491 ART. VIII. ΩΡΙΓΕΝΟΥΣ ΤΑ ΕΥΡΙΣΚΟΜΕΝΑ ΠΑΝΤΑ. Origenis opera omnia quæ Græce vel Latine tantum exstant et ejus nomine circumferuntur, ex variis Editionibus, et Codicibus mana exaratis, Gallicanis, Italicis, Germanicis et Anglicis collecta, recensita, Latine versa, atque annotationibus illustrata, cum copiosis indicibus, vita Auctoris, et multis dissertationibus. Opera et Studio Domni CAROLI DELARUE, Presbyteri et Monachi Benedictini e Congregatione. S. Mauri. Parisiis, MDCCXXXIII. AFTER the capture of Gaza, Alexander the Great marched through the desert to Pelusium, and found himself master of Egypt. In this country he resolved to build a city which should inherit the commercial greatness once possessed by the fallen Tyre. At the close of a day spent in examining the intended site, he retired to rest, filled with pleasing anticipations. As sleep came on, and his thoughts began to group themselves in that fantastical disarray so common to our dreams, his favourite scheme appeared before him completed. He saw the coast covered with magnificent buildings down to the edge of the sea, so that the blue waters of the harbour seemed to be lying in a basin of marble. Multitudes of vessels were passing to and fro; he heard the whistle and the shouts of the mariners, the rattling of the cordage, the noisy lading and unlading of the merchant-ships, and a thousand other busy sounds. Still he was at a loss to determine on what part of the coast the city stood. It was certainly not on the spot he had selected. While occupied partly in admiring the prosperity and grandeur of the place, and partly in endeavours to ascertain its exact position, his attention was arrested by the appearance of a colossal figure which arose out of the sea. It was that of an aged man; in his hand he held the well-known trident, and as he came gliding onward, the attendant waves thronged about him with a joyous rippling. After glancing with serene satisfaction at what he saw going on about him, the god of the ocean fixed his eyes on the hero and repeated the following lines from the Odyssey: He then disappeared beneath the waves; a mist began to overspread the sea; it extended to the city; palace after palace, street after street, faded away, and the king of Macedon awoke. With Alexander, to resolve was to act. He called for his horse, sallied forth, and by the light of the moon reached the locality pointed out by the vision. Before him lay the island of Pharos, a short distance from the mainland, and on either side swept the dark lines of coast, stretching away with a slight curve to the right and left. The eye of the monarch was not slow to discern the advantages of such a position. He remained motionless, gazing on the scene and calling up the time when that desolate solitude should become populous as had been his dream. Glorious Homer!' exclaimed he, architect as well as poet!' The following day, on the neck of land which lies between the Mediterranean and the Lake Mareotis, the demarcations of the city of Alexandria were laid out with the customary solemnities. The conqueror soon afterwards gathering his sea of human beings about him, poured the flood over the whole of the East, and dying there, left the world everywhere covered with the tide-marks of his greatness and his littleness. He bequeathed to the Orientals lasting remembrances of the terrible Iskander; to his followers a legacy of contention; but to Egypt a city destined to become second only to Rome itself. At Alexandria literature and commerce were to flourish long after his great empire had fallen into decay. This beautiful city was thus the Venus that arose out of all that idle foam of conquest. The Ptolemies spared no cost in adorning their chosen residence. Men of all nations were invited to a share in the privileges of citizenship, and the town was filled ere long with a dense population of Ægyptians, Greeks, and Jews. Every country was laid under contribution to decorate the rising favourite. All books of value that found their way into the city were seized by the government, carefully copied, and the transcripts sent to the owners with a liberal acknowledgment for the exchange. An extensive library was erected near the palace, and in connexion with the Museum whose groves and porches became the resort of the most distinguished professors in literature and science. The gods of other nations were prevailed upon to bestow even their divinity on this Pandora, and forsook their old abodes to become the patrons of Alexandria. Serapis, yielded up at last by the reluctant Scydrothemis, was transported from the shores of the Euxine and installed in the Serapion, an edifice inferior only to the Capitol in its extent and grandeur. Whatever might have been the faults of the Ptolemies they were at all times ready to throw their shield over literature, and to lavish treasure on the famous library. Even that monster of cruelty, Ptolemy Physcon, was a munificent patron of letters, and himself an author. In the luxurious Alexandria, Antony and Cleopatra found a fitting place for their memorable revelries. Here it was that he 'Who had superfluous kings for messengers forgot defeat in feasting his faithful veterans through the night, till he forced the wine peep through their scars;' and in decking one last festival with every splendour that love and royalty could bring, as though to hide the form of coming death with flowers, or to disperse by the brilliance of that artificial scene the gloom that was thickening about him. After the death of Cleopatra, the last of the descendants of Ptolemy Lagus, Egypt became a Roman province. To the Alexandrians the change was slight. They followed their gains and pleasures as before. Situated as their city was, the floodgate through which passed all the traffic between the east and west; while that was undisturbed in the constancy of its ebb and flow, Alexandria must be rich; and the revolution which substituted the prætor Gallus for the high-born Cleopatra put no check upon its growing prosperity. A traveller in the early part of the third century, on approaching Alexandria from the west would enter the harbour of Eunostus, passing on his left the island of Pharos, with the celebrated light-house on its eastern promontory. This island was connected with the mainland by a causeway and a bridge of unusual height, beneath which he sees vessels passing to and fro between the harbour of Eunostus and the larger one on the other side. He lands on the spacious quay of Port Cibotus, and proceeding southwards, about half way down the broad straight street which ran the whole width of the city, beholds on his right the Serapion. After ascending its hundred steps, and passing through exterior buildings occupied by the priests and the devotees of the god, he finds himself within a vast quadrangle adorned with porticoes; and in the centre rises the temple itself, in which the massiveness of the old Ægyptian architecture derives new beauty from an admixture of Grecian elegance. In the interior he sees the colossal statue of Serapis, the extended hands touching the walls on either side, the serpent, the symbol of eternity, coiled about him, its head resting on his hand. Here he meets worshippers of almost every creed, for all, except Jews and Christians, adored Serapis. Egypt raised temples to his honour as the beneficent deity of the Nile, while the Greek and the Roman recognised in him another impersonation of Jupiter, Pluto, or Esculapius. The traveller would probably feel desirous next of visiting another range of buildings within the verge of the temple-the library, with its 300,000 volumes.* If he mounts to the summit of the fane, an extended prospect presents itself. On his right, as he looks towards the south, lie the If Cleopatra deposited here the books from the Pergamean library with which Antony presented her, the total amounts to 500,000. crowded dwellings of the poorer classes, in the ancient quarter Rhacotis; and beyond them the Necropolis, with its catacombs reaching as far as the coast. Directly in front stretches the Lake Mareotis; its shore next the city forming a second harbour, filled with the vessels that have arrived from the east through the Nile and the canals which join that river to the lake. More distant, the surface of the water is traversed in every direction by gaily-coloured pleasure-boats, that, with music playing and streamers flying, glide across its blue like aurora-borealis lights over a northern sky. The shores of this little inland sea, covered with vines, (the Mareotides albæ' of Virgil,) are studded with the suburban villas of the merchant-princes. In the line of the horizon lies a dreary expanse of desert, the refuge at first of many a persecuted Christian, and afterwards the chosen wildernessEden of multitudes of dreaming Eremites. 6 * Our visitor descends, and quitting the temple enters the great street extending the entire length of the city, from the gate of Necropolis to that of Canopus. Passing the Gymnasium, with its porticoes six hundred feet in length, he reaches the eastern quarter of the city, the northern half of which was occupied by the palace of the Ptolemies. Here he enters the Museum, the residence of the royal society of literati. He sees them walking in the peripatus, or sitting in the shady retirement of the exhedra, discussing their theories in ethics, astronomy, or medicine. In another department of the palace once stood the Bruchion, a library of four hundred thousand volumes. These were consumed when the ships in the neighbouring harbour were burnt during Cæsar's Alexandrian war. A third division, called the Soma, was set apart as the burial-place of the kings; and here lay the body of Alexander in its sarcophagus of glass. Leaving the city by the gate of Canopus, he has before him the circus for the chariot-races, and in the distance the commencement of the suburbs of Nicopolis, which with Eleusis and Canopus formed a chain of towns along the shore. Such was the golden Alexandria,' whose growth the commerce of all climes combined to nourish, causing it to send out its roots and its branches both wide and deep. Not only were the boughs laden with wealthy fruit, but vocal in every leaf, like those of the singing tree in the Arabian nights, with a perpetual songfull no less of gaiety than of riches. All the fowls of heaven lodged in the branches of it. Not a phantasy in religion, not a chimera in politics, or hypothesis in science, but might there soar * ̓Απὸ δὲ τῆς Νεκροπόλεως ἡ ἐπὶ τὸ μῆκος πλατεῖα διατείνει παρὰ τὸ γυμνάσιον μέχρι τῆς πύλης τῆς κανωβικῆς. Strabo. l. xvii. or flutter, sing its song, or display its plumage. That there should at times be discord in the notes, occasionally much mutual pecking and acrimonious chatter, was not surprising. To the Alexandrians, in their laughter-loving moods this was delightful. It was all so much in the way of vive la bagatelle. The traveller of whom we have spoken might enrich himself with all the lore of the literary and scientific world, without stirring beyond the city walls. He might become initiated in the philosophical Judaism of Philo, and learn to find in Plato the Attic Moses.' Large store of fantastical subtilties and an edifying contempt of the body he might acquire from the Neoplatonist Plotinus. Sitting in a mingled auditory of Christians and Pagans, he might be taught from the lips of the eclectic Ammonius Saccas how to patch up a coat of many colours with scraps stolen from every system of philosophy and religion. He might be inducted by the lectures of Clement into a knowledge of Christianity through the gate of the Platonic philosophy. With the Gnostics he might lose himself in a labyrinth of æons, becoming profound in the history of the strife waged by Oromasdes and Ahriman; and achieving the finishing stroke in the subterranean chambers beneath the Rhacotis, become a candidate for admission to the unrighteous mysteries of Serapis. But he need be a careful observer of the signs of the times, for he treads a soil where massacres and riots are indigenous. The Alexandrians were disposed to carry their jests to a length somewhat inconvenient to themselves and others. They were once honoured with a visit from that indefatigable traveller Adrian. He restored them old privileges and conferred new ones. When his back was turned their wit could content itself with no less royal a whetstone than himself and his son Pius. The emperor inflicted no punishment, but in a letter to Servian, expresses, with the utmost naiveté, a wish, that this city, by its grandeur and riches the first of all Egypt, were furnished with better inhabitants.' A Caracalla displayed less forbearance. Deformed and imbecile, this prince longed to be thought an Alexander, or a swift-footed Achilles. The popularis aura, however, responded from beneath, like the wind among the reeds in the old fable, to the tune of Midas has ass's ears.' The enraged prince, in the midst of the festivities with which he was welcomed, gave orders for an indiscriminate slaughter of the inhabitants. So notorious was their proneness to sedition, that, with the exception of the prætor and his retinue, no Roman citizen of rank was allowed to reside among them without a special permission from the emperor. The elements of this miscellaneous population were in contact but not in union. No asperity of prejudice was worn away by the |