Historical Tales [calibre 5.4.1]

Long before these later writers came into the field the centres of literary effort had shifted to new localities. Sicily became the field of the choicest lyric poetry, giving us Theocritus, with his charming "Idyls," or scenes of rural life, and his songful dialogues, with their fine description and delightful humor. Following him came Bion and Moschus, two other bucolic poets, whose finest productions are elegies of unsurpassed beauty.

Syracuse was the home of this new field of lyric poetry, but there were other centres in which literature flourished, especially Pergamus, Antiochia, Pella, and above all Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great in Egypt, and which under the fostering care of the Ptolemies, Alexander's successors in this quarter, developed into a remarkable centre of intellectual effort.

The first Ptolemy made Alexandria his capital and founded there a great state institution which became famous as the Museum, and to which philosophers, scholars, and students flocked from all parts of the world. Here learned men could find a retreat from the bustle of the great metropolis which Alexandria became, and pursue their studies or teach their pupils in peace within its walls, and it is said that at one time fourteen thousand students gathered within its classic shades.

Here grew up two great libraries, said to number seven hundred thousand volumes, and embracing all that was worthy of study or preservation in the writings of ancient days. Of these, one was burned during the siege of the city by Julius Caesar, but it was replaced by Marc Antony, who robbed Pergamus of its splendid library of two hundred thousand volumes and sent it to Alexandria as a present to Cleopatra.

In this secure retreat, amply supported by the liberality of the Ptolemies, philosophers and scholars spent their days in mental culture and learned lectures and debates. The scientific studies inaugurated by Aristotle were here continued by a succession of great astronomers, geometers, chemists, and physicians, for whose use were furnished a botanical garden, a menagerie of animals, and facilities for human dissection, the first school of anatomy ever known.

In the heart of the great library, battening on books, flourished a circle of learned literary critics, engaged in the study of Homer and the other already classical writers of Greece and supplying new and revised editions of their works. Here philosophy was ardently pursued, the works of Plato and his great rivals being diligently studied, while in a later age the innovation of Neoplatonism was abundantly debated and taught. A new school of poetry also arose, most of its followers being mechanical versifiers, though the idyllic poets of Sicily sought these favoring halls. Most famous among the philosophers of Alexandria was the maiden Hypatia, who had studied in the still active schools of Athens, and taught the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle and the then popular tenets of Neoplatonism—her fame being chiefly due to her violent and terrible death at the hands of fanatical opponents of her teachings.