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City of Wonders
Inside the Episode
With Jonathan Stamp
Alexandria! The 'Crown of all cities'! Where East meets West! Where the road begins to fabled India! Exciting! Enchanting! Exotic!
Sounds like a vacation poster? Well in a way, for the Romans, it was. When tourism took off in the first century after the birth of Christ it was to Alexandria that the crowds made their way.
The Romans were not given to admiring foreign cities. They were more prone to destroying them - Carthage and Corinth spring to mind. But for Alexandria they made an exception. They couldn't get enough of it.
Alexandria had everything. Every race was represented there. You could enjoy any dish, any drink, any drug. And the climate? It was perfect.
It was rich. Egypt supplied up to half of the grain that Rome handed out free to its urban poor. Without the free grain, Rome would riot. Without Alexandria, there'd be no free grain. It was a simple equation of dependence, and Alexandria exploited it.
A sense of their indispensability made the Alexandrians famously rude. Only they could insult Romans and expect to get away with it. For Roman visitors the lack of subservience was refreshing, at least at first.
A beautiful city too. Where Rome was a maze of narrow, winding streets Alex was laid out on a geometric grid. It is the world's first city where street numbers are recorded.
Above all it was a city of wonders. The Pharos lighthouse qualified to be one of the big Seven, a Wonder of the World. It towered over the entrance to the bay to a height of more than 300 feet and the light it cast was visible for more than ten miles out to sea. Another tidbit that the sources record is a building with automatic doors powered by steam - 1700 years before the Industrial Revolution.
It had culture the Romans could only dream of and libraries to burn. Caesar took this rather too literally when he accidentally set fire to the fabled Great Library during his Egyptian campaign in 47BC. The resultant destruction was probably the single greatest loss of knowledge in history, but Alexandria was so rich it could accommodate even that disaster. There was still the Serapeum library and the library at Bruchion, either of them greater in its holdings than anything in Rome.
Founded by Alexander the Great on the river delta, Alexandria was also connected by the Nile to the wonders of Pharaonic Egypt: the sacred bull of Apis at Memphis, the Pyramids at Giza, and finally, deep in the south, the astonishing temples of Karnak and Luxor at Thebes. Then, as now, a Nile cruise was de rigeur. And Alexandria was where the cruise began.
Such of course was the tourist hype. The reality? Well for any Roman who chose to stay it was likely to be loneliness, addiction, strange crocodile gods and existential angst. As Antony, Vorenus, Posca and Jocasta all discover, it's never quite how it looks in the posters.
Documentarian and historian Jonathan Stamp is a former Executive Producer in the BBC History Department and acted as Consultant and Co-Producer on Rome.
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Rome Logo Tee
An HBO SHOP(SM) exclusive features a soft cotton construction with the Rome logo across the front.
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Rome Fact
Immediately after birth, Roman babies were
not considered officially 'alive' unless physically
picked up by their father, (the Latin word for this was 'sublatus'). If the father did not pick the child up it was considered not to exist and was thrown out with the rubbish.
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"Deus Impeditio Esuritori Nullus "
