The Metropolis of Ancient Egypt.

Alexandria: City of the Western Mind, by Theodore Vrettos, New York: Free Press, 2001. xx + 249 pp.

IN ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, William Shakespeare immortalized the ancient Egyptian metropolis, Alexandria. For most contemporary Americans, if ancient Alexandria is anything, it is either the site of Shakespeare's tale or the setting for the on-screen love affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1963's visually sumptuous "Cleopatra."

Theodore Vrettos, author of a previous popular history on the theft of the Parthenon marbles, The Elgin Affair: The Abduction of Antiquity's Greatest Treasures and the Passions It Aroused (1998), gives the famous loves of Queen Cleopatra extensive space in his history of Alexandria. Yet, there certainly is more to his story than that, and one can hope that his study reaches a wide audience.

Alexandria, Egypt, was the most important cultural center in the Hellenistic era, the name usually given to the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 321 B.C. and the Roman conquest of the Levant three centuries later. Even after the Romans conquered the Levant, while Rome ruled the civilized world, "conquered Greece took captive her rude conqueror." If Greek culture converted the Romans from brutal, uncouth barbarians to slightly less brutal, semi-cultured barbarians, a large share of the credit must go to Alexandria, the metropolis of ancient Egypt.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote,

  Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
  And on the pedestal these words appear:
  "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

His general topic was the fleeting nature of fame and earthly power. He might have had Alexandria, now a pale shadow of its former self, in mind.

Theodore Vrettos provides a reminder why this great Greek city's story is worth knowing. In the areas of science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, economic life, and theology, Alexandria's is a fascinating tale. Perhaps it does not deserve the sobriquet "City of the Western Mind," but Alexandria's contribution to Western thought and religious experience has been absolutely central.

As Vrettos notes in his prologue, it seems that the first mention of Alexandria appears in Homer's Odyssey, where he describes "an island in the surging sea which they call 'Pharos,' lying off Egypt. It is a harbor with good anchorage, and hence they put out to sea after drawing water." Of course, it took the great Macedonian conqueror Alexander III "the Great" to re-found the city, make it the center of his north African empire, and redub it (as he named and renamed a score of other cities, from Egypt to distant Afghanistan--where, 2400 years later, one of them would become the center of the Taliban movement). In the first chapter of his book. Vrettos provides a rather uninspired history of Alexander's life. Adopting a position held by a small minority of scholars. Vrettos asserts with certainty that Alexander was entombed in Alexandria, where his body assumed an unexplained position in the state cult.

From the beginning. Alexandria reflected the Aristotelian training of its founder: it was a cosmopolis, a city of cities in an empire Alexander intended as a melange of all the positive attributes of his conquered lands. Greeks, Jews, and Copts (the pre-Arab invasion natives of Egypt, descendants of the pharaohs and builders of the pyramids) formed the main elements in the Egyptian population in the days when the Greeks ruled their city, but their neighbors also included significant numbers of Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Syrians, Medes, Persians, Carthaginians, Italians, Gauls, and others. Despite this ethnic salad bowl, however, far the most significant contributions to Alexandrian and world civilization were made by the Greeks and Copts.

Alexander's story, which formed the basis of legends from Spain to India, is a thrilling one. From a wronged son succeeding to his father's throne in suspicious circumstances to the master of the known world was a voyage of scarcely a decade, and he died in the prime of life and at the peak of his powers. However, this is a book about his great city, so Vrettos skates over the tale of the Macedonian in only 26 pages.

The second section of the book may be the most interesting one. Entitled "The Mind of the City," this 44-page chapter sketches the enormously significant intellectual achievements of Alexandrians over the centuries. Whether in philosophy, in science, or in letters, Alexandria was host to some of the Hellenic world's leading thinkers. As an amateur in this field, I am at a loss to say which of them was most significant.

Vrettos begins this part of his book with a description of the Alexandria entry in the ancient list of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Pharos Lighthouse (dedicated 279 B.C.). Frequent viewers of PBS will know that in recent years, marine archaeologists have identified the materials that once made up the famous Light-house in the bay of Alexandria, and Vrettos's evident ignorance of this work is jarring.

In Vrettos's account, even in the fourth century A.D., long after Alexandria's heyday, Roman historians still described Alexandria's temple of Serapis as second only to Rome's Capitol. Far the most significant structure in a city that included the Pharos Lighthouse. Alexander's supposed tomb, and the Serapis temple, however, was the greatest library of the ancient world: the library of Alexandria.

Until its destruction by Alexandria's Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, Alexandria's library served as a gathering place for the greatest Hellenic scholars. It was a magnet for the learned from all corners of the Hellenistic world. The Ptolemy dynasty of Egypt, the first of whom was one of Alexander's Successors, backed this institution with its full prestige and, more importantly, its treasury, over the entire course of the Greeks' reign in Egypt from the fourth to the first century B.C. Material from the Far East, from Egypt, in Latin, and in Greek was collected and translated, sifted and standardized in Alexandria's great library over many years; it is to the Alexandrians that we owe the earliest reliable editions of the Greek classics. Vrettos notes scholars' uncertainty concerning the actual functioning of the library (college? research collection alone?), but it definitely was the hub of the knowledgeable in its day.

Perhaps the most famous scholar to have written at Alexandria was the geometrician Euclid, whose Elements remains the most impressive treatment of the subject ever written. It was adopted at the major centers of instruction in its day and long remained the leading textbook, as its inclusion in the Harvard Classics series a century ago attests. Euclid's other works included a pioneering book on optics.

A second great mathematician, Archimedes, also studied at Alexandria, although he did his greatest original work after returning to his home in Sicily. His fame today rests on his invention of a powerful mirror that his countrymen of Syracuse used to ignite attacking Roman ships off the Sicilian coast. It was Archimedes who famously said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth," as Vrettos reports, and among his ingenious mechanical devices was one that allowed him to move a large ship with only slight exertion.

In the field of astronomy, the Alexandrian Aristarchus pioneered the theory of heliocentrism. Copernicus, in Vrettos's account, intentionally omitted to mention his debt to Aristarchus; while Copernicus's subscription to the idea was not original, it was he, and not Aristarchus, who succeeded in persuading the world of the theory. Also enormously impressive was the calculation of Archimedes's contemporary Eratosthenes, who calculated the diameter of the earth accurately and its circumference within fifty miles through a series of ingenious observations. Eratosthenes also published the first map with demarcations of latitude, and he was a noted poet, to boot! Vrettos's account is especially strong when he is dealing with these scientific and mathematical matters; even a liberal arts major such as I is certain to find this section of the book, with its tales of noted astronomers, physicians, geographers, and others, intensely fascinating.

Only in literature was Alexandria's tradition markedly inferior. Alexandria nurtured no philosophically profound play-wrights or poets to compare to the leading Latin figures, let alone to the Greek masters. Its one famous product, Apollonius's account of Jason and the Argonauts, drags on interminably in description of Alexandria, which leaves little time for the actual search for the Golden Fleece. Romance and passion stood at the center of the Alexandrian tradition, and they formed no ground for a potential Aeschylus or Homer to occupy.

The central section of Vrettos's account, "The Power of the City," recounts the story of Alexandria's most famous queen, the most famous of all Greek women, Cleopatra. Vrettos's Cleopatra is unlike some other portraits of the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt: she is a cunning woman hopeful first of uniting the Hellenistic and Roman worlds in the person of her and Julius Caesar's son, Caesarion, then determined to insure the continuation of her dynasty through the assistance of her second Roman lover, Mark Antony. Unfortunately for her hopes, Caesar is killed in the Roman Senate at the moment when he stands on the threshold of empire, while Antony proves completely unworthy of the great faith the Egyptian queen reposes in him. While generous toward Cleopatra, Vrettos's account will disabuse his readers of any romantic admiration for Antony; this is not Marlon Brando in the 1950s movie version of "Julius Caesar."

Perhaps surprisingly, Vrettos omits the significant place the new Roman province of Egypt played in the imperial system established by the equally egotistical fellow who vanquished Cleopatra and her man. Augustus Caesar: this is one of the vicissitudes of popular history, in which the reader's attention must be retained, often at the expense of desirable coverage. Thus, he proceeds directly from Augustus's victory to an account of Alexandria's extremely significant place in the religious history of the West.

The most consequential people in Alexandria's religious history were Origen, St. Athanasius, and St. Cyril. Origen, in particular, has been enormously influential. For example, it was he who popularized the typological study of the Old Testament, in which the stories and images in the Old Testament are seen as foreshadowing events in the New. This method of scriptural interpretation had perhaps its most notable manifestation in St. Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses, in which the great Cappadocian Father found in the life of the greatest of the Hebrews several elements that foretold events in the life of Christ and of His Mother. Similar readings of the Old Testament dominated the patristic readings of that document, and this helped to reassure Christians that despite the Jews' claims, the Old Testament was properly understood not simply as the story of God's relationship with His chosen people, but as the record of His preparation of the world for the Incarnation of His Son.

St. Athanasius was the heroic patriarch of Alexandria who, despite opposition from within his own see and from the imperial court at Constantinople, stood up to the Arian heresy and insisted that the Nicene Creed form the basic teaching of the Orthodox Church. Against Arius's insistence that Christ was a creature of God, St. Athanasius insisted that Christ was God, that the homoousion clause of the Creed be understood literally. Arius's position foreclosed the possibility of Christ's crucifixion serving to close the distance between God and man opened by Adam's sin; St. Athanasius's was a very hopeful vision, and one that he held up through repeated banishments and years of persecution.

Readers conversant in Church history will take exception to Vrettos's treatment of the story of Patriarch St. Cyril of Alexandria, the famous opponent of the heretic Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople. Despite the teaching of John Anthony McGuckin, currently the leading authority on St. Cyril, Vrettos repeats the old canard that St. Cyril was responsible for various riots and the notorious murder of the Neoplatonist Hypatia in the city. "Everyone in the city" did not love Hypatia, as seems obvious from the fact that a mob stoned her to death, and Vrettos's reference to St. Cyril's "army of fanatical monks" is so uncharitable as to distort reality. Besides calumniating St. Cyril, Vrettos--who did his theological study at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Theological Seminary in Boston (which for some reason is alternately referred to as "Holy Cross Greek Theological Seminary" and "Holy Cross Greek Theological School" here)--never accurately describes the Alexandrian patriarch's triumphant contribution to Orthodox Tradition in the course of the struggle against Nestorianism. St. Cyril successfully defended the doctrine that Christ was both wholly God and wholly man, so that His Mother was properly called "Theotokos" (literally, "God-Bearer," and usually translated "Mother of God"). Instead, he concludes that the Greek tradition represented by Alexander the Great died with Hypatia. The death of a decaying pagan philosophical tradition's leading exponent is portrayed as epochal, in other words, while Alexandria's enormous role in shaping Orthodox Christianity is never made clear. Just when he could have tied Alexandria to the modern world most forcefully, Vrettos misses the mark.

Since the Moslems who conquered Egypt in the seventh century destroyed the magnificent Library that had long served as repository of all Greek learning, the world cultural significance of the city from that time went into marked decline. If they had never wrecked the ancient Christian centers of the Middle East or the imperial capital of Constantinople, the single barbarian decision to destroy the stupendous Alexandrian library would give the lie to all the recent assertions about the Moslem religion's contribution to world civilization; as it is, the negative side of the ledger greatly overbalances the positive.

Yet, despite all that, our modern religious and scientific traditions would be unrecognizably different without the elements they owe to Alexandria. The Greek population of Alexandria, a city of several million residents, has shrunk to a few dozen in the past few decades. It likely will dwindle to nothing in the lifetimes of people reading this review. That is a true shame, as Vrettos makes clear.

KEVIN R. C. GUTZMAN teaches in the Department of History at Western Connecticut State University.