III. ALEXANDRIA
Most of this wealth came to Alexandria. The nome capitals and a few other towns were also prosperous, with paved and lighted streets, police protection, and a good water supply; but nothing quite so “modern” as Alexandria had ever been seen before. Strabo describes it in the first centuryA.D. as over three miles long and a mile wide; Pliny reckons the city wall as fifteen miles in length.31 Dinocrates of Rhodes and Sostratus of Cnidus laid out the city on the rectangular plan, with a central avenue one hundred feet wide running from east to west, crossed by an equally wide avenue from north to south. Each of these thoroughfares, and probably some others, was well lighted at night, and was kept cool during the day by mile after mile of shaded colonnades. Of the four quarters into which the main arteries divided the city the westernmost, Rhacotis, was occupied chiefly by Egyptians; the northeast portion formed the Jewish quarter; the southeast corner, or Brucheum, contained the royal palace, the Museum, the Library, the tombs of the Ptolemies, the sarcophagus of Alexander (the Hotel des Invalides of the age), the arsenal, the chief Greek temples, and many spacious parks. One park had-a portico six hundred feet in length; another contained the royal zoological collection. In the center of the city were the administrative buildings, the government storehouses, the courthouse, the main gymnasium, and a thousand shops and bazaars. Outside the gates were a stadium, a hippodrome or race track, an amphitheater, and a vast cemetery known as the Necropolis, or City of the Dead.32 Along the beach ran a succession of bathing establishments and resorts. A dike or mole, called Heptastadium because it was seven stadia long, connected the city with the island of Pharos, and made two harbors out of one. Behind the city lay Lake Mareotis, which provided ports and outlets for the traffic on the Nile; here the Ptolemies kept their pleasure boats and took their royal ease.*
The population of Alexandria about 200 B.C. was as varied as in a modern metropolis: from four to five hundred thousand Macedonians, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Persians, Anatolians, Syrians, Arabs, and negroes.*33 The growth of commerce had swelled the lower middle class, and filled the cosmopolitan capital with a busy, talkative, litigious crowd of shopkeepers and traders, always on the alert for a bargain, and with no prejudice in favor of honesty. At the top were the Macedonians and the Greeks, living in such luxury as astonished the Roman ambassadors who were appointed to the court in 273. Athenaeus recounts the delicacies that burdened the tables and digestions of the master class,34 and Herodas writes: “Alexandria is the house of Aphrodite, and everything is to be found there—wealth, playgrounds, a large army, a serene sky, public displays, philosophers, precious metals, fine young men, a good royal house, an academy of science, exquisite wines, and beautiful women.”35 Alexandria’s poets were discovering the literary value of virginity, and its novelists would soon make it the theme and final casualty of many a tale; but the city was notorious for the generosity of its women and the number of its stepdaughters of joy; Polybius complained that the finest private homes in Alexandria belonged to courtesans.36 Women of all classes moved freely through the streets, shopped in the stores, and mingled with the men. Some of them made a name for themselves in literature and scholarship.37 The Macedonian queens and ladies of the court, from Ptolemy II’s Arsinoe to Antony’s Cleopatra, took an active part in politics, and served policy rather than love with their crimes; but they retained sufficient charm to arouse the men to unprecedented gallantry, at least in poetry and prose, and brought into Alexandrian society an element of feminine influence and grace unknown in classic Greece.
Probably a fifth of Alexandria’s population was Jewish. As far back as the seventh century there had been Hebrew settlements in Egypt; many Jewish traders had entered in the wake of the Persian conquest. Alexander had urged Jews to emigrate to Alexandria, and had, according to Josephus, offered them equal political and economic rights with the Greeks.38 Ptolemy I, after taking Jerusalem, carried with him into Egypt thousands of Jewish captives, who were freed by his successor;39 at the same time he invited well-to-do Hebrews to establish their homes and businesses in Alexandria40 By the beginning of the Christian era there were a million Jews in Egypt.41 A large number of these lived in the Jewish quarter of the capital. It was no ghetto, for the Jews were free to live in any quarter but the Brucheum, which was restricted to official families and their servitors. They chose their own gerousia or senate, and followed their own worship. In 169 the high priest Onias III built a great temple at Leontopolis, a suburb of Alexandria, and Ptolemy VI, his personal friend, assigned the revenues of Heliopolis for its maintenance. Such temples served as schools and meeting places as well as for religious services; hence they were called by the Greek-speaking Jews synagogai, i.e., places of assembly. Since few Egyptian Jews after the second or third generation in Egypt knew Hebrew, the reading of the Law was followed by an interpretation in Greek. Out of these explanations and applications rose the custom of preaching a sermon on a text; and out of the ritual came the first forms of the Catholic Mass.42
This religious and racial separation combined with economic rivalries to arouse, towards the end of this period, an anti-Semitic movement in Alexandria. The Greeks and Egyptians alike were habituated to the union of church and state, and frowned upon the cultural independence of the Jews; furthermore, they felt the competition of the Jewish artisan or businessman, and resented his energy, tenacity, and skill. When Rome began to import Egyptian grain it was the Jewish merchants of Alexandria who carried the cargoes in their fleets.42a The Greeks, perceiving their failure to Hellenize the Jews, feared for their own future in a state where the majority remained persistently Oriental, and bred so vigorously. Forgetting the legislation of Pericles, they complained that the Jewish law forbade mixed marriages, and that the Jews for the most part kept to themselves. AntiSemitic literature multiplied. Manetho, the Egyptian historian, gave currency to the story that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt, centuries back, because they had been afflicted with scrofula or leprosy.43 Feeling mounted on both sides until, in the first century of the Christian era, it broke out into destructive violence.
The Jews did what they could to allay the resentment against their amixia—their social separation—and their success. Though they clung to their religion they spoke Greek, studied and wrote about Greek literature, and translated their sacred books and their histories into Greek. To acquaint the Greeks with the Jewish religious tradition, and to enable the Jew who knew no Hebrew to read his own scriptures, a group of Alexandrian Jewish scholars began, probably under Ptolemy II, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The kings favored the undertaking in the hope that it would make the Jews of Egypt more independent of Jerusalem, and would lessen the flow of Jewish-Egyptian funds to Palestine. Legend told how Ptolemy Philadelphus, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, had invited some seventy Jewish scholars to come from Judea about 250 to translate the scriptures of their people; how the King had lodged each of them in a separate room on Pharos, and had kept them without intercommunication until each had made his own rendering of the Pentateuch; how all the seventy versions, when finished, agreed word for word, proving the divine inspiration of the text and of the translators; how the King rewarded the scholars with costly presents of gold; and how from these circumstances the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible came to be known as the hermeneia kata tous hebdomekonta—the Interpretation according to the Seventy—in Latin, Interpretatio Septuaginta (sc. Seniorum)—in a word, the “Septuagint.”*44 Whatever the process of translation, the Pentateuch seems to have appeared in Greek before the close of the third century, and the Prophetic books in the second.46 This was the Bible used by Philo and St. Paul.
The process of Hellenization in Egypt failed as completely with the natives as with the Jews. Outside of Alexandria the Egyptians sullenly maintained their own religion, their own dress or nudity, their own immemorial ways. The Greeks thought of themselves as conquerors, not as fellow men; they did not bother to build Greek cities south of the Delta, or to learn the language of the people; and their laws did not recognize the marriage of an Egyptian with a Greek. Ptolemy I tried to unite the Greek and native faiths by identifying Serapis and Zeus; later Ptolemies encouraged the cult of themselves as gods to offer a common and convenient object of worship to their heterogeneous population; but those Egyptians who were not courting office paid little attention to these artificial cults. The Egyptian priests, shorn of their wealth and power, and dependent for their sustenance upon grants of money from the state, waited patiently for the Greek wave to recede. In the end it was not Hellenism that won in Alexandria, but mysticism; now were laid the foundations of Neo-Platonism and the medley of promissory cults that competed for the Alexandrian soul in the centuries that surrounded the birth of Christ. Osiris as Serapis became the favorite god of the later Egyptians, and of many Egyptian Greeks; Isis regained popularity as the goddess of women and motherhood. When Christianity came neither the clergy nor the people found it impossible to change Isis into Mary, and Serapis into Christ.