Caracalla, Alexandria, and Its Library
"Toward the philosophers who were called Aristotelians he showed bitter hatred in every way, even going so far as to desire to burn their books, and in particular he abolished their common messes in Alexandria and all the other privileges that they had enjoyed; his grievance against them was that Aristotle was supposed to have been concerned in the death of Alexander."
Dio, Roman History (LXXVIII.7.3)
Dio is speaking of Antoninus (better known by his agnomen Caracalla), the elder son of Septimius Severus, whose name had been changed to Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus to affiliate the Severans with Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the last of the "five good emperors" and philosophic author of the Meditations. Caracalla imagined himself to be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and thought Aristotle to have been complicit in the death of his hero, hence the antipathy toward the philosophers of the Museum. And Arrian does record that some suspected that Aristotle had formulated the drug that poisoned Alexander, although even at the time the story was not regarded as credible (Campaigns of Alexander, VII.27; Plutarch, Life of Alexander, LXXVII.3).
Aristotle had been the first man "to have collected books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library" (Strabo, Geography, XIII.1.54), and it was Demetrius, a student of Aristotle, who advised Ptolemy I Soter in founding the Great Library (Letter of Aristeas, IX; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III.21.2). It later may have been dedicated by his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who banished Demetrius for not having recommended that he serve as co-regent (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, V.78). The Library even held Aristotle's own books, purchased by Philadelphus (Deipnosophistae, I.3B)—unless they "came into the hands of careless and illiterate people" and eventually were taken to Rome by Sulla in 86 BC (Plutarch, Life of Sulla, XXVI.1-2).
Referring to the passage above from Dio (but mistakenly citing 77.22-3), El-Abbadi says of the Museum that Caracalla "suspended its revenues, abolished the sustenance of its members and expelled all its foreign members," lines which Phillips paraphrases as "Marcus Aurelius Antoninus suspended the revenues of the Mouseion, abolishing the members’ stipends and expelling all foreign scholars." More than any single cataclysmic event, it was bureaucratic decisions such as these, she contends, that caused the Library's demise.
To be sure, maintenance of the Library must have become increasingly ineffectual, and it always was susceptible to Ptolemaic or imperial dictate. But Caracalla's pique with the Alexandrians is not the best example of such reprisals. Dio does not say that foreign scholars were expelled from the Museum; rather, the inference derives from a later passage, where he remarks that Caracalla expelled all foreigners from Alexandria (except those who were merchants) and slaughtered the native inhabitants for having ridiculed him (LXXVIII.23.2; also Herodian, IV.9.1). Nor does Dio mention the abolition of Museum revenues and member stipends, which presumably is to be inferred from the loss of "all the other privileges" the Aristotelian philosophers had enjoyed.
It is not certain how long "the treatment accorded unhappy Alexandria" (LXXVIII.23.4) actually was in effect. Athenaeus wrote that the scholars in the Museum, "who got their living there," were "fed like the choicest birds in a coop" (I.22D), and Philostratus speaks of their communal banquets in the Lives of the Sophists, where he relates that Hadrian once had enrolled a favorite "among those who had free meals in the Museum." He then feels compelled to add parenthetically "(By the Museum I mean a dining-table in Egypt to which are invited the most distinguished men of all countries)" (Lives of the Sophists, 524). Caracalla's punishment of the Alexandrians occurred late in AD 215; the Lives were dedicated to Gordian I when he was consul in AD 229-230. If the communal meals (syssitia) were ended by Caracalla, Philostratus' use of the present tense seems to imply that they later were restored.
Caracalla also "abolished the spectacles and the public messes of the Alexandrians" (Dio, LXXVIII.23.3). In the reign of Trajan a century before, Dio Chrysostom had chastised the populace for its frivolity and unreasoned enthusiasm for spectacles, especially the "passion for horses that infects the city" (Discourses, XXXII.77). He admonished them not to make the Graces vulgar and boorish, so that the Museum will be regarded "not just as a place in the city, as indeed, I fancy, there are other places with labels devoid of meaning, not possessing a character to match the name" (XXXII.100). (It is yet another reference to the Museum after the Caesarean fire of 48 BC.)
Dio Chrysostom was a friend of Apollonius of Tyana, whose biography was recorded in another, earlier work by Philostratus, the Life of Apollonius, which was written sometime after the death of Julia Domna (the wife of Septimius Severus) in AD 217—the year that Caracalla himself was killed as he relieved himself by the side of the road, less than eighteen months after his visit to Alexandria. Again, Philostratus uses the present tense: "Because the Alexandrians are devoted to horses, and flock into the racecourse to see the spectacle, and murder one another in their partisanship, he [Apollonius] therefore administered a grave rebuke to them over these matters" (V.26). The implication is that races, too, were being run when Philostratus wrote. If fact, horse racing continued for hundreds of years, taking place in the Lageion or hippodrome situated just below the Acropolis. Even after the riots provoked by the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, when soldiers were burned alive in the Serapeum and the Alexandrians punished by the loss of "the privileges of the baths and spectacles," races were reinstated only two years later (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History, II.5). If Caracalla really did abolish the communal banquets enjoyed by the philosophers of the Museum, as well as the spectacles of the Alexandrians, they seem soon to have been revived.
A greater threat to the integrity of the Museum had occurred almost four centuries earlier, when Ptolemy VIII Psychon came to the throne in 145 BC. Resentful of those who had opposed his accession, he expelled all the intellectuals from Alexandria—"philologians, philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, painters, athletic trainers, physicians, and many other men of skill in their profession. And so they, reduced by poverty to teaching what they knew, instructed many distinguished men." As a result, it was said that "the Alexandrians were the teachers of all Greeks and barbarians" (Deipnosophistae, IV.184B-C).
Pfeiffer has characterized this expulsion as "the first crisis in the history of scholarship." Among those forced into exile was the director of the Library, Aristarchus of Samothrace, who had been the pharaoh's tutor (Deipnosophistae, II.71B) and was noted for his recension of the Iliad and Odyssey, and the critical principle that in interpreting Homer one should look to Homer himself, "explaining Homer from Homer" as Porphyry phrased it (Homeric Questions, I.1.12-13). The pupils of Aristarchus, the grammarians Apollodorus of Athens and Dionysius Thrax, were expelled as well. The Techne Grammatike attributed to Dionysius, who may have written only the initial paragraphs, was particularly influential as the first treatise on Greek grammar.
A papyrus from Oxyrhynchus (POxy.1241) preserves a fragmentary (and possibly apocryphal) list of the Library's directors (another, also incomplete, is in Tzetzes). They would have been responsible for the administration and utilization of the collection, a role conveyed by the term bibliophylax or "guardian of the books." Because of a lacuna, Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first librarian (and first editor of Homer), is not recorded in the text. Rather, it begins with Apollonius of Rhodes (a student of Callimachus and author of the Argonautica), and then Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the earth), Aristophanes of Byzantium (who studied accentuation and punctuation in Greek pronunciation), Apollonius of Alexandria (the Eidographer, i.e., one who classifies by genres, to distinguish him from Apollonius the Rhodian, with whom he may have been confused), and Aristarchus. "After him came Cydas [one] of the spearmen," who may have been appointed by Ptolemy VIII to purge the Museum of his opponents. After Aristarchus, the importance of the Library diminished in the second century BC, its prestige never again so great nor its librarians as distinguished.
The scowling bust of Caracalla, which is in the Pergamum Museum (Berlin), is typical of his portrait, all frown and furrowed brow. In part, this was because he deliberately tried to emulated the appearance of Alexander. Indeed, "After he viewed the body of Alexander of Macedon, he ordered himself to be called 'the Great' and 'Alexander,' having been drawn by the intrigues of flatterers to the point that, with fierce expression and neck turned toward his left shoulder (which he had noted in Alexander's face), he reached the point of conviction and persuaded himself that he was of very similar countenance" (Aurelius Victor, Epitome De Caesaribus, Caracalla, IV; also Herodian, IV.7,1-2).
