What defines us better than our name? The same for cities. ‘Our’ Alexandria is Alexandrea ad Aegyptum (in Greek, Alexándreia he kat’Áigypton), i.e. ‘Alexandria near Egypt’. One of the capitals of the ancient world, desired by Alexander the Great on his way to eastern conquests, a melting pot of peoples who mingled to enrich one another, “it remained essentially a Greek city in Egypt”, as Lorenzo Guardiano, Egyptologist at the University of Milan, writes in his Alexandria of Egypt. Storia di una capitale del mondo antico. It is a journey through history, through culture, among the traces – few, unfortunately – still visible in today’s urban fabric. Above all, Guardiano has written an ambitious book that makes you want to leave physically or even just with your mind or a book. It matters little, what is important is to go in search of the glory that was to understand what Alexandria knows how to teach 2,350 years after its foundation: that contamination is richness.
This story begins with a dream, that of Alexander the Macedonian, young and handsome, to whom, in front of a deserted bay, on a night in 331 BC, Homer’s verses suggest founding a city. It is Plutarch, in the Lives, who reminds us of this: in the 4th book of the Odyssey Telemachus, in search of his father Odysseus, comes before Menelaus, who tells him of his return from Troy. But the Atrid is stranded on the very island of Pharos, where Proteus and his daughter Eidothea were staying. Thanks to the latter, Menelaus ambushes Proteus in order to interrogate him to leave the island, and the memory of Homeric verses drives Alexander to the foundation. From the mouth of the Nile, between waters and marshes, a small island can be seen towards the sea, one kilometre from the coast, the island of Pharos, which is caput mundi, capable of ‘uniting the East with the West and creating a mother city from which the new culture, no longer Greek but Hellenistic, will spread’. The Egyptians, tired of Persian domination and also bewitched by the millenary Greek wisdom, offered no resistance to the Macedonian, who, having traced the perimeter of the city on a Hippodamian plan, set off to conquer his empire. He returned to Alexandria to be buried there, and his tomb was visited from Caesar to Octavian, up to Caracalla in 216 AD. Then, the tomb of the Macedonian king and pharaoh of Egypt will never be mentioned again.
It matters little, because the city shines with grandeur: it is a superb Greek pólis inhabited by native Egyptians, Jews and various ethnic minorities, ‘it has beautiful public sanctuaries and even royal palaces, representing a quarter or a third of the entire urban area’, as Strabo writes in Geography: there is the royal palace, Bruchéion, the setting of the Grand Harbour, the Lighthouse, immense and one of the seven wonders of the world, the Emporium and the Serapeum, the only Alexandrian temple to have left archaeological evidence. And then the great library, with 40,000 volumes according to Seneca. At the court of the Ptolemies, Hellenistic culture gave the best results in the fields of science, philology, literature and philosophy. In Alexandria, Callimachus embroiders eternal verses, here the constellation north-east of Leo is sung as ‘Berenice’s hair’, in honour of Queen Berenice II. The hustle and bustle of trade moves ideas, which fertilise, abundantly, the sciences: under Ptolemy I, Euclid works and then his pupil Archimedes. Eratosthenes, measuring the angle of the sun’s rays in Alexandria during midday of the summer solstice, using a stick that casts a shadow on the ground, estimates the circumference of the Earth. And how can we forget the philosopher Hypatia.
Naturally, Alexandria is the fifth in the tragedy involving Caesar, Cleopatra, Egypt’s last cruel and fatal queen, and her love Antony. With the woman’s death on 12 August 30 BC, Octavian became lord of Egypt and, from that moment on, the area no longer had an autonomous ruler on the throne. The Romans, Byzantines and Arabs took over and the city entered a darkness that lasted a millennium: from a cosmopolitan metropolis, it became a fishing village of 4,000 inhabitants. Napoleon launched the Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801), whose most important legacy is the Rosetta Stone; Mohammed Ali revived it on behalf of Istanbul and people arrived from all over, Greeks, Syrians, French, English, Italians. Finally, how can we fail to recall Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Silenzio (from L’allegria, 1916): ‘I know a city / that every day is filled with sunshine / and everything is rapt in that moment / I left one evening / In the heart lasted the limio / of cicadas / From the ship / painted white / I saw / my city disappear / leaving / a little / an embrace of lights in the turbid air / suspended’.
Lorenzo Guardiano, Alessandria of Egypt. Storia di una capitale del mondo antico, il Mulino, pp. 160, € 15
