Alexandria and her Schools | Page 9

be a long and
sanguinary task. It was better to make terms with them; to employ them

as friendly warders of their own mountain walls. Their very fanaticism
and isolation made them sure allies. There was no fear of their
fraternising with the Eastern invaders. If the country was left in their
hands, they would hold it against all comers. Terms were made with
them; and for several centuries they fulfilled their trust.
This I apprehend to be the explanation of that conciliatory policy of
Alexander's toward the Jews, which was pursued steadily by the
Ptolemies, by Pompey, and by the Romans, as long as these same Jews
continued to be endurable upon the face of the land. At least, we shall
find the history of Alexandria and that of Judea inextricably united for
more than three hundred years.
So arose, at the command of the great conqueror, a mighty city, around
those two harbours, of which the western one only is now in use. The
Pharos was then an island. It was connected with the mainland by a
great mole, furnished with forts and drawbridges. On the ruins of that
mole now stands the greater part of the modern city; the vast site of the
ancient one is a wilderness.
But Alexander was not destined to carry out his own magnificent
project. That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to
whose personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom
history knows few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an
adventurer, the son of an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of
Philip of Macedon. There were those who said that he was in reality a
son of Philip himself. However, he rose at court, became a private
friend of young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of
Colonel of the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, till after
his great master's death he found himself despot of Egypt.
His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most Jove- like
type of Greek beauty. There is a possibility about it, as about most old
Greek faces, of boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and a
contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, which puts one in mind
of Goethe's expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too
well to respect them. At least, he was a man of clear enough vision. He
saw what was needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the
thing which he saw. It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge
amorphous empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and
advised its partition among the generals, taking care to obtain himself

the lion's share; not in size, indeed, but in capability. He saw, too (what
every man does not see), that the only way to keep what he had got was
to make it better, and not worse, than he found it. His first Egyptian act
was to put to death Cleomenes, Alexander's lieutenant, who had
amassed vast treasures by extortion; and who was, moreover, (for
Ptolemy was a prudent man) a dangerous partisan of his great enemy,
Perdiccas. We do not read that he refunded the treasures: but the
Egyptians surnamed him Soter, the Saviour; and on the whole he
deserved the title. Instead of the wretched misrule and slavery of the
conquering Persian dynasty, they had at least law and order, reviving
commerce, and a system of administration, we are told (I confess to
speaking here quite at second-hand), especially adapted to the peculiar
caste-society, and the religious prejudices of Egypt. But Ptolemy's
political genius went beyond such merely material and Warburtonian
care for the conservation of body and goods of his subjects. He effected
with complete success a feat which has been attempted, before and
since, by very many princes and potentates, but has always, except in
Ptolemy's case, proved somewhat of a failure, namely, the making a
new deity. Mythology in general was in a rusty state. The old Egyptian
gods had grown in his dominions very unfashionable, under the
summary iconoclasm to which they had been subjected by the
Monotheist Persians--the Puritans of the old world, as they have been
well called. Indeed, all the dolls, and the treasure of the dolls' temples
too, had been carried off by Cambyses to Babylon. And as for the
Greek gods, philosophers had sublimed them away sadly during the last
century: not to mention that Alexander's Macedonians, during their
wanderings over the world, had probably become rather remiss in their
religious exercises, and had possibly given up mentioning the Unseen
world, except for those hortatory purposes for which it used to be
employed by Nelson's veterans. But, as Ptolemy felt, people (women