ALEXANDRIA.
Internal administration of the Ptolemies.--Industry of the people.--Its
happy effects.--Idleness the parent of vice.--An idle aristocracy
generally vicious.--Degradation and vice.--Employment a cure for
both.--Greatness of Alexandria.--Situation of its port.--Warehouses and
granaries.--Business of the port.--Scenes within the city.--The natives
protected in their industry.--Public edifices.--The light-house.--Fame
of the light-house.--Its conspicuous position.--Mode of lighting the
tower.--Modern method--The architect of the Pharos.--His ingenious
stratagem.--Ruins of the Pharos.--The Alexandrian library.--Immense
magnitude of the library.--The Serapion.--The Serapis of Egypt.--The
Serapis of Greece.--Ptolemy's dream.--Importance of the
statue.--Ptolemy's proposal to the King of Sinope.--His ultimate
success.--Mode of obtaining books.--The Jewish Scriptures.--Seclusion of
the Jews.--Interest felt in their Scriptures.--Jewish slaves in
Egypt.--Ptolemy's designs.--Ptolemy liberates the slaves.--Their ransom
paid.--Ptolemy's success.--The Septuagint.--Early copies of the
Septuagint.--Present copies.--Various other plans of the
Ptolemies.--Means of raising money.--Heavy taxes.--Poverty of the
people.--Ancient and modern capitals.--Liberality of the
Ptolemies.--Splendor and renown of Alexandria.--Her great rival.
It must not be imagined by the reader that the scenes of vicious
indulgence, and reckless cruelty and crime, which were exhibited with
such dreadful frequency, and carried to such an enormous excess in the
palaces of the Egyptian kings, prevailed to the same extent throughout
the mass of the community during the period of their reign. The internal
administration of government, and the institutions by which the
industrial pursuits of the mass of the people were regulated, and peace
and order preserved, and justice enforced between man and man, were all
this time in the hands of men well qualified, on the whole, for the
trusts committed to their charge, and in a good degree faithful in the
performance of their duties; and thus the ordinary affairs of
government, and the general routine of domestic and social life, went
on, notwithstanding the profligacy of the kings, in a course of very
tolerable peace, prosperity, and happiness. During every one of the
three hundred years over which the history of the Ptolemies extends, the
whole length and breadth of the land of Egypt exhibited, with
comparatively few interruptions, one wide-spread scene of busy industry.
The inundations came at their appointed season, and then regularly
retired. The boundless fields which the waters had fertilized were then
every where tilled. The lands were plowed; the seed was sown; the canals
and water-courses, which ramified from the river in every direction over
the ground, were opened or closed, as the case required, to regulate the
irrigation. The inhabitants were busy, and, consequently, they were
virtuous. And as the sky of Egypt is seldom or never darkened by clouds
and storms, the scene presented to the eye the same unchanging aspect of
smiling verdure and beauty, day after day, and month after month, until
the ripened grain was gathered into the store-houses, and the land was
cleared for another inundation.
We say that the people were virtuous because they were busy; for there
is no principle of political economy more fully established than that
vice in the social state is the incident and symptom of idleness. It
prevails always in those classes of every great population who are
either released by the possession of fixed and unchangeable wealth from
the necessity, or excluded by their poverty and degradation from the
advantage, of useful employment. Wealth that is free, and subject to its
possessor's control, so that he can, if he will, occupy himself in the
management of it, while it sometimes may make individuals vicious, does
not generally corrupt classes of men, for it does not make them idle.
But wherever the institutions of a country are such as to create an
aristocratic class, whose incomes depend on entailed estates, or on
fixed and permanent annuities, so that the capital on which they live
can not afford them any mental occupation, they are doomed necessarily
to inaction and idleness. Vicious pleasures and indulgences are, with
such a class as a whole, the inevitable result; for the innocent
enjoyments of man are planned and designed by the Author of Nature only
for the intervals of rest and repose in a life of activity. They are
always found wholly insufficient to satisfy one who makes pleasure the
whole end and aim of his being.
In the same manner, if, either from the influence of the social
institutions of a country, or from the operation of natural causes which
human power is unable to control, there is a class of men too low, and
degraded, and miserable to be reached by the ordinary inducements to
daily toil, so certain are they to grow corrupt and depraved, that
degradation has become in all languages a term almost synonymous with
vice. There are many exceptions, it is true, to these general laws. Many
active men are very wicked; and there have been frequent instances of
the most exalted virtue among nobles and kings. Still, as a general
law, it is unquestionably true that vice is the incident of idleness;
and the sphere of vice, therefore, is at the top and at the bottom of
society--those being the regions in which idleness reigns. The great
remedy, too, for vice is employment. To make a community virtuous, it is
essential that all ranks and gradations of it, from the highest to the
lowest, should have something to do.
In accordance with these principles, we observe that, while the most
extreme and abominable wickedness seemed to hold continual and absolute
sway in the palaces of the Ptolemies, and among the nobles of their
courts, the working ministers of state, and the men on whom the actual
governmental functions devolved, discharged their duties with wisdom and
fidelity, and throughout all the ordinary ranks and gradations of
society there prevailed generally a very considerable degree of
industry, prosperity and happiness. This prosperity prevailed not only
in the rural districts of the Delta and along the valley of the Nile,
but also among the merchants, and navigators, and artisans of
Alexandria.
Alexandria became, in fact, very soon after it was founded, a very great
and busy city. Many things conspired to make it at once a great
commercial emporium. In the first place, it was the depôt of export for
all the surplus grain and other agricultural produce which was raised in
such abundance along the Egyptian valley. This produce was brought down
in boats to the upper point of the Delta, where the branches of the
river divided, and thence down the Canopic branch to the city. The city
was not, in fact, situated directly upon this branch, but upon a narrow
tongue of land, at a little distance from it, near the sea. It was not
easy to enter the channel directly, on account of the bars and
sand-banks at its mouth, produced by the eternal conflict between the
waters of the river and the surges of the sea. The water was deep,
however, as Alexander's engineers had discovered, at the place where the
city was built, and, by establishing the port there, and then cutting a
canal across to the Nile, they were enabled to bring the river and the
sea at once into easy communication.
The produce of the valley was thus brought down the river and through
the canal to the city. Here immense warehouses and granaries were
erected for its reception, that it might be safely preserved until the
ships that came into the port were ready to take it away. These ships
came from Syria, from all the coasts of Asia Minor, from Greece, and
from Rome. They brought the agricultural productions of their own
countries, as well as articles of manufacture of various kinds; these
they sold to the merchants of Alexandria, and purchased the productions
of Egypt in return.
The port of Alexandria presented thus a constant picture of life and
animation. Merchant ships were continually coming and going, or lying at
anchor in the roadstead. Seamen were hoisting sails, or raising anchors,
or rowing their capacious galleys through the water, singing, as they
pulled, to the motion of the oars. Within the city there was the same
ceaseless activity. Here groups of men were unloading the canal boats
which had arrived from the river. There porters were transporting bales
of merchandise or sacks of grain from a warehouse to a pier, or from one
landing to another. The occasional parading of the king's guards, or the
arrival and departure of ships of war to land or to take away bodies of
armed men, were occurrences that sometimes intervened to interrupt, or
as perhaps the people then would have said, to adorn this scene of
useful industry; and now and then, for a brief period, these peaceful
vocations would be wholly suspended and set aside by a revolt or by a
civil war, waged by rival brothers against each other, or instigated by
the conflicting claims of a mother and son. These interruptions,
however, were comparatively few, and, in ordinary cases, not of long
continuance. It was for the interest of all branches of the royal line
to do as little injury as possible to the commercial and agricultural
operations of the realm. In fact, it was on the prosperity of those
operations that the revenues depended. The rulers were well aware of
this, and so, however implacably two rival princes may have hated one
another, and however desperately each party may have struggled to
destroy all active combatants whom they should find in arms against
them, they were both under every possible inducement to spare the
private property and the lives of the peaceful population. This
population, in fact, engaged thus in profitable industry, constituted,
with the avails of their labors, the very estate for which the
combatants were contending.
Seeing the subject in this light, the Egyptian sovereigns, especially
Alexander and the earlier Ptolemies, made every effort in their power to
promote the commercial greatness of Alexandria. They built palaces, it
is true, but they also built warehouses.
One of the most expensive and celebrated of all the edifices that they
reared was the light-house which has been already alluded to. This
light-house was a lofty tower, built of white marble. It was situated
upon the island of Pharos, opposite to the city, and at some distance
from it. There was a sort of isthmus of shoals and sand-bars connecting
the island with the shore. Over these shallows a pier or causeway was
built, which finally became a broad and inhabited neck. The principal
part of the ancient city, however, was on the main land.
The curvature of the earth requires that a light-house on a coast should
have a considerable elevation, otherwise its summit would not appear
above the horizon, unless the mariner were very near. To attain this
elevation, the architects usually take advantage of some hill or cliff,
or rocky eminence near the shore. There was, however, no opportunity to
do this at Pharos; for the island was, like the main land, level and
low. The requisite elevation could only be attained, therefore, by the
masonry of an edifice, and the blocks of marble necessary for the work
had to be brought from a great distance. The Alexandrian light-house was
reared in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second monarch in the
line. No pains or expense were spared in its construction. The edifice,
when completed, was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. It
was indebted for its fame, however, in some degree, undoubtedly to the
conspicuousness of its situation, rising, as it did, at the entrance of
the greatest commercial emporium of its time, and standing there, like a
pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, to attract the welcome gaze
of every wandering mariner whose ship came within its horizon, and to
awaken his gratitude by tendering him its guidance and dispelling his
fears.
The light at the top of the tower was produced by a fire, made of such
combustibles as would emit the brightest flame. This fire burned slowly
through the day, and then was kindled up anew when the sun went down,
and was continually replenished through the night with fresh supplies of
fuel. In modern times, a much more convenient and economical mode is
adopted to produce the requisite illumination. A great blazing lamp
burns brilliantly in the center of the lantern of the tower, and all
that part of the radiation from the flame which would naturally have
beamed upward, or downward, or laterally, or back toward the land, is so
turned by a curious system of reflectors and polyzonal lenses, most
ingeniously contrived and very exactly adjusted, as to be thrown forward
in one broad and thin, but brilliant sheet of light, which shoots out
where its radiance is needed, over the surface of the sea. Before these
inventions were perfected, far the largest portion of the light emitted
by the illumination of light-house towers streamed away wastefully in
landward directions, or was lost among the stars.
Of course, the glory of erecting such an edifice as the Pharos of
Alexandria, and of maintaining it in the performance of its functions,
was very great; the question might, however, very naturally arise
whether this glory was justly due to the architect through whose
scientific skill the work was actually accomplished, or to the monarch
by whose power and resources the architect was sustained. The name of
the architect was Sostratus. He was a Greek. The monarch was, as has
already been stated, the second Ptolemy, called commonly Ptolemy
Philadelphus. Ptolemy ordered that, in completing the tower, a marble
tablet should be built into the wall, at a suitable place near the
summit, and that a proper inscription should be carved upon it, with his
name as the builder of the edifice conspicuous thereon. Sostratus
preferred inserting his own name. He accordingly made the tablet and set
it in its place. He cut the inscription upon the face of it, in Greek
characters, with his own name as the author of the work. He did this
secretly, and then covered the face of the tablet with an artificial
composition, made with lime, to imitate the natural surface of the
stone. On this outer surface he cut a new inscription, in which he
inserted the name of the king. In process of time the lime moldered
away, the king's inscription disappeared, and his own, which
thenceforward continued as long as the building endured, came out to
view.
The Pharos was said to have been four hundred feet high. It was famed
throughout the world for many centuries; nothing, however, remains of it
now but a heap of useless and unmeaning ruins.
Besides the light that beamed from the summit of this lofty tower, there
was another center of radiance and illumination in ancient Alexandria,
which was in some respects still more conspicuous and renowned, namely,
an immense library and museum established and maintained by the
Ptolemies. The Museum, which was first established, was not, as its name
might now imply, a collection of curiosities, but an institution of
learning, consisting of a body of learned men, who devoted their time to
philosophical and scientific pursuits. The institution was richly
endowed, and magnificent buildings were erected for its use. The king
who established it began immediately to make a collection of books for
the use of the members of the institution. This was attended with great
expense, as every book that was added to the collection required to be
transcribed with a pen on parchment or papyrus with infinite labor and
care. Great numbers of scribes were constantly employed upon this work
at the Museum. The kings who were most interested in forming this
library would seize the books that were possessed by individual
scholars, or that were deposited in the various cities of their
dominions, and then, causing beautiful copies of them to be made by the
scribes of the Museum, they would retain the originals for the great
Alexandrian library, and give the copies to the men or the cities that
had been thus despoiled. In the same manner they would borrow, as they
called it, from all travelers who visited Egypt, any valuable books
which they might have in their possession, and, retaining the originals,
give them back copies instead.
In process of time the library increased to four hundred thousand
volumes. There was then no longer any room in the buildings of the
Museum for further additions. There was, however, in another part of the
city, a great temple called the Serapion. This temple was a very
magnificent edifice, or, rather, group of edifices, dedicated to the god
Serapis. The origin and history of this temple were very remarkable. The
legend was this:
It seems that one of the ancient and long-venerated gods of the
Egyptians was a deity named Serapis. He had been, among other
divinities, the object of Egyptian adoration ages before Alexandria was
built or the Ptolemies reigned. There was also, by a curious
coincidence, a statue of the same name at a great commercial town named
Sinope, which was built upon the extremity of a promontory which
projected from Asia Minor into the Euxine Sea. Sinope was, in some
sense, the Alexandria of the north, being the center and seat of a great
portion of the commerce of that quarter of the world.
The Serapis of Sinope was considered as the protecting deity of seamen,
and the navigators who came and went to and from the city made
sacrifices to him, and offered him oblations and prayers, believing that
they were, in a great measure, dependent upon some mysterious and
inscrutable power which he exercised for their safety in storms. They
carried the knowledge of his name, and tales of his imaginary
interpositions, to all the places that they visited; and thus the fame
of the god became extended, first, to all the coasts of the Euxine Sea,
and subsequently to distant provinces and kingdoms. The Serapis of
Sinope began to be considered every where as the tutelar god of seamen.
Accordingly, when the first of the Ptolemies was forming his various
plans for adorning and aggrandizing Alexandria, he received, he said,
one night, a divine intimation in a dream that he was to obtain the
statue of Serapis from Sinope, and set it up in Alexandria, in a
suitable temple which he was in the mean time to erect in honor of the
god. It is obvious that very great advantages to the city would result
from the accomplishment of this design. In the first place, a temple to
the god Serapis would be a new distinction for it in the minds of the
rural population, who would undoubtedly suppose that the deity honored
by it was their own ancient god. Then the whole maritime and nautical
interest of the world, which had been, accustomed to adore the god of
Sinope, would turn to Alexandria as the great center of religious
attraction, if their venerated idol could be carried and placed in a new
and magnificent temple built expressly for him there. Alexandria could
never be the chief naval port and station of the world, unless it
contained the sanctuary and shrine of the god of seamen.
Ptolemy sent accordingly to the King of Sinope and proposed to purchase
the idol. The embassage was, however, unsuccessful. The king refused to
give up the god. The negotiations were continued for two years, but all
in vain. At length, on account of some failure in the regular course of
the seasons on that coast, there was a famine there, which became
finally so severe that the people of the city were induced to consent to
give up their deity to the Egyptians in exchange for a supply of corn.
Ptolemy sent the corn and received the idol. He then built the temple,
which, when finished, surpassed in grandeur and magnificence almost
every sacred structure in the world.
It was in this temple that the successive additions to the Alexandrian
library were deposited, when the apartments of the Museum became full.
In the end there were four hundred thousand rolls or volumes in the
Museum, and three hundred thousand in the Serapion. The former was
called the parent library, and the latter, being, as it were, the
offspring of the first, was called the daughter.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, who interested himself very greatly in collecting
this library, wished to make it a complete collection of all the books
in the world. He employed scholars to read and study, and travelers to
make extensive tours, for the purpose of learning what books existed
among all the surrounding nations; and, when he learned of their
existence, he spared no pains or expense in attempting to procure either
the originals themselves, or the most perfect and authentic copies of
them. He sent to Athens and obtained the works of the most celebrated
Greek historians, and then causing, as in other cases, most beautiful
transcripts to be made, he sent the transcripts back to Athens, and a
very large sum of money with them as an equivalent for the difference of
value between originals and copies in such an exchange.
In the course of the inquiries which Ptolemy made into the literature of
the surrounding nations, in his search for accessions to his library, he
heard that the Jews had certain sacred writings in their temple at
Jerusalem, comprising a minute and extremely interesting history of
their nation from the earliest periods, and also many other books of
sacred prophecy and poetry. These books, which were, in fact, the Hebrew
Scriptures of the Old Testament, were then wholly unknown to all nations
except the Jews, and among the Jews were known only to priests and
scholars. They were kept sacred at Jerusalem. The Jews would have
considered them as profaned in being exhibited to the view of pagan
nations. In fact, the learned men of other countries would not have been
able to read them; for the Jews secluded themselves so closely from the
rest of mankind, that their language was, in that age, scarcely ever
heard beyond the confines of Judea and Galilee.
Ptolemy very naturally thought that a copy of these sacred books would
be a great acquisition to his library. They constituted, in fact, the
whole literature of a nation which was, in some respects, the most
extraordinary that ever existed on the globe. Ptolemy conceived the
idea, also, of not only adding to his library a copy of these writings
in the original Hebrew, but of causing a translation of them to be made
into Greek, so that they might easily be read by the Greek and Roman
scholars who were drawn in great numbers to his capital by the libraries
and the learned institutions which he had established there. The first
thing to be effected, however, in accomplishing either of these plans,
was to obtain the consent of the Jewish authorities. They would probably
object to giving up any copy of their sacred writings at all.
There was one circumstance which led Ptolemy to imagine that the Jews
would, at that time particularly, be averse to granting any request of
such a nature coming from an Egyptian king, and that was, that during
certain wars which had taken place in previous reigns, a considerable
number of prisoners had been taken by the Egyptians, and had been
brought to Egypt as captives, where they had been sold to the
inhabitants, and were now scattered over the land as slaves. They were
employed as servile laborers in tilling the fields, or in turning
enormous wheels to pump up water from the Nile. The masters of these
hapless bondmen conceived, like other slave-holders, that they had a
right of property in their slaves. This was in some respects true, since
they had bought them of the government at the close of the war for a
consideration; and though they obviously derived from this circumstance
no valid proprietary right or claim as against the men personally, it
certainly would seem that it gave them a just claim against the
government of whom they bought, in case of subsequent manumission.
Ptolemy or his minister, for it can not now be known who was the real
actor in these transactions, determined on liberating these slaves and
sending them back to their native land, as a means of propitiating the
Jews and inclining them to listen favorably to the request which he was
about to prefer for a copy of their sacred writings. He, however, paid
to those who held the captives a very liberal sum for ransom. The
ancient historians, who never allow the interest of their narratives to
suffer for want of a proper amplification on their part of the scale on
which the deeds which they record were performed, say that the number of
slaves liberated on this occasion was a hundred and twenty thousand, and
the sum paid for them, as compensation to the owners, was six hundred
talents, equal to six hundred thousand dollars.[1]
[Footnote 1: It will be sufficiently accurate for the general
reader of history to consider the Greek talent, referred to in
such transactions as these, as equal in English money to two
hundred and fifty pounds, in American to a thousand dollars.
It is curious to observe that, large as the total was that was
paid for the liberation of these slaves, the amount paid for
each individual was, after all, only a sum equal to about five
dollars.]
And yet this was only a preliminary expense to pave the way for the
acquisition of a single series of books, to add to the variety of the
immense collection.
After the liberation and return of the captives, Ptolemy sent a splendid
embassage to Jerusalem, with very respectful letters to the high priest,
and with very magnificent presents. The embassadors were received with
the highest honors. The request of Ptolemy that he should be allowed to
take a copy of the sacred books for his library was very readily
granted. The priests caused copies to be made of all the sacred
writings. These copies were executed in the most magnificent style, and
were splendidly illuminated with letters of gold. The Jewish government
also, at Ptolemy's request, designated a company of Hebrew scholars, six
from each tribe--men learned in both the Greek and Hebrew languages--to
proceed to Alexandria, and there, at the Museum, to make a careful
translation of the Hebrew books into Greek. As there were twelve tribes,
and six translators chosen from each, there were seventy-two translators
in all. They made their translation, and it was called the _Septuagint_,
from the Latin _septuaginta duo_, which means seventy-two.
Although out of Judea there was no feeling of reverence for these Hebrew
Scriptures as books of divine authority, there was still a strong
interest felt in them as very entertaining and curious works of history,
by all the Greek and Roman scholars who frequented Alexandria to study
at the Museum. Copies were accordingly made of the Septuagint
translation, and were taken to other countries; and there, in process of
time, copies of the copies were made, until at length the work became
extensively circulated throughout the whole learned world. When,
finally, Christianity became extended over the Roman empire, the priests
and monks looked with even a stronger interest than the ancient scholars
had felt upon this early translation of so important a portion of the
sacred Scriptures. They made new copies for abbeys, monasteries, and
colleges; and when, at length, the art of printing was discovered, this
work was one of the first on which the magic power of typography was
tried. The original manuscript made by the scribes of the seventy-two,
and all the early transcripts which were made from it, have long since
been lost or destroyed; but, instead of them, we have now hundreds of
thousands of copies in compact printed volumes, scattered among the
public and private libraries of Christendom. In fact, now, after the
lapse of two thousand years, a copy of Ptolemy's Septuagint may be
obtained of any considerable bookseller in any country of the civilized
world; and though it required a national embassage, and an expenditure,
if the accounts are true, of more than a million of dollars, originally
to obtain it, it may be procured without difficulty now by two days'
wages of an ordinary laborer.
Besides the building of the Pharos, the Museum, and the Temple of
Serapis, the early Ptolemies formed and executed a great many other
plans tending to the same ends which the erection of these splendid
edifices was designed to secure, namely, to concentrate in Alexandria
all possible means of attraction, commercial, literary, and religious,
so as to make the city the great center of interest, and the common
resort for all mankind. They raised immense revenues for these and other
purposes by taxing heavily the whole agricultural produce of the valley
of the Nile. The inundations, by the boundless fertility which they
annually produced, supplied the royal treasuries. Thus the Abyssinian
rains at the sources of the Nile built the Pharos at its mouth, and
endowed the Alexandrian library.
The taxes laid upon the people of Egypt to supply the Ptolemies with
funds were, in fact, so heavy, that only the bare means of subsistence
were left to the mass of the agricultural population. In admiring the
greatness and glory of the city, therefore, we must remember that there
was a gloomy counterpart to its splendor in the very extended
destitution and poverty to which the mass of the people were everywhere
doomed. They lived in hamlets of wretched huts along the banks of the
river, in order that the capital might be splendidly adorned with
temples and palaces. They passed their lives in darkness and ignorance,
that seven hundred thousand volumes of expensive manuscripts might be
enrolled at the Museum for the use of foreign philosophers and scholars.
The policy of the Ptolemies was, perhaps, on the whole, the best, for
the general advancement and ultimate welfare of mankind, which could
have been pursued in the age in which they lived and acted; but, in
applauding the results which they attained, we must not wholly forget
the cost which they incurred in attaining them. At the same cost, we
could, at the present day, far surpass them. If the people of the United
States will surrender the comforts and conveniences which they
individually enjoy--if the farmers scattered in their comfortable homes
on the hill-sides and plains throughout the land will give up their
houses, their furniture, their carpets, their books, and the privileges
of their children, and then--withholding from the produce of their
annual toil only a sufficient reservation to sustain them and their
families through the year, in a life like that of a beast of burden,
spent in some miserable and naked hovel--send the rest to some
hereditary sovereign residing upon the Atlantic sea-board, that he may
build with the proceeds a splendid capital, they may have an Alexandria
now that will infinitely exceed the ancient city of the Ptolemies in
splendor and renown. The nation, too, would, in such a case, pay for its
metropolis the same price, precisely, that the ancient Egyptians paid
for theirs.
The Ptolemies expended the revenues which they raised by this taxation
mainly in a very liberal and enlightened manner, for the accomplishment
of the purposes which they had in view. The building of the Pharos, the
removal of the statue of Serapis, and the endowment of the Museum and
the library were great conceptions, and they were carried into effect in
the most complete and perfect manner. All the other operations which
they devised and executed for the extension and aggrandizement of the
city were conceived and executed in the same spirit of scientific and
enlightened liberality. Streets were opened; the most splendid palaces
were built; docks, piers and breakwaters were constructed, and
fortresses and towers were armed and garrisoned. Then every means was
employed to attract to the city a great concourse from all the most
highly-civilized nations then existing. The highest inducements were
offered to merchants, mechanics, and artisans to make the city their
abode. Poets, painters, sculptors, and scholars of every nation and
degree were made welcome, and every facility was afforded them for the
prosecution of their various pursuits. These plans were all eminently
successful. Alexandria rose rapidly to the highest consideration and
importance; and, at the time when Cleopatra--born to preside over this
scene of magnificence and splendor--came upon the stage, the city had
but one rival in the world. That rival was Rome.