with him as judges, was to give away honours and rewards to the best authors, one of the chairs was empty, one of the judges happened not to be there. The king asked who should be called up to fill his place; and, after thinking over the matter, the six judges fixed upon Aristophanes, who had made himself known to them by being seen daily studying in the public library. When the reading was over, the king, the public, and the six other judges, were agreed upon which was the best piece of writing; but Aristophanes was bold enough to think otherwise, and he was able, by means of his great reading, to find the book in the library from which the pupil had copied the greater part of his work. The king was much struck with this proof of his learning, and soon afterwards made him keeper of the library which he had already so well used. Aristophanes followed Zenodotus in his critical efforts to mend the text of Homer's poems. He also invented the several marks by which grammarians now distinguish the length and Epist. Vinatone of a syllable and the breathing of a vowel, that is, the marks for long and short, and the accents and aspirate. The last two, after his time, were always placed over Greek words, and are still used in printed books; the marks for long and short syllables are only used in works of prosody. Arcadius, ap. Villoison rienses. Pliny, Cleomedes De Mundo. (16) Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the inventor of astronomical geography, was at this time at the head of the mathematical school. He was the first who fixed the place of a city upon the earth by the help of astronomy, or lib. vi. 34. by eans of its latitude, which he learned from the length of the sun's shadow at noon on the equinoctial days (see Fig. 238). This observation he named the Theory of Shadows. Nor was that all; for nothing is denied to well-directed labour. By his Strabo, Theory of Shadows he learned that the earth is a ball, and his next aim was to determine its size. He knew that at noon on the longest day the sun throws no shadow at Syene. He had learned by measurement that Syene was due south of Alexandria, and at a distance of five thousand stadia. He therefore measured the sun's shadow at noon on the longest day in his own study in Alexandria, and thus found that if a circle were drawn round the world, these two cities 2 A VOL. I. lib. i. 10 20 Equator. Meroe⋅ Rhandria! 40 50 80 North were distant by a fiftieth part of that circle (see Fig. 239). This gave him the measure of the earth's circumference. Had a traveller from Alexandria, through Ethiopia, through Meroë, passing by the unknown sources of the Nile, been able to cross the unheard of lands and seas beyond, and thence to come round by the equally unknown north, through the Hyperborean nations, the Euxine Sea, and Rhodes again to Alexandria, Eratosthenes would have told him that he had travelled over fifty times five thousand stadia. With this knowledge, he lessened the mistakes in maps, which, before his time, had been drawn without any help from astronomy, and in which the distances in miles had been mostly laid down by days' journeys or by measuring along the crooked roads. By these great strides of science he justly earned the name of Surveyor of the World. Ptolemy, lib. i. Pole. Fig. 238.-Latitude measured on the 9 20 Equator. Syene. Alexandra By measuring the sun's shadow, at the same place, on the longest and on the 40 50 60 70 80 North Fig. 239.-The Earth measured on the longest day. shortest day in the year, he learned the obliquity of the ecliptic, which he fixed at more than 23° 50′, and Strabo, less than 23° 52′ 30′′. But in pure mathematics lib. i. he did not rank so high. Hipparchus said of him that he wrote mathematically about geography and geographically about mathematics; indeed, Hipparchus in his Commentaries on the Geography of Eratosthenes, in many places defended the old maps against his too bold changes. Eratosthenes was a man of such unbounded knowledge, and so nearly at the head of every branch of learning, that, as in philosophy he was called a second Plato, and was spoken of in the same way in many other sciences, he was jokingly called Beta, or Number Two. Sect. xxxiii. (17) As a poet, Eratosthenes, like the rest of the Alexandrian school, was critically and coldly correct; Longinus considers his little poem of Erigone faultless, but equally free from high excellence. His longest work now remaining is a description of the constellations. He also wrote a history of Egypt, to correct the errors, or to explain the omissions of Manetho; but as he could not, like Manetho, read the sculptured records for himself, when they disagree we must prefer the authority of the native historian. But nevertheless the small remains of his history are of some use to us; for, while Manetho's lists only give us the separate dynasties of the several cities, without saying which king reigned over all Egypt and which was under the sceptre of another, Eratosthenes means to give us a straightforward list of the kings of Thebes only. (18) But what most strikes us with wonder and regret is, that these two writers, Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek, Eratosthenes, a Greek who understood something of Egyptian, neither of them took the trouble to lay open to their readers the peculiarities of the hieroglyphics. Through all these reigns, the titles and praises of the Ptolemies were carved upon the temples in the sacred characters. These two histories were translated from the same inscriptions. We even now read the names of the kings which they mention carved on the statues and temples; and yet the language of the hieroglyphics still remained unknown beyond the class of priests; such was the want of curiosity on the part of the Greek grammarians of Alexandria. Such we may add was their want of respect for the philosophy of the Egyptians; and we need no stronger proof that the philosophers of the Museum had hitherto borrowed none of the doctrines of the priests, though we shall find them freely adopted after the rise of Christianity. (19) Lycon of Troas was another settler in Alexandria. Diogenes He followed Strato, whom we have before spoken of, as the head of one of the schools in the Museum. He was Laertius. Very successful in bringing up the young men, who needed, he used to say, modesty and the love of praise, as a horse needs bridle and spur. His eloquence was so pleasing that he was wittily called Glycon, or the sweet. Cicero, Acad. iv. 45. B.C. 222. Suidas. (20) Carneades of Cyrene at the same time held a high place among philosophers; but as he had removed to Athens, where he was at the head of a school, and was even sent to Rome as the ambassador of the Athenians, we must not claim the whole honour of him for the Ptolemics under whom he was born. It is therefore enough to say of him that, though a follower of Plato, he made such changes in the opinions of the Academy, by not wholly throwing off the evidence of the senses, that his school was called the New Academy. (21) Apollonius, who was born at Alexandria, but is commonly called Apollonius Rhodius, because he passed many years of his life at Rhodes, had been, like Eratosthenes, a hearer of Callimachus. His only work which we now know is his Argonautics, a poem on the voyage of Jason to Colchis in search of the golden fleece. It is a regular epic poem, in imitation of Homer; and, like other imitations, it wants the interest which hangs upon the reality of manners and story in the Iliad. Aristophanes and Quintilian, his pupil Aristarchus, the great critics of the day, lib. x. 1. with whose judgment few dared to disagree, and who had perhaps quarrelled with the poet, declared that it was not poetry; and after that, the most that Quintilian would say for it was that it ought not to be overlooked, and that it never falls below mediocrity. It is not wanting in graceful expressions and well-turned sentences, but it pos sesses no depth of feeling or happy boldness of thought, and Longinus dismisses it with the cold praise of being free from fault. Callima (22) His master Callimachus showed his dislike of his Suidas. young rival by hurling against him a reproachful poem, in which he speaks of him under the name of chus. an Ibis. This is now lost, but it was copied by Ovid in his poem of the same name; and from the Roma we can gather something of the dark and learned style in which Callimachus threw out his biting reproaches. We do not know from what this quarrel arose, but it seems to have been the cause of Apollonius leaving Alexandria. Ho removed to Rhodes, where he taught in the schools during all the reign of Philopator, till he was recalled by Epiphanes, and made librarian of the Museum in his old age, on the death of Eratosthenes. Suidas. (23) Lycophron, the tragic writer, lived about this time at Alexandria, and was one of the seven men of letters sometimes called the Alexandrian Pleiades, though writers are not agreed upon the names which fill up the list. His tragedies are all lost, and the only work of his which we now have is the dark and muddy poem of Alcandra, or Cassandra, of which the lines most striking to the historian are those in which the prophetess foretells the coming greatness of Rome; "that the children of Æneas will raise Line 1227. the crown upon their spears, and seize the sceptres Diogenes of sea and land." Lycophron was the friend of Laertius. Menedemus and Aratus; and it is not easy to believe that these lines were written before the overthrow of Hannibal in Italy, and of the Greek phalanx at Cynocephalæ, or that one who was a man in the reign of Philadelphus should have foreseen the triumph of the Roman arms. These words may have been a later addition to the poem, to improve the prophecy. (24) Conon, one of the greatest of the Alexandrian astronomers, has left no writings for us to judge of his Seneca, merits by, though they were thought highly of, and made great use of, by his successors. He worked both as an observer and an inquirer, mapping out the heavens by his observations, and collecting the accounts of the eclipses which had been before observed in ArchimeEgypt. He was the friend of Archimedes of Syracuse, to whom he sent his problems, and from whom he received that great geometrician's writings in return. Quæst. vii. 3. des, passim. (25) Apollonius of Perga came to Alexandria in this reign, to study mathematics under the pupils of Euclid. He is well known for his work on conic sections, or the several curves which are made by cutting a cone; and he may be called the founder of this study. The Greek mathematicians sought after knowledge for its own sake, and, unlike ourselves, |
