Ancient Alexandria left its mark on the world. Its history, however, appears to connect it rather with great names than with great events. Fancy is pleased with the picture of the greatest of the Greeks, Philip’s godlike son, Aristotle’s pupil, who carried about with him his Homer in a golden casket, the Conquistador of Asia, and the heir of the Pharaohs, tracing, with the contents of a flour-bag, the outlines of the nascent city, which was to bear his name of might, and to sepulchre his remains.

The trade of Phœnicia revived in its harbours, and on its quays. It became the Heliopolis, as well as the Thebes, of Hellenic Egypt. Even the Hebrew part of the population caught the infection of the place, and showed some capacity for philosophy and letters. Here it was that their sacred Scriptures were, in the Septuagint translation, first given to the educated world. And Plato, too, was soon more studied in the schools of Alexandria than in his native Greece.

Here fell the Great Pompey. And here, in pursuit of him, came the Cæsar, who bestrode the world like a Colossus; to be followed in our own time by the only modern leader of men, whose name, if he had possessed the generous magnanimity of the two captains of Greece and Rome, history might have bracketed with theirs.

Here ‘the unparalleled lass,’ rather, perhaps, of the greatest of poets than of history, having beguiled to his ruin the soft triumvir, preferred death to the brutalities of a Roman triumph.

Matters, however, of this kind—and they might be multiplied—are only bubbles on the surface. They interest the fancy, but have no effect on the great current of events. We, at this day, are neither the better nor the worse for them. But of the theology of Alexandria we must speak differently. It is through that that it affected, and still affects, the whole of Christendom. Sixteen hundred years have passed, and Alexandrian thought still holds its ground amongst us.

It would help us to a right understanding of what this thought was, and how it came to be what it was, if we knew something about the city, the times, the country, and the mental condition of its inhabitants. Alexandria, like Calcutta and New Orleans, having been called into existence by the requirements of commerce, had been obliged, for the sake of a harbour, to accept a singularly monotonous and uninteresting site. This alone must have had much influence on the cast of thought of its inhabitants. All who visit it will, I think, feel this. One cannot imagine a healthy and vigorous literature springing up in a place where Nature has neither grandeur nor beauty. Being mainly a commercial city, its inhabitants—as must be the case in all large commercial cities in the East—were composed of many nationalities. They had brought with them their respective religions and literatures, as well as manners and customs. It also contained the most brilliant Greek Court in the world, in which we might be certain that Greek inquisitiveness, and mental activity, would not be extinguished. This will account for the libraries and the schools of Alexandria.

We must understand why it never could become anything in the world of action. It was not because the Egypt of the Ptolemies was inferior to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. It might have been its superior in every particular of power and greatness, and yet have been unable to do anything in the outer world. What kept it quiet was a consciousness of moral and intellectual inferiority to the people time had at last educated and organized on the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

The mental activity of the Alexandrians was all connected with their libraries and schools. The work they did belongs to a condition of mind which can use libraries and schools, but which really originates nothing. It was all work upon other people’s work. They never produced anything of their own. They never could have had an Æschylus, or an Aristophanes; a Thucydides, or an Aristotle. The genius that can originate implies vigour, freedom, individuality, irrepressible impulse—in two words, expansive humanity. Nothing of this kind could have been the growth of Alexandria. The possession it was of these qualities which made the Greeks original, and great in everything they undertook: in art, in war, in government, in colonization, in philosophy, in poetry, in history. The genius which showed itself in their literature was only the same genius which showed itself in other forms and directions, as needs required: which showed itself in everything Greek. Alexandria could not have produced a Pericles, or a Phidias, or an Alexander, any more than a great writer. It would have taken the same mental stuff to make one of these, as to make a poet, an historian, or a philosopher. They all work with the same motive power. The main conditions, too, are the same in all. It is the object only to which the work is directed that varies. The Greeks were, emphatically, men. It was this that made them creative. Humanity was the soul of everything they created; the stamp upon everything they did; and this it is that gives to their work its eternal value.

The mind of Alexandria was a parasitical plant. It fastened itself on the work of others; and endeavoured to extract from it what they had already assimilated, and which its own limited capacities disqualified it from extracting, first hand, for itself from the rich store-house of Nature. It could live upon their work, and turn it to its own narrowly-bounded purposes. For instance, the Greek language had been perfected by the long series of generations who had used it, and who had known nothing of grammars and dictionaries: but at Alexandria it was studied for the sake of the grammar and of the dictionary. Homer had been loved in the Greek world, because he spoke, as a man, to men’s hearts and imaginations. He was valued at Alexandria, not for his poetry—the men and women he had created—but because he supplied a text to comment on. So with the divine dreams of Plato: their use, at Alexandria, was that they supplied some materials for the construction of systems.

It was exactly in this spirit that the Gospel was laid on the dissecting tables of Alexandria. The object proposed was to set up a skeleton to be called Christian Theology; and to inject and arrange certain preparations, to be called Christian doctrines. Here was a strange perversion. Never were the uses to which a thing had been ingeniously turned so thoroughly alien to its real nature and design. The objects of the Gospel were moral and religious. Its appeals were addressed to the ordinary conscience, and to the ordinary understanding: in them its philosophy is to be found. But the systematizers of Alexandria had no taste for dealing with such materials. The Christian religion, as presented to us in their theology, has not one particle of the Gospel in it: no heart, no soul; no human duties, no human motives—nothing human, nothing divine. It is something as hard, and as dry, as a mummy; and would be as dead, were it not for its savage, truculent spirit. It is an attempt to construct a material god, mechanically, of body, parts, and passions—the Egyptian passions of the day; such as burnt, volcanically, in the hearts of the crocodile haters, and crocodile worshippers, of Ombos and Tentyra, and impelled them to eat each other’s still quivering flesh, and drink each other’s blood hot. The watch-word, the source, the main-spring, of Christ’s religion, the one word that fulfils it, is absent from this travesty of it.

This anatomical Christianity, in which there is no Gospel, this systematic divinity, in which there is nothing divine, this mechanical theology, which contradicts the idea of God, Alexandria had the chief hand in inflicting on the world, and a grievous infliction they were. Christendom is still suffering from it. It is the anatomy of a body from which the heart, the blood, the flesh, the muscles, all that rendered it a living power, and made it beautiful and beneficent, have been removed. It is the systematization of a Hortus Siccus. It is a theology that kills religion, in order that it may examine it. The religion that is fixed and formulated; a matter of definitions, and quantitive proportions; that can be handled, and measured, and weighed; that can be taken to pieces, and put together again by a monk in his cell, just as if it were a Chinese puzzle; cannot be the living growth of minds whose knowledge is ever being extended, and of consciences that are ever becoming more sensitive. It cannot indeed, as far as these things go, be a religion at all. A religion, though burdened with them, and perpetually dragged by them into the sphere of formalism, controversy, and passion, may, and will, live on in spite of them; for nothing can kill religion: still the two are antagonistic and incompatible.

The Alexandrian theologians interpreted Christianity in accordance with the criticism, the knowledge, the ignorance, the mind, and the conscience of their day. They could hardly have done otherwise. They came from caves in the desert, and from old tombs, and they returned to them for fresh inspiration. They had a right to interpret things according to the light that was in them. So have we. Our light, however, is somewhat different from theirs. ‘The New Commandment’ was not one that at all commended itself to their sepulchral, troglodytic minds. It finds no place in their creeds. We, however, give it the first place in ours. The perfect law of liberty was unintelligible to them: their only thought about it was to make it impossible: to us it is as necessary as the air we breathe. They held that man is for the creed: we that the creed is for man. Which is right makes much difference.

For the traveller who is desirous of seeing the present in connexion with the past, Alexandria has many other reminiscences. Homer mentions the Isle of Pharos, which formed the harbour. On this classic rock Ptolemy Philadelphus built a magnificent lighthouse of white marble. This was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world. Its name, which was borrowed from the rock on which it had been placed, has passed into most of the languages of Europe, as the appellative of these useful structures. We, however, who employ them more largely than any other people, and who have in our Eddystone the finest and most interesting structure of this kind in the world, built under widely different conditions from those of the tideless middle sea, very properly give to them a name of our own.

The causeway, three-quarters of a mile in length, which was formed for the purpose of connecting Ptolemy’s Pharos with the mainland, having been enormously expanded, in the course of two thousand years, by the same process, which, in the same period, has raised the present to more than twenty feet above the original level of Rome, is now the Frank quarter of the city. The whole of this space must, therefore, in the time of Homer, and down to the time of Alexander, have been under water.

The city, having become the capital of Egypt, grew rapidly in population, wealth, and splendour. The Ptolemies disposed of the revenue of Egypt, which had now become the chief entrepôt of the commerce of the world; and they spent it with no niggard hand in embellishing their capital. Few great cities have had so large a proportion of their space occupied by magnificent public buildings. Nothing, however, need be said here of its palaces, theatres, and temples, except that they were worthy of the city which filled the first place in the cities of the Greek world, and in the universal empire of the Cæsars was second only to Rome.

Pompey’s Pillar, as the inscription upon it informs us, was erected in honour of Diocletian.

Cleopatra’s Needle had originally stood at Heliopolis, where it had been set up by Thuthmosis III., and afterwards seen by Joseph and Moses. It was transplanted from Heliopolis to Alexandria by one of the Roman Emperors, after the time of Cleopatra. It had been cut from the granite quarries of Syené. It has, therefore, travelled from the John o’Groat’s House to the Land’s End of Egypt.

Its deservedly world-famous library recurs to every one who thinks about Old Alexandria. No other library had ever such a history. It was founded two hundred and eighty-three years before the Christian era; that is to say, before Rome had entered on her Punic wars. While those wars were raging the Alexandrians must, within the walls of this library, have canvassed the news of the day with much the same feelings with which we were ourselves, but just now, talking over the last intelligence from Sedan and Metz, from the Loire and the Seine. In the Greek world a public library had never before been heard of. It was connected with a great mass of buildings called the Museum, which was a kind of institution for the promotion of study, discussion, and learning. Eventually it contained 700,000 volumes. Of these 400,000 were at the Museum; the remainder were in a building connected with the great Temple of Serapis. With the Ptolemies the enrichment of this library was always a great concern. They dispersed their collectors wherever books were to be obtained; and were ready to pay the highest price for them. It was the boast of the city that the library contained a copy of every known book. At last it was overtaken by the fate which awaits all the works of man. In Cæsar’s attack on the city the great library of the Museum was accidentally burnt. The library, therefore, which is supposed to have been destroyed by the command of the Caliph Omar, could only have contained the books, that might have remained to his time, of the inferior library of the Serapeum. This we know had been very much dilapidated by neglect, and in other ways, during the intervening seven centuries of occasional violence, and of constant decay. One, however, is hardly disposed to acquiesce in the opinion on this subject of the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; for, among so large a collection of books, there must, one would suppose, have been some precious works of antiquity, which we should now value highly, but which were then lost to us irreparably.

While we regard with reverence this great library, both for the antiquity of the date of its establishment, and for the useful and noble purposes it was intended to serve, those of perpetuating, and of extending, knowledge, we should be guilty of an injustice if we were to forget that it was not the first institution of its kind. The idea of establishing a public library, which the Ptolemies deserve much credit for carrying out liberally and thoroughly, had nothing original in it in one country, at all events, of the world, and that one was Egypt. Eleven centuries before their time, as we have already seen, the Great Rameses, in his temple-palace at Thebes, had erected a public library. The walls of it are still standing. We need not repeat what we have said elsewhere about the sculptures on its walls, the inscription over its doors, the manuscripts dated from it still in existence, and the tombs of its librarians. This was done more than three thousand years ago. Perhaps, then, other ideas and practices, we may be in the habit of regarding as modern, were also familiar to the Egyptians of that remote day. Those times, indeed, may, in some not unimportant matters, be virtually nearer to us than the times of our Edwards and Henries.