Alexandria: Rome's Second City
Alexandria was not a Roman city. It was a Greek city under Roman administration, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and designed from its inception as a world capital — a city that would connect the Mediterranean world to Egypt and, through Egypt, to the trade routes of the East. By the time Rome absorbed it as part of Egypt following Cleopatra’s death in 30 BC, Alexandria was already three centuries old, the second-largest city in the Mediterranean after Rome itself, and possessed of institutions — the Library, the Museum, the great lighthouse — that Rome had nothing to rival. The Romans did not conquer Alexandria so much as inherit it, and the inheritance was complicated.
The city that Alexander and his successors built occupied a narrow strip between the Mediterranean and Lake Mareotis, connected to the island of Pharos by a causeway called the Heptastadion that created two harbors. The planning was intentional and the execution was thorough: Alexandria had a grid of broad streets, a palace quarter on its northeastern point, temples to the major Greek and Egyptian gods, and a mixed population of Greeks, Jews, Egyptians, and people from across the eastern Mediterranean that made it among the most cosmopolitan places in the ancient world. The Jewish population was substantial enough to require its own administrative quarter and to produce the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures — which was the Bible of the early Christian church.
The Library of Alexandria occupies a place in historical imagination that somewhat exceeds its actual importance and has been considerably distorted by the romantic story of its destruction. The Library was part of the Mouseion — the institution of learning attached to the Ptolemaic palace complex — and its collection of papyrus scrolls, at its height, may have numbered several hundred thousand texts, representing the most comprehensive collection of Greek literature in existence. It was not destroyed in a single dramatic conflagration. It declined over centuries through neglect, deliberate removal of texts, damage during various conflicts including Caesar’s Alexandrian War in 47 BC, and the general deterioration of the Ptolemaic and then Roman patronage that had sustained it. The romantic image of a single fire consuming all ancient knowledge in an afternoon is one of history’s most persistent and misleading simplifications.
Rome’s relationship with Egypt was unusual. Unlike other provinces, Egypt was administered directly as a personal possession of the emperor, not through the normal senatorial governorship structure. The reason was explicit: Egypt’s grain production fed Rome, and its wealth was too strategically significant to allow senatorial families to build personal power bases there. Senators were prohibited from even visiting Egypt without imperial permission. The prefecture of Egypt — the position governing the wealthiest province in the empire — was filled by equestrians, the second tier of the Roman aristocracy, specifically to ensure that it could not become a power base for senatorial ambition.
The effect of Roman administration on Alexandria was mixed. The city continued to be prosperous, its commercial role enhanced by Roman pacification of the eastern Mediterranean and the trade routes it enabled. The great Library continued to function, though with diminishing imperial support. Alexandria remained a center of Greek philosophical and scientific activity: the mathematician Euclid had worked there under the Ptolemies, and the tradition of scholarship continued under Roman rule with figures like Hero, Ptolemy the geographer and astronomer, and eventually the philosopher Hypatia, whose murder in 415 AD has been read as a symbol of classical learning’s vulnerability to Christian intolerance — a somewhat anachronistic reading, but one that captures something real about the period.
The religious complexity of Alexandria was extraordinary and repeatedly explosive. Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, and later Christian populations occupied the same city under a Roman administration that tried to manage their conflicts with limited success. The pogrom against Alexandria’s Jewish population in 38 AD — coordinated by the prefect Flaccus, later prosecuted and exiled — was severe enough to prompt Philo of Alexandria to lead a delegation to Rome. The Jewish revolt of 115–117 AD devastated Alexandria’s Jewish community, whose subsequent history in the city is fragmentary. The Christian community grew steadily and its conflicts with the remaining pagan institutions of the city — including the Serapeum, the great temple of Serapis, destroyed in 391 AD — mark the transition from the classical to the late antique city.
Arab forces under Amr ibn al-As captured Alexandria in 641 AD, ending Roman and then Byzantine control of the city and Egypt after nearly seven hundred years. The Arab conquest transformed the city’s religious and cultural landscape over the following decades, though Alexandria’s commercial role and its position as a Mediterranean trading hub persisted in modified form under Islamic rule. The city that Alexander had founded to connect worlds continued connecting them under successive empires, each of which found it indispensable and difficult to govern.
What Rome took from Alexandria was as important as what it gave. The philosophical schools of Alexandria — Neoplatonism, in particular, as developed by Plotinus and his successors — shaped the intellectual framework within which early Christian theology developed. The Alexandrian scholarly tradition transmitted Greek science and mathematics to the Islamic world, from which it eventually returned to Europe. The city was one of the places where the ancient and medieval worlds were made, where the inheritance of Greece was processed and forwarded under Roman and then Arab administration to the traditions that followed. It deserves better than the footnote it occupies in most accounts of Roman history.