There it towered up, the wonder of the world, its white roof bright against the
rainless blue; and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of noble buildings, a
broad glimpse of the bright blue sea (3).
3. Charles Kingsley: Hypatia, New York, 1895 (Vol. I, P. 23).
In the Brucheion, the Royal Greek center of the city, an amazing pile of
white marble and stone was consecrated to the Muses. Here were
statuary-halls, picture-galleries, lecture-rooms, and refectories for
resident and itinerant scholars. Perhaps a hundred scholars lived under
the generous patronage of the royal foundation: the Museum. Here, free
from want and from taxes, they studied and labored, making researches
into the history of the past and seeking to discover the secrets of nature.
In verse and prose, they produced original work in letters and made
lasting contributions to science. Above all, they collated the MSS.,
critically studied the texts, and through this exegesis, they issued
recensions of Greek literature. And still more humbly, they copied
manuscripts which they sold to those who had the desire and means of
having books of their own. There was an archpriest of the Muses who
nominally presided over the confraternity, although we believe the chief
librarian of the king and of the Alexandriana was the most important
personage of the intellectual entourage.
But the Museum, considered in its larger aspect as the University of
HclIas, or rather of the Hellenic World, did not alone consist of sleeping-
apartments, refectory or common hall for eating, or walks in cloisters or
colonnaded shelters with seats for rest and contemplation, of theatres
for lectures on philosophy or science, or for readings of the classic
poets and historians, of botanical gardens and animal-parks for the study
of flora and fauna, but above all it offered to its privileged fellows, or
indeed to the scholarship of the world, the incomparable resources of
the first real and greatest collection of intellectual materials or data ever
assembled in antiquity: the Library of Alexandria.
Writing incidentally of the Museum-Library, Grcgorovius says:
The Alexandrian school diffused a splendour over the civilized world
which lasted longer than that shed by any university afterwards,
whether of Paris, Bologna or Padua. Long after the creative power of
Greek genius was exhausted, encyclopaedic knowledge and Greek
sophistry were to be found in the Library and Museum of Alexandria'.
m. Ferdinand Gregorovius: The Emperor Hadrian, London, a 898 (p. 238).
A covered marble colonnade connected the Museum with an adjacent
stately building, also in white marble and stone, architecturally
harmonious, indeed forming an integral part of the vast pile, dedicated to
learning by the wisdom of the first Ptolemy in following the advice and
genius of Demetrios of Phaleron. This was the famous Library of
Alexandria, the "Mother" library of the Museum, the Alexandriana, truly
the foremost wonder of the ancient world. Here in ten great Halls, whose
ample walls were lined with spacious armaria, numbered and titled, were
housed the myriad manuscripts containing the wisdom, knowledge, and
information, accumulated by the genius of the Hellenic peoples. Each of
the ten Halls was assigned to a separate department of learning
embracing the assumed ten divisions of Hellenic knowledge as may have
been found in the Catalogue of Callimachus of Greek Literature in the
Alexandrian Library, the farfamed Pinakes. The Halls were used by the
scholars for general research, although there were smaller separate
rooms for individuals or groups engaged in special studies.
Considering the date of its origin, at the close of the classic period of
the world's greatest literature (Aristotle and Demosthenes died in 322
B.C.), when Athens, its mother, no longer afforded the means, power or
genius necessary for its protection or preservation, the conception and
building of this Library is an outstanding achievement in the intellectual
life of man.
In the old Egyptian quarter, in Rhakotis, on a slight elevation (1), artificially
enlarged, with a wealth of Egyptian marbles and rare materials gathered
by the devotion of sacerdotal colleges, arose the Temple of Serapis. This
was the most magnificent of all the buildings in monumental Alexandria,
and dominated the metropolis, which it surveyed in all its quarters from
its western coign of vantage. Here the Greco-Egyptian populace could
worship at common altars, with a composite ritual, under an elaborate
priesthood that could trace its spiritual succession from
1. Some writers as old as Aphthonius and as young as Parthey, have dignified it with the name acropolis.
the old priests of Zeus and the more ancient hierarchies of Osirus. This
was the Serapeum ofwhich Ammianus Marcellinus declared:
No description can do it justice, yet (it) is so adorned with extensive
columned halls, with almost breathing statues, and a great number of
other works of art, that next to the Capitol, with which revered Rome
elevates herself to eternity, the whole world beholds nothing more
magnificent (1).
Within its ample porticoes was housed the "daughter" library ol
Alexandria, the Serapeiana.
Alexandria was in fact sui generis, a city learned and gay, and we could
hardly omit one of the rare bits of contemporary description surviving,
that by the iambist Herodes:
Egypt! There, think, is the temple of the Goddess (Arsinoe).
Everything that is or can be anywhere, is in Egypt-riches, gymnasiums,
power, comfort, glory, shows, philosophers, gold, young men, the
precinct of the Brother-and-Sister Gods, the King, a liberal man, the
Museum, wine, all good things heart can possibly desire, women too
more in number than the stars, and as beautiful as the goddesses who
went to Paris for judgment (2).
In the autumn days of Athens, when the exquisite flowering of Attic
culture fclt the coming frost and Hellas seemed to have lived its amazing
life and the golden book was about to close, there arose a radiant youth
who seized the dying torch which he carried triumphant on three
continents. In the center of the world he built by fiat a monument that for
three centuries maintained in trade, in art, in science, and in thought
Hellenic glory. And when Greece died as the Roman came, the mighty
spirit of Alexander abided for still four hundred years.
The city of Alexandria was ever the symbol of the greatness of her
founder, and it took a thousand years of the revolutions of men and the
destructions of ages to eflect the final ruin of that fabulous city that was
the scene of both the triumph and the fall of pagan antiquity, and the rise
and the disasters of the Christian faith, and which, in no flattering mood,
provoked the dictum of Chrysostom:
For your city is vastly superior in point of size and situation, and it is
admittedly ranked second among all the cities beneath the sun (3).
1. XX-16-12.
2. Of course "Egypt" = "Alexandria", Herodes, 1-23 ff. (tr. Bevan).
3. The Thirty-Second Discourse (36).