Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [114]
Octavian may have been the ruler of the Roman world, but he had never seen a great Hellenistic megalopolis before. He was familiar with cities that, like Rome and Athens, had grown untidily and organically over many centuries—crowded, noisy, ugly conurbations devoid of wide avenues and splendid vistas. So Alexandria made a great impression on him.
Founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great, the twenty-five-year-old Macedonian king who conquered the Persian empire, the city was built on a narrow bar of land with the Mediterranean on one side and a shallow lake, called Maraeotis (today’s Lake Mariout, smaller and shallower than in ancient times), on the other. A little way offshore lay an island, Pharos, with its celebrated lighthouse, which was three miles long and gave protection from storms.
As in a modern American city, the street plan was based on a grid. A mile-long mole or dike was built between the shore and the island of Pharos, so creating two harbors, the Great harbor on the east side and the Eunostus (or Happy Return) harbor to the west. A canal from Lake Maraeotis in the south connected the city to the Nile and so to Egypt both as a production center and a market.
The city was a runaway success. In the first century B.C., the total population may have been about the same size as that of Rome, up to one million. With its grand overall look, Alexandria, rather like Haussmann’s Paris in the nineteenth century, became a center for culture and fashion throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Strabo called it the “greatest emporium of the inhabited world.”
Octavian was now free to enter the city, and on foot he led his men through the Gate of the Sun, not far from the hippodrome outside the walls, and along one of the city’s main streets, the Canopic Way. Nervous crowds had gathered. Octavian made a point of being accompanied by Areius, an Alexandrian citizen and a well-known philosopher and rhetorician. This friendly gesture was presumably calculated to allay the fears of the people, for it was an accepted custom of war that a captured city could be given over to pillage by the victors.
Octavian and his party made their way to the Gymnasium, where the triumvir and the queen had probably held the ceremony of the Donations of Alexandria. The place was packed: when Octavian came in and mounted a speaker’s dais, the audience was beside itself with fear and all present fell on their faces. He announced that he had no intention of holding the city at fault for the conduct of its rulers. At Areius’ request, he granted a number of pardons.
Octavian’s next destination was the Royal Palace, which lay north of the Canopic Way; here he would find the queen. He sent ahead as his envoy an eques called Gaius Proculeius, a close friend of his whom, it so happened, Antony in his last moments had recommended to the queen. Proculeius was under instruction to do whatever was needed to capture her alive.
The “palace” took up an entire fifth of the city, along the quayside of the Great harbor. We can imagine a large park or campus dotted with mansions, temples, and pavilions of one kind or another. The complex has almost entirely disappeared under later buildings and there are no ruins to visit; however, some of it sank into the sea as a result of an earthquake and tidal wave in the fourth century A.D., and is now being explored.
The main palace building stood on Cape Lochias, a promontory at the harbor opening. A twentieth-century historian writes: “No Latin ruler, gasping for air in the hot Roman summer, had nearly so attractive a situation as these Greek rulers of the Egyptian people.”
Somewhere in the vicinity, Cleopatra sat desolate in her mausoleum, awaiting her conqueror. She had gathered there all the most precious items of royal treasure—gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony, ivory,