The Glory and a Dim Memory

The Glory and a Dim Memory

The glory of the Alexandrian Library is a dim memory. Its last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia’s death. It was as if the entire civilization had undergone some self-inflicted brain surgery, and most of its memories, discoveries, ideas and passions were extinguished irrevocably. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only seven survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Corolanus and A Winter’s Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prize in his time, works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.

On the physical contents of the glorious Library not a single scroll remains. In modern Alexandria few people have a keen appreciation, much less a detailed knowledge, of the Alexandrian Library or of the great Egyptian civilization that preceded if for thousands of years. More recent events, other cultural imperatives have taken precedence. The same is true all over the world. We have only the most tenuous contact with our past. And yet just a stone’s throw from the remains of the Serapaeum are reminders of many civilizations: enigmatic sphinxes from pharaonic Egypt; a great column erected to the Roman Emperor Diocletian by a provincial flunky for not altogether permitting the citizens of Alexandria to starve to death; a Christian Church; many minarets; and the hallmarks of modern industrial civilization – apartment houses, automobiles, streetcars, urban slums, a microwave relay tower. There are a million threads from the past interwined to make the ropes and cables of the modern world.

A Gothic Bird. Photo by Elena

Men of Honor

We have devoted attention to some of our ancestors whose names have not been lost: Eratosthenes, Democritus, Aristarchus, Hypatia, Leonardo, Kepler, Newton, Huygens, Champollion, Humason, Goddard, Einstein – all from Western culture because the emerging scientific civilization on our planet is mainly a Western civilization; but every culture – China, India, West Africa, Mesoamerica – has made its major contributions to our global society and had its seminal thinkers. Through technological advances in communication our planet is in the final stages of being bound up at a breakneck pace into a single global society. If we can accomplish the integration of the Earth without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing.

In addition to Eratosthenes there was Dionysius of Thrace, the man who defined the parts of speech and did for the study of language what Euclid did for geometry; Herophilus, the physiologist who firmly established the brain rather than the heart is the seat of intelligence; Apollonius of Perga, the mathematician who demonstrated the forms of the conic sections (so called because the can be produced by slicing through a cone at various angles.

Eighteen centuries later, the writings of Apollonius on conic sections would be employed by Johannes Kepler in understanding for the first time the movement of the planets) – ellipse, parabola and hyperbola – the curves, as we now know, followed in their orbits by the planets, the comets and the stars; Archimedes, the greatest mechanical genius until Leonardo da Vinci; and the astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, who compiled much of what is today the pseudoscience of astrology: his Earth-centered universe held sway for 1,500 years, a reminder that intellectual capacity in no guarantee against being dead wrong.

And among those great men was a great woman, Hypatia, mathematician and astronomer, the last light of the library, whose martyrdom was bound up with the destruction of the library seven centuries after its founding…

The high peak of knowledge is perfect self-knowledge (Richard Of Saint-Victor, a prominent ancient thinker). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (ElenaB).