They were called Ophtho, or persons dedicated, and by the Greeks Catochoi, or persons confined, of which last our Latin name, a religious recluse, is the translation. These pagans gave us the first example of a monastic life and our name for it. They showed their zeal for their gods by the amount of want which they were able to endure. Cleanliness and change of linen were luxuries which they thought it right to shun, and they added to their discomfort by cutting their flesh from time to time with knives. They thought that sitting. upon the ground in idleness, with the knees up to the chin, was one of the first of religious duties. In this posture they are often represented in their statues (see Fig. 229). Fig. 229. (30) The Museum of Alexandria held at this time the highest rank among the Greek schools, whether for poetry, mathematics, astronomy, or medicine, the four branches into which it was divided. Its library soon held two Antiq. xii. hundred thousand rolls of papyrus; which, however, 2. could hardly have been equal to ten thousand Athenaus, printed volumes. Many of these were bought by Josephus, lib. i. 2. Philadelphus in Athens and Rhodes; and his copy of Aristotle's works was bought of the philosopher Nileus, who had been a hearer of that great man, and afterwards inherited his books through Theophrastus, to whom Strabo, they had been left by Aristotle. The books in the lib. xiii. Museum were of course all Greek; the Greeks did not study foreign languages, and thought the Egyptian writings barbarous. Hieronym. (31) In the last reign Demetrius Phalereus had been at the head of this library, who, after ruling Athens with in Dan, xi. great praise, was banished from his country, and fled to Ptolemy Soter, under whom he consoled himself for the loss of power in the enjoyment of literary Brutus. leisure. He was at the same time the most learned Cicero, and the most polished of orators. He brought learning from the closet into the forum; and, by the soft turn which he gave to public speaking, made that sweet and lovely which had before been grave and severe. Suidas. Plutarch, Cicero thought him the great master in the art of speaking, and seems to have taken him as the model upon which he wished to form his own style. He wrote upon philosophy, history, government, and poetry; but the only one of his works which has reached our time is his treatise on elocution; and the careful thought which he there gives to the choice of words and to the form of a sentence, and even the parts of a sentence, shows the value then set upon style. Indeed, he seems rather to have charmed his hearers by the softness of his words, than to have roused them to noble deeds by the strength of his thoughts. He not only advised Ptolemy Soter what books he Regum should buy, but which he should read, and he chiefly apophtheg. recommended those on government and policy; and it is alike to the credit of the king and of the librarian, that he put before him books which, from their praise of freedom and hatred of tyrants, few persons would even speak of in the presence of a king. But Demetrius had also been consulted by Soter about the choice of a successor, and had given his opinion that the crown ought to be left to his eldest son, and that wars would arise between his children if it were not so left; hence we can hardly wonder that, on the death of Soter, Demetrius should have lost his place at the head of the Museum, and been ordered to leave Alexandria. He died, as courtiers say, in disgrace; and he was buried near Diospolis, in the Cicero, pro Busirite nome of the Delta. According to one account he was put to death by the bite of an asp, in obedience to the new king's orders. Diogenes lib. v. Rabirio. (32) Soon after this we find Zenodotus of Ephesus filling the office of librarian to the Museum. He was a Suidas. poet, who, with others, had been employed by Scter in the education of his children. He is also known as the first of those Alexandrian critics who turned their thoughts towards mending the text of Homer, and to whom we are indebted for the tolerably correct state of the great poet's works, which had become faulty through the carelessness of the copiers. Zenodotus was soon followed by other critics in this task of editing Homer. But their Diogenes in labours were not approved of by all; and when Timone. Aratus asked Timon which he thought the best edition of the poet, the philosopher shrewdly answered, "That which has been least corrected." (33) At the head of the mathematical school was Euclid; who is, however, less known to us by what his pupils have said of him than by his own invaluable work on geometry. This is one of the few of the scientific writings of the ancients that are still in use among us. The discoveries of the man of science are made use of by his successor, and the discoverer perhaps loses part of his reward when his writings are passed by, after they have served us as a stepping-stone to mount by. If he wishes his works to live with those of the poet and orator, he must, like them, cultivate those beauties of style which are fitted to his matter. Euclid did so; and the Elements have been for more than two thousand years the model for all writers on geometry. He begins at the beginning, and leads the learner, step by step, from the simplest propositions, called axioms, which rest upon metaphysical rather than mathematical proof, to high geometrical truths. The mind is indeed sometimes wearied by being made to stop at every single step in the path, and wishes with Ptolemy Soter for a shorter road; but upon the whole Euclid's neatness and clearness have never been Comm. equalled. The writings of Hippocrates, Eudoxus, ii. 4. Leon, Theatetus, and others, from which the Elements were very much taken, are now lost, and their names hardly known; while the writings of Euclid, from their style and manner, will be read as long as geometry is studied. Proclus, Athenæus, lib. vii. 38. (34) Ctesibius at the same time ranked equally high in mixed mathematics, although his name is now little lib. ix. known; he wrote on the theory of hydrostatics, Pliny, and was the inventor of several water-engines, an application of mathematics which was much called for by the artificial irrigation of Egypt. He also invented that useful instrument the water-clock, or hourVitruvius, glass, to supply the place of the sun-dial after sunlib. ix. 9. set; and by these and other inventions, he rose from being the son of a barber in Alexandria to hold a high rank in the scientific world. The water-clock, in order to be useful, had to be adjusted to the common sun-dial. And as this divided the daylight into twelve hours, long hours in summer and short hours in winter, it required not a little skill in Ctesibius, to make his hours of the corresponding uneven lengths. (35) Among the best known of the men of letters who came to Alexandria to enjoy the patronage of Philadelphus was Theocritus. He was born or at least brought up at Syracuse. Many of his poems are now lost; but his pastoral poems, though too rough for the polished taste of Quintilian, and perhaps more like nature than we wish any works of imitative art to be, have always been looked upon as the model of that kind of poetry. If his shepherds do not speak the language of courtiers, they have at least a rustic propriety which makes us admire the manners and thoughts of the peasant. He repaid the bounty of the king in the way most agreeable to him; he speaks of him as one to freemen kind, Idyll. xiv. 60. Wise, fond of books and love, of generous mind; Theocritus boasted that he would in an undying poem place him in the rank of the demigods; and, writing with the Pyramids and the Memnonium before his eyes, assured him that generosity toward the poets would do more to make his name live for ever than any building that he could raise. The muse of Theocritus is wholly Sicilian; he has drawn no pictures from the country to which he had removed. He hardly mentions Egypt; when he writes to please himself his free thoughts wander over the hills and plains of Sicily; when he writes through gratitude, they are imprisoned in the court of Alexandria. Suidas. (36) In a back street of Alexandria, in a part of the city named Eleusinis, near the temple of Ceres and Proserpine, lived the poet Callimachus, earning his livelihood by teaching. But the writer of the Hymns could not long dwell so near the court of Philadelphus unknown and unhonoured. He was made professor of poetry in the Museum, and even now repays the king and patron for what he then received. He was a man of great industry, and wrote in prose and in all kinds of verse; but of these only a VOL. I. Y Hymn to Hymn to Delos. few hymns and epigrams have come down to our time. Egypt seems to have been the birthplace of the mournful elegy, and Callimachus was the chief of the elegiac poets. He was born at Cyrene; and though from the language in which he wrote his thoughts are mostly Greek, yet he did not forget the place of his birth. He calls upon Apollo by the Apollo. name of Carneus, because, after Sparta and Thera, Cyrene was his chosen seat. He paints Latona, weary and in pain in the island of Delos, as leaning against a palm-tree, by the side of the River Inopus, which, sinking into the ground, was to rise again in Egypt, near the cataracts of Syene; and prettily pointing to Philadelphus, he makes Apollo, yet unborn, ask his mother not to give birth to him in the island of Cos, because that island was already chosen as the birthplace of another god, the child of the gods Soteres, who would be the copy of his father, and under whose diadem both Egypt and the islands would be proud to be governed by a Macedonian. Quintilian, Ælianus, (37) The poet Philætas, who had been the first tutor of Philadelphus, was in elegy second only to Callilib. x. 1. machus; but Quintilian (while advising us about books, to read much but not many) does not rank him among the few first-rate poets by whom the student should form his taste; and his works are now lost. He was small and thin in person, and it was jokingly said lib. ix. 14. of him that he wore leaden soles to his shoes lest he should be blown away by the wind. But in losing his poetry we have perhaps lost the point of the joke. While these three, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Philætas, were writing in Alexandria, the Museum was certainly the chief seat of the muses. Athens itself could boast of no such poet but Menander, with whom Attic literature ended; and him Philadelphus earnestly invited to his court. Pliny, He sent a ship to Greece on purpose to fetch him; lib. vii. 31. but neither this honour nor the promised salary could make him quit his mother-country and the schools of Athens; and in the time of Pausanias his tomb was still visited by the scholar on the road to the Piræus, and his statue was still seen in the theatre. (38) Strato, the pupil of Theophrastus, though chiefly known for his writings on physics, was also a writer on many |
