Ptolemy I Soter’s securing of Egypt as a kingdom for a Greek-speaking dynasty was to have far-reaching consequences for the place of Egypt in Greek literary culture. Greek-speaking poets and scholars working in the new Greek city of Alexandria were brought into contact with Egypt’s people and culture in an unprecedented manner, but their presence in Alexandria also transformed their relationship with the traditional Greek world and its literature. That world, the world of Homer and Hesiod, tragedy, comedy, lyric, Herodotos, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest was one from which they were distanced not only by many years but also by hundreds of miles. Addressing these gaps of time and distance was an important element in several different aspects of the literary production of Hellenistic Alexandria.
The story, then, of Greek literature in Hellenistic Egypt is not simply one of negotiation between increasingly complex ideas about ‘‘Greeks’’ and ‘‘Egyptians,’’ and ‘‘Greece’’ and ‘‘Egypt’’ and their relationship (though it is that too). The city of Alexandria encompassed far more ethnic groups than Greeks and Egyptians (see Selden 1998: 289-98), and the Greeks in Hellenistic Egypt were accordingly confronted with the ‘‘other’’ in a number of different forms in a single city, rather than distributed across the Mediterranean. As evidence of the cultural interaction between Greeks and others in Alexandria we have the Exagoge of Ezekiel (a Greek tragedy about Moses and the exodus of Israelites from Egypt, of which 269 lines survive) and the Septuagint itself, the translation (undertaken at Alexandria) into Greek of Jewish writings which became the Greek Old Testament. Nevertheless, a reader coming for the first time to Alexandrian literature might expect to find the most substantial and explicit engagement to be with Egypt, its past and its people, given its characterization in Homer and Herodotos, but, surprisingly, there is little direct mention of Egypt, its ancient monuments, the traditional gods of its religion, or what was for Herodotos the wondrously different behavior of its people (cf. Weber 1993: 369-99). If Egypt is mentioned at all, this tends to be, for example, in the form of references to the Nile, which had stood for Egypt as early as Homer, as in Kallimachos’ (now fragmentary) ode for a victory won by Sosibios (later the regent and minister of Ptolemy IV Philopator), where the Nile itself boasts:
Here’s a noble recompense from my nursling!
... for none has ever brought home the prize ... from these death celebrations ... [Sure, I am] great, and no man knows my source, and yet, in one regard I have been paltrier
. . . than those whom the white ankles of women
Easily cross, or a child on foot, not wetting his knees. (fr. 384 Pf., tr. Nisetich)
This picks up earlier Greek comparisons of their own rivers to the great Nile (which is ‘‘to compare small with large,’’ as Herodotos puts it at 2.10) and the use of the Nile to mark out the limits of the known world, as in a victory ode of Pindar’s, Isthmian 6 (probably c. 480 bc in date), where it is used to emphasize the reach of the fame of the sons of the hero Aiakos:
Numberless paths, one hundred feet wide,
Have been laid out by your illustrious deeds, one after the other,
Beyond the source of the Nile and further than the Hyperboreans. {Isthm. 6.22-3, tr.
Verity)
We also find poems (or parts of poems) set in Alexandria itself, such as the fragment of Kallimachos’ Aitia in which the narrator (a version of the historical author) attends a symposium at which he chats with ‘‘a foreigner who was visiting Egypt, just arrived | on private business, an Ikian by birth’’ (fr. 178.6-8 Pf., tr. Nisetich). But, though the scene is set in Egypt, the conversation is about Greek customs:
Kallimachos wants to know why the Ikians (i. e. from the island of Ikos in the Aegean, to the north of Euboia) worship Peleus, even though he is a Thessalian (fr. 178.23-4 Pf.). The Aitia (or ‘‘Origins’’) was a four-book elegiac poem on the origins of various rituals, festivals, and cult-practices from around the Mediterranean. But crucially, these rituals and customs are Greek: there seems to have been little room in the Aitia (of which much is lost) for the religious culture of ancient Egypt itself which had so fascinated Herodotos, and which formed for him the origins of several aspects of Greek religious practice. Indeed the symposium at which Kallimachos meets the Ikian, Theogenes, is held by their Athenian host Pollis to celebrate a Greek festival from far away, the Athenian Aiora in memory of Erigone. It is striking that a poem like the Aitia, which in many ways echoes the character and interests of Herodotos’ ethnographic sections, should largely shut its eyes to native Egyptian customs.
Where we do find mentions of native Egyptians the picture is not positive. In Idyll 15 of Theokritos, where two Alexandrian Greek women called Gorgo and Praxinoa attend the festival of Adonis in the Ptolemies’ palace, Praxinoa praises Ptolemy II Philadelphos for having cracked down on street robberies by ‘‘Egyptians’’:
You’ve done much good, Ptolemy, since your father went immortal:
Villains don’t creep up on you now in the street and mug you Egyptian fashion - that was a dirty game they used to play,
Ruffians to a man, born criminals. To hell with the lot of them.
(Theokritos 15.46-50, tr. Verity)
One way of reading such an attitude (though note this is expressed by a character who is an ordinary Alexandrian woman, rather than a member of the Ptolemaic court or its attendant literary elite) alongside the surprising lack of reference to Egypt in Alexandrian literature is to see it as part of a kind of cultural ‘‘apartheid’’ where the Greeks of the few Greek cities of Egypt (which numbered only three: Alexandria, the existing city of Naukratis in the Delta, and the southern city of Ptolemais Hermiou, founded by Ptolemy I Soter) disdained interest in the culture and history of the ancient Egyptians, and concentrated instead on their connections with the literary monuments of the Greek world. There is some evidence for the separation and autonomy of the different ethnic groupings within early Alexandria (see Selden 1998: 294-8): perhaps such separateness encouraged or exemplified a hostility or distaste between Greeks and Egyptians for one another. On such a reading the Library and Museum founded by Ptolemy I can be seen as an aggressive cultural move (Erskine 1995) designed at least partly to remind the native Egyptian population of its being reduced to subject status by an alien people. The self-presentation to the local population of the Ptolemies as Pharaohs using Egyptian iconography but in such a way as also to remind them of their Greek identity (see Ma 2003: 189-91 on the Raphia stela of Ptolemy IV, where he wears the Pharaonic crown but also takes the form of a Macedonian horseman) might also be made part of this answer for Egypt’s general absence from Alexandrian Greek literature.
But it is an exaggeration that Pharaonic Egypt is nowhere to be found in the literature produced under the Ptolemies. Egypt is, in a sense, at the heart of the Greek literary culture of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In some ways, as we shall see below, the strategies which Alexandrian Greek literature uses to think about Egypt echo the use in Athenian tragedy of other, different Greek cities to think and talk about Athens: Thebes, Argos, Corinth. Indeed, one important reason for the particular way in which Egypt is present in Alexandrian literature is the other ancient, learned, and unavoidable culture with which the Hellenistic Greeks in Egypt had to negotiate their relationship, that of the Greeks themselves in preceding centuries. In earlier Greek literature Egypt had played (as we have seen) the role of the ‘‘other’’ against which Greek identity was partly defined, but in the Egypt of the Ptolemies it could not straightforwardly fulfil the same function. Hence it often reappears in Ptolemaic Greek literature, but transformed (in a manner reminiscent of Proteus) into many different shapes and identities. The treatment of Egypt in the Greek literature of the Hellenistic Period produced there is one part of the re-negotiation of the Hellenistic relationship with the Greek past and its literature. It is this relationship which we shall examine next.
World History
