8 Route 2. ALEXANDRIA. History.
kingdom of the Pharaohs with that widely extended Greek em¬
pire which it was his great ambition to found. The site chosen
was opposite the island of Pharos, near the ancient Egyptian village
of Rhakotis, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Mareotic Lake
(p. 21), which was connected with the Nile by several navigable
channels. The choice was both judicious and far-seeing. For the
older, and apparently more favourably situated, harbours at the E.
end of the Delta, close to the Red Sea, were exposed to the danger
of being choked hy the Nile mud, owing to a current in the Mediter¬
ranean, beginning at the Strait of Gibraltar, which washes the whole
of the N. African coast. Deinocrates, the architect, was entrusted
with the planning and building of the new city. After Alexander's
death, when his empire was divided among his generals, Ptolemy I.
Soter (323-286 B.C.) came into possession of Egypt. During his
wise and upright reign Alexandria became a great resort of artists
and scholars, including Demetrius Phalereus, the orator, who sug¬
gested the foundation ofthe famous library, Apelles and Antiphilus,
the painters, Euclid, the mathematician, and Erasistratus and
Herophilus, the physicians. A history of Alexander the Great
written by Ptolemy himself has unfortunately been lost. This Ptol¬
emy also founded the Museum (p. 9), a splendid pile dedicated to
science and poetry, in which scholars dwelt as well as studied and
taught. Comp. p. lxxxvii.
Notwithstanding the continual dissensions among the Ptolemies
with regard to the succession to the throne (p. lxxxvii), which
seriously disturbed the peace of the city, the fame of Alexandria,
as the greatest centre of commerce in the world and the chief seat of
Greek learning, steadily increased, and in B.C. 48, when the
Romans interfered in the quarrels of Cleopatra and her husband
and brother Ptolemy XIV., had reached its zenith. After the murder
of Pompey at Pelusium, Caesar entered Alexandria in triumph
(p. cvi), but was attacked by the citizens and the army of Ptol¬
emy XIV., and had considerable difficulty in maintaining himself
in the Regia (see p. 9). Csesar was afterwards conquered hy the
charms of the Egyptian queen, but Antony fell more fatally into her
toils, and spent years of revelry with her at Alexandria (42-30).
Augustus enlarged the city by the addition of the suburb of Nico-
polis (p. 18). At this prosperous period Alexandria is said to have
numbered more than half-a-miilion inhabitants. The Greek element
predominated, next in importance to which was the Egyptian, while
a numerous, but exclusive, Jewish community was settled here as
early as the 4th cent. B.C.
The Greek scholar and traveller Strabo (B.C. 66-24) describes Alexan¬
dria as it was in the decades immediately before the beginning of our era,
in the 17th Book of his Geography. The former island of Pharos had been
united to the mainland by an embankment known as the Heptastadium
(see p. 9), and on the E. extremity of the island rose the famous light¬
house built by Sostratos, the Cnidian, in the reign of Ptolemy II. Phila¬
delphus, which was regarded hy the ancients as one of the wonders of
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