History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12)Rappoport, A. S. (Angelo Solomon)
History
History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12)
Rappoport, A. S. (Angelo Solomon)
Egypt -- History
The art of engraving coins did not flourish alone in Alexandria;
painters and sculptors flocked to Egypt to enjoy the favours of Ptolemy.
Apelles, indeed, whose paintings were thought by those who had seen
them to surpass any that had been before painted, or were likely to be
painted, had quarrelled with Ptolemy, who had known him well when he
was the friend and painter of Alexander. Once when he was at Alexandria,
somebody wickedly told him that he was invited to dine at the royal
table, and when Ptolemy asked who it was that had sent his unwelcome
guest, Apelles drew the face of the mischief-maker on the wall, and he
was known to all the court by the likeness. It was, perhaps, at one
of these dinners, at which Ptolemy enjoyed the society of the men of
letters, or perhaps when visiting the philosophers in their schools,
that he asked Euclid if he could not show him a shorter and easier way
to the higher truths of mathematics than that by which he led the pupils
in the Museum; and Euclid, as if to remind him of the royal roads of
Persia, which ran by the side of the highroads, but were kept clear and
free for the king's own use, made him the well-known answer, that there
was no royal road to geometry.
Ptolemy lived in easy familiarity with the learned men of Alexandria;
and at another of these literary dinners, when Diodorus, the
rhetorician, who was thought to have been the inventor of the Dilemma,
was puzzled by a question put to him by Stilpo, the king in joke said
that his name should be Cronus, a god who had been laughed at in the
comedies. Indeed, he was so teased by Ptolemy for not being able to
answer it, that he got up and left the room. He afterwards wrote a book
upon the subject; but the ridicule was said to have embittered the rest
of his life. This was the person against whom Callimachus, some years
later, wrote a bitter epigram, beginning "Cronus is a wise man."
Diodorus was of the sceptical school of philosophy, which, though not
far removed from the Cyrenaic school, was never popular in Alexandria.
Among other paradoxes he used to deny the existence of motion. He argued
that the motion was not in the place where the body moved from, nor in
the place that the body moved to, and that accordingly it did not exist
at all. Once he met with a violent fall which put his shoulder out of
joint, and he applied to Herophilus, the surgeon, to set it. Herophilus
began by asking him where the fall took place, whether in the place
where the shoulder was, or in the place where it fell to; but the
smarting philosopher begged him to begin by setting his limb, and they
would talk about the existence of motion after the operation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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