Alexandria and Her Schools: Four Lectures Delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh — John Shaqi
Alexandria and Her Schools: Four Lectures Delivered at the Philosophical Institution, EdinburghKingsley, Charles
Philosophy
Alexandria and Her Schools: Four Lectures Delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh
Kingsley, Charles
Alexandrian school
* * * * *
So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and completed by
Philadelphus; or rather two libraries, for while one part was kept at the
Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which, as far
as we can discover, Pompey’s Pillar alone remains, one column out of four
hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and the
Museum. Philadelphus buys Aristotle’s collection to add to the stock,
and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of Æschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more honest methods.
Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with emulation, commences
a similar collection, and is so successful, that the reigning Ptolemy has
to cut off his rival’s supplies by prohibiting the exportation of
papyrus; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth transcribed on
parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, which thus has its name to this day,
from Pergamus. That collection, too, found its way at last to
Alexandria. For Antony having become possessor of it by right of the
stronger, gave it to Cleopatra; and it remained at Alexandria for seven
hundred years. But we must not anticipate events.
Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple of the Muses, with all
due appliances, in a vast building adjoining the palace itself, under the
very wing of royalty; and it must have porticos, wherein sages may
converse; lecture-rooms, where they may display themselves at their will
to their rapt scholars, each like a turkey-cock before his brood; and a
large dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as
befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and
Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For
Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle
of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went
home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died
in despair, leaving five “dialectical daughters” behind him, to be thorns
in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as “emancipated
women;” a class but too common in the later days of Greece, as they will
always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and crumbling to
pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what they are, and
what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings. But to return: funds
shall be provided for the Museum from the treasury; a priest of rank,
appointed by royalty, shall be curator; botanical and zoological gardens
shall be attached; collections of wonders made. In all things the
presiding genius of Aristotle shall be worshipped; for these, like
Alexander, were his pupils. Had he not mapped out all heaven and earth,
things seen and unseen, with his entelechies, and energies, and dunameis,
and put every created and uncreated thing henceforth into its proper
place, from the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues and the
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