Ptolemy and Manetho

Transcript (PDF)

Alexandria and Rome
Presentation 1 of 14

Ptolemy and Manetho
The Beginnings of Alexandria. Egyptian and Greek Origins, and the Tetrabiblos.
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 1, 1982

Transcript:

This particular series will be somewhat difficult. It's a difficult conception to shape and hold in mind. And it became evident that this series would be necessary when at the end of the series on classical Greece, we suddenly jumped to Plotinus. And for those of you who are procuring the cassettes of these lecture series, if you review the cassette on Plotinus, you'll notice that the emphasis and the focus of the Greek mind had changed astronomically. And that I made a statement in the very next lecture, which was the series on the Asian tradition, the second part. Where the opening lecture was on Nagarjuna the great Indian stage of the 2nd century A.D. And commented how the Indian mind and the Greek mind had somehow come into a harmony at some time from the demise of classical Athens. And that time period, and that in fact, some high watermark of human intelligence and spirit had been achieved and reached.

So, this series became apparent that we had to fill in that it was too large of a jump to move from Plato to Plotinus. And in fact, it is. So that all of this series, this entire history falls in between Plato and Plotinus. 600 hundred years, but 600 years in which the very structure of the mind was changed irrevocably. And I think that if there is a key to this system, is that our civilization seems to lie somewhere on this timescale duration replaying itself again. And it's difficult to say whether we're at the beginning or the end of this particular duration. The characteristics are always mixed. I would rather expect from myself that we're at the beginning because of the nature of the integration happening in our own time. Whereas external critics, or cynics more properly termed, who view current history and potentials of man from the external only see us rather at the end of the cycle that is the close of Roman power, rather than the beginning of the brilliance of the Alexandrian world synthesis. I of course take the other tack. I think it's better to look inside.

If there is some general key it is that the founding of Alexandria changed the very way in which a human being could regard themselves. That whatever civilization or culture, tribe, a person what have grown up with previous to Alexandria, they thought of themselves in terms of a parochial history and development. They were a member of this or that family. They were a member of this or that kingdom. They might even have extended themselves to consider them their affinities with a kind of people. Great Sur, Etruscans or Persians or so forth. That was as far as it went. And usually, it went just that far when there was a time of crisis or a great celebration. For the most part human nature in its temporal growing up in duration had been provincial. And we find for the first time at Alexandria, that there was the birth of the conception of universal man. The human being who would be at home anywhere on the planet and probably off the planet too.

So, we start the evening trying to delineate the beginnings of this conception. And There'll be one change in the lecture series. I've discovered that in order to make a shape instead of next week, having Callimachus and Plautus, that I will have to bring in the Roman historian Livy. I will mention a little bit about Callimachus and Plautus, but I need to bring in Livy for the early history of Rome. We need to have the contrast. Rome And Alexandria are quite dissimilar. They are like in the metaphor and the Bhagavad Gita, fire and iron. And they're meeting and they're joining produced in amalgam that was new. And we are the inheritors of that quite directly.

So that I would hope that you would continue to come. These lectures are style to make a sweep of a shape of a view. And they should fit together. Not so much like building blocks or double pieces, but rather as movements of color and volume on a canvas that progressively should become clear. As to its symbolic purpose. And so, I'll try for that.

And when we get down to Constantine at the end, we'll see whether or not we can understand that the triumph of Christianity over the Roman empire was an almost inevitable happening. It was as if the spiritual roots had led to that plant, that blossoming, from the very first. Almost as if it were completely and totally planned.

So, we'll begin tonight with the beginnings of Alexandria. The figure of course, who looms largest is Alexander himself for whom the city is named. And we've done a lecture on Alexander. It's available on cassette. So, I won't go into it in detail except to start with the fact that one of his closest companions throughout his entire life was Ptolemy. Ptolemy, who was referred to in history as Ptolemy Soter. Soter is the Greek word for savior. So that Alexandra begins with a man already nicknamed savior.

Ptolemy was somewhat older than Alexander. And it's important for us to conceive of a little bit of history and connection with him. Plato was alive until 347 and Ptolemy was born in 367. So that Plato was still alive when Ptolemy was 20 years old. So that the founder of Alexandra in a practical way was the classical Greek. Even though he was a Macedonian, he was still a classical Greek. He would have had an Athenian mind. And what's more, he was very, very close to Alexander as a companion. So that under the educational aegis of Aristotle, who had studied with Plato for 20 years. While Alexander was taking lessons from Aristotle, Ptolemy most probably was there also. So that even though he had ordinary family backgrounds, circumstance and education made him a very shrewd, intelligent individual. He was as a physical person, very robust and burly. He had very deep-set eyes. Kind of ridgey eyebrows. A largish sort of nose that tended to puck just a little bit. Huge shocks of unruly hair. The sort of man who had wear of a leather necklace around himself with dangling strips of colored fabric when going into battle. Highly stylized, courageous individual.

And Alexander of course, when he was being suspected by his father Phillip the second of perhaps starting to fudge toward the kingship was reprimanded and his closest friends were exiled. And Ptolemy was one of them. And within a year with the assassination of Philip, Ptolemy was back at Alexander's side. And from the very beginning Alexander's first campaigns in Europe, before he even began to move toward Asia, Ptolemy was already a distinguished General with Alexander's army.
So that by the age of 30-31 Ptolemy was considered by Alexander to be his closest personal associate. He felt closer in a military strategic way to some of the older Generals. Parmenion, Antipater and so forth. But Ptolemy was his closest best friend in the way in which men who go out consistently month after month to fight and die together, become close and talk about any and everything. And having shared a great, fantastic educational opportunity with Aristotle they were intellectual visionaries and clear-sighted empiricists as well as being warriors. So that the term Hellenic warrior King really applies to individuals like Alexander and Ptolemy.

When it occurred to Alexander that only his death would take away the tremendous empire that he was trying to instate in the world. And it was not just a geographic empire, but it was the development of a single world with one integrated culture from end to end. And the Greek word for it was ecumene. Ecumene. E-c-u-m-e-n-e. ecumene. And by this Alexander meant to bring together all the disparate strands of human history and potential and make a single fabric. Ptolemy also shared this vision from youth as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And that their continued success battle after battle, empire after empire, as far as they wished to go was just proof positive confirming the fact that they were the ones to do it.

When Alexander had to reach the extremities of India and halted his advanced in front of the Buddhist monks at Taxila and realized that they had met a civilization just as sophisticated as themselves. Ptolemy being Alexander's top bodyguard, there were seven bodyguards, was put in charge of the vast strategic retreat. Not so much a retreat from having been defeated in battle, but going back to the center of the empire, because they had found the ends of the Earth. They had found a civilization quite as sophisticated as themselves and no need for forces arms to proceed. Ptolemy was put in charge of the Greek fleet. The huge boats that they had made, and they came down the Indus River down to the Arabian sea.

And all the way back as Alexander began to suffer from the illness that finally he would die from. The talk was of next going completely around Africa. Sailing around and, and maybe carrying on the ecumene to distant shores crossing the great waters. And this kind of conversation was still ringing in the spirit of Ptolemy when Alexander died suddenly. And after the great funeral procession in Babylon, the Generals of Alexander's army got together and held a council in Babylon to decide what was to be done with the ecumene, with the Empire. It was Ptolemy's notion and idea that there were so many powerful headstrong Generals that there never would be a chance in his generation for someone to replace Alexander. Why? Because they, talented as they were, were only men. Whereas he believed that Alexander had actually divine heritage behind him. He believed in this. So that he insisted that they top Generals take sections of the empire called satraps. And these little kingdoms, actually they were quite large, would be portioned out and they would maintain some kind of a communication between them in terms of the Greek culture. They would have a common language. They would have common marriages at the top levels between them. And they would begin to have a chance to evolve towards some generation further on down the line that could maybe bring the Empire back into physical manifestation again. This was the view that finally obtained and held.

And the kingdom that fell to Ptolemy was Egypt. Because Egypt was the most secure base from which any one of these generals could protect himself for a long duration of time. And it proved to be the case. Ptolemy was extraordinarily sharp in this capacity. Egypt was capable of producing an excess of food, commodities. An excess of agricultural crops like cotton and so forth. It was isolated enough by the Mediterranean Sea and by the deserts so that it would take a tremendous army to push across. And if some well-organized Greek army fortified with the population of the indigenous Egyptian people behind them could hold them off, no single individual and perhaps no collection of individuals could invade Egypt.

So, Ptolemy took this tack and stance and moved himself to Alexandria. He originally thought of positioning the Greek. Let's use a metaphor here, the Greek nervous system put on the Egyptian body. He originally thought that he would position it at Memphis, which was near contemporary Cairo where the Nile begins to branch out into the Delta. We had a branch and another branch. And Alexandria is up here. Memphis is right about here. Great pyramids and modern Cairo here.

But he had in his mind, not just the idea of taking over Egypt and putting a Hellenistic nervous system on the Egyptian body. But his long-term conception was to reunite the Greek world again at some time in the future. So, he located the center in Alexandria, which would be completely asymmetrical and off center as far as Egypt was concerned, but which would give him a view of the world from its true center, right on the Mediterranean. Capable of sailing directly across the Crete or Cyprus or Sicily. Or what has become Palestine. Or further along the African coast. So that Alexandra was positioned so that it was able to be defended very easily. And yet one could move out from Alexandria very, very quickly.

And of course, they historical development show this design of Ptolemy. Because he not only took Egypt, but very, very quickly the Aegean Sea became a tug of war, a playground for his ambitions. And he also held the cities of Athens and Sparta. Which by this time were not so much power centers but worked for additional geographical elements in the Greek world. If your kingdom contained Athens and Sparta, then you were very close to being legitimate. And if you had a few other places, like he went out of his way to befriend the Rhodesians, who were great sailors. And Rhodes, of course, was a great trades crossroad. He also held the cities of Tyre and Sidon on the Phoenician coast.

So that Ptolemy from Alexandria was not on the edge of Egypt but was in the center of the Hellenic world. And very, very, very quickly the perspicacity of Ptolemy paid off. Within several decades of it sounding Alexandria became a phenomenal commercial success. And the city grew by leaps and bounds.

The laying out of Alexandria. I have to bring this in. This will be an interesting…When Alexander saw the site, he decided that he himself would begin laying out the lines of the city with cornmeal. And after they had spread a number of long lines of cornmeal, an enormous flock of crows came and consumed this cornmeal. And Alexander who had very large eyes and complete shock staring, wondering what this foretold. When all of the chief advisors and priests and so forth, not wanting to curry Royal disfavor, decided finally that it meant that Alexander would feed the world. And that this was a sign to go ahead with it. They did and they did.

Ptolemy Soter as he set up Alexandria made sure that this would be a Royal capital city from the start. It's almost, I think in our experience that San Francisco would be about the closest kind of analogy. In 30 B.C. when the Romans took over Alexandria from Cleopatra, officially, the geographers Strabo said that fully one fourth or one third of the city of Alexandria was the spread of the Royal palaces. So, you just have an idea in your mind of the absolute grandeur of this place.

He made sure that the museum or the museum, which was being built there would contain facilities for scholars and artists from all over the Empire to get together and to know each other and to live together. They had a common eating ground, mess hall. They had common sleeping quarters. And very nearby, the great library of Alexandria was being enmasse, not just with the books of the time, but with the originals. All of the manuscripts which were being bought out. And believe me, Ptolemy had plenty of money from all the crops that they were growing and turning out. Egypt was a very fabulous land. The image is that Egypt was like the Midwest of the United States. It could feed the world. It was just fantastically capable.

One slight degression, just to show you the genius of the Ptolemy’s son, which we'll get to in just a minute. Ptolemy Philadelphus, one of the most elegant human beings in history. In a survey of the agricultural lands, found that one of the areas off the Nile called the **inaudible word** had ancient times back around the 12th dynasty, 10th dynasty and so forth had produced enormous amounts of food. And in trying to understand why and his time the crops were so small, and it was **inaudible word** and desert. They found that there had been a rise of land here and that the Nile waters no longer were able to flow into the **inaudible word** in an underground fashion. So, Ptolemy Philadelphus [Ptolemy II Philadelphus] cut a series of canals and this enormous Valley somewhat like our San Joaquin Valley only instead of long bulbous was turned back into fertile land. And it was just miles and miles and miles of crops.

Also, the other Kingdoms of the Hellenic world were so involved in the bitter power struggles that they were killing off their men. They were burning each other's fields. And they progressively found themselves with all kinds of armor and very little food to eat. They had plenty of gold and jewels from their plunder. And it was the Ptolemy who had the food. And of course this was the big draw.

This entire program of developing Alexandria as this capital would reach its apex very, very quickly with the son Ptolemy Philadelphus of Ptolemy Soter. Ptolemy Soter lived to be about 83 or 84 years old. He had gone through several wives. He had a pastel of children. But in his judgment, his youngest son was the genius. Who had been born in 308 B.C. in the Aegean. Ptolemy Philadelphus is often shown what the Egyptian pharaonic headdress coming down. The Vatican has a large pink granite statue of him in Egyptian dress. But Philadelphus was in fact, a Greek, born in the Aegean on an Island. And when he was 22, because gnarly old father realized she has talent and capacity and brought him in as co-regen t. And to prepare that **inaudible word** because Ptolemy like a great general moved pawns before he moved his bishops, made the mother of Ptolemy Philadelphus the official Queen of Egypt and built monuments for her. Berenice was her name, not Bernice, but Berenice. And so, one looks at a map of Hellenic Egypt and you find a Ptolemaics all over the place and Berenices all over it.

Philadelphus is one of those grand individuals who comes along every once in a while, with the capacities to not only integrate, but to hold it in a crucible so that the essences of the integration can distill and can be had. And if the vigor and the healthiness of Alexandria is due to the father, the son, the second Ptolemy brought in the mystical current, which became the hallmark of Alex…of the Alexandrian mind.

The mysticism of Alexander was ecumenical in the sense that Ptolemy was acquainted with the entire known world of the time. When the Buddhists held a third convention in India, Ptolemy Philadelphus stent emissaries from the city of Alexandria to represent them. When the Romans would hold religious festivals, Ptolemy would send delegates there. He was acquainted with the whole broad swath from Spain to China of the known world.

And his view, what his father had started with Alexandria was not only worth doing but doing in spades. And so, Philadelphus began to refashion the original conception of Alexandria, about a hundred-fold. He just opened up the whole conception. For instance, he realized that in order to educate a cosmopolitan population, that you would have to have a facility that had never been in gendered in the city before. One example is he created the first zoo. He imported odd and rare animals from all over the world. Way out in Africa and way out in Europe. And from India and from central Asia and so forth. And brought them all and made this enormous zoological gardens in Alexandria to show, yes, the variety of life.

He was the one who realized that the cult of Serapis, which his father had started, would have to be bred across the entire Hellenic population. I should give you a little background in Serapis. Ptolemy, realizing that, Ptolemy Soter, realizing that if the Greeks were going to have to join with the Egyptians, there would have to be a religious interface. The Egyptians were very religious people. Probably the oldest continuous religious consciousness in the world. And it was a custom of Pharaonic Egypt that the new Pharaoh would promote a chief God from out of the whole Pantheon of possible Gods from their own home ground. It was a custom. Everyone would expect it.

So, Ptolemy trying to pick which of the Greek Gods to bring in was beset, finally, with this problem, hanging on him by a fierce dream. And in the dream, he saw a statue and it was a statue of the Greek God Hades or Pluto, the God of the underworld. The man who had kidnapped Persephone. And he ignored the dream. And several months later he had the same dream again, and this time it was a real nightmare. And he woke up and he consulted with people in his palace, especially with the Egyptian priest Manetho, who had come from Heliopolis and was the head priest there and was working in connection with Timotheus from Eleusis, from the Eleusinian mysteries, to try and find a new religious symbol. And they listened to Ptolemy's dream. And they said, you have to send for the statute where is it? And he didn't know. And finally, in conversations with travelers and traders, they ran across a man who said, I’ve seen this statue. It's in a city on the black sea. His name was Sinope.

And so tough, **inaudible word** Ptolemy, absolutely convinced that this was a direct message from the Gods themselves sent he has very, very close emissaries, all the way up the Aegean through the Bosporus. Across most of the coasts, Turkish coast and Anatolian coast to the Black Sea at Sinope. And they wouldn't give it up. They said this is our God. He's at home in the temple and in fact, he belongs here. So, for three years Ptolemy kept raising the ante. Sending more gold. Sending more food. Making all of these pleas until finally he had his men do what they'll always do. They stole the statue. And they covered themselves by spreading the story that the statue was so moved by Ptolemy, that he had gotten himself into life and had walked down to the ship and had cast off the moorings himself.

So, this wonderful statue of Pluto arrived with great ceremony and pomp into the Harbor of Alexandria. There were two harbors. They had made a **inaudible word** between the Island of Pharos and the mainland and they created two harbors. There’s an east harbor and a west harbor. He arrived in the east harbor and the libraries and museums and palaces and everything was along in here. And in front of the whole population of Alexandria done up in his wonderful robes Manetho came out and pronounced this to be the God Serapis. This is the one. Serapis.

And that Serapis, Plutarch says that Serapis is the Egyptian pronunciation of the great Hades, Pluto. That's stretching it. A case can be made. There are many derivations for the word Serapis, but the best one is that it was a combination of two Gods. Both of them Egyptian. One is Osiris and the other is Apis. And the duration of Apis is somewhat…Apis was a sacred bull at Memphis. And Osiris, of course, was the Egyptian God of resurrection. His wife was Isis. And they form a conciliate. In fact, they were related in a very special way. That Osiris an Isis were actually prototypically brother and sister, husband, and wife. They were that kind of a duality. Which in Greek term is Theos or God's Adelphi, which means brother God's. Using the masculine tense and gender to just designate that there are two aspects of a primordial unity. That they are only apparently disparate, but in fact are from a unity. So that Osiris and Isis form a unity.

This of course goes back to Egyptian history and religion. And so impressed Ptolemy Philadelphus that he finally took as his second wife, his own sister named Arsinoe. Arsinoe the second, who was an extraordinarily intelligent woman. Very, very capable. And actually just lived a few years, about 10 years or so after the marriage. But the marriage was a religious manifestation of this **inaudible word or two** Adelphi, the brother Gods of Osiris and Isis. A And the basic tone and I'll, I'll read you some material in just a little bit. The basic tone of Osiris is that he is a sun God who kept his unity, not only during the day or not only during the manifestation period of life, but after the sunsets and goes down under the world. In the underworld still keep the unity. And even though his body is torn apart. He is dismembered. Fragmented. His other half who keeps the unity alive in the meanwhile, goes around and recollects his fragments and put them back together. And Osiris is resurrected whole, that he was only apparently dismembered and fragmented. And that this is a mystical secret of everlasting life that these vehicles are, but fragments that break because of their nature, but have nothing whatsoever to do with the inner spirit. So, that this notion of Osiris being a continuity of the spirit was a forerunner of Serapis.

What does this have to do with Hades? Hades or Pluto is the God of the underworld. Of the afterlife. And progressively the Greek mind began to understand the underworld not as a dead end at all. Very much in the Egyptian way they began to see that it was a fantastical illusion to think of death as an end or as a negative or as a darkness. That burying a body in the ground doesn't make the spirit part of the dirt. Has nothing to do with it. And we find even as early as Homer, where this original Greek conception actually based on a perceptual yogic quality of insight. Homer already sees the underworld as being like we are accept fading away. The Asphodel fields fade away. And what are they fading away to? They're fading away, not to nothingness, but they're fading away to a transparency. And that once it reaches the quality of a transparency, man's spiritual vision sees through the illusion, through the afterlife illusion, to the eternal life. So that death becomes progressively less and less of a threat. Less than less of a nightmare. Less and less of a physical counterpart to the granite blocking us of existence or its termination. And more of an ever-flowing quality of endurance.

And so, when the Alexandrians appropriated Pluto, the God of the underworld, they appropriated him with this mystical insight in mind. And when Manetho confirmed that this was in fact Serapis. It was in fact stressing this entire transcendent quality to the afterlife in the underworld. And not just this, but another thing. The statue of Pluto was covered with a compound, which was made out of cinnabar. Now cinnabar in classical times was called synoptic earth because most of the cinnabar in the Western world came from that Anatolian Highland region. They hadn't yet had trade with China. And China became the source of cinnabar somewhat later in history. Synoptic earth was cinnabar. And Cinnabar, of course, is the alchemists compound. Because mercury can be processed out of the sulfate, which is cinnabar. And cinnabar when it is ground up and amalgamated makes a perfect covering for a statue because it was, it is hard, and it will take a finely detailed curving. So that you can make a, an exquisitely detailed statute.

Now, the statue of Pluto that was brought from Sinope to Alexandria had a very peculiar quality to the facial expression. The statement in classical antiquity was that Serapis was a weeping God, but that's somewhat sophomoric. It was rather that his face showed the pathos of existence in his expression. So that it was not just a mask of feeling tenderness about existence and living life, but he really did understand it. And yet the body posture showed the lightness of joy. So that the gratefulness of the physical form and the symbolism of its attributes, which I'll get into a moment, combined with the pathos on the face, showed that the sorrow of life is a misplaced feeling tone. And that way should bear it with grace and joy and dignity. It shows our humanity, but in no way reflects the true condition of the spiritual reality.

And so, Serapis had to be that particular stature, because it was the one in manifestation that Ptolemy in his world reaching psyche **inaudible word or two**. And later on, of course they made many statues. There were 42 Serapians by the time that the Romans took over Alexandria. But this was the first.

In fact, later on when there was a damage to this statue several hundred years later, and it had to be replaced the Alexandrian scientists who were extremely adapt. And I'll talk about them in just a little while. Made a new statue of Serapis out of an amalgam of filings of precious metals, like gold and silver mixed with led. Mixed with ground jewels, like emeralds and topaz and rubies. And they made a covering so hard covering this statue of Serapis that five or six hundred years down the line when the emperor Theodosius decided he was going to root out these pagans for once and for all, had his troops go in. And the first soldier who swung a battle ax at the statue of Serapis it shattered the battle ax into a flurry of fragments and sparks. And for several days, soldiers wouldn't go near it. Good Christians though they were, they said this is too much for us. God. But they had used the prototype of the covering of the statute with cinnabar.

And of course, later on in Alexandria is several hundred years down the line when they began with their Hermetic distillations of science, alchemy got its first roots and growth from the analysis of the cinnabar and its properties. Because it was clothing, personally clothing, of the God Serapis. And of course, it was totally natural to them that the cloth that the God would hold the secret of transformation in life. Just like a devout Christian today in Italy would hold the shroud of Turin as being a perfectly legitimate object to study and understand the mysteries of life. The same thing. Same thing.

So that the Alexandrians with the development of the cult of Serapis. It had begun in Memphis and Manetho was I was able to write the scenarios of the rituals and so forth. And with the help of this man from Eleusis. There’s one time family from Eleusis who handled all of the ceremonies of the Eleusinian mysteries. They were called the Eumolpid. E-u-m-o-l-p-i-d. Eumolpid family. They were traditionally in charge. And Timotheus was a senior member of that family. Had been brought to Alexandria. And not only that, but Ptolemy was bringing the cream about the intellectual world to Alexandria.

And the first person who was cured by the miracles of Serapis was a very famous poet named Demetrius of Phalerum. And he had gone blind. And in making his pilgrimage to this new statue just installed in the Serapeum in Alexandria, he was cured of his blindness. And because he was a very great poet at the time, wrote a tremendous hymns about this event. And of course, the Ptolemies with their ear to the practical ground, of course, made additions of these and promoted it. And pretty soon everybody in the Greek world had understood that there is a new God who had arisen in Alexandria, and he could cure. The process of curing incidentally was termed incubation. And what it was is that one would have to sleep on the temple grounds overnight so that the spirit of the God could manifest and move among his worshipers and affect his cure as directly that way. And if you weren't cured that night, then you had to stay. And the object was to stay until you were cured. So, the temple grounds were quite large, and facilities were very, very fine. It was very much like the old medieval pilgrimages where persons would go for hundreds of miles and plan to stay for several weeks. And that sort of occurrence.

The temple of Serapis incidentally was in the Western part of Alexandria. In a suburb named Rhacotis. And Rhacotis has later on had a very large Jewish population. And many of the Hellenic Jews began to see in Serapis the kind of relationality that they had seen in the story of Joseph. And the Hellenistic Jews of the 2nd century B.C. when the wisdom literature began to come out, understood that Serapis was a Greek metaphor for an eternal process, which they also had a metaphor. And this would happen time and time again with various populations of Alexandria. The Egyptians could look at Serapis and understand Serapis in terms of Osiris.

The Greek populations very, very quickly became attuned to the fact that Serapis had many qualities that Apollo had. And Serapis began to displace, somewhat, the individual personal or national Gods of these peoples. Not displace it totally, but to make them aware that there was a bridging between all of them in common. That they could understand each other in terms of Serapis.

And of course, with a genius, like Ptolemy Philadelphus, who had 40 years following his father's 40 years. And then his son Ptolemy Euergetes [Ptolemy III Euergetes], who was there for another 20 or 25 years, also very talented. Alexandra is first century was a child and it grew in population. It grew in wealth. It grew in position. Though all of that Alexandria became a second flowering of Greek culture and actually displaced for about two centuries, any mainland Greek city. Athens or Koren, or any of them.

This development of course, made Alexandria a tourist paradise. And as soon as the Hellenic wars died down a little bit, after a while, they got tired of pushing each other with huge armies and it got to be skirmishes. And in fact, the Ptolemies set a great example. Ptolemy Soter near the end of his life, realized that it was much easier to marry off one of your daughters to the son of some King. And then it was harder for him to get up an army to come in and hurt you because you were related. So, with Soter, and then later on with Philadelphus, they took the tack that it was, it's better to bring your enemies into the family. And they did that many times.

And in fact, the, the incident that convinced Ptolemy Soter of this capacity. He engendered one of the largest fleets that had ever been seen. Nearly 200 ships. Had sent it in war against Cyprus. Had lost about 170 of these ships. Then the enemy was sending a huge fleet against him and this tremendous storm came up and sank most of that fleet. And here, Ptolemy began to realize that maybe there was something else. Maybe he’d better believe his own propaganda that there were other forces at work in the world at this time and not just military power. And of course, it proved to be a Godsend because Alexandria set a tone of kindliness intelligence for the entire world at that time from India to Spain.

I have some quotes in here that I could give you. This is from Plutarch's Isis and Osiris. Plutarch was a Greek writing in Roman times about the 2nd century. This is his account of Ptolemy Soter’s dream about the statue.
Besides Ptolemy Soter saw a dream, the Colossus of Pluto that stood at Sinope. Though he knew it not, nor had ever seen what shape it was. Calling upon him and bidding him to convey it speedily away to Alexandria. And as he was ignorant to that, a great loss where it should be found. And it was telling his dream to familiars there was found by chance, a certain fellow that had been a general rambler in all parts. His name was Sisyphus who affirmed that he had seen at Sinope such a colossus as the King had dreamt of. He therefore sent **inaudible name** and Bacchus to there, who in a long time, and with much difficulty and not without the special help of a divine providence, stole it away and brought it to Alexandria. When therefore it was conveyed thither and viewed Timothy the expositor and Manetho the Sibonite,
Timotheus and Manetho.
“Including from the Cerberus and serpent that stood by it that it must be a statue of Pluto.”
Cerberus of course, is a three headed dog, but in the old classical iconography, the three heads represent a lion, a wolf and a dog. And the three heads of Cerberus actually represent the past, the present and the future. Tying tenses that come from a single body and the body is wrapped around by a serpent.

That the patternings that were a clarion call for the responsiveness of the Roman people appear in such clear repetitions and basic universal patterns again and again, and again, that up until the first Punic war, they felt themselves indeed the masters of their fate and situation by virtue of the proof of ethics test that was given to them. It was not until the second Punic war that the character and the nature of the Roman mind is changed irrevocably. And from then on, we're dealing with the different sort of people. Up to this point, they are really recognizable as coming from a tradition of peasant farmers. Small groups of tribes working together over the centuries and building up a combine. And really one must think of Rome as a combine, not as any one people, but have a tremendous melee of various peoples braided together by increasing successes, which were repeated down through many hundreds of years. Till it got to the point where they thought that it was simply a structural necessity on their part to continue.

Well, let's take a break and then we'll, we'll come back for a little bit.

I was unable to find the appropriate inscription from Callimachus **inaudible word** imitation of him. Just to give the flavor. We haven't much of Callimachus. I give you this, and then I'll go into the background somewhat.
Then Venus that among the various lights of heaven. Not only should the golden crown taken from the brows of Ariadne be fix, that I also might shine. The dedicated spoil of Bernice’s sunny hip. Me too wet with tears and transported to the abodes of the Gods. Me, the new constellation among the ancient stars, did the Goddess Set. For I touching the fires of the Virgin, the raging lion. And close by Callisto, daughter of Lycaon move to my setting while I point the way before slow booties, who scarce late at night dips in deep ocean. But though at night, the footsteps of the Gods press cloaks upon me. Whilst by day, I am restored to grey tepees. Under thy sufferce let me speak this, oh Virgin of **inaudible word**. No fear shall make me hide the truth. No, not even though the star shall rend me with angry words while I refrain from uttering the secrets of a true heart. I do not so much rejoice in this good fortune as grieve that parted, ever parted, must I be from the head of my lady. With whom of old, while she was still a Virgin delighting herself with all kinds of perfumes. I drank many thousands.

So, the sophisticated lament of Callimachus with its ultra refined Alexandrian sensibilities is written about the same time as the Romans were slaughtering tens of thousands at the Battle of Centennial. And it's a peculiarity to fled from Rome to Alexandria at this time period. Because the contrast and civilization is literally a thousand years of sophisticated, clever development.

And it's been observed many times that if one were to have taken a survey of the ancient world in 300 B.C., you wouldn't even have included Rome in the possibilities of having taken over the great Alexandrian ecumene. The great world empire. The universal cosmo-polis. It just wouldn't have been conceivable. And then a hundred years later, there was no competition whatsoever. Rome was hands down the greatest power in the world. And it was just a matter of inevitable conquest area by area.

So that the 3rd century B.C., in terms of trying to understand patterns of history is a monstrous problem. It's a puzzle. How can this be? And I think the only way to really seriously regard it is to understand that the sophistication of the Hellenistic Mediterranean had reached a point where they had literally frozen themselves into an equilibrium. Afraid for anyone to get any kind of hegemony. And because the center, the spiritual center of Greek culture had moved so far to the East, it left a vacuum in the Western part of the Mediterranean. And the only real growing, even though constantly slow growing, protagonist on that Western field of action was Rome.

The Gauls, the Celts were never interested beyond the momentary plundering or the fortifying of a single tribal area. The Etruscans faded back into the misty realms of history. The other coasts along the Adriatic delirium and so forth were really devoted to piracy. It was only the Carthaginians and the Romans that had a chance. And really when we see the outcome of the second Punic war and the third, next week, that Rome was really almost the only real protagonist that Carthage was like a screen of possibilities, but it did not have the real foundation in base. It had been stretched out way too far. The Carthaginians were great seafarers and explorers. By 490 B.C. one of them named Hanno had already sailed out through the straits of Gibraltar. And as far down the African coast, as Cameroon in central equatorial Africa. And this was not just a single ship, but it was a whole Armada of ships containing as they say, classically 3000 men and women. So that it was really like a floating exploring city that had gone that far down.

So, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, very capable people. But they were always a sea-based exploring people. So that their cities, their colonies were on the coasts. And in comparison, to this sort of butterfly cluster of Carthaginian ports, this oak of Roman solid achievement, adding ring by ring by ring simply was too much to overcome. Rome could be beat in a battle, but after 387 B.C., it wasn't sacked for maybe 700 years. It simply was unbeatable. And they had the internal resources, economically, and in terms of population. And in terms of military prowess to just keep coming back again and again and again. And if they didn't do it in this generation, they would do it and the next or the next. And we can see that by the time of the principate of Augustus, just a few years before the birth of Jesus, that the Roman idea had become the only viable political reality in the Western world.

Alexandria, of course, in the 3rd century, B.C. was by far the center of Greek culture. I think it's been stated that even though there were competitors from time to time on certain levels. Pergamum had a great library about the third of the size of the Alexandria library. Maybe a fourth. Today they produce several named scholars, grammarians and so forth. But they never had a civilization in a culture like Alexandria in the sense of a continuous overlapping of generations for many generations. So that the fruition of the Greek culture, which had come in the 5th and 4th century blossomed. And not only blossomed what was surrounded by innumerable leaves of real genius that made it a living plant.

Ptolemy Soter who had founded the museum and had founded the library left in he his sons’ hands, Philadelphus, the task of increasing these structures. And it was the kind of situation that for instance, in the museum we have records of the fact that there were dozens of scholars who were there and were supported by the state. They were subsidized. And they in turn then worked with the library. And the great library, the head librarian would be the tutor for the Ptolemaic children coming up for the next generation. So that this tremendous combine in the Alexandrian palace complex produced increasingly general patients of leaders who had a tremendous education and background. They were prepared to take it. It was a full blossoming of Aristotle's idea that if you train someone, they're efficiency in their incarnation would be raised finally to the level, to which the ceiling would be simply the extent to which the imagination could conceive of efficiency. You could produce in physical reality any level of achievement which the mind of man could dream of. If you had continuity and excellence unbroken all the way.

And of course, the first three or four Ptolemies were exceptional individuals. The fifth Ptolemy was a little bit of a problem. And in fact, he realized the, the danger of this tremendous weight of experience and for just a little while, exiled the scholars from Alexandria in 145 B.C., but they soon came back and soon the great gears were working again.

It's also interesting to note that it had become a structural support of Alexandrian society to consult the great library on matters instead of going to consult by a sacrifice of an animal in some temple. One went to the great library and inquired of the **inaudible word** what was the right way to handle a situation? How had it been handled before? And the great Alexandrian library, of course, just to give you some idea of its size. Very, very competent instrument. In the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, this would be roughly 280 B.C.-270 B.C., there was an account that all huge Papyrus rolls. They had about 400,000 of them. And these huge rolls had many different books on. Of simple Papyrus roles that had just one book on say, like Plato's Republic or something like that. They had 90,000 of these. And as a compliment to the grand great library, they had at the temple of Serapis a smaller daughter library that held about 42,800 volumes. So that the Papyrus scrolls were really there for popular consumption. That is the general populace would go to the library at the temple of Serapis and there with 42,800 volumes available to themselves. All in translation to **inaudible word or two** the Greek language. All of them fully annotated with critical apparatus, the percentages of Alexandra or any of the traders who were coming through Alexandria. It was a great crossroads, could see that this was part of the boon of the God Serapis. Not just to restore to through the process of incubation of sleeping in the temple, but that knowledge, wisdom Athena's brilliance itself was here writ out in detail to be consulted in detail through the process of what we would call scholarship today, I think. Or education, really. The idea comes from Plato the idea of paideia, of being able to educate one successors so that they improve. And if that goes on, eventually men will refine himself to a true capability. The longer the process goes on, the closer one comes to the archetypal potential. So that the process of paideia is one of educating to the level of a divine insight through information through its process.

The library itself, the great library was really off limits to most individuals except for scholars. Visiting scholars in many instances. But usually what would happen is that the scholars would come, and they would join the library. They would live there. They would take their meals. There would be free concourse between them. There would be lectures in pub and halls open to the public of the scholars, but not so much the general public. And on the inner circles of the library, those who were tutors to the Ptolemies, all of the great structures of learning from the past, Greek and Egyptian, Indian, no matter where it had originated. They had everything except the civilization of China. Everything. They had all the copies of all the books that were available. And they were all translated into one Greek language and then they were digested by generations of scholars pouring over them.

The great example, of course, the two-legged pedestal upon which the Greek vision has always rested as Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. And all of the head librarians of Alexandria, the first six or seven at least, all produced grand great additions of Homer. Each one trying to up to the other. And we find that this emphasis upon Homer, of course, is reproduced in our own Western European civilization. The last hundred years or so. Our whole ideas, scholarship and critical additions and everything really reborn from the old questions of Homeric scholarship. Which were reborn again largely in Germany in the 19th century. And finally in England in the early 20th century and so forth. This process happened in Alexandria in the 3rd century B.C.

Callimachus is often stated to have been one of the first, if not the first chief librarian at Alexandria. In fact, it probably never happened. He probably was not the chief librarian. A certain Zenodotus I would think was the chief librarian at the time. But Callimachus had a more important job. He was assigned by Ptolemy Philadelphus to be the cataloger of the library. And you have to realize that the first generation that went in there like Callimachus, sophisticated though they were, had not yet set up the library. And they had, as some of the fragments tells us that they'll tell us heaps of scrolls everywhere throughout the city. Which they had to physically bring into the grand library as it was being finished and it had to be put into some sort of an order. And to take this enormous title way of information, which spanned the Learning of the entire known world at that time, took a feat of superhuman genius.

And it was Callimachus who cataloged the library of Alexandria. He spent his entire life at it. And he annotated his cataloguing and his procedure in a series of books, Pinakes. It's Greek for tablets. And what they were, were outlined lists organized placing all the knowledge of the known world into patterns or worlds of meaning and showing that all of the scrolls that go along with this referential diagram are here. This room and that room. In this place and so on. So that you have a phenomenon really one man setting up the British museum, for instance. Just going through all of it. Reading it all, in the sense of knowing what was in every, dare we say damn scroll, and then writing a short precis on who this was that wrote this, what this was in here, and then collecting all this together and ordering it into structures of reference and information. That's what Callimachus did.

Well, you can imagine the fine hammered steel of a man's mind. Having spent a lifetime reviewing what human beings have found out. He wrote poetry, but he said having understood Homer as well as anybody has ever understood him, that the age of the grand epic is over. Not appropriate anymore. He said, in fact, we would be hard pressed to write small epics. Better to write short lyrical poems. Better to write epigrams. Better to write various other kinds of poetic structures. But not the grand epic. That the time was over for that. Not only had man changed, but that Homer had done it once and for all for all time. Because if you can read Homer and look through his eyes, that's it. He will teach you how to see in the grand epic manner of the grand muse Calliope, she sings through him and always will.

So, Callimachus set this up. But while he was cataloging and making these statements about poetry, another man became the chief librarian in Alexandria. And he was from Rhodes. Same as Apollonius. Apollonius Rhodes. And he said that Callimachus was a fool. He didn't write an epic because he couldn't. That he in fact had written in epic. And Apollonius of Rhodes drew out his Argonautica complete with people like Jason and Orpheus and cast of thousands and grand adventures and got himself exiled. Because the Ptolemy's liked Callimachus. And not only the Ptolemy’s but the Alexandrians liked Callimachus because the quality of his mind. They didn't want to have these big, wonderful Cecile B. DeMille type productions anymore. They wanted the nice, refined cameo parts that they could pull out of their Toga and on a moonlit night, maybe they could recite two or three verses to a friend and say, well we're the inheritors of all of this wisdom. Aren't we nice. That sort of thing. That's Alexandria.

And it carries down really to the present day. If one looks at, for instance, the poems of Cavafy, C.P. Cavafy, the great Greek who wrote a lot in Alexandria quite a bit. In our time, the 20th century, again you find this tremendous satisfaction in being able in 20 lines to say exactly what one's view of life is through this situation and to let it go at that. Let it resonate from that.

The great librarians of Alexandria numbered, quite a few marvelous individuals among them. I will incidentally cover all this in greater depth and detail on the 31st of July when I lecture on Ptolemaic Alexandria, Saturday morning here. Just to give you a few of their names. There was Eratosthenes. Eratosthenes was a great geographer and mathematician. He was able to measure the circumference of the Earth to within 30 miles in 270 B.C. Sophisticated man. There was Aristarchus, of course. There was Aristophanes of the Santiam. A number of individuals. There were people who were talented, like Hipparchus, the greatest astronomer of antiquity who did not become a chief librarian.
But all of these great names of Alexandra and individuals literally were held together by the great library that was there. By the museum of which they would be corresponding members living there. Subsidized by the government and the state. And in return for this enormous investment in keeping and this pattern of life, which allowed them to come into contact with the best minds of the world in one place. Not only one city, but one building over an indefinite span of time, allowed the human psyche to blossom and produce that for you vision of one world. That all mankind is a single family. A single species. And that their contact with divinity is not through the ritual slaughter of any number of life forms, but through the understanding of the relationality of all life forms in their living context.

And Ptolemy Philadelphus in order to ensure that this understanding did not go astray, had put in the Serapeum alongside of the statute that had been brought over from Sinope of Pluto, of Serapis, a huge cage light structure that had living birds and living plants and living animals. So that one could see that Serapis was the God of life in particular of life relationality in its total. And that man's sacrifice was to devote himself assiduously away from the materialistic conquests of others to the divine plan of understanding the all in its living manifestation and in its total exfoliation.

And this was the clear message of Alexandria. And this was the culture that increasingly Rome was to come into contact with. And the first indications of the fact that it was going to change them structurally was with you the assimilation of the Greek colonies of Southern Italy and of Sicily. Where are the fringes of the benefits of Alexandria, which had just begun to come out, first touched their own Romans and made them self-conscious of the fact that they were a little clumsy and a little blocky next to the Greeks. This whole direction would have a combination 200 years down the line when the Romans finally breached what they thought was an apex of their sophistication and their power with Julius Caesar. And came into direct confrontation with Alexandra in the person age of Cleopatra. And that grand story when we get to it, a Caesar and Cleopatra is not just a man and a woman, but it's these two cultural types. These two incarnations of the way in which man manifests divinity came into conflict. And we'll see, I think at that time, some amazing.
Well next week, the great story of Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, the great mystic religious man who found himself in a position as the counsel, the head of the Roman legions at a time of absolute desperation. Hannibal had for almost 20 years marched unbeaten up and down Italy until the Romans were sure that hell itself was at their door. And then Scipio came through with a series of movements and plans that were just astounded and changed the history of the world.

We'll see that. And I hope I'll be able to get that all within two hours. I don't know.

See you next week.

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