Alexandria and Grecian Africa: An Interpretation

By: Charles Van Doren

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Alexandria and Grecian Africa: An Interpretation

Alexandria flourished for more than a thousand years as the intellectual and cultural center and the greatest city of the ancient Mediterranean world. It was the prime conduit for the passage of African images and ideas into Europe and European images and ideas into Africa. This article deals primarily with the role of Alexandria in the development of Grecian Africa in ancient times. (For a history of the city up to modern times, see the entry on Alexandria.)

Ancient Egypt

For the early Greeks, Egypt was the oldest, the wisest, and the richest of all nations. The Greeks were new to civilization; when they first visited Egypt they discovered a civilization that was already more than 2,000 years old. Temples and monuments loomed in the desert, their origins lost in the mists of time. The Great Sphinx looked down upon the newcomers with its benign, unfathomable gaze, as it had for twenty centuries or more. Confronted by the splendors of the Egyptian past, Greeks like the historian Herodotus (who visited Egypt in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E.) were overcome with a kind of religious awe.

Ancient Egypt.  Bas reliefs depict the Sobek and Ptolemy VI Philometor on the Temple of Sobek and Haroeris built at Kom Ombo by the Ptolemies.

(Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library International Ltd.)

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Egyptian civilization was not only the oldest in the world, it was also astonishingly stable, at least when compared to every other nation known to the early Greeks. The concept of ma'at, or social order, ruled every aspect of Egyptian life. Greeks were iconoclasts; they constantly tested their laws and traditions, always seeking improvement, or at least novelty. Egyptians clung to their unimaginably ancient traditions; in their eyes, change was always dangerous and never desirable, as it was to the Greeks, for its own sake.

The agricultural economy of Egypt was based on the annual floods of their great river. Each year, in late summer, the river rose, bringing with it a flux of mud and silt that spread over the lands of the Nile Delta like a blanket of rich fertilizer. Farmers planted their fields, and the harvest was nearly always bountiful. A portion of the wealth brought by the river went to the king, or pharaoh, and to the priests who supported him and interpreted his will and that of the gods. But almost always there was enough for all, and over the centuries the national wealth had also become unimaginable.

For more than two millennia, from about 3500 to about 1500 B.C.E., Egypt was content with the unchanging existence it had chosen. In the second millennium B.C.E. it began to reach out, north into Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, east into Arabia, south into Nubia and present-day Sudan. During the fifteenth century B.C.E., under Thutmose III, an Egyptian empire expanded over most of northeastern Africa and much of the Near East as well. Inevitably, these aggressive moves provoked a response. Slowly at first and then more rapidly, the nation was forced back within its ancient borders. A time of troubles ensued, with frequent revolts and rival claimants to the throne. Always there was the threat of Persia and other Asiatic powers. Vast wealth and innumerable artistic treasures remained, but when Alexander arrived with his army in 330 B.C.E. he was able to conquer the Old Kingdom without a battle. He was proclaimed pharaoh and king, and as a symbol of his triumph, in 332 B.C.E., he established a new city near the west branch of the Nile Delta and named it after himself.

Alexander the Great

Alexander was born in 365 B.C.E. in a small country in northern Greece called Macedonia, of which his father, Philip, was the king. From ages thirteen to sixteen, the philosopher Aristotle, who was brought from Athens by Philip, tutored him. Alexander was more interested in warfare than in philosophy. Philip was assassinated in 336 B.C.E., and the Macedonian nobles and army accepted Alexander as their new king.

Philip had defeated a large force of allied Greek city-states before his death; now Alexander set about confirming Macedonian power in Greece. This took less than two years, whereupon he embarked on the adventure he had dreamed of since a child, namely, the conquest of Greece's perennial enemy, the Persian Empire. By now, Persia was the largest and richest nation in the world; its military prowess was legendary, its wealth almost mythical, its size and population many times greater than Greece, to say nothing of little Macedonia. Undaunted, Alexander set out on the Persian expedition in the spring of 334 B.C.E. with an army of 30,000 men and 5,000 cavalry, plus at least an equal number of surveyors, engineers, architects, scientists, court officials, historians, and of course, women. He let it be known that he intended to conquer not only Persia but the entire world.

He headed east, stopped at Troy to pay his respects to Achilles, and then turned south along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, defeating every Persian and other army that stood in his way. In Gordium, a city in Asia Minor, he was shown a famous knot that no one had ever untied; the man who could untie it, he was told, was fated to be the ruler of Asia. Alexander said nothing but drew his sword and cut the Gordian knot in twain. Within three years he was the undisputed lord of Asia, having conquered all of Persia and having been acclaimed as the Great King. He was then twenty-five years old.

Alexander founded half a dozen Alexandrias in various parts of Asia and India, but the Egyptian city was always his favorite. Choosing the site carefully, he endowed the new town with riches gleaned from his victories. He departed after two years to complete his conquest of the entire world as he knew it, but it seems he always intended to return. He did so, but only after his death, which occurred in Babylon in his thirty-third year. His body was carried to Alexandria and buried in a coffin of solid gold that has long been sought but never found.

The Ptolemies

After his death, Alexander's vast empire, which he had hoped to unify and make permanent, was soon broken up and shared among his generals. One of the most capable of these was Ptolemy Soter, who had been left in charge of the Egyptian city. Ptolemy, who founded a dynasty that bore his name, was a man of parts. A brilliant military strategist and a cunning politician (cunning being an indispensable virtue of the times), he was also deeply curious and a true Greek, tolerant of new ideas.

Eleven different Ptolemies in the direct line ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander to the conquest of the country by Rome, in 30 B.C.E., but of these only the first three, Ptolemy I Soter (ruled 323–282 B.C.E.), Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282–246 B.C.E.), and Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–221 B.C.E.), were enlightened and effective monarchs. Father, son, and grandson, they ruled their city for a difficult one hundred years, maintaining it as the center of a commercial and cultural sphere of influence extending from the Straits of Gibraltar to the shores of India.

Cleopatra’s Needle.  Soaring above its humble surroundings, the so-called Cleopatra’s Needle was photographed between 1856 and 1860.

(Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

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The ups and downs of Egyptian political and military power during this period are too complex to discuss here; in any case, the achievements of the first Ptolemies in other realms were more important and enduring. At the head of these were two great institutions. Intended to rival and surpass Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum at Athens, the Mouseion (or Museum) was founded around 300 B.C.E. as a kind of research university and institute for advanced study. It occupied a large site near the king's palace on which were erected a number of structures, connected to one another by colonnades winding among beautiful gardens, each of which was devoted to the study of a different branch of knowledge. A faculty of experts in every field was paid by the king (later by the Roman emperors), who also funded scholarships that brought prominent poets, historians, and scientists from all over the Hellenic world to Alexandria, which soon became universally recognized as the place to live and work.

Among the famous scholars who studied and wrote in Alexandria's Mouseion during those halcyon years were Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus the astronomer, and Hipparchus, all famous mathematicians and physicists, and, in later years, Strabo the geographer, and Ptolemy (not a member of the royal family) the astronomer. Ptolemy's geocentric theory of the universe prevailed for over 1,000 years before it was displaced by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. (Ironically, Aristarchus the astronomer, while at Alexandria, had also proposed a heliocentric theory.) Among the poets were Callimachus and Theocritus. The former was, after Homer, the most oft-cited poet of the later classical world. The latter had even greater influence, for his delicate, lovely verses about nature and country things were the foundation of the pastoral school of poetry, among whose practitioners were Virgil, Milton, Wordsworth, and Robert Frost, as well as a host of others.

The other renowned Ptolemaic institution was a library, the largest in the ancient world and one of the most important in history. Founded by Ptolemy I Soter as part of the Mouseion, it provided employment as well as a place to work for many scholars. At its most extensive, around the time of Christ, it was said to contain more than 500,000 volumes. Tragically, this magnificent source of knowledge and scholarship did not survive the tumultuous years of the early first millennium C.E.. Often desecrated, the great library of Alexandria was finally burned toward the end of the third century C.E..; nothing is known definitely to have survived. Not a single classical scholar of the last five hundred years has failed to bemoan this terrible loss, perhaps the greatest in Western intellectual history.

The Ptolemies were Greeks; they spoke, read, and wrote Greek and looked to the land of their ancestors as the ultimate source of scientific and artistic ideas. But they were also Egyptians, and as such, also Africans. Ptolemy I Soter was aware of the need to be, or at least to seem to be, Egyptian, especially in religion, and he established a new cult of the god Sarapis that combined Greek and Egyptian religious elements. Based in the ancient Egyptian capital city of Memphis, the cult spread all over the Mediterranean world and influenced Greek religious practices in Athens and other cities.

Cleopatra and Antony

Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Roman Senate on the Ides of March (March 15) in the year 44 B.C.E. After Caesar's death the fierce final phase ensued to the civil war that had been brewing for nearly a century. The two main factions were led by Octavian, named Caesar's successor in his will, and Mark Antony, who had been the dead man's closest associate. Octavian was a brilliant, handsome, and ruthlessly cold young man; he was eighteen when Caesar died. Antony was a violent and passionate man of thirty-six who was adored by his soldiers and by many women.

One woman adored him more than any other, and he adored her with a passion that endured until their deaths. She was Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, who had seduced Caesar when he had visited her country a few years before and now undertook to seduce the man she assumed would succeed him. How she did so is, thanks to Plutarch and Shakespeare, the stuff of legend. In Shakespeare's play (act 2, scene 2), Enobarbus, Antony's lieutenant, tells his friend Agrippa how “when she first met Mark Antony, she pursed up his heart, upon the river of Cydnus.” Agrippa is astounded by the splendor of this famous meeting; nevertheless, he declares, Antony must leave Cleopatra if he is to succeed. Enobarbus replies:

Never; he will not. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. (II, ii, 239)

And so it was. Antony divorced his wife (who happened to be Octavian's sister) to marry Cleopatra. Spending too little time in Rome, he spent too much in Alexandria. He was generous and open, but his gifts were interpreted by the calculating Octavian as the excesses of a wastrel and a slave to love. Such a man, Octavian whispered, was not worthy to be the ruler of all Rome.

In the end, love and spectacle could not prevail over hard, practical politics. Too many Romans, even Antony's followers, believed Octavian was right. The last battle of the long civil war was fought at Actium, on the coast of Greece. The combined fleets of Antony and Cleopatra were soundly beaten and the lovers fled to Alexandria, where, abandoned and alone, they committed suicide. Octavian, henceforth unopposed and supported by all the Roman armies, became the man we know as Augustus, the first Roman emperor.

What if Antony and Cleopatra Had Won the Battle of Actium?

It's a good question, although there can be no certain answer. Paris and London are monopole cities; they are the artistic, intellectual, financial, and political capitals of their countries. Italy today has two capitals: Milan for business and finance, Rome for political administration. The artistic and financial capital of the United States is New York, while the national government is based in Washington, D.C. Both systems work, though in different ways.

After Actium, Alexandria continued for centuries as the center of artistic and intellectual life of the Mediterranean, and one of the most important financial centers as well. But it had no political power beyond its minor role as the capital of the Roman province of Egypt. Lacking power, it was spared the political tumult that made life in Rome so dangerous. At the same time, Alexandria was starved for support, although the emperors made efforts to support the Mouseion and its library. Augustus was a Roman and a northern Italian; he had little interest in Africa. Alexandria continued to be a conduit for African products, men, and ideas under his rule, but the stream did not flow so richly as it had under the Ptolemies.

Mark Antony was a Roman, but he was the son and grandson of soldiers and had lived all over the world. His first allegiance was probably to Greece, not Rome; he tried for years to institute a Greco-Roman alliance that would include Egypt in an alliance of countries of the eastern Mediterranean. And he loved Cleopatra.

Augustus proclaimed, after spending millions of his people's money, that he had “found Rome brick and left it marble.” The diversion of revenues from outlying provinces had made this possible. If Antony had won, the funds that rebuilt Rome might have rebuilt the ancient cities of the Nile and made of Alexandria a glittering and better fortified imperial capital that might, because of its position on the African coast, have held off the barbarian invasions that inaugurated the Dark Ages.

Antony, Greek in spirit, was curious about new ideas. As emperor, he would have sought them out, even in that relatively unknown world beyond and below the Sahara. Under Augustus, the Roman Empire tended steadily northwest and east. Under Antony, guided by Cleopatra, it could have moved south and west. That difference would have changed almost everything.

As one example of what might have happened, note that slavery was rare in Egypt; it was endemic in Italy and Greece. The classical world was founded on the economic institution of slavery, without which, most Romans agreed, society could not endure. Aristotle had observed that if machines could do the work of men, then slaves would not be needed. A certain Greek, Hero of Alexandria, invented the steam engine, but the Augustans ignored its possibilities; the Antonians might have seen how to exploit it to replace slave labor. Taking these and other things into account, is it possible that Antony and Cleopatra, if they had won, might have established another kind of empire, based on the ideas of human equality instead of inequality, and freedom instead of slavery? And if so, might the Roman Empire, instead of being destroyed by Christianity (as Gibbon wrote), have made an early peace with it that changed not only the empire but Christianity as well?

Cleopatra's Nose

These speculations may seem absurd, or at the least misguided and illegitimate. Indeed, there is some truth in that judgment. Whatever happened in the past was the result of a long line of causes, not just one, and thus was more or less inevitable; at any rate, a single event could not be said to have determined the entire future. Thus the great changes that were occurring around the end of the first millennium B.C.E.—the collapse of the Roman Republic and its replacement by something like the Roman Empire, the advent of Christianity, and, later, the gradual movement of the center of Western civilization from the shores of the Mediterranean north and west, to Germany, to France, to Great Britain (to use the modern names for those parts of Europe)—were probably going to occur anyway, whatever the outcome of a single battle.

We may remember, however, that famous remark of a great philosopher, Blaise Pascal, a remark that has teased schoolboys, if not professional historians, for three hundred years. “Cleopatra's nose,” he wrote, “if it had been shorter, the whole course of history would have changed.” Presumably, if her nose had been shorter, she would not have been so beautiful, Mark Antony would not have fallen in love with her, he and Octavian would have reached some sort of reconciliation, and …

We should remember something else. History is always written by the winners. The bad character of Mark Antony, the irresponsibility of Cleopatra, are at least in part the creation of the Augustans. They had good reason to sully the reputations of their defeated foes, and they did so.

Perhaps it is not misguided or illegitimate, then, to imagine a past that was different than it actually was and a present that is consequently different from what it actually is. At the least, if Antony and Cleopatra had won, the role played by Africa in the history of the last 2,000 years would have been different. And the world we live in might be a good deal better than it is.

See also Egypt, Ancient Kingdom of.

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