Looking at Athens as the preacher and missionary of Letters, and as enlisting the whole Greek race in her work, who is not struck with admiration at the range and multiplicity of her operations? At first, the Ionian and Æolian cities are the principal scene of her activity; but, if we look on a century or two, we shall find that she forms the intellect of the colonies of Sicily and Magna Græcia, has penetrated Italy, and is shedding the light of philosophy and awakening thought in the cities of Gaul by means of Marseilles, and along the coast of Africa by means of Cyrene. She has sailed up both sides of the Euxine, and deposited her literary wares where she stopped, as traders nowadays leave samples of foreign merchandize, or as war steamers land muskets and ammunition, or as agents for religious societies drop their tracts or scatter their versions. The whole of Asia Minor and Syria resounds with her teaching; the barbarians of Parthia are quoting fragments of her tragedians; Greek manners are introduced and perpetuated on the Hydaspes and Acesines; Greek coins, lately come to light, are struck in the capital of Bactriana; and so charged is the moral atmosphere of the East with Greek civilization, that, down to this day, those tribes are said to show to most advantage, which can claim relation of place or kin with Greek colonies established there above two thousand years ago. But there is one city, which, though Greece and Athens have no longer any memorial in it, has in this point of view a claim, beyond the rest, upon our attention; and that, not only from its Greek origin, and the memorable name which it bears, but because it introduces us to a new state of things, and is the record of an advance in the history of the education of the intellect;—I mean, Alexandria.
Alexander, if we must call him a Greek, which the Greeks themselves would not permit, did that which no Greek had done before; or rather, because he was no thorough Greek, though so nearly a Greek by descent and birthplace and by tastes, he was able, without sacrificing what Greece was, to show himself to be what Greece was not. The creator of a wide empire, he had talents for organization and administration, which were foreign to the Athenian mind, and which were absolutely necessary if its mission was to be carried out. The picture, which history presents of Alexander, is as beautiful as it is romantic. It is not only the history of a youth of twenty, pursuing conquests so vast, that at the end of a few years he had to weep that there was no second world to subjugate, but it is that of a beneficent prince, civilizing, as he went along, both by his political institutions and by his patronage of science. It is this union of an energetic devotion to letters with a genius for sovereignty, which places him in contrast both to Greek and Roman. Cæsar, with all his cultivation of mind, did not conquer in order to civilize, any more than Hannibal; he must add Augustus to himself, before he can be an Alexander. The royal pupil of Aristotle and Callisthenes started, where aspiring statesmen or generals end; he professed to be more ambitious of a name for knowledge than for power, and he paid a graceful homage to the city of intellect by confessing, when he was in India, that he was doing his great acts to gain the immortal praise of the Athenians. The classic poets and philosophers were his recreation; he preferred the contest of song to the palæstra; of medicine he had more than a theoretical knowledge; and his ear for music was so fine, that Dryden’s celebrated Ode, legendary as may be its subject, only does justice to its sensitiveness. He was either expert in fostering, or quick in detecting, the literary tastes of those around him; and two of his generals have left behind them a literary fame. Eumenes and Ptolemy, after his death, engaged in the honourable rivalry, the one in Asia Minor, the other in Egypt, of investing the dynasties which they respectively founded, with the patronage of learning and of its professors.
Ptolemy, upon whom, on Alexander’s death, devolved the kingdom of Egypt, supplies us with the first great instance of what may be called the establishment of Letters. He and Eumenes may be considered the first founders of public libraries. Some authors indeed allude to the Egyptian king, Osymanduas, and others point to Pisistratus, as having created a precedent for their imitation. It is difficult to say what these pretensions are exactly worth: or how far those personages are entitled to more than the merit of a conception, which obviously would occur to various minds before it was actually accomplished. There is more reason for referring it to Aristotle, who, from his relation to Alexander, may be considered as the head of the Macedonian literary movement, and whose books, together with those of his wealthy disciple, Theophrastus, ultimately came into the possession of the Ptolemies; but Aristotle’s idea, to whatever extent he realized it, was carried out by the two Macedonian dynasties with a magnificence of execution, which kings alone could project, and a succession of ages secure. For the first time, a great system was set on foot for collecting together in one, and handing down to posterity, the oracles of the world’s wisdom. In the reign of the second Ptolemy the number of volumes rescued from destruction, and housed in the Alexandrian Library, amounted to 100,000, as volumes were then formed; in course of time it grew to 400,000; and a second collection was commenced, which at length rose to 300,000, making, with the former, a sum total of 700,000 volumes. During Cæsar’s military defence of Alexandria, the former of these collections was unfortunately burned; but, in compensation, the library received the 200,000 volumes of the rival collection of the kings of Pergamus, the gift of Antony to Cleopatra. After lasting nearly a thousand years, this noblest of dynastic monuments was deliberately burned, as all the world knows, by the Saracens, on their becoming masters of Alexandria.