the irrigation.  The inhabitants were busy, and,
consequently, they were virtuous.  And as the sky of Egypt is seldom or never
darkened by clouds and storms, the scene presented to the eye the same
unchanging aspect of smiling verdure and beauty, day after day, and month
after month, until the ripened grain was gathered into the store-houses, and
the land was cleared for another inundation.

     We say that the people were virtuous because they were busy; for there is
not principle of political economy more fully established than that vice in
the social state is the incident and symptom of idleness.  It prevails always
in those classes of every great population who are either released by the
possession of fixed and unchangeable wealth from the necessity, or excluded by
their poverty and degradation from the advantage, of useful employment.
Wealth that is free, and subject to its possessor's control, so that he can,
if he will, occupy himself in the management of it, while it sometimes may
make individuals vicious, does not generally corrupt classes of men, for it
does not make them idle.  But wherever the institutions of a country are such
as to create an aristocratic class, whose incomes depend on entailed estates
or on fixed and permanent annuities, so that the capital on which they live
can not afford them any mental occupation, they are doomed necessarily to
inaction and idleness.  Vicious pleasures and indulgences are, with such a
class as a whole, the inevitable result; for the innocent enjoyments of man
are planned and designed by the Author of nature only for the intervals of
rest and repose in a life of activity.  They are always found wholly
insufficient to satisfy one who makes pleasure the whole end and aim of his
being.

     In the same manner, if, either from the influence of the social
institutions of a country, or from the operation of natural causes which human
power is unable to control, there is a class of men too low, and degraded, and
miserable to be reached by the ordinary inducements to daily toil, so certain
are they to grow corrupt and depraved, that degradation has become in all
languages a term almost synonymous with vice.  There are many exceptions, it
is true, to these general laws.  Many active men are very wicked; and there
have been frequent instances of the most exalted virtue among nobles and
kings.  Still, as a general law, it is unquestionably true that vice is the
incident of idleness; and the sphere of vice, therefore, is at the top and at
the bottom of society - those being the regions in which idleness reigns.  The
great remedy, too, for vice is employment.  To make a community virtuous, it
is essential that all ranks and gradations of it, from the highest to the
lowest, should have something to do.

     In accordance with these principles, we observe that, while the most
extreme and abominable wickedness seemed to hold continual and absolute sway
in the palaces of the Ptolemies, and among the nobles of their courts, the
working ministers of state, and the men on whom the actual governmental
functions devolved, discharged their duties with wisdom and fidelity, and
throughout all the ordinary ranks and gradations of society there prevailed
generally a very considerable degree of industry, prosperity, and happiness.
This prosperity prevailed not only in the rural districts of the Delta and
along the valley of the Nile, but also among the merchants, and navigators,
and artisans of Alexandria.

     Alexandria became, in fact, very soon after it was founded, a very great
and busy city.  Many things conspired to make it at once a great commercial
emporium.  In the first place, it was the depot of export for all the surplus
grain and other agricultural produce which was raised in such abundance along
the Egyptian valley.  This produce was brought down in boats to the upper
point of the Delta, where the branches of the river divided, and thence down
the Canopic branch to the city.  The city was not, in fact, situated directly
upon this branch, but upon a narrow tongue of land, at a little distance from
it, near the sea.  It was not easy to enter the channel directly, on account
of the bars and sand-banks at its mouth, produced by the eternal conflict
between the waters of the river and the surges of the sea.  The water was
deep, however, as Alexander's engineers had discovered, at the place where the
city was built, and, by establishing the port there, and then cutting a canal
across to the Nile, they were enabled to bring the river and the sea at once
into easy communication.

     The produce of the valley was thus brought down the river and through the
canal to the city.  Here immense warehouses and granaries were erected for its
reception, that it might be safely preserved until the ships that came into
the port were ready to take it away.  These ships came from Syria, from all
the coasts of Asia Minor, from Greece, and from Rome.  They brought the
agricultural productions of their own countries, as well as articles of
manufacture of various kinds; these they sold to the merchants of Alexandria;
and purchased the productions of Egypt in return.

     The port of Alexandria presented thus a constant picture of life and
animation.  Merchant ships were continually coming and going, or lying at
anchor in the roadstead.  Seamen were hoisting sails, or raising anchors, or
rowing their capacious galleys through the water, singing, as they pulled, to
the motion of the oars.  Within the city there was the same ceaseless
activity.  Here groups of men were unloading the canal boats which had arrived
from the river.  There porters were transporting bales of merchandise or sacks
of grain from a warehouse to a pier, or from one landing to another.  The
occasional parading of the king's guards, or the arrival and departure of
ships of war to land or to take away bodies of armed men, were occurrences
that sometimes intervened to interrupt, or as perhaps the people then would
have said, to adorn this scene of useful industry; and now and then, for a
brief period, these peaceful avocations would be wholly suspended and set
aside by a revolt or by a civil war, waged by rival brothers against each
other, or instigated by the conflicting claims of a mother and son.  These
interruptions, however, were comparatively few, and, in ordinary cases, not of
long continuance.  It was for the interest of all branches of the royal line
to do as little injury as possible to the commercial and agricultural
operations of the realm.  In fact, it was on the prosperity of those
operations that the revenues depended.  The rulers were well aware of this,
and so, however implacably two rival princes may have hated one another, and
however desperately each party may have struggled to destroy all active
combatants whom they should find in arms against them, they were both under
every possible inducement to spare the private property and the lives of the
peaceful population.  This population, in fact, engaged thus in profitable
industry, constituted, with the avails of their labors, and very estate for
which the combatants were contending.

     Seeing the subject in this light, the Egyptian sovereigns, especially
Alexander and the earlier Ptolemies, made every effort in their power to
promote the commercial greatness of Alexandria.  They built palaces, it is
true, but they also built warehouses.  One of the most expensive and
celebrated of all the edifices that they reared was the light-house which has
been already alluded to.  This light-house was a lofty tower, built of white
marble.  It was situated upon the island of Pharos, opposite to the city, and
at some distance from it.  There was a sort of isthmus of shoals and sand-bars
connecting the island with the shores.  Over these shallows a pier or causeway
was built, which finally became a broad and inhabited neck.  The principal
part of the ancient city, however, was on the main land.

     The curvature of the earth requires that a light-house on a coast should
have a considerable elevation, otherwise its summit would not appear above the
horizon, unless the mariner were very near.  To attain this elevation, the
architects usually take advantage of some hill or cliff, or rocky eminence
near the shore.  There was, however, no opportunity to do this at Pharos; for
the island was, like the main land, level and low.  The requisite elevation
could only be attained, therefore, by the masonry of an edifice, and the
blocks of marble necessary for the work had to be brought from a great
distance.  The Alexandrian light-house was reared in the time of Ptolemy
Philadelphus, the second monarch in the line.  No pains or expense were spared
in its construction.  The edifice, when completed, was considered one of the
seven wonders of the world.  It was indebted for its fame, however, in some
degree, undoubtedly to the conspicuousness of its situation, rising, as it
did, at the entrance of the greatest commercial emporium of its time, and
standing there, like a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, to attract
the welcome gaze of every wandering mariner whose ship came within its
horizon, and to awaken his gratitude by tendering him its guidance and
dispelling his fears.

     The light at the top of the tower was produced by a fire, made of such
combustibles as would emit the brightest flame.  This fire burned slowly
through the day, and then was kindled up anew when the sun went down, and was
continually replenished through the night with fresh supplies of fuel.  In
modern times, a much more convenient and economical mode is adopted to produce
the requisite illumination.  A great blazing lamp burns brilliantly in the
center of the lantern of the tower, and all that part of the radiation from
the flame which would naturally have beamed upward, or downward, or laterally,
or back toward the land, is so turned by a curious system of reflectors and
polyzonal lenses, most ingeniously contrived and very exactly adjusted, as to
be thrown forward in one broad and thin, but brilliant sheet of light, which
shoots out where its radiance is needed, over the surface of the sea.  Before
these inventions were perfected, far the largest portion of the light emitted
by the illumination of light-house towers streamed away wastefully in landward
directions, or was lost among the stars.

     Of course, the glory of erecting such an edifice as the Pharos of
Alexandria, and of maintaining it in the performance of its functions, was
very great; the question might, however, very naturally arise whether this
glory was justly due to the architect through whose scientific skill the work
was actually accomplished, or to the monarch by whose power and resources the
architect was sustained.  The name of the architect was Sostratus.  He was a
Greek.  The monarch was, as has already been stated, the second Ptolemy calle
commonly Ptolemy Philadelphus.  Ptolemy ordered that, in completing the tower,
a marble tablet should be built into the wall, at a suitable place near the
summit, and that a proper inscription should be carved upon it, with his name
as the builder of the edifice conspicuous thereon.  Sostratus preferred
inserting his own name.  He accordingly made the tablet and set it in its
place.  He cut the inscription upon the face of it, in Greek characters, with
his own name as the author of the work.  He did this secretly, and then
covered the face of the tablet with an artificial composition, made with lime,
to imitate the natural surface of the stone.  On this outer surface he cut a
new inscription, in which he inserted the name of the king.  In process of
time the lime moldered away, the king's inscription disappeared, and his own,
which thence forward continued as long as the building endured, came out to
view.

     The Pharos was said to have been four hundred feet high.  It was famed
throughout the world for many centuries; nothing, however, remains of it now
but a heap of useless and unmeaning ruins.

     Besides the light that beamed from the summit of this lofty tower, there
was another center of radiance and illumination in ancient Alexandria, which
was in some respects still more conspicuous and renowned, namely, an immense
library and museum established and maintained by the Ptolemies.  The Museum,
which was first established, was not, as its name might now imply, a
collection of curiosities, but an institution of learning, consisting of a
body of learned men, who devoted their time to philosophical and scientific
pursuits.  The institution was richly endowed, and magnificent buildings were
erected for its use.  The king who established it began immediately to make a
collection of books for the use of the members of the institution. This was
attended with great expense, as every book that was added to the collection
required to be transcribed with a <illegible> on parchment or papyrus, with
infinite labor and care.  Great numbers of scribes were constantly employed
upon this work at the Museum.  The kings who were most interested in forming
this library would seize the books that were possessed by individual scholars,
or that were deposited in the various cities of their dominions, and then,
causing beautiful copies of them to be made by the scribes of the Museum, they
would retain the originals for the great Alexandrian Library, and give the
copies to the men or the cities that had been thus despoiled.  In the same
manner they would borrow, as they called it, from all travelers who visited
Egypt, any valuable books which they might have in their possession, and,
retaining the originals, give them back copies instead.

     In process of time the library increased to four hundred thousand
volumes.  There was then no longer any room in the buildings of the Museum for
further additions.  There was, however, in another part of the city, a great
temple called the Serapion.  This temple was a very magnificent edifice, or,
rather, group of edifices, dedicated to the god Serapis.  The origin and
history of this temple were very remarkable.  The legend was this:

     It seems that one of the ancient and long venerated gods of the Egyptian
was a deity named Serapis.  He had been, among other divinities, the object of
Egyptian adoration ages before Alexandria was built or the Ptolemies reigned.
There was also, by a curious coincidence, a statue of the same name at a great
commercial town named Sinope, which was built upon the extremity of a
promontory which projected from Asia Minor into the Euxine Sea. Sinope was, in
some sense, the Alexandria of the north, being the center and seat of a great
portion of the commerce of that quarter of the world.

     The Serapis of Sinope was considered as the protecting deity of seamen,
and the navigators who came and went to and from the city made sacrifices to
him, and offered him oblations and prayers, believing that they were, in a
great measure, dependent upon some mysterious and inscrutable power which he
exercised for their safety in storms.  They carried the knowledge of his name,
and tales of his imaginary interpositions, to all the places that they visited
and thus the fame of the god became extended first, to all the coasts of the
Euxine Sea, and subsequently to distant provinces and kingdoms.  The Serapis
of Sinope began to be considered every where as the tutelar god of seamen.

     Accordingly, when the first of the Ptolemies was forming his various
plans for adorning and aggrandizing Alexandria, he received, he said, one
night, a divine intimation in a dream that he was to obtain the statue of
Serapis from Sinope, and set it up in Alexandria, in a suitable temple which
he was in the mean time to erect in honor of the god.  It is obvious that very
great advantages to the city would result from the accomplishment of
thisdesign.  In the first place, a temple to the god Serapis would be a new
distinction for it in the minds of the rural population, who would undoubtedly
suppose that the deity honored by it was their own ancient god. Then the whole
maritime and nautical interest of the world, which had been accustomed to
adore the god of Sinope, would turn to Alexandria as the great center of
religious attraction, if their venerated idol could be carried and placed in a
new and magnificent temple built expressly for him there. Alexandria could
never be the chief naval port and station of the world, unless it contained
the sanctuary and shrine of the god of seamen.

     Ptolemy sent accordingly to the King of Sinope and proposed to purchase
the idol.  The embassage was, however, unsuccessful.  The king refused to give
up the god.  The negotiations were continued for two years, but all in vain.
At length, on account of some failure in the regular course of the seasons on
that coast, there was a famine there, which became finally so severe that the
people of the city were induced to consent to give up their deity to the
Egyptians in exchange for a supply of corn.  Ptolemy sent the corn and
received the idol.  He then built the temple, which, when finished, surpassed
in grandeur and magnificence almost every sacred structure in the world.

     It was in this temple that the successive additions to the Alexandrian
library were deposited, when the apartments at the Museum became full.  In the
end there were four hundred thousand rolls or volumes in the Museum, and three
hundred thousand in the Serapion.  The former was called the parent library,
and the latter being, as it were, the offspring of the first, was called the
daughter.

     Ptolemy Philadelphus, who interested himself very greatly in collecting
this library, wished to make it a complete collection of all the books in the
world.  He employed scholars to read and study, and travelers to make
extensive tours, for the purpose of learning what books existed among all the
surrounding nations; and, when he learned of their existence, he spared no
pains or expense in attempting to procure either the originals themselves, or
the most perfect and authentic copies of them.  He sent to Athens and obtained
the works of the most celebrated Greek historians, and then causing, as in
other cases, most beautiful transcripts to be made, he sent the transcripts
back to Athens, and a very large sum of money with them as an equivalent for
the difference of value between originals and copies in such an exchange.

     In the course of the inquiries which Ptolemy made into the literature of
the surrounding nations, in his search for accessions to his library, he heard
that the Jews had certain sacred writings in their temple at Jerusalem,
comprising a minute and extremely interesting history of their nation from the
earliest periods, and also many other books of sacred prophecy and poetry.
These books, which were, in fact, the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament,
were then wholly unknown to all nations except the Jews, and among the Jews
were known only to priests and scholars.  They were kept sacred at Jerusalem.
The Jews would have considered them as profaned in being exhibited to the view
of pagan nations.  In fact, the learned men of other countries would not have
been able to read them; for the Jews secluded themselves so closely from the
rest of mankind, that their language was, in that age, scarcely ever heard
beyond the confines of Judea and Galilee.

     Ptolemy very naturally thought that a copy of these sacred books would be
a great acquisition to his library.  They constituted, in fact, the whole
literature of a nation which was, in some respects, the most extraordinary
that ever existed on the globe.  Ptolemy conceived the idea, also, of not only
adding to his library a copy of these writings in the original Hebrew, but of
causing a translation of them to be made into Greek, so that they might easily
be read by the Greek and Roman scholars who were drawn in great numbers to his
capital by the libraries and the learned institutions which he had established
there.  The first thing to be effected, however, in accomplishing either of
these plans, was to obtain the consent of the Jewish, authorities.  They would
probably object to giving up any copy of their sacred writings at all.

     There was one circumstance which led Ptolemy to imagine that the Jews
would, at that time particularly, be averse to granting any request of such a
nature coming from an Egyptian king, and that was, that during certain wars
which had taken place in previous reigns, a considerable number of prisoners
had been taken by the Egyptians, and had been brought to Egypt as captives,
where they had been sold to the inhabitants, and were now scattered over the
land as slaves.  They were employed as servile laborers in tilling the fields,
or in turning enormous wheels to pump up water from the Nile.  The masters of
these hapless bondmen conceived, like other slave-holders, that they had a
right of property in their slaves.  This was in some respects true, since they
had bought them of the government at the close of the war for a consideration;
and though they obviously derived from this circumstance no valid proprietary
right or claim as against the men personally, it certainly would seem that it
gave them a just claim against the government of whom they bought, in case of
subsequent manumission.

     Ptolemy or his minister, for it can not now be known who was the real
actor in these transactions, determined on liberating these slaves and sending
them back to their native land, as a means of propitiating the Jews and
inclining them to listen favorably to the request which he was about to prefer
for a copy of their sacred writings.  He, however, paid to those who held the
captives a very liberal sum for ransom.  The ancient historians, who never
allow the interest of their narratives to suffer for want of a proper
amplification on their part of the scale on which the deeds which they record
were performed, say that the number of slaves liberated on this occasion was a
hundred and twenty thousand, and the sum paid for them, as compensation to the
owners, was six hundred talents, equal to six hundred thousand dollars. ^* And
yet this was only a preliminary expense to pave the way for the acquisition of
a single series of books, to add to the variety of the immense collection.

[Footnote *: It will be sufficiently accurate for the general reader of
history to consider the Greek talent, referred to in such transactions as
these, as equal in English money to two hundred and fifty pounds, in America
to a thousand dollars.  It is curious to observe that, large as the total was
that was paid for the liberation of these slaves, the amount paid for each
individual was, after all, only a sum equal to about five dollars]

     After the liberation and return of the captives, Ptolemy sent a splendid
embassage to Jerusalem, with very respectful letters to the high priest, and
with very magnificent presents.  The embassadors were received with the
highest honors.  The request of Ptolemy that he should be allowed to take a
copy of the sacred books for his library was very readily granted.

     The priests caused copies to be made of all the sacred writings.  These
copies were executed in the most magnificent style, and were splendidly
illuminated with letters of gold.  The Jewish government also, at Ptolemy's
request, designated a company of Hebrew scholars, six from each tribe - men
learned in both the Greek and Hebrew languages - to proceed to Alexandria, and
there, at the Museum, to make a careful translation of the Hebrew books into
Greek.  As there were twelve tribes, and six translators chosen from each,
there were seventy-two translators in all.  They made their translation, and
it was called the Septuagint, from the Latin septuaginta duo, which means
seventy-two.

     Although out of Judea there was no feeling of reverence for these Hebrew
Scriptures as books of divine authority, there was still a strong interest
felt in them as very entertaining and curious works of history, by all the
Greek and Roman scholars who frequented Alexandria to study at the Museum.
Copies were accordingly made of the Septuagint translation, and were taken to
other countries; and there, in process of time, copies of the copies were
made, until at length the work became extensively circulated throughout the
whole learned world.  When, finally, Christianity became extended over the
Roman empire, the priests and monks looked with even a stronger interest than
the ancient scholars had felt upon this early translation of so important a
portion of the sacred Scriptures.  They made new copies for abbeys,
monasteries, and colleges; and when, at length, the art of printing was
discovered, this work was one of the first on which the magic power of
typography was tried.  The original manuscript made by the scribes of the
seventy-two, and all the early transcripts which were made from it, have long
since been lost or destroyed; but, instead of them, we have now hundreds of
thousands of copies in compact printed volumes, scattered among the public and
private libraries of Christendom.  In fact, now, after the lapse of two
thousand years, a copy of Ptolemy's Septuagint may be obtained of any
considerable bookseller in any country of the civilized world; and though it
required a national embassage, and an expenditure, if the accounts are true,
of more than a million of dollars, originally to obtain it, it may be procured
without difficulty now by two days' wages of an ordinary laborer.

     Besides the building of the Pharos, the Museum, and the Temple of
Serapis, the early Ptolemies formed and executed a great many other plans
tending to the same ends which the erection of these splendid edifices was
designed to secure, namely, to concentrate in Alexandria all possible means of
attraction, commercial, literary, and religious, so as to make the city the
great center of interest, and the common resort for all mankind.  They raised
immense revenues for these and other purposes by taxing heavily the whole
agricultural produce of the valley of the Nile.  The inundations, by the
boundless fertility which they annually produced, supplied the royal
treasuries.  Thus the Abyssinian rains at the sources of the Nile built the
Pharos at its mouth, and endowed the Alexandrian library.

     The taxes laid upon the people of Egypt to supply the Ptolemies with
funds were, in fact, so heavy, that only the bare means of subsistence were
left to the mass of the agricultural population.  In admiring the greatness
and glory of the city, therefore, we must remember that there was a gloomy
counterpart to its splendor in the very extended destitution and poverty to
which the mass of the people were every where doomed.  They lived in hamlets
of wretched huts along the banks of the river, in order that the capital might
be splendidly adorned with temples and palaces.  They passed their lives in
darkness and ignorance, that seven hundred thousand volumes of expensive
manuscripts might be enrolled at the Museum for the use of foreign
philosophers and scholars.  The policy of the Ptolemies was, perhaps, on the
whole, the best, for the general advancement and ultimate welfare of mankind,
which could have been pursued in the age in which they lived and acted; but,
in applauding the results which they attained, we must not wholly forget the
cost which they incurred in attaining them.  At the same cost, we could, at
the present day, far surpass them.  If the people of the United States will
surrender the comforts and conveniences which they individually enjoy - if the
farmers scattered in their comfortable homes on the hill - sides and plains
throughout the land will give up their houses, their furniture, their carpets,
their books, and the privileges of their children, and then - withholding from
the produce of their annual toil only a sufficient reservation to sustain them
and their families through the year, in a life like that of a beast of burden,
spent in some miserable and naked hovel - send the rest to some hereditary
sovereign residing upon the Atlantic sea - board, that he may build with the
proceeds a splendid capital, they may have an Alexandria now that will
infinitely exceed the ancient city of the Ptolemies in splendor and renown.
The nation, too, would, in such a case, pay for its metropolis the same price,
precisely, that the ancient Egyptians paid for theirs.

     The Ptolemies expended the revenues which they raised by this taxation
mainly in a very liberal and enlightened manner, for the accomplishment of the
purposes which they had in view.  The building of the Pharos, the removal of
the statue of Serapis, and the endowment of the Museum and the library were
great conceptions, and they were carried into effect in the most complete and
perfect manner.  All the other operations which they devised and executed for
the extension and aggrandizement of the city were conceived and executed in
the same spirit of scientific and enlightened liberality.  Streets were
opened; the most splendid palaces were built; docks, piers, and breakwaters
were constructed, and fortresses and towers were armed and garrisoned.  Then
every means was employed to attract to the city a great concourse from all the
most highly-civilized nations then existing.  The highest inducements were
offered to merchants, mechanics, and artisans to make the city their abode.
Poets, painters, sculptors, and scholars of every nation and degree were made
welcome, and every facility was afforded them for the prosecution of their
various pursuits.  These plans were all eminently successful.  Alexandria rose
rapidly to the highest consideration and importance; and, at the time when
Cleopatra - born to preside over this scene of magnificence and splendor -
came upon the stage, the city had but one rival in the world.  That rival was
Rome.