ALEXANDRIA. Alexandria was founded in 332 b.c. by the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great, one of the many cities which bore his name. Alexander was in the midst of his destructive drive through the crumbling Persian Empire, an advance maintained and spearheaded by his superbly drilled Macedonian phalanx and its fine cavalry arm. Without adequate communications, successful largely because of the shock tactics of his assault on an ill-knit and loosely garrisoned, polyglot political system, Alexander needed bases and a network of control behind him as he drove deeper and deeper into E Egypt, strategically essential to the control of the Eastern Mediterranean and strategically vulnerable, requiring a strong garrison and firm government. A city and port on the Nile Delta provided both, with harbor facilities in addition.

The site itself, as the astounding Gr. conquest of the Middle E brought unprecedented unity to a vast and ancient sector of the world, promoted the growth of Alexandria. When Alexander died in 323 b.c., and Ptolemy, one of his generals, took Egypt as his share of the succession, a Gr. state was founded in Egypt. Alexandria became the seat of government in place of Memphis, the last capital of the pharaohs. Ptolemy was aided not a little by his shrewd interception of Alexander’s corpse, for which he built a magnificent tomb. The dynasty which Ptolemy founded lasted three centuries. Fourteen monarchs of the name sat on the throne of Gr. Egypt, and the last of the varied line was the famous Cleopatra who almost divided the Roman empire before its time.

From the beginning Alexandria was cosmopolitan. Greeks and Jews in large numbers made it a goal of emigration. There was a large native Egyp. population. Rapidly becoming a great commercial center and a nodal point of communication like Corinth, a terminal of the E Mediterranean sea routes with canal links from the Nile to the Red Sea, and the dhow trade which plied to the Malabar Coast and Ceylon, Alexandria became the metropolis where E met W, wealth inevitably accumulated, and where the ambitious, the able, and the cultured assembled. They gathered under the stimulus and encouragement of the first able members of the Ptolemaic line.

Hellenism was born in Alexandria. The Museum, founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second ruler of the dynasty, was one of the first great universities of the world. A “museum,” in ancient parlance, was not, as in modern times, a collection of objects of art, rarity, and curiosity, but a center of culture, a “home of the Muses,” as its name implies. The Alexandrian Museum was established in 280 b.c. on the advice of Aristotle’s pupil Demetrius of Phalerum. Ptolemy gathered a band of men, who today would be called research scholars, from all parts of the Mediterranean and supported them by generous salaries to foster learning, academic discussion, and writing. The Caesars inherited the Museum from the Ptolemies, and for centuries its band of learned men promoted the culture of the Gr. and Rom. world. The buildings, worthy of a city famous for its architecture, were splendidly furnished and had a great dining hall, lecture and seminar rooms.

In spite of the vicissitudes of cultural life in a politically turbulent city, and the fortunes of changing imperialism, the Museum pursued its active life for at least five centuries, and the preservation of much of the culture of the ancient world must be ascribed to its beneficent work. This invaluable function of conservation was shared by the great Library, also a foundation of the first two Ptolemies. A series of notable scholars and literary men worked in this great institution and together established a Silver Age of Gr. lit. whose forms and canons deeply influenced and inspired the lit. of Rome, and through Rome the lit. of Western Europe and the world.

It was in Alexandria, under the influence of the cultural and literary activity which gathered around the Museum and the Library, that the scholars from the great Jewish sector of Alexandria produced the LXX, the Gr. VS of the OT. The production of this tr. is one of the most significant events in the history of religion. The LXX is the subject of much legendary lore, and it is not known for certain how and when it was produced. It is sufficient to say that it prob. appeared at intervals during the 3rd and 2nd centuries b.c., the work of unknown trs. of unequal merit. The influence of the LXX tr. in the history of world Judaism is beyond calculation. It played a major part in the growth of the intelligent Hel. Judaism whose exponents, men like Stephen, Philip, and Paul, took Christianity to the world and preserved it from the narrowing influence of metropolitan Judaism. The LXX, of course, had currency and influence in wider spheres than Judaism and the Hel. synagogues. It familiarized thoughtful multitudes, to whom old forms of paganism no longer appealed, with the God of the Jewish faith and OT canons of righteousness. The fact that quotations from the Heb. Scriptures in the NT are from the LXX VS shows that the Alexandrian trs. had provided the Early Church with a Bible.

The same hothouse atmosphere of speculation, philosophy, and literary criticism which produced the attempt to fuse Hebraism and Hel. found its greatest exponent in the Jewish scholar Philo, a contemporary of Christ. The movement with its elaborate and obtuse allegorizing, was a barren one, but it influenced a school of Christian theologians including Clement and Origen, both Alexandrians, whose speculative interpretations and extravagant “typology” found partisans in the church until recent years. For the most part Jewish Alexandrianism was irrelevant to the emerging theology of Christianity, though some have thought that here lay the reason for the further instruction which Apollos of Alexandria needed from Priscilla and Aquila (Acts 18:24-28). Others have thought that the Epistle to the Hebrews and parts of the Epistle to the Galatians (e.g. 4:24-31) show traces of Alexandrian hermeneutics. The fact that the synagogue of the Alexandrian Jews (Acts 6:9) in Jerusalem emphatically opposed Stephen’s plain interpretation of OT history shows that Christianity owed little to Alexandrian Jewish thought. Paul, in his person, doctrine, and writing, demonstrated that fusion of Judaism and Hel. which the Jews of Alexandria and Philo’s school attempted to achieve but failed to discover.

The Jews of Alexandria reflected the spirit of the city in other ways than in their enthusiasm for literary culture and intellectual speculation. They constituted a turbulent section of the great city, ever prone to riot and contention with the Greeks, and frequently the victims of pogrom and repression. It was an inflammable situation. In Alexandria the largest and most self-conscious section of the Jewish Diaspora lived side by side with a Gr. community notorious for its unruliness. The Jewish community claimed to be coeval with the city itself and had received special privileges and concessions from the first Ptolemies. They had rapidly overflowed the NE quarter, their statutory ghetto, and when in a.d. 42 the bungling governor Flaccus declared alien all the Jews domiciled in Gr. districts of Alexandria, no fewer than 400 business establishments were destroyed by the riotous mob. The anti-Semitism was prob. inspired by the manner in which the Jews were dominating the trade and commerce of the city. There is some evidence that they controlled the wheat export trade, and Egypt being Rome’s granary, vast tonnage of grain passed through the Alexandrian docks. It was a grain ship of Alexandria on which Paul sailed to Rome (Acts 27:6). Flaccus, no doubt, was encouraged by Caligula’s wellknown hostility to the Jews, an attitude which occasioned Philo’s embassy to Rome, but such outbursts must find base and impetus in popular discontent. It was a dangerous situation relieved only by the mad, young emperor’s early and opportune death.

Claudius, learned and conciliatory, succeeded Caligula, and the pogrom was the occasion of a wordy letter to the Alexandrians in which, with appeal and threat commingled, Claudius sought to reduce the city to peace. In the course of the document he mentions “Jews who come down the river from Syria.” This may be the first indication of Christian missionaries arriving in Alexandria and becoming there, as elsewhere, a source of debate and unrest in the Jewish community. Apart from this there is no certain knowledge of how the Christian religion reached Alexandria.

Alexandria prob. housed a million people by the 1st cent. The city was worthy of the reputation which wealth, trade, and a cultured monarchy had given it. The Romans inherited from the Ptolemies a city of palaces and public buildings unique in the world, interlaced with parkland like some ancient Washington or Canberra. The royal palace, where Julius Caesar first met Cleopatra, occupied a whole section of the level waterfront, dominated by the Pharos, the mighty 590 ft. lighthouse built for the second Ptolemy by Sostratus of Cnidus. The temple of Serapis was accounted one of the finest buildings in the world. The temple of Pan is described by the geographer Strabo as an artificial rock mound like a pine cone, from the top of which was a panoramic view of the whole flat, geometrically planned city. Ancient writers mention many other magnificent buildings. The architectural magnificence of Alexandria, its boulevards, motley crowds, industry, culture, trade, crowded dockland, and busy roads and waterways made Alexandria more like some modern metropolis than almost any other city of the 1st cent. Its active life is as open to modern view as that of Rome itself. Rome left a lit. in poetry, prose, and multitudinous inscrs. Alexandria also left considerable lit., but the papyri of Egypt, with their astounding revelation of common life in town and countryside over the many centuries of Alexandria’s preeminence, give as vivid a view of the teeming life of the delta port and metropolis as any source which the ancient world has to offer.

Bibliography H. I. Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt (1924); CAH X (1924-1939), 284-314; H. I. Bell, Cults and Creeds in Graeco-Roman Egypt (1953); E. M. Smallwood, Philonis Alexandrini Legatio ad Gaium, ed. with an intro., tr. and comm. (1961); V. Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1961), 320-328, 409-415; E. Badian, Studies in Greek and Roman History (1964), 179-191.