Transcribed from the 1902 Macmillan and Co. “Historical Lectures and
Essays” edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. {3}
PREFACE.
I SHOULD not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine such a
subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book. The subject
was chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered. Still
less should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how
fragmentary and crude they are. They were printed at the special request
of my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed to
publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or
sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear)
would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless, it
seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could see
the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right method or
sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything which I have
ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness and ambition, when
the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the universe, must needs
know everything, or rather know about everything, at once and on the
spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years, to complain of
Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time teaches the student,
year by year, what is really required for an understanding of the objects
with which he meets, he begins to find that his University, in as far as
he has really received her teaching into himself, has given him, in her
criticism, her mathematics, above all, in Plato, something which all the
popular knowledge, the lectures and institutions of the day, and even
good books themselves, cannot give, a boon more precious than learning;
namely, the art of learning. That instead of casting into his lazy lap
treasures which he would not have known how to use, she has taught him to
mine for them himself; and has by her wise refusal to gratify his
intellectual greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be the
stronger to hunt and till for his own subsistence; and thus, the deeper
he drinks, in after years, at fountains wisely forbidden to him while he
was a Cambridge student, and sees his old companions growing up into
sound-headed and sound-hearted practical men, liberal and expansive, and
yet with a firm standing-ground for thought and action, he learns to
complain less and less of Cambridge studies, and more and more of that
conceit and haste of his own, which kept him from reaping the full
advantage of her training.
These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether crude and fragmentary—how,
indeed, could they be otherwise, dealing with so vast a subject, and so
long a period of time? They are meant neither as Essays nor as Orations,
but simply as a collection of hints to those who may wish to work out the
subject for themselves; and, I trust, as giving some glimpses of a
central idea, in the light of which the spiritual history of Alexandria,
and perhaps of other countries also, may be seen to have in itself a
coherence and organic method.
I was of course compelled, by the circumstances under which these
Lectures were delivered, to keep clear of all points which are commonly
called “controversial.” I cannot but feel that this was a gain, rather
than a loss; because it forced me, if I wished to give any interpretation
at all of Alexandrian thought, any Theodicy at all of her fate, to refer
to laws which I cannot but believe to be deeper, wider, more truly
eternal than the points which cause most of our modern controversies,
either theological or political; laws which will, I cannot but believe
also, reassert themselves, and have to be reasserted by all wise
teachers, very soon indeed, and it may be under most novel embodiments,
but without any change in their eternal spirit.
For I may say, I hope, now (what if said ten years ago would have only
excited laughter), that I cannot but subscribe to the opinion of the many
wise men who believe that Europe, and England as an integral part
thereof, is on the eve of a revolution, spiritual and political, as vast
and awful as that which took place at the Reformation; and that,
beneficial as that revolution will doubtless be to the destinies of
mankind in general, it depends upon the wisdom and courage of each nation
individually, whether that great deluge shall issue, as the Reformation
did, in a fresh outgrowth of European nobleness and strength or usher in,
after pitiable confusions and sorrows, a second Byzantine age of
stereotyped effeminacy and imbecility. For I have as little sympathy
with those who prate so loudly of the progress of the species, and the
advent of I know-not-what Cockaigne of universal peace and plenty, as I
have with those who believe on the strength of “unfulfilled prophecy,”
the downfall of Christianity, and the end of the human race to be at
hand. Nevertheless, one may well believe that prophecy will be fulfilled
in this great crisis, as it is in every great crisis, although one be
unable to conceive by what method of symbolism the drying up of the
Euphrates can be twisted to signify the fall of Constantinople: and one
can well believe that a day of judgment is at hand, in which for every
nation and institution, the wheat will be sifted out and gathered into
God’s garner, for the use of future generations, and the chaff burnt up
with that fire unquenchable which will try every man’s work, without
being of opinion that after a few more years are over, the great majority
of the human race will be consigned hopelessly to never-ending torments.
If prophecy be indeed a divine message to man; if it be anything but a
cabbala, useless either to the simple-minded or to the logical, intended
only for the plaything of a few devout fancies, it must declare the
unchangeable laws by which the unchangeable God is governing, and has
always governed, the human race; and therefore only by understanding what
has happened, can we understand what will happen; only by understanding
history, can we understand prophecy; and that not merely by picking
out—too often arbitrarily and unfairly—a few names and dates from the
records of all the ages, but by trying to discover its organic laws, and
the causes which produce in nations, creeds, and systems, health and
disease, growth, change, decay and death. If, in one small corner of
this vast field, I shall have thrown a single ray of light upon these
subjects—if I shall have done anything in these pages towards
illustrating the pathology of a single people, I shall believe that I
have done better service to the Catholic Faith and the Scriptures, than
if I did really “know the times and the seasons, which the Father has
kept in His own hand.” For by the former act I may have helped to make
some one man more prudent and brave to see and to do what God requires of
him; by the latter I could only add to that paralysis of superstitious
fear, which is already but too common among us, and but too likely to
hinder us from doing our duty manfully against our real foes, whether it
be pestilence at home or tyranny abroad.
These last words lead me to another subject, on which I am bound to say a
few words. I have, at the end of these Lectures, made some allusion to
the present war. To have entered further into political questions would
have been improper in the place where those Lectures were delivered: but
I cannot refrain from saying here something more on this matter; and
that, first, because all political questions have their real root in
moral and spiritual ones, and not (as too many fancy) in questions merely
relating to the balance of power or commercial economy, and are (the
world being under the guidance of a spiritual, and not a physical Being)
finally decided on those spiritual grounds, and according to the just
laws of the kingdom of God; and, therefore, the future political
horoscope of the East depends entirely on the present spiritual state of
its inhabitants, and of us who have (and rightly) taken up their cause;
in short, on many of those questions on which I have touched in these
Lectures: and next, because I feel bound, in justice to myself, to guard
against any mistake about my meaning or supposition that I consider the
Turkish empire a righteous thing, or one likely to stand much longer on
the face of God’s earth.
The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me an altogether
unrighteous and worthless thing. It stands no longer upon the assertion
of the great truth of Islam, but on the merest brute force and
oppression. It has long since lost the only excuse which one race can
have for holding another in subjection; that which we have for taking on
ourselves the tutelage of the Hindoos, and which Rome had for its
tutelage of the Syrians and Egyptians; namely, the governing with
tolerable justice those who cannot govern themselves, and making them
better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to law.
I do not know when this excuse is a sufficient one. God showed that it
was so for several centuries in the case of the Romans; God will show
whether it is in the case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that the
Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by the
patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world, has
become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government.
As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the
regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant
savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more
is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise
of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by
more perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence. History gives
no instance, it seems to me, of either case; and if our attempt to
regenerate Greece by freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it
seems to me, would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish race.
For what can be done with a people which has lost the one great quality
which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill? Let any one
read the accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, when they were the tutors and models of all Europe
in the art of war, and then consider the fact that those very armies
require now to be officered by foreign adventurers, in order to make them
capable of even keeping together, and let him ask himself seriously,
whether such a fall can ever be recovered. When, in the age of
Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies had fallen
into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be led by
Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and Narses
the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; as it will come
soon to Turkey.
But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it must not fall by our
treachery. Its sins will surely be avenged upon it: but wrong must not
avenge wrong, or the penalty is only passed on from one sinner to
another. Whatsoever element of good is left in the Turk, to that we must
appeal as our only means, if not of saving him, still of helping him to a
quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race of successors. He
is said (I know not how truly) to have one virtue left; that of
faithfulness to his word. Only by showing him that we too abhor
treachery and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a safe
standing-ground in our own peril. And this we have done; and for this we
shall be rewarded. But this is surely not all our duty. Even if we
should be able to make the civil and religious freedom of the Eastern
Christians the price of our assistance to the Mussulman, the struggle
will not be over; for Russia will still be what she has always been, and
the northern Anarch will be checked, only to return to the contest with
fiercer lust of aggrandisement, to enact the part of a new Macedon,
against a new Greece, divided, not united, by the treacherous bond of
that balance of power, which is but war under the guise of peace. Europe
needs a holier and more spiritual, and therefore a stronger union, than
can be given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause of order.
She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan age united the free states of
Europe against the Anarch of Spain, and delivered the Western nations
from a rising world-tyranny, which promised to be even more hideous than
the elder one of Rome. If, as then, England shall proclaim herself the
champion of freedom by acts, and not by words and paper, she may, as she
did then, defy the rulers of the darkness of this world, for the God of
Light will be with her. But, as yet, it is impossible to look without
sad forebodings upon the destiny of a war, begun upon the express
understanding that evil shall be left triumphant throughout Europe,
wheresoever that evil does not seem, to our own selfish
short-sightedness, to threaten us with immediate danger; with promises,
that under the hollow name of the Cause of Order—and that promise made by
a revolutionary Anarch—the wrongs of Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden,
shall remain unredressed, and that Prussia and Austria, two tyrannies,
the one far more false and hypocritical, the other even more rotten than
that of Turkey, shall, if they will but observe a hollow and uncertain
neutrality (for who can trust the liar and the oppressor?)—be allowed not
only to keep their ill-gotten spoils, but even now to play into the hands
of our foe, by guarding his Polish frontier for him, and keeping down the
victims of his cruelty, under pretence of keeping down those of their
own.
It is true, the alternative is an awful one; one from which statesmen and
nations may well shrink: but it is a question, whether that alternative
may not be forced upon us sooner or later, whether we must not from the
first look it boldly in the face, as that which must be some day, and for
which we must prepare, not cowardly, and with cries about God’s wrath and
judgments against us—which would be abject, were they not expressed in
such second-hand stock-phrases as to make one altogether doubt their
sincerity, but chivalrously, and with awful joy, as a noble calling, an
honour put upon us by the God of Nations, who demands of us, as some
small return for all His free bounties, that we should be, in this great
crisis, the champions of Freedom and of Justice, which are the cause of
God. At all events, we shall not escape our duty by being afraid of it;
we shall not escape our duty by inventing to ourselves some other duty,
and calling it “Order.” Elizabeth did so at first. She tried to keep
the peace with Spain; she shrank from injuring the cause of Order (then a
nobler one than now, because it was the cause of Loyalty, and not merely
of Mammon) by assisting the Scotch and the Netherlanders: but her duty
was forced upon her; and she did it at last, cheerfully, boldly, utterly,
like a hero; she put herself at the head of the battle for the freedom of
the world, and she conquered, for God was with her; and so that seemingly
most fearful of all England’s perils, when the real meaning of it was
seen, and God’s will in it obeyed manfully, became the foundation of
England’s naval and colonial empire, and laid the foundation of all her
future glories. So it was then, so it is now; so it will be for ever: he
who seeks to save his life will lose it: he who willingly throws away his
life for the cause of mankind, which is the cause of God, the Father of
mankind, he shall save it, and be rewarded a hundred-fold. That God may
grant us, the children of the Elizabethan heroes, all wisdom to see our
duty, and courage to do it, even to the death, should be our earliest
prayer. Our statesmen have done wisely and well in refusing, in spite of
hot-headed clamours, to appeal to the sword as long as there was any
chance of a peaceful settlement even of a single evil. They are doing
wisely and well now in declining to throw away the scabbard as long as
there is hope that a determined front will awe the offender into
submission: but the day may come when the scabbard must be thrown away;
and God grant that they may have the courage to do it.
It is reported that our rulers have said, that English diplomacy can no
longer recognise “nationalities,” but only existing “governments.” God
grant that they may see in time that the assertion of national life, as a
spiritual and indefeasible existence, was for centuries the central idea
of English policy; the idea by faith in which she delivered first
herself, and then the Protestant nations of the Continent, successively
from the yokes of Rome, of Spain, of France; and that they may reassert
that most English of all truths again, let the apparent cost be what it
may.
It is true, that this end will not be attained without what is called
nowadays “a destruction of human life.” But we have yet to learn (at
least if the doctrines which I have tried to illustrate in this little
book have any truth in them) whether shot or shell has the power of
taking away human life; and to believe, if we believe our Bibles, that
human life can only be destroyed by sin, and that all which is lost in
battle is that animal life of which it is written, “Fear not those who
can kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do: but I
will forewarn you whom you shall fear; him who, after he has killed, has
power to destroy both body and soul in hell.” Let a man fear him, the
destroying devil, and fear therefore cowardice, disloyalty, selfishness,
sluggishness, which are his works, and to be utterly afraid of which is
to be truly brave. God grant that we of the clergy may remember this
during the coming war, and instead of weakening the righteous courage and
honour of our countrymen by instilling into them selfish and
superstitious fears, and a theory of the future state which represents
God, not as a saviour, but a tormentor, may boldly tell them that “He is
not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live unto Him;” and
that he who renders up his animal life as a worthless thing, in the cause
of duty, commits his real and human life, his very soul and self, into
the hands of a just and merciful Father, who has promised to leave no
good deed unrewarded, and least of all that most noble deed, the dying
like a man for the sake not merely of this land of England, but of the
freedom and national life of half the world.
LECTURE I.
THE PTOLEMAIC ERA.
BEFORE I begin to lecture upon the Physical and Metaphysical schools of
Alexandria, it may be better, perhaps, to define the meaning of these two
epithets. Physical, we shall all agree, means that which belongs to
φύσις; _natura_; nature, that which φύεται, _nascitur_, grows, by an
organic life, and therefore decays again; which has a beginning, and
therefore, I presume, an end. And Metaphysical means that which we learn
to think of after we think of nature; that which is supernatural, in
fact, having neither beginning nor end, imperishable, immovable, and
eternal, which does not become, but always is. These, at least, are the
wisest definitions of these two terms for us just now; for they are those
which were received by the whole Alexandrian school, even by those
commentators who say that Aristotle, the inventor of the term
Metaphysics, named his treatise so only on account of its following in
philosophic sequence his book on Physics.
But, according to these definitions, the whole history of Alexandria
might be to us, from one point of view, a physical school; for
Alexandria, its society and its philosophy, were born, and grew, and fed,
and reached their vigour, and had their old age, their death, even as a
plant or an animal has; and after they were dead and dissolved, the atoms
of them formed food for new creations, entered into new organisations,
just as the atoms of a dead plant or animal might do. Was Alexandria
then, from beginning to end, merely a natural and physical phenomenon?
It may have been. And yet we cannot deny that Alexandria was also a
metaphysical phenomenon, vast and deep enough; seeing that it held for
some eighteen hundred years a population of several hundred thousand
souls; each of whom, at least according to the Alexandrian philosophy,
stood in a very intimate relation to those metaphysic things which are
imperishable and immovable and eternal, and indeed, contained them more
or less, each man, woman, and child of them in themselves; having wills,
reasons, consciences, affections, relations to each other; being parents,
children, helpmates, bound together by laws concerning right and wrong,
and numberless other unseen and spiritual relations.
Surely such a body was not merely natural, any more than any other
nation, society, or scientific school, made up of men and of the spirits,
thoughts, affections of men. It, like them, was surely spiritual; and
could be only living and healthy, in as far as it was in harmony with
certain spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God; perhaps, as
certain Alexandrian philosophers would have held, in as far as it was a
pattern of that ideal constitution and polity after which man was
created, the city of God which is eternal in the Heavens. If so, may we
not suspect of this Alexandria that it was its own fault if it became a
merely physical phenomenon; and that it stooped to become a part of
nature, and took its place among the things which are born to die, only
by breaking the law which God had appointed for it; so fulfilling, in its
own case, St. Paul’s great words, that death entered into the world by
sin, and that sin is the transgression of the law?
Be that as it may, there must have been metaphysic enough to be learnt in
that, or any city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, even though it
had never contained lecture-room or philosopher’s chair, and had never
heard the names of Aristotle and Plato. Metaphysic enough, indeed, to be
learnt there, could we but enter into the heart of even the most brutish
negro slave who ever was brought down the Nile out of the desert by
Nubian merchants, to build piers and docks in whose commerce he did not
share, temples whose worship he did not comprehend, libraries and
theatres whose learning and civilisation were to him as much a sealed
book as they were to his countryman, and fellow-slave, and only friend,
the ape. There was metaphysic enough in him truly, and things eternal
and immutable, though his dark-skinned descendants were three hundred
years in discovering the fact, and in proving it satisfactorily to all
mankind for ever. You must pardon me if I seem obscure; I cannot help
looking at the question with a somewhat Alexandrian eye, and talking of
the poor negro dock-worker as certain Alexandrian philosophers would have
talked, of whom I shall have to speak hereafter.
I should have been glad, therefore, had time permitted me, instead of
confining myself strictly to what are now called “the physic and
metaphysic schools” of Alexandria, to have tried as well as I could to
make you understand how the whole vast phenomenon grew up, and supported
a peculiar life of its own, for fifteen hundred years and more, and was
felt to be the third, perhaps the second city of the known world, and one
so important to the great world-tyrant, the Cæsar of Rome, that no Roman
of distinction was ever sent there as prefect, but the Alexandrian
national vanity and pride of race was allowed to the last to pet itself
by having its tyrant chosen from its own people.
But, though this cannot be, we may find human elements enough in the
schools of Alexandria, strictly so called, to interest us for a few
evenings; for these schools were schools of men; what was discovered and
taught was discovered and taught by men, and not by thinking-machines;
and whether they would have been inclined to confess it or not, their own
personal characters, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, strength and
weakness, beliefs and disbeliefs, determined their metaphysics and their
physics for them, quite enough to enable us to feel for them as men of
like passions with ourselves; and for that reason only, men whose
thoughts and speculations are worthy of a moment’s attention from us.
For what is really interesting to man, save men, and God, the Father of
men?
In the year 331 B.C. one of the greatest intellects whose influence the
world has ever felt, saw, with his eagle glance, the unrivalled advantage
of the spot which is now Alexandria; and conceived the mighty project of
making it the point of union of two, or rather of three worlds. In a new
city, named after himself, Europe, Asia, and Africa were to meet and to
hold communion. A glance at the map will show you what an ὀμφαλὸς γῆς, a
centre of the world, this Alexandria is, and perhaps arouse in your
minds, as it has often done in mine, the suspicion that it has not yet
fulfilled its whole destiny, but may become at any time a prize for
contending nations, or the centre of some world-wide empire to come.
Communicating with Europe and the Levant by the Mediterranean, with India
by the Red Sea, certain of boundless supplies of food from the
desert-guarded valley of the Nile, to which it formed the only key, thus
keeping all Egypt, as it were, for its own private farm, it was weak only
on one side, that of Judea. That small strip of fertile mountain land,
containing innumerable military positions from which an enemy might annoy
Egypt, being, in fact, one natural chain of fortresses, was the key to
Phoenicia and Syria. It was an eagle’s eyrie by the side of a pen of
fowls. It must not be left defenceless for a single year. Tyre and Gaza
had been taken; so no danger was to be apprehended from the seaboard: but
to subdue the Judean mountaineers, a race whose past sufferings had
hardened them in a dogged fanaticism of courage and endurance, would be a
long and sanguinary task. It was better to make terms with them; to
employ them as friendly warders of their own mountain walls. Their very
fanaticism and isolation made them sure allies. There was no fear of
their fraternising with the Eastern invaders. If the country was left in
their hands, they would hold it against all comers. Terms were made with
them; and for several centuries they fulfilled their trust.
This I apprehend to be the explanation of that conciliatory policy of
Alexander’s toward the Jews, which was pursued steadily by the Ptolemies,
by Pompey, and by the Romans, as long as these same Jews continued to be
endurable upon the face of the land. At least, we shall find the history
of Alexandria and that of Judea inextricably united for more than three
hundred years.
So arose, at the command of the great conqueror, a mighty city, around
those two harbours, of which the western one only is now in use. The
Pharos was then an island. It was connected with the mainland by a great
mole, furnished with forts and drawbridges. On the ruins of that mole
now stands the greater part of the modern city; the vast site of the
ancient one is a wilderness.
But Alexander was not destined to carry out his own magnificent project.
That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose
personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history knows
few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the son of
an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of Macedon.
There were those who said that he was in reality a son of Philip himself.
However, he rose at court, became a private friend of young Alexander,
and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of the Life Guards.
And from thence he rose rapidly, till after his great master’s death he
found himself despot of Egypt.
His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most
Jove-like type of Greek beauty. There is a possibility about it, as
about most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and
a contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, which puts one in mind of
Goethe’s expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too well
to respect them. At least, he was a man of clear enough vision. He saw
what was needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the thing
which he saw. It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge amorphous
empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and advised its partition
among the generals, taking care to obtain himself the lion’s share; not
in size, indeed, but in capability. He saw, too (what every man does not
see), that the only way to keep what he had got was to make it better,
and not worse, than he found it. His first Egyptian act was to put to
death Cleomenes, Alexander’s lieutenant, who had amassed vast treasures
by extortion; and who was, moreover, (for Ptolemy was a prudent man) a
dangerous partisan of his great enemy, Perdiccas. We do not read that he
refunded the treasures: but the Egyptians surnamed him Soter, the
Saviour; and on the whole he deserved the title. Instead of the wretched
misrule and slavery of the conquering Persian dynasty, they had at least
law and order, reviving commerce, and a system of administration, we are
told (I confess to speaking here quite at second-hand), especially
adapted to the peculiar caste-society, and the religious prejudices of
Egypt. But Ptolemy’s political genius went beyond such merely material
and Warburtonian care for the conservation of body and goods of his
subjects. He effected with complete success a feat which has been
attempted, before and since, by very many princes and potentates, but has
always, except in Ptolemy’s case, proved somewhat of a failure, namely,
the making a new deity. Mythology in general was in a rusty state. The
old Egyptian gods had grown in his dominions very unfashionable, under
the summary iconoclasm to which they had been subjected by the Monotheist
Persians—the Puritans of the old world, as they have been well called.
Indeed, all the dolls, and the treasure of the dolls’ temples too, had
been carried off by Cambyses to Babylon. And as for the Greek gods,
philosophers had sublimed them away sadly during the last century: not to
mention that Alexander’s Macedonians, during their wanderings over the
world, had probably become rather remiss in their religious exercises,
and had possibly given up mentioning the Unseen world, except for those
hortatory purposes for which it used to be employed by Nelson’s veterans.
But, as Ptolemy felt, people (women especially) must have something
wherein to believe. The “Religious Sentiment” in man must be satisfied.
But, how to do it? How to find a deity who would meet the aspirations of
conquerors as well as conquered—of his most irreligious Macedonians, as
well as of his most religious Egyptians? It was a great problem: but
Ptolemy solved it. He seems to have taken the same method which Brindley
the engineer used in his perplexities, for he went to bed. And there he
had a dream: How the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus (somewhere near this
present hapless Sinope), appeared to him, and expressed his wish to come
to Alexandria, and there try his influence on the Religious Sentiment.
So Serapis was sent for, and came—at least the idol of him,
and—accommodating personage!—he actually fitted. After he had been there
awhile, he was found to be quite an old acquaintance—to be, in fact, the
Greek Jove, and two or three other Greek gods, and also two or three
Egyptian gods beside—indeed, to be no other than the bull Apis, after his
death and deification. I can tell you no more. I never could find that
anything more was known. You may see him among Greek and Roman statues
as a young man, with a sort of high basket-shaped Persian turban on his
head. But, at least, he was found so pleasant and accommodating a
conscience-keeper, that he spread, with Isis, his newly-found mother, or
wife, over the whole East, and even to Rome. The Consuls there—50 years
B.C.—found the pair not too respectable, and pulled down their temples.
But, so popular were they, in spite of their bad fame, that seven years
after, the Triumvirs had to build the temples up again elsewhere; and
from that time forth, Isis and Serapis, in spite, poor things, of much
persecution, were the fashionable deities of the Roman world. Surely
this Ptolemy was a man of genius!
But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making gods. He had
to make men; for he had few or none ready made among his old veterans
from Issus and Arbela. He had no hereditary aristocracy: and he wanted
none. No aristocracy of wealth; that might grow of itself, only too fast
for his despotic power. But as a despot, he must have a knot of men
round him who would do his work. And here came out his deep insight into
fact. It had not escaped that man, what was the secret of Greek
supremacy. How had he come there? How had his great master conquered
half the world? How had the little semi-barbarous mountain tribe up
there in Pella, risen under Philip to be the master-race of the globe?
How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of
Salamis and Marathon, held out triumphantly century after century,
against the vast weight of the barbarian? The simple answer was: Because
the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere brute force. Because mind is the
lord of matter; because the Greek being the cultivated man, is the only
true man; the rest are βάρβαροι, mere things, clods, tools for the wise
Greeks’ use, in spite of all their material phantom-strength of
elephants, and treasures, and tributaries by the million. Mind was the
secret of Greek power; and for that Ptolemy would work. He would have an
aristocracy of intellect; he would gather round him the wise men of the
world (glad enough most of them to leave that miserable Greece, where
every man’s life was in his hand from hour to hour), and he would develop
to its highest the conception of Philip, when he made Aristotle the tutor
of his son Alexander. The consequences of that attempt were written in
letters of blood, over half the world; Ptolemy would attempt it once
more, with gentler results. For though he fought long, and often, and
well, as Despot of Egypt, no less than as general of Alexander, he was
not at heart a man of blood, and made peace the end of all his wars.
So he begins. Aristotle is gone: but in Aristotle’s place Philetas the
sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus the grammarian of Ephesus, shall
educate his favourite son, and he will have a literary court, and a
literary age. Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his time,
the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, poet, warrior, and
each of them in the most graceful, insinuating, courtly way, migrates to
Alexandria, after having had the three hundred and sixty statues, which
the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled
down again. Here was a prize for Ptolemy! The charming man became his
bosom friend and fellow, even revised the laws of his kingdom, and fired
him, if report says true, with a mighty thought—no less a one than the
great public Library of Alexandria; the first such institution, it is
said, which the world had ever seen.
* * * * *
So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and completed by
Philadelphus; or rather two libraries, for while one part was kept at the
Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which, as far
as we can discover, Pompey’s Pillar alone remains, one column out of four
hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and the
Museum. Philadelphus buys Aristotle’s collection to add to the stock,
and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of Æschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more honest methods.
Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with emulation, commences
a similar collection, and is so successful, that the reigning Ptolemy has
to cut off his rival’s supplies by prohibiting the exportation of
papyrus; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth transcribed on
parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, which thus has its name to this day,
from Pergamus. That collection, too, found its way at last to
Alexandria. For Antony having become possessor of it by right of the
stronger, gave it to Cleopatra; and it remained at Alexandria for seven
hundred years. But we must not anticipate events.
Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple of the Muses, with all
due appliances, in a vast building adjoining the palace itself, under the
very wing of royalty; and it must have porticos, wherein sages may
converse; lecture-rooms, where they may display themselves at their will
to their rapt scholars, each like a turkey-cock before his brood; and a
large dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as
befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and
Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For
Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle
of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went
home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died
in despair, leaving five “dialectical daughters” behind him, to be thorns
in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as “emancipated
women;” a class but too common in the later days of Greece, as they will
always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and crumbling to
pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what they are, and
what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings. But to return: funds
shall be provided for the Museum from the treasury; a priest of rank,
appointed by royalty, shall be curator; botanical and zoological gardens
shall be attached; collections of wonders made. In all things the
presiding genius of Aristotle shall be worshipped; for these, like
Alexander, were his pupils. Had he not mapped out all heaven and earth,
things seen and unseen, with his entelechies, and energies, and dunameis,
and put every created and uncreated thing henceforth into its proper
place, from the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues and the
vices—yea, to that Great Deity and Prime Cause (which indeed was all
things), _Noesis Noeseon_, “the Thought of Thoughts,” whom he discovered
by irrefragable processes of logic, and in whom the philosophers believe
privately, leaving Serapis to the women and the sailors? All they had to
do was to follow in his steps; to take each of them a branch, of science
or literature, or as many branches as one man conveniently can; and
working them out on the approved methods, end in a few years, as
Alexander did, by weeping on the utmost shore of creation that there are
no more worlds left to conquer.
Alas! the Muses are shy and wild; and though they will haunt, like
skylarks, on the bleakest northern moor as cheerfully as on the sunny
hills of Greece, and rise thence singing into the heaven of heavens, yet
they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, however amusingly made and
plentifully stored with comforts. Royal societies, associations of
savants, and the like, are good for many things, but not for the breeding
of art and genius: for they are things which cannot be bred. Such
institutions are excellent for physical science, when, as among us now,
physical science is going on the right method: but where, as in
Alexandria, it was going on an utterly wrong method, they stereotype the
errors of the age, and invest them with the prestige of authority, and
produce mere Sorbonnes, and schools of pedants. To literature, too, they
do some good, that is, in a literary age—an age of reflection rather than
of production, of antiquarian research, criticism, imitation, when
book-making has become an easy and respectable pursuit for the many who
cannot dig, and are ashamed to beg. And yet, by adding that same
prestige of authority, not to mention of good society and Court favour,
to the popular mania for literature, they help on the growing evil, and
increase the multitude of prophets who prophesy out of their own heart
and have seen nothing.
And this was, it must be said, the outcome of all the Ptolemæan
appliances.
In Physics they did little. In Art nothing. In Metaphysics less than
nothing.
We will first examine, as the more pleasant spectacle of the two, that
branch of thought in which some progress was really made, and in which
the Ptolemaic schools helped forward the development of men who have
become world-famous, and will remain so, I suppose, until the end of
time.
Four names at once attract us: Euclid, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes,
Hipparchus. Archimedes, also, should be included in the list, for he was
a pupil of the Alexandrian school, having studied (if Proclus is to be
trusted) in Egypt, under Conon the Samian, during the reigns of two
Ptolemies, Philadelphus and Euergetes.
Of Euclid, as the founder (according to Proclus) of the Alexandrian
Mathematical school, I must of course speak first. Those who wish to
attain to a juster conception of the man and his work than they can do
from any other source, will do well to read Professor De Morgan’s
admirable article on him in “Smith’s Classical Dictionary;” which
includes, also, a valuable little sketch of the rise of Geometric
science, from Pythagoras and Plato, of whose school Euclid was, to the
great master himself.
I shall confine myself to one observation on Euclid’s genius, and on the
immense influence which it exerted on after generations. It seems to me,
speaking under correction, that it exerted this, because it was so
complete a type of the general tendency of the Greek mind, deductive,
rather than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining results from
principles, and results again from them _ad infinitum_: deficient in that
sturdy moral patience which is required for the examination of facts, and
which has made Britain at once a land of practical craftsmen, and of
earnest scientific discoverers.
Volatile, restless, “always children longing for something new,” as the
Egyptian priest said of them, they were too ready to believe that they
had attained laws, and then, tired with their toy, throw away those
hastily assumed laws, and wander off in search of others. Gifted, beyond
all the sons of men, with the most exquisite perception of form, both
physical and metaphysical, they could become geometers and logicians as
they became sculptors and artists; beyond that they could hardly rise.
The were conscious of their power to build; and it made them ashamed to
dig.
Four men only among them seem, as far as I can judge, to have had a great
inductive power: Socrates and Plato in Metaphysics; Archimedes and
Hipparchus in Physics. But these men ran so far counter to the national
genius, that their examples were not followed. As you will hear
presently, the discoveries of Archimedes and Hipparchus were allowed to
remain where they were for centuries. The Dialectic of Plato and
Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making anything appear
alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, for undermining
the ground of all science, and paving the way for scepticism, by denying
the natural world to be the object of certain knowledge. The only
element of Plato’s thought to which they clung was, as we shall find from
the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in which, deserting his
inductive method, he has fallen below himself into the popular cacoethes,
and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the mysterious powers of numbers,
and of the regular solids.
Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, would be, and
in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy, or
any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up the
material as well as the intellectual glory of Britain.
To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned naturally,
as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its inductive
to its deductive stage—not as we have done now, after two centuries of
inductive search for the true laws, and their final discovery by Kepler
and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had propounded any theory which
would do instead of the true laws, content there to stop their
experiments, and return to their favourite work of commenting, deducing,
spinning notion out of notion, _ad infinitum_.
Still, they were not all of this temper. Had they been, they would have
discovered, not merely a little, but absolutely nothing. For after all,
if we will consider, induction being the right path to knowledge, every
man, whether he knows it or not, uses induction, more or less, by the
mere fact of his having a human reason, and knowing anything at all; as
M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without being aware of it.
Aristarchus is principally famous for his attempt to discover the
distance of the sun as compared with that of the moon. His method was
ingenious enough, but too rough for success, as it depended principally
on the belief that the line bounding the bright part of the moon was an
exact straight line. The result was of course erroneous. He concluded
that the sun was 18 times as far as the moon, and not, as we now know,
400; but his conclusion, like his conception of the vast extent of the
sphere of the fixed stars, was far enough in advance of the popular
doctrine to subject him, according to Plutarch, to a charge of impiety.
Eratosthenes, again, contributed his mite to the treasure of human
science—his one mite; and yet by that he is better known than by all the
volumes which he seems to have poured out, on Ethics, Chronology,
Criticism on the Old Attic Comedy, and what not, spun out of his weary
brain during a long life of research and meditation. They have all
perished,—like ninety-nine hundredths of the labours of that great
literary age; and perhaps the world is no poorer for the loss. But one
thing, which he attempted on a sound and practical philosophic method,
stands, and will stand for ever. And after all, is not that enough to
have lived for? to have found out one true thing, and, therefore, one
imperishable thing, in one’s life? If each one of us could but say when
he died: “This one thing I have found out; this one thing I have proved
to be possible; this one eternal fact I have rescued from Hela, the realm
of the formless and unknown,” how rich one such generation might make the
world for ever!
But such is not the appointed method. The finders are few and far
between, because the true seekers are few and far between; and a whole
generation has often nothing to show for its existence but one solitary
gem which some one man—often unnoticed in his time—has picked up for
them, and so given them “a local habitation and a name.”
Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper Egypt, deep wells were
enlightened to the bottom on the day of the summer solstice, and that
vertical objects cast no shadows.
He had before suggested, as is supposed, to Ptolemy Euergetes, to make
him the two great copper armillæ, or circles for determining the equinox,
which stood for centuries in “that which is called the Square
Porch”—probably somewhere in the Museum. By these he had calculated the
obliquity of the ecliptic, closely enough to serve for a thousand years
after. That was one work done. But what had the Syene shadows to do
with that? Syene must be under that ecliptic. On the edge of it. In
short, just under the tropic. Now he had ascertained exactly the
latitude of one place on the earth’s surface. He had his known point
from whence to start on a world-journey, and he would use it; he would
calculate the circumference of the earth—and he did it. By observations
made at Alexandria, he ascertained its latitude compared with that of
Syene; and so ascertained what proportion to the whole circumference was
borne by the 5000 stadia between Alexandria and Syene. He fell into an
error, by supposing Alexandria and Syene to be under the same meridians
of longitude: but that did not prevent his arriving at a fair rough
result of 252,000 stadia—31,500 Roman miles; considerably too much; but
still, before him, I suppose, none knew whether it was 10,000, or
10,000,000. The right method having once been found, nothing remained
but to employ it more accurately.