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ORDAINERS OF THE UNIVERSE
lexandria in Egypt was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman
historian who lived in the reign of Claudius and wrote more than four centuries after the event, noted in
his History of Alexander that the founding took place immediately after Alexander’s visit to the shrine of
the Egyptian god Ammon, “the Hidden One”, where the priest addressed Alexander as “son of Jupiter”. In
this recently acquired state of grace, Alexander chose for his new city the stretch of land between Lake
Mareotis and the sea, and ordered his people to migrate from neighbouring cities to the new metropolis.
“There is a report,” wrote Rufus, “that after the king had completed the Macedonian custom of marking
out the circular boundary for the future city-walls with barley-meal, flocks of birds flew down and fed on
the barley. Many regarded this as an unfavourable omen, but the verdict of the seers was that the city
would have a large immigrant population and would provide the means of livelihood to many countries.”
People of many nations did indeed flock to the new capital, but it was a different sort of immigration that
ultimately made Alexandria famous. By the time of Alexander’s death in 323, the city had become what
we would call today a “multicultural society”, divided into politeumata or corporations based on
nationality, under the sceptre of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Of these nationalities, the most important aside
from the native Egyptians was the Greeks, for whom the written word had become a symbol of wisdom
and power. “Those who can read see twice as well,” wrote the Attic poet Menander in the fourth century
BC.
Though traditionally the Egyptians had set down much of their administrative business in writing, it was
probably the influence of the Greeks, who believed that society required a precise and systematically
written record of its transactions, that transformed Alexandria into an intensely bureaucratic state. By the
mid-third century BC, the flow of documents was becoming unwieldy. Receipts, estimates, declarations
and permits were issued in writing. There are examples of documents for every kind of task, no matter
how small: keeping pigs, selling beer, trading in roasted lentils, keeping a bath-house, undertaking a paint
job. A document dating from 258–257 BC shows that the accounting offices of the finance minister
Apollonius received 434 rolls of papyrus in thirty-three days. A lust for paper does not imply a love for
books, but familiarity with the written word no doubt accustomed the citizens of Alexandria to the act of
reading.
If the tastes of its founder were anything to go by, Alexandria was destined to become a bookish city.
Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, had engaged Aristotle as a private tutor for his son, and through
Aristotle’s teaching Alexander became “a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading” — so keen a
reader, in fact, that he was seldom without a book. Once, travelling in Upper Asia and “being destitute of
other books”, he ordered one of his commanders to send him several; he duly received Philistus’s History,
a number of plays by Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus and poems by Telestes and Philoxenus.
It may have been Demetrius of Phalerum — a scholar from Athens, the compiler of Aesop’s fables, a critic
of Homer and a student of the celebrated Theophrastus (himself a student and friend of Aristotle) — who
suggested to Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy I, the founding of the library that was to make Alexandria
famous; so famous that 150 years after the library had perished, Athenaeus of Naucratis thought it
superfluous to describe it to his readers. “And concerning the numbers of books, the establishing of
libraries, and the collection in the Hall of the Muses, why need I even speak, since they are in all men’s
memories?” This is unfortunate, because where exactly the library stood, how many books it housed, how
it was run and who was responsible for its destruction are all questions for which we have no satisfactory
answers.
The Greek geographer Strabo, writing towards the end of the first century BC, described Alexandria and
its museum in some detail but never mentioned the library. According to the Italian historian Luciano
Canfora, “Strabo doesn’t mention the library simply because it wasn’t a separate room or building” but
rather a space attached to the colonnades and common room of the museum. Canfora surmises that the
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