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.