This chapter is concerned with Alexander in Egypt in both life and legend. Subjects discussed include his foundation of Alexandria, which became a new capital for Egypt on the Mediterranean coast, his expedition through the Libyan desert to Siwah, where the oracle’s recognition of the conqueror as son of Zeus-Ammon resonated in both Greek and Egyptian cultic terms, his acceptance as the pharaoh of Egypt, and finally, after his death in Babylon, his return for burial to Egypt, where his embalmed corpse and tomb in Alexandria became the centre of Ptolemaic ruler cult, a focal point for later visits of Roman emperors, and where the question of its actual location remains a source of continuing fascination and debate. In the accounts of classical historians, Alexander in Egypt is already variously presented; the historiography is as important as the history. From the start some specifically local legendary elements may be seen and over time the Romance or Legend of Alexander in its many different forms overshadows and surpasses any strictly historical account.

This chapter surveys the main treatments of Alexander in Jewish literature (in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic), from the Hellenistic period to the Hebrew Alexander Romances and the medieval biblical and Talmudic commentators. Themes discussed include the prophecy of Daniel regarding Alexander and Makedonian rule, the king’s visit to Jerusalem, the analogies drawn between his character and role and those of Cyrus and Antiochos IV, and the value attached to his name and personality by the Jewish community in Alexandria. The Romances tell of Alexander’s adventures with gymnosophists, Amazons, and his wise judgement given to the king of Katzia. Though a hero and sage in Jewish tradition, his aspirations to divinity make him an imperfect role model for the rabbinic scholars.

This chapter deals with two different types of capital formation. Alexandria was by far the most important royal city in Egypt. Urban centers in the imperial possessions outside of Egypt never conflicted with the centrality of Alexandria. The Seleucids, by contrast, took over a more heterogeneous, mobile and paradoxically more connected empire with a tradition of several royal cities already established. Identifying a political center is more problematic there, but governance was “a network of ever-shifting, personalized relationships between interest groups and powerful individuals based on reciprocal transactions.” There was a particular need to establish a symbolical political center that was Seleucia-Pieria first, and then Antioch. Both authors observe, however, that it was imperial competition, and to a lesser extent local discourse, that shaped the vision of Ptolemaic and Seleucid capitals. Looking at foundation myths as a guide to the symbolic construction of these capitals, they observe a deeply entangled discourse. Each court and population responded to each other and to Rome in an antagonistic interaction that manifested itself in many other forms than war alone.

In this chapter the reader is introduced to the background to Roman Egypt, starting with Egypt’s experience of foreign rule under the Kushites, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks. The impact of the three centuries of rule by the dynasty of the Ptolemies, who took over after the death of Alexander the Great, is explored; many traditional Egyptian institutions remained in place, most importantly the great temples. Many Persian administrative innovations were also kept, but the Greeks brought in their own financial practices. Substantial immigration from the Greek world and the Levant changed the population, and Greek largely displaced Egyptian as a language of power, even though Egyptian society was substantially multilingual. Periodic revolts show that foreign rule was not universally accepted, but many Egyptians became part of the Ptolemaic administration and served its economic goals, which depended heavily on exporting wheat. Romans began to settle in Alexandria in the last decades before the Roman conquest.

With the death of Antony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium in 30 BC, the Roman general Octavian, soon to be called Augustus, took control of Egypt. Roman rule brought a standing garrison of some 20,000 troops and began the long process of making the administration of Egypt more like that used elsewhere in the Romans’ diverse empire. Although no longer a royal capital, Alexandria remained a center of commerce and culture. Much of Egypt’s wheat surplus was shipped to Rome to feed its population, and Egypt was partly integrated into regional economic networks. Roman taxation policies favored the concentration of wealth in private hands and the development of an urban elite that could take on many of the tasks of governance. The cult of the emperors was introduced into Egyptian temples, which continued as vital cultural centers during the first two centuries of Roman rule. The Jewish community of Egypt was destroyed during a revolt in the early second century.

Although Egypt in the fifth century was highly integrated into the empire, it also began to develop new elements of distinctiveness. In part this trend resulted from divisions in theology and church politics that emerged around the Council of Chalcedon in 451, leading to deep splits in the church by the middle of the sixth century and the creation of competing church hierarchies. The native Egyptian language came to have its own literature and began to be used more widely in official contexts. At the same time, Alexandria remained a vibrant center of Greek culture, which permeated the rest of Egypt as well. The economic and social elite of the cities, increasingly closely tied to the imperial administration, concentrated wealth and power in their hands to a degree not seen earlier, even as most of the population continued to live in villages and work the land.

Chapter Four, ‘On Leave’, explores tourism in Cairo, Alexandria and London. The chapter begins with the Egyptian cities to explore how the men responded to their expectations of an ‘ancient’ space that was brought to life by its tourist infrastructure: from the perceived ‘sideshow’ of the Middle East, expressions of racism towards the Egyptian people and the clash of ancient and modern. At the same time, though, the men exploited their newfound status as soldiers to access elite spaces and enjoy the cities’ pleasures. The chapter then turns to London. Coming ‘home’ to the metropolis called into question the colonial troops’ relationship to the British Empire – this was not straightforward tourism but had crucial stakes for identity, through better understandings of Britain and their place within it. The chapter concludes by comparing representations of sexual activity while on leave.

The depiction of Troy and Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid is influenced by the very recent events of the civil war between the future Augustus and Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The orientalising propaganda directed against Cleopatra and her city of Alexandria has left its mark on the depiction of Carthage and Dido, whose temptations for Aeneas recall the temptations of Alexandria and Cleopatra for Mark Antony. The victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra represents the defeat of a threat of a Roman reversion to their Eastern origins in Troy.

The first chapter contextualizes Forster’s ‘rhythm’ in Aspects of the Novel within the contemporary currency of the term in evolutionary discourses on non-Western cultures, arguing that his conception of ‘rhythm’ as an aesthetics of fiction is preceded by his use of the term to interrogate the conditioning of epistemology in cross-cultural encounters. Analysing two articles on music Forster wrote in Egypt, a 1912 essay by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson about Anglo-India, as well as A Passage to India, it proposes that Forster was alert to the many problems of subjectivity, perspective, and language in delineating the racial other, and that his representations of rhythm in the novel suggest a significant, and previously unacknowledged, negotiation of the plurality of musical cultures. The chapter thus challenges the critical notion of rhythm as reflective purely of modernist fascination with form and intermediality. Complicating the long-held dichotomy of aesthetics and politics in modernist scholarship, it recovers the racial connotations of Forster’s ‘rhythm’ in Aspects, offering a new understanding of his aspiration for ‘expansion’ as a reconfiguration of the racial other.

Chapter 16 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates how the poetry of Sappho came to the world of the Alexandrian Museum, placing her transmission scholarly schematisation of the Greek literary heritage that took place within that period.

The bitter division in Alexandria that led to the Council of Nicaea began as a theological dispute between Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, and a significant number of his clergy, including a presbyter Arius, and quickly overflowed into a feud among eastern bishops. “Arianism” was assumed by scholars and theologians to be a coherent set of heretical teachings embraced by a succession of followers. Historians have now identified sets of alliances rather than genealogies as well as the polemical construction of “Arianism” by Athanasius and Marcellus. This separation of Arius from later “Arianism,” together with the continuing lack of consensus with regard to theological or philosophical genealogies as the source of his thought, encourages another look at the particular social and religious context of the initial local controversy. The central issues of monotheism, apophatic theology, incarnation, and changeability in fact map over traditional Christian apologetic theology and the literary and ecclesiastical legacies of the Great Persecution. Arius’s insistence on divine monotheism and transcendence together with his defense of a “living image” may echo the contemporary arguments with Celsus and Porphyry in Eusebius and Athanasius as well as a refutation of polytheism.

Why would Clement showcase his participation in the Classical discourse of literary miscellanism when writing a project for the formation of Christians in late second century Alexandria? This chapter sketches Clement’s social context in order to bring light to his and his audience’s relationship to Classical tradition. Then it considers aspects of the Classical culture of miscellany-making and indicates how they were shared or transformed in Clement’s Christian setting. This encourages us to imagine how Clement and his audience could have taken delight in the rhetorical aesthetics of miscellanism and could have been attracted or impressed by the social and intellectual lifestyle within which it was cultivated, such that they sought to inhabit it and make it their own. Miscellanism was neither peripheral nor boring in the lives of imperial literary men, but it took people to the heart of the friendship circles, activities and institutions that framed and supported the culture of the pepaideumenoi, such as the library and the symposium.

This chapter reviews three incidents of urban violence in the late Ottoman port cities: the 1876 St. George's Day intercommunal riots resulting in the lynching of the French and German consuls of Thessaloniki; the 1881 intercommunal riots in Alexandria, resulting in the British Navy shelling the city and occupying the country; and the 1903 bomb attacks in Thessaloniki by Macedonian separatists. It comes to the conclusion that incidents of violence that targeted European foreigners and non-Muslims indiscriminately most often did not succeed. Therefore, in the particular sociocultural climate of the nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean, agents often resorted to discrediting communities separately, as this held higher chances success, even against Western parties.

This chapter contrasts two parallel views of demons and their disruption of the ascetic life which coexisted in fourth-century Egypt. It rests on the hypothesis that we can read discussion of the nature, mode, and location of demons and the violence they work upon the ascetic as a medium for creating religious subjectivities in relation to a non-human adversary. Examination of each ascetic teacher’s demonology therefore reveals their vision for the ascetic life, its urgency and potentials, as well as the precarity and vulnerability an ascetic could expect to experience. The demons in the Letters of Antony manipulate the thoughts, impulses, and emotions of the individual. Their work occurs inside the person and exploits the weakness of the human mind and body. For Athanasius, in contrast, demons function primarily in an external, corporeal, and physically violent mode. Athanasius locates the ascetic life in a large-scale conflict with demons who do not merely corrupt the monk’s perceptions and emotions, as in the Letters, but also turn out in gangs and beat him senseless. This introduction of physicalised and externalised violence into the ascetic work of Antony moves the readers far away from the process of careful reflection and discernment of one’s emotions and thoughts which the Antony of the Letters had encouraged as a defence against internally located demons. This project of comparative reading shows that Antony and Athanasius have diverging and partially incompatible notions of the human predicament and therefore also of the ethical urgencies to which a human being is subject, suggesting that there is substantial diversity within early Christian ascetic thinking which goes far beyond any issue of doctrine. By focusing on each teacher’s account of demonic violence, we can see how violence interacts with the ethical imagination, bodies, and monastic pedagogy.