Our business is with
Alexandria; and there, certainly, they did nothing for the elevation of
humanity. What culture they may have given, probably helped to make the
Alexandrians, what Caesar calls them, the most ingenious of all nations:
but righteous or valiant men it did not make them. When, after the
three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of
the Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its
sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a
hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents
and readings with the true odium gammaticum, and kings plunged deeper
and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty,
till the flood came, and swept them all away. Cleopatra, the Helen of
Egypt, betrayed her country to the Roman; and thenceforth the
Alexandrians became slaves in all but name.
And now that Alexandria has become a tributary province, is it to share
the usual lot of enslaved countries and lose all originality and vigour
of thought? Not so. From this point, strangely enough, it begins to
have a philosophy of its own. Hitherto it has been importing Greek
thought into Egypt and Syria, even to the furthest boundaries of Persia;
and the whole East has become Greek: but it has received little in
return.
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