Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

CHAPTER LVII.
ALEXANDRIA.

Wide will wear. Narrow will tear.

Ancient Alexandria left its mark on the world. Its history, however, appears to connect it rather with great names than with great events. Fancy is pleased with the picture of the greatest of the Greeks, Philip’s godlike son, Aristotle’s pupil, who carried about with him his Homer in a golden casket, the Conquistador of Asia, and the heir of the Pharaohs, tracing, with the contents of a flour-bag, the outlines of the nascent city, which was to bear his name of might, and to sepulchre his remains.

The trade of Phœnicia revived in its harbours, and on its quays. It became the Heliopolis, as well as the Thebes, of Hellenic Egypt. Even the Hebrew part of the population caught the infection of the place, and showed some capacity for philosophy and letters. Here it was that their sacred Scriptures were, in the Septuagint translation, first given to the educated world. And Plato, too, was soon more studied in the schools of Alexandria than in his native Greece.

Here fell the Great Pompey. And here, in pursuit of him, came the Cæsar, who bestrode the world like a Colossus; to be followed in our own time by the only modern leader of men, whose name, if he had possessed the generous magnanimity of the two captains of Greece and Rome, history might have bracketed with theirs.

Here ‘the unparalleled lass,’ rather, perhaps, of the greatest of poets than of history, having beguiled to his ruin the soft triumvir, preferred death to the brutalities of a Roman triumph.

Matters, however, of this kind—and they might be multiplied—are only bubbles on the surface. They interest the fancy, but have no effect on the great current of events. We, at this day, are neither the better nor the worse for them. But of the theology of Alexandria we must speak differently. It is through that that it affected, and still affects, the whole of Christendom. Sixteen hundred years have passed, and Alexandrian thought still holds its ground amongst us.

It would help us to a right understanding of what this thought was, and how it came to be what it was, if we knew something about the city, the times, the country, and the mental condition of its inhabitants. Alexandria, like Calcutta and New Orleans, having been called into existence by the requirements of commerce, had been obliged, for the sake of a harbour, to accept a singularly monotonous and uninteresting site. This alone must have had much influence on the cast of thought of its inhabitants. All who visit it will, I think, feel this. One cannot imagine a healthy and vigorous literature springing up in a place where Nature has neither grandeur nor beauty. Being mainly a commercial city, its inhabitants—as must be the case in all large commercial cities in the East—were composed of many nationalities. They had brought with them their respective religions and literatures, as well as manners and customs. It also contained the most brilliant Greek Court in the world, in which we might be certain that Greek inquisitiveness, and mental activity, would not be extinguished. This will account for the libraries and the schools of Alexandria.

We must understand why it never could become anything in the world of action. It was not because the Egypt of the Ptolemies was inferior to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. It might have been its superior in every particular of power and greatness, and yet have been unable to do anything in the outer world. What kept it quiet was a consciousness of moral and intellectual inferiority to the people time had at last educated and organized on the northern shores of the Mediterranean.