The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (10 page)

Unlike Socrates, whose parents were artisans, Plato was from a noble and literate family, and once he had settled in Athens he began to write prodigiously. His philosophy was based on the physics of Heraclitus, who held that everything was in a state of continual flux and that change was the ultimate reality; his metaphysics he took from the Egyptian Pythagorean school, and his ethics and morals from his master, Socrates.

Socrates had not chosen to put any of his philosophy in writing himself, so Plato saw his first task as setting down his master’s dialogues. As no comparative records exist, it’s impossible to tell whether these early works are straightforward transcriptions of Socrates in action (they are written in that form, with Socrates the inquisitor unraveling the beliefs and knowledge of his subjects), or Plato is already using the Socratic dialogues to put his own thoughts in the mouth of his dead master.

It is clear, however, that as Plato’s writings progress, still couched in the form of Socratic dialogues, the voice we are hearing is more and more that of Plato himself. Because these works take the form of questions and answers, it is to some extent left to the reader to determine exactly what his philosophy consists of, but there are some basic notions which underlie his vision, and these would inform the physical and cultural life of Alexandria in years to come.

At the most profound level Plato perceived everything in the universe as having two manifestations. On the one hand there is the physical world which we recognize all around us. This is composed of ordinary matter, which the Greeks believed was made up of the four essential elements—earth, fire, water, air—constantly transforming themselves from one state into the next. This world is unstable and in a constant state of flux, essentially imperfect, giving rise to the endless disorders and deceptions which create the errors and miseries of human life.

But behind this perceived sensory world lies a quite different world of ideal “forms” or “ideas.” In the fullest expositions of Plato’s theories these forms are perfect, unchangeable, pure, and immortal. The human soul is composed of such divine stuff, though it is surrounded by the unstable elements of the sensuous world. It is the task of the philosopher to recapture his divine origins by moving away from the material world, curbing and governing his physical passions, and embracing the inner world of form and the mind.

For Plato this was much more than a simple philosophical construct; it was a way of life, both for the individual and for the state. The perfect state was one where the rules he was deducing were put into perfect practice, making philosophy not the preserve of ethereal academics, but an essential and practical tool of government. Plato believed he could divide up the types of government just as he could divide earth, fire, water, and air, or the polluted “material” from the pure “form.” According to Diogenes Laertius, Plato divided the political world into five species: democracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, and tyranny. He goes on to explain:

 
This was the sort of philosophy that must have been impressed on the young Alexander and Ptolemy at the Macedonian court—practical information for the future rulers of the world. In the monarchical setting of his father’s palace, Alexander likely mused on the relative values of democracy and monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. Athens had embraced democracy but often had fallen to foreign rulers. Carthage was a land of oligarchs set soon to clash with a Roman republic ruled by an aristocracy. But how would he rule the world? Did he dream of becoming monarch of the world? Would he rule through an aristocracy? Would he allow democracy to thrive in Greece? Whatever his decision, in the end, in trying to hold together one vast empire he chose the last and Plato’s least favored route—tyranny.

For Ptolemy, the decision had been different. Born into an aristocracy ruled by a monarchy he could join only through mythmaking, he would choose the route of monarchy, reinventing his family as the legitimate successors to the most ancient court on earth. His empire was to be a family affair, not fought over by his generals, but bound to the age-old traditions of the Egyptian royal house.

But Plato had more to say on government. He went on to describe justice as being of three species—justice toward God, men, and the dead—but it was in one last division that he really struck a chord with Ptolemy, giving him the chance when building his new kingdom to put into practice the philosophical ideas he had learned as a child at the court of Philip. This was in Plato’s conception of the three types of knowledge: “In the same way, there are also three species of knowledge. There is one kind which is practical, a second which is productive, a third which is theoretical” (Diogenes Laertius,
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers [Plato]
).

It was this thought that electrified Ptolemy—bringing together the productive, the practical, and the theoretical in one state. Plato went on to define his three species. House building and shipbuilding were productive knowledge in that one could see the work produced by them. Playing a flute or harp, by contrast, was practical knowledge, for although there was no visible result produced by playing the instrument, something was clearly being done. The same was true of political science. Geometry and astronomy, by contrast, concerned themselves with abstractions and hence were purely theoretical.

It was by combining the three that Ptolemy hoped to create a new model city in Alexandria and a new country beyond. It would feed and be fed by productive knowledge—the ships in the Great Harbor and the markets beyond. It would be governed by practical knowledge in the application of the very best and most efficient forms of government and administration. And set at its heart would be the world’s greatest center for Plato’s third species—theoretical knowledge—which seeks out the truths of the universe and reaches out for the perfect forms of God and soul that lie behind the chaos of the everyday world. This would be a community that had mastered its sensual passions and, in knowing the miseries which arise from unjust conduct, could aspire to excellence and perfection through the exercise of rational and morally sound judgment.

In 1929 the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, when considering Plato’s contribution to Western philosophy, could not avoid the opinion that “the safest general characterisation of the European (modern) philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Alfred North Whitehead,
Process and Reality
).

 
 
It happens very rarely in the history of any branch of knowledge that three of the greatest masters of a subject follow each other in direct descent, each one in many ways outshining his master and predecessor. Just as Plato first recorded, formalized, expanded, and developed the Socratic philosophy, so would Aristotle take the ideas of his master, Plato, and forge from them systems of thought which have affected the entire development of Western civilization. It was also through Aristotle that the ideas of the perfect state were brought to the attention of young Ptolemy, and through Aristotle’s own unique way of gathering knowledge that Alexandria’s preeminent institutions—her museum and library—came into existence.

Aristotle came to Athens to study under Plato when he was about eighteen years old, but he came with certain predispositions. His father had been court physician to King Amyntas II of Macedonia, father of Philip, grandfather of Alexander the Great. Although his father died when Aristotle was only ten, medicine was the traditional occupation of certain families, passed down from father to son. It is therefore very likely that the young Aristotle had already received medical training from his father at home, and that training would have emphasized the importance of investigation and objective observation of the patient and the physical world.

So his family background connected him directly to the Macedonian royal family, trained him as an empirical observer, and also, incidentally, left him with an intense dislike of courts and princes. Unlike Plato, who was an accomplished athlete, the young Aristotle was small in stature, thin-legged, with small eyes and a lisp, which may well have left him prey to the scorn of the noble athletes of the Macedonian court, for whom outward disfigurement was a sign of inner decay.

Aristotle remained at Plato’s Academy in Athens until the death of his master, and most people assumed that he would inherit the position as head of the Academy, but the post was eventually given to a nephew of Plato’s. However, Aristotle had certainly not been idle during his fifteen years at the Academy. On the contrary, his insatiable appetite for knowledge had led him to study literally every subject that existed at that time.

Plato himself had felt that he needed to restrain the young man rather than encourage him in his researches. But though there was never any serious rift between the two, and Aristotle always remained highly respectful of his master, intellectual differences had begun to emerge. Plato remained convinced that only the refinement of the soul would give access to the underlying, ideal forms of the universe and existence, the world around being merely an imperfect copy of the forms. He was therefore in essence an idealist, a rationalist.

But Aristotle came increasingly to place value on the knowledge he gained through his senses, making him an empiricist, trusting what he could see and test, ignoring or dismissing speculation. Here, then, lay the path which would lead directly to the “scientific” method, though it would not gain that label until nearly two thousand years later.

After Plato’s death Aristotle accepted an invitation from a former fellow student at the Academy to travel to Assos near Troy, which his colleague ruled, and he stayed there until his patron was overthrown and killed. He then traveled on to Lesbos, where he carried out biological research of such outstanding quality that it was not superseded until the eighteenth century AD. Even Charles Darwin was an unqualified admirer of Aristotle’s biology. Writing up his findings in
On the Generation of Animals,
Aristotle lays bare the fundamentals of all scientific inquiry, stating boldly that facts can be established only by observation and that theories are valid only insofar as they are supported by observed facts.

And this was the approach he applied as he systematically surveyed the whole of human knowledge as it was in the Mediterranean world in his time. Not content with pioneering the observational method in biology and inventing the study of formal logic, Aristotle both studied and wrote definitively about physics, chemistry, zoology, botany, anatomy, embryology, astronomy, geography, geology, and meteorology. He also explored almost every known aspect of psychology, government, politics and political theory, ethics and moral philosophy, economics, aesthetics, metaphysics, history, literary theory, rhetoric, and religion. And in so doing he created a model of the philosopher as a man of knowledge and wisdom in all fields, which acted as a beacon for generations of scholars, researchers, and philosophers who would later throng the halls, lecture theaters, and libraries of the museum in Alexandria.

These then were the three generations of exceptional scholarship, the pedigree of thought that came to bear on the practical rule of the world in 342 BC, when Philip II of Macedon summoned Aristotle to become his fourteen-year-old son Alexander’s personal tutor. Aristotle performed this role until Alexander assumed the throne on Philip’s death in 336, and remained as personal adviser to the young king until Alexander set off in 333 on his Asian campaigns. During these critical years Aristotle prepared Alexander to be a military leader, using as models great Greek heroes like Ajax and Achilles as they appear in Homer’s
Iliad,
paragons of classical valor.

Alexander’s subsequent career shows that his old tutor had prepared him well, but in his hurry to dominate the whole world the conqueror and his teacher began to drift apart. Perhaps to the most powerful man on earth, the strict admonitions of this old-school master no longer seemed relevant or dignified. Equally Aristotle can only have felt unease with the stories coming back from Asia of his old pupil’s growing autocracy and superstitious paranoia. The imprisonment and subsequent death of Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes at Alexander’s order cannot have helped. Callisthenes, sent with Alexander to record the greatest military campaign of all time, had proved to be an outspoken critic of some of Alexander’s decisions, particularly his adoption of Persian customs, which alienated his Macedonian troops and commanders. In response Alexander accused him of treachery and threw him into prison, where he died, either from torture or disease. When that news got back to Aristotle it must have given rise to foreboding as well as grief. He had always maintained to his young pupil that a ruler over vast swaths of the earth must be as superior to ordinary men as we humans are superior to beasts. In Alexander he could now see a man who believed every day that he was closer to this godlike state, but whose actions betrayed a cruelty and arrogance that in reality took him further from it. Plutarch notes that Alexander, having in his youth treated Aristotle as a second father, once out on his campaigns “suspected him somewhat, yet he did him no hurt, neither was he so friendly to him as he had been; whereby men perceived that he did not bear him the good will that he was wont to do” (Plutarch,
Life of Alexander,
in
Parallel Lives,
8).