1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

9.5 The Role of the City in the Ancient World 227
of Egypt did not plunge its economy into a crisis. Dio Chrysostom, in an
oration probably dating from the reign of Vespasian, says to the Alexandrians:
Not only do you have a monopoly in sea traffic over the whole Mediterranean
. . . but both the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean are in your
reach. . . . Alexandria is at the crossroads of the world . . . as if the
world were an immense market in the service of a single city. 68
Here is how Alexandria is described as late as the fourth century A.D.
in a Latin-language letter apocryphally attributed to Hadrian:
Its inhabitants are very factious, arrogant and violent; the city is rich
and prosperous, and no-one is idle. One blows glass, another makes
papyrus into paper, yet another weaves flax: everyone seems to practice
a craft. The gouty, the mutilated, the blind, all do something. Not
even cripples live in idleness. Their only god is money, worshiped by
Christians and Jews and all others. If only this city had better moral
principles. . . 69
This anonymous Roman author finds industriousness morally reproachable
and a sign of a blasphemous yearning for wealth. He seems very
irritated at the prosperity of Alexandria.
The city does not seem to have been significantly depopulated even in
late Antiquity. At the time of the Arab conquest there were still four hundred
theaters and other entertainment venues, as well as four thousand
public baths. 70
There seem to be only two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive:
Alexandria was either a trade center or a production center. We don’t page 283
have enough information for a firm answer, 71 but the small amount of
data we do have unanimously point to the conclusion that Alexandria’s
vast sea traffic consisted above all of imports of raw materials and exports
of finished products. We know, in particular, that Alexandria imported
gold, iron, tin, silver, copper and many pharmacological and perfumery
68
Dio Chrysostom, Orationes, xxxii, 36.
69
Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Firmus Saturninus Proculus et Bonosus, VIII, 5–7 (in, e.g., Loeb
Classical Library, vol. 263).
70
These figures are in a letter sent by the Emir Amr ibn al-As, the conqueror of Alexandria, to
the Caliph Omar. The letter is preserved in the Annals of Eutychius, a tenth-century patriarch of
Alexandria; the passage in question is given in [Canfora], p. 83 (p. 92 in the original).
71
Fraser leans toward the prevalence of trade, but regards the question as open. However he
takes it as certain that Alexandria’s industry was much more developed than can be directly documented
today; see [Fraser], vol. I, p. 143.
Revision: 1.4 Date: 2002/10/12 00:00:03