The Provinces of the Roman Empire 38

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 38

“Alexandria,” says a reporter of the fourth century, “is entered by

the governors with trembling and despair, for they fear the justice

of the people; where a governor perpetrates a wrong, there follows

at once the setting of the palace on fire and stoning.” The naive

trust in the rectitude of this procedure marks the standpoint of

the writer, who belonged to this “people.” The continuation of this

Lynch-system, dishonouring alike to the government and to the nation,

is furnished by what is called Church-history, in the murder of the

bishop Georgius, alike obnoxious to the heathen and to the orthodox,

and of his associates under Julian, and that of the fair freethinker

Hypatia by the pious community of Bishop Cyril under Theodosius II.

These Alexandrian tumults were more malicious, more incalculable, more

violent than the Antiochene, but just like these, not dangerous either

for the stability of the empire or even for the individual government.

Mischievous and ill-disposed lads are very inconvenient, but not more

than inconvenient, in the household as in the commonwealth.

 

[Sidenote: Alexandrian worship.]

 

In religious matters also the two cities had an analogous position.

To the worship of the land, as the native population retained it in

Syria as in Egypt, the Alexandrians as well as the Antiochenes were

disinclined in its original shape. But the Lagids, as well as the

Seleucids, were careful of disturbing the foundations of the old

religion of the country; and, merely amalgamating the older national

views and sacred rites with the pliant forms of the Greek Olympus, they

Hellenised these outwardly in some measure; they introduced, _e.g._

the Greek god of the lower world Pluto into the native worship, under

the hitherto little mentioned name of the Egyptian god Sarapis, and

then gradually transferred to this the old Osiris worship.[240] Thus

the genuinely Egyptian Isis and the pseudo-Egyptian Sarapis played in

Alexandria nearly the same part as Belus and Elagabalus in Syria, and

made their way in a similar manner with these, although less strongly

and with more vehement opposition, by degrees into the Occidental

worship of the imperial period. As regards the immorality developed on

occasion of these religious usages and festivals, and the unchastity

approved and stimulated by priestly blessing, neither city was in a

position to upbraid the other.

 

Down to a late time the old cultus retained its firmest stronghold in

the pious land of Egypt.[241] The restoration of the old faith, as

well scientifically in the philosophy annexed to it as practically

in the repelling of the attacks directed by the Christians against

Polytheism, and in the revival of the heathen temple-worship and the

heathen divination, had its true centre in Alexandria. Then, when

the new faith conquered this stronghold also, the character of the

country remained nevertheless true to itself; Syria was the cradle of

Christianity, Egypt was the cradle of monachism. Of the significance

and the position of the Jewish body, in which the two cities likewise

resembled each other, we have already spoken in another connection

(p. 163). Immigrants called by the government into the land like the

Hellenes, the Jews were doubtless inferior to these and were liable

to poll-tax like the Egyptians, but accounted themselves, and were

accounted, more than these. Their number amounted under Vespasian to a

million, about the eighth part of the whole population of Egypt, and,

like the Hellenes, they dwelt chiefly in the capital, of the five wards

of which two were Jewish. In acknowledged independence, in repute,

culture, and wealth, the body of Alexandrian Jews was even before the

destruction of Jerusalem the first in the world; and in consequence of

this a good part of the last act of the Jewish tragedy, as has been

already set forth, was played out on Egyptian soil.

 

[Sidenote: The learned world of Alexandria.]

 

Alexandria and Antioch were pre-eminently seats of wealthy merchants

and manufacturers; but in Antioch there was wanting the seaport and

its belongings, and, however stirring matters were on the streets

there, they bore no comparison with the life and doings of the

Alexandrian artisans and sailors. On the other hand, for enjoyment

of life, dramatic spectacles, dining, pleasures of love, Antioch had

more to offer than the city in which “no one went idle.” Literary

amusements, linking themselves especially with the rhetorical

exhibitions--such as we sketched in the description of Asia Minor--fell

into the background in Egypt,[242] doubtless more amidst the pressure

of the affairs of the day than through the influence of the numerous

and well-paid _savants_ living in Alexandria, and in great part

natives of it. These men of the Museum, of whom we shall have to

speak further on, did not prominently affect the character of the

town as a whole, especially if they did their duty in diligent work.

But the Alexandrian physicians were regarded as the best in the whole

empire; it is true that Egypt was no less the genuine home of quacks

and of secret remedies, and of that strange civilised form of the

“shepherd-medicine,” in which pious simplicity and speculating deceit

draped themselves in the mantle of science. Of the thrice-greatest

Hermes we have already made mention (p. 261); the Alexandrian Sarapis,

too, wrought more marvellous cures in antiquity than any one of his

colleagues, and he infected even the practical emperor Vespasian, so

that he too healed the blind and lame, but only in Alexandria.

 

[Sidenote: Scholar-life in Alexandria.]

 

Although the place which Alexandria occupies, or seems to occupy,

in the intellectual and literary development of the later Greece

and of Occidental culture generally cannot be fitly estimated in a

description of the local circumstances of Egypt, but only in the

delineation of this development itself, the Alexandrian scholarship

and its continuation under the Roman government are too remarkable

a phenomenon not to have its general position touched on in this

connection. We have already observed (p. 126) that the blending of

the Oriental and the Hellenic intellectual world was accomplished

pre-eminently in Egypt alongside of Syria; and if the new faith which

was to conquer the West issued from Syria, the science homogeneous

with it--that philosophy which, alongside of and beyond the human

mind, acknowledges and proclaims the supra-mundane God and the divine

revelation--came pre-eminently from Egypt: probably already the new

Pythagoreanism, certainly the philosophic Neo-Judaism--of which we

have formerly spoken (p. 170)--as well as the new Platonism, whose

founder, the Egyptian Plotinus, was likewise already mentioned (p.

126). Upon this interpenetration of Hellenic and Oriental elements,

that was carried out especially in Alexandria, mainly depends the fact,

that--as falls to be set forth more fully in surveying the state of

things in Italy--the Hellenism there in the earlier imperial period

bears pre-eminently an Egyptian form. As the old-new wisdoms associated

with Pythagoras, Moses, Plato, penetrated from Alexandria into

Italy, so Isis and her belongings played the first part in the easy,

fashionable piety, which the Roman poets of the Augustan age and the

Pompeian temples from that of Claudius exhibit to us. Art as practised

in Egypt prevails in the Campanian frescoes of the same epoch, as in

the Tiburtine villa of Hadrian. In keeping with this is the position

which Alexandrian erudition occupies in the intellectual life of the

imperial period. Outwardly it is based on the care of the state for

intellectual interests, and would with more warrant link itself to the

name of Alexander than to that of Alexandria; it is the realisation of

the thought that in a certain stage of civilisation art and science

must be supported and promoted by the authority and the resources

of the state, the consistent sequel of the brilliant moment in the

world’s history which placed Alexander and Aristotle side by side. It

is not our intention here to inquire how in this mighty conception

truth and error, the injuring and elevating of the intellectual life,

became mingled, nor is the scanty after-bloom of the divine singing

and of the high thinking of the free Hellenes to be once more placed

side by side with the rank and yet also noble produce of the later

collecting, investigating, and arranging. If the institutions which

sprang from this thought could not, or, what was worse, could only

apparently, renew to the Greek nation what was irrecoverably lost, they

granted to it on the still free arena of the intellectual world the

only possible compensation, and that, too, a glorious one. For us the

local circumstances are above all to be taken into account. Artificial

gardens are in some measure independent of the soil, and it is not

otherwise with these scientific institutions; only that they from

their nature are directed towards the courts. Material support may be

imparted to them otherwise; but more important than this is the favour

of the highest circles, which swells their sails, and the connections,

which, meeting together in the great centres, replenish and extend

these circles of science. In the better time of the monarchies of

Alexander there were as many such centres as there were states, and

that of the Lagid court was only the most highly-esteemed among them.

The Roman republic had brought the others one after another into its

power, and had set aside with the courts also the scientific institutes

and circles belonging to them. The fact that the future Augustus,

when he did away with the last of these courts, allowed the learned

institutes connected with it to subsist, is a genuine, and not the

worst, indication of the changed times. The more energetic and higher

Philhellenism of the government of the Caesars was distinguished to

its advantage from that of the republic by the fact that it not merely

allowed Greek literati to earn money in Rome, but viewed and treated

the great guardianship of Greek science as a part of the sovereignty

of Alexander. No doubt, as in this regeneration of the empire as a

whole, the building-plan was grander than the building. The royally

patented and pensioned Muses, whom the Lagids had called to Alexandria,

did not disdain to accept the like payments also from the Romans;

and the imperial munificence was not inferior to the earlier regal.

The fund for the library of Alexandria and the fund for free places

for philosophers, poets, physicians, and scholars of all sorts,[243]

as well as the immunities granted to these, were not diminished

by Augustus, and were increased by the emperor Claudius--with the

injunction, indeed, that the new Claudian academicians should have the

Greek historical works of the singular founder publicly read year by

year in their sittings. With the first library in the world Alexandria

retained at the same time, through the whole imperial period, a

certain primacy of scientific work, until Islam burnt the library and

killed the ancient civilisation. It was not merely the opportunity

thus offered, but at the same time the old tradition and turn of mind

of these Hellenes, which preserved for the city that precedence, as

indeed among the scholars the native Alexandrians are prominent in

number and importance. In this epoch numerous and respectable labours

of erudition, particularly philological and physical, proceeded

from the circle of the _savants_ “of the Museum,” as they entitled

themselves, like the Parisians “of the Institute”; but the literary

importance, which the Alexandrian and the Pergamene court-science

and court-art had in the better epoch of Hellenism for the whole

Hellenic and Hellenising world, was never even remotely attached to

the Romano-Alexandrian. The cause lay not in the want of talents or in

other accidents, least of all in the fact that places in the Museum

were bestowed by the emperor sometimes according to gifts and always

according to favour, and the government dealt with them quite as with

the horse of the knight and the posts of officials of the household;

the case was not otherwise at the older courts. Court-philosophers

and court-poets remained in Alexandria, but not the court; it was

here very clearly apparent that the main matter was not pensions and

rewards, but the contact--quickening for both sides--of great political

and great scientific work. The latter doubtless presented itself for

the new monarchy and brought its consequences with it; but the place

for it was not Alexandria: this bloom of political development justly

belonged to the Latins and to the Latin capital. The Augustan poetry

and Augustan science attained, under similar circumstances, to a similar important and pleasing development with that attained by the Hellenistic at the court of the Pergamenes and the earlier Ptolemies.