Although the place which Alexandria occupies, or seems to occupy, in the intellectual and literary development of the later Greece and of Occidental culture generally cannot be fitly estimated in a description of the local circumstances of Egypt, but only in the delineation of this development itself, the Alexandrian scholarship and its continuation under the Roman government are too remarkable a phenomenon not to have its general position touched on in this connection. We have already observed (p. 126) that the blending of the Oriental and the Hellenic intellectual world was accomplished pre-eminently in Egypt alongside of Syria; and if the new faith which was to conquer the West issued from Syria, the science homogeneous with it--that philosophy which, alongside of and beyond the human mind, acknowledges and proclaims the supra-mundane God and the divine revelation--came pre-eminently from Egypt: probably already the new Pythagoreanism, certainly the philosophic Neo-Judaism--of which we have formerly spoken (p. 170)--as well as the new Platonism, whose founder, the Egyptian Plotinus, was likewise already mentioned (p. 126). Upon this interpenetration of Hellenic and Oriental elements, that was carried out especially in Alexandria, mainly depends the fact, that--as falls to be set forth more fully in surveying the state of things in Italy--the Hellenism there in the earlier imperial period bears pre-eminently an Egyptian form. As the old-new wisdoms associated with Pythagoras, Moses, Plato, penetrated from Alexandria into Italy, so Isis and her belongings played the first part in the easy, fashionable piety, which the Roman poets of the Augustan age and the Pompeian temples from that of Claudius exhibit to us. Art as practised in Egypt prevails in the Campanian frescoes of the same epoch, as in the Tiburtine villa of Hadrian. In keeping with this is the position which Alexandrian erudition occupies in the intellectual life of the imperial period. Outwardly it is based on the care of the state for intellectual interests, and would with more warrant link itself to the name of Alexander than to that of Alexandria; it is the realisation of the thought that in a certain stage of civilisation art and science must be supported and promoted by the authority and the resources of the state, the consistent sequel of the brilliant moment in the world’s history which placed Alexander and Aristotle side by side. It is not our intention here to inquire how in this mighty conception truth and error, the injuring and elevating of the intellectual life, became mingled, nor is the scanty after-bloom of the divine singing and of the high thinking of the free Hellenes to be once more placed side by side with the rank and yet also noble produce of the later collecting, investigating, and arranging. If the institutions which sprang from this thought could not, or, what was worse, could only apparently, renew to the Greek nation what was irrecoverably lost, they