It is to this reign, also, that we seem to owe the great temple at Apollinopolis Magna, although it was not finished till one or two reigns later. It is one of the largest and least ruined of the Egyptian temples. Its front is formed of two huge square towers, with sloping sides, between which is the narrow doorway, the only opening in its massive walls. Through this the worshipper entered a spacious courtyard or cloister, where he found shade from the sun under a covered walk on either side. In front is the lofty portico with six large columns, the entrance to the body of the building. This last is flat-roofed, and far lower than the grand portico which hid it from the eyes of the crowd in the courtyard. The staircases in the towers are narrow. The sacred rooms within were small and dark, with only a glimmering flame here and there before an altar, except when lighted up with a blaze of lamps on a feast-day. As a castle it must have had great strength; from the top and loopholes of the two towers, stones and darts might be hurled at the enemy; and as it was in the hands of the Egyptians, it is the strongest proof that they were either not distrusted or not feared by their Greek rulers. The city of Apollinopolis stands on a grand and lofty situation, overlooking the river and the valley; and this proud temple, rising over all, can only have been planned by military skill as a fortress to command the whole.
At this time the Greeks in Egypt were beginning to follow the custom of their Egyptian brethren, to take upon themselves monastic vows, and to shut themselves up in the temples in religious idleness. But these foreigners were looked upon with jealousy by the Egyptian monks as intruders on their endowments, and we meet with a petition addressed to Philometor by Ptolemy, the son of Glaucias, a monk in the temple of Serapis at Memphis, who styles himself a Macedonian, complaining that his cell had been violently entered and himself ill-treated because he was a Greek; and reminding the king that last year, when the king visited the Serapium, he had addressed the same petition to him through the bars of his window. The priests in temples of Egypt were maintained, partly by their own estates, and partly by the offerings of the pious; and we still possess a deed of sale made in this reign by the Theban priests, of one-half of a third of their collections for the dead who had been buried in Thynabunum, the Libyan suburb of Thebes. This sixth share of the collections consisted of seven or eight families of slaves; the price of it was four hundred pieces of brass; the bargain was made in the presence of sixteen witnesses, whose names are given; and the deed was registered and signed by a public notary in the city of Thebes. The custom of giving offerings to the priests for the good of the dead would seem to have been a cause of some wealth to the temples. It was one among the many Egyptian customs forbidden by the law of Moses.
From this deed of sale we also gain some knowledge of the state of slavery in Egypt. The names of the slaves and of their fathers are Koptic, and in some cases borrowed from the names of the gods; hence the slaves were probably of the same religion, and spoke nearly the same language as their masters. They sunk into that low state rather by their own want of mind than by their masters’ power. In each case the slave was joined in the same lot with his children; and the low price of four hundred pieces of brass, perhaps about thirty-eight dollars for eight families, or even if it be meant for the half of eight families, proves that they were of the nature of serfs, and that the master, either by law or custom, could have had no power of cruelly overworking them. On the other hand, in the reign of Philadelphus, the prisoners taken in battle, who might be treated with greater severity, were ransomed at fifteen dollars each. We see by the monuments that there were also a few negroes in the same unhappy state of slavery. They were probably not treated much worse than the lowest class of those born on the soil, but they were much more valuable. Other slaves of the Berber race were brought in coasting vessels from Opone on the incense coast, near to the island of Dioscorides.
Aristarchus, who had been the tutor of Euergetes II., and of a son of Philometor, was one of the ornaments of this reign. He had been a pupil of Aristophanes, the grammarian, and had then studied under Crates at Pergamus, the rival school to Alexandria. He died at Cyprus, whither he probably withdrew on the death of Philometor. He was chiefly known for his critical writings, in which his opinions of poetry were thought so just that few dared to disagree with them; and his name soon became proverbial for a critic. Aristarchus had also the good fortune to be listened to in his lecture-room by one whose name is far more known than those of his two royal pupils. Moschus of Syracuse, the pastoral poet, was one of his hearers; but his fame must not be claimed for Alexandria; he can hardly have learned from the critic that just taste by which he joined softness and sweetness to the rude plainness of the Doric muse. Indeed in this he only followed his young friend Bion, whose death he so beautifully bewails, and from whose poems he generously owns that he learned so much. It may be as well to add that the lines in which he says that Theocritus, who had been dead above one hundred years, joined with him in his sorrow for the death of Bion are later additions not found in the early manuscripts of his poems.
From our slight acquaintance with Bion’s life, we are left in doubt whether he accompanied his friend Moschus to the court of Alexandria; but it is probable that he did. In his beautiful lamentation for the death of Adonis, we have an imitation of the melancholy chant of the Egyptians, named maneros, which they sang through the streets in the procession on the feast of Isis, when the crowd joined in the chorus, “Ah, hapless Isis, Osiris is no more.” The tale has been a good deal changed by the Sicilian muse of Bion, but in the boar which killed Adonis, we have the wicked Typhon as carved on the monuments; we have also the wound in the thigh, and the consolations of the priests, who every year ended their mournful song with advising the goddess to reserve her sorrow for another year, when on the return of the festival the same lament would be again celebrated. The whole poem has a depth and earnestness of feeling which is truly Egyptian, but which was very little known in Alexandria.
To the Alexandrian grammarians, and more particularly to Aristophanes, Aristarchus, and their pupil, Ammonius, we are indebted for our present copies of Homer. These critics acted like modern editors, each publishing an edition, or rather writing out a copy, which was then re-copied in the museum as often as called for by the demands of the purchasers of books. Aristophanes left perhaps only one such copy or edition, while Aristarchus, in his efforts to correct the text of the great epic poet, made several such copies. These were in the hands of the later scholiasts, who appealed to them as their authority, and ventured to make no further alterations; we therefore now read the Iliad and Odyssey nearly as left by these Alexandrian critics. They no doubt took some liberties in altering the spelling and smoothing the lines; and, though we should value most highly a copy in the rougher form in which it came into their hands, yet, on the whole, we must be great gainers by their labours. They divided the Iliad and Odyssey into twenty-four books each, and corrected the faulty metres; but one of their chief tasks was to set aside, or put a mark against, those more modern lines which had crept into the ancient poems. It had been usual to call every old verse Homer’s or Homeric, and these it was the business of the critic to mark as not genuine. Aristarchus was jocosely said to have called every line spurious which he did not like; but everything that we can learn of him leads us to believe that he executed his task with judgment. From these men sprang the school of Alexandrian grammarians, who for several centuries continued their minute and often unprofitable studies in verbal criticism.
These were the palmy days of criticism. Never before or since have critics held so high a place in literature. The world was called upon to worship and do honour to the poet, but chiefly that it might admire the skill of the critic who could name the several sources of his beauties. The critic now ranked higher than a priest at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Homer was lifted to the skies that the critic might stand on a raised pedestal among the Muses. Such seems to be the meaning of the figures on the upper part of the well-known sculpture called the Apotheosis of Homer. It was made in this reign; and at the foot Ptolemy and his mother, in the characters of Time and the World, are crowning the statue of the poet, in the presence of ten worshippers who represent the literary excellences which shine forth in his poems. The figures of the Iliad and Odyssey kneel beside his seat, and the Frogs and Mice creep under his footstool, showing that the latter mock-heroic poem was already written and called the work of Homer.
Other celebrities who flourished under the fifth Ptolemy were Pamphilius, an Alexandrian physician who wrote on medical plants; Meander, a poet and physician who studied poisons, and the great Hipparchus, the founder of mathematical astronomy. Hero, also, in this reign, invented a kind of primitive steam-engine.