25 stories from this place.
On 2 September 31 BC, off western Greece, the fleets of Octavian and of Antony and Cleopatra met at Actium. Cleopatra's squadron broke out mid-battle and Antony followed her, abandoning his fleet and army — which surrendered. Within a year both were dead in Alexandria, Egypt was a Roman province, and Octavian was on his way to becoming Augustus.
Read the story →Cleopatra VII killed herself at Alexandria on approximately 10 August 30 BCE, eleven days after her partner Mark Antony's suicide and three weeks after the city's fall to Octavian. The conventional account of the Egyptian cobra concealed in a basket of figs is first attested by Plutarch a century later. A 2010 reanalysis by Christoph Schaefer argued for a self-administered poison mixture as the more plausible cause of death.
Read the story →The 21-metre granite obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle was carved at Aswan for Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BCE. The Khedive of Egypt gifted it to New York City in 1877. The 224-ton stone took 112 days to cross the Atlantic in the steamship Dessoug and was erected in Central Park on 22 January 1881. Modern atmospheric pollution has weathered it more in 145 years than the Egyptian desert did in 3,400.
Read the story →Ptolemy Philadelphus was born to Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 36 BC, the third of their three children together. He was four years old when his parents died and his siblings were taken to Rome. The Roman record loses him after approximately 30 BC. His fate is unknown.
Read the story →Theodosius I's edicts of 391 and 392 AD prohibited all pagan religious practice across the Roman Empire and authorised the demolition of pagan temples. The Serapeum of Alexandria was destroyed within months. The legal framework defined the institutional end of Greco-Roman paganism.
Read the story →Strabo of Amaseia wrote the seventeen-book *Geographika* between approximately 20 BC and 23 AD. The work was substantially the last great Hellenistic geographical synthesis. Strabo disagreed with most of Eratosthenes's specific positions on geographical method, but cited him so extensively in the process of disagreeing that Strabo is now the principal surviving source for Eratosthenes's lost work.
Read the story →Aristarchus of Samos proposed around 270 BC that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around. The classical and late-antique Greek astronomical mainstream — including Hipparchus and Ptolemy — rejected the proposal on empirical grounds. The work survives only through a single passage in Archimedes.
Read the story →Serapis was a deliberately syncretic Greco-Egyptian deity created under Ptolemy I around 305 BC to unite the Ptolemaic kingdom's Greek and Egyptian populations under a shared imperial cult. The Serapis cult flourished across the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean for six centuries before the 391 AD Christian suppression substantially erased it.
Read the story →Eratosthenes's famous measurement of the Earth's circumference depended on a peculiar geographical fact about the southern Egyptian town of Syene. On the summer solstice, the Sun stood exactly at the zenith there — a single annual moment that defined the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer.
Read the story →The 27-metre red granite column that stands on the Alexandrian acropolis where the [Serapeum once was](/articles/serapeum-destruction-391) is the largest free-standing ancient column in the Mediterranean world. The Crusaders gave it the name "Pompey's Pillar" in the 14th century. It was actually erected in 297 AD as a victory monument for the Roman emperor Diocletian, 350 years after Pompey was dead.
Read the story →Claudius Ptolemy's *Mathēmatikē Syntaxis* — known to Europe as the *Almagest* through its 9th-century Arabic translation — was the single dominant astronomical reference work of the Western world from approximately 150 AD to 1543. Most of its observational content was inherited from Hipparchus of Rhodes three centuries earlier.
Read the story →An earthquake struck Rhodes in approximately 226 BC, knocking down the Colossus, damaging substantial portions of the city walls, and producing widespread Aegean damage. The Hellenistic kings of Egypt, Macedon, Syria, and Pergamon all sent substantial financial and material aid — the first known case of coordinated international disaster diplomacy.
Read the story →Theophilus of Alexandria served as patriarch from 385 to 412. He was the principal Christian figure behind the 391 destruction of the Serapeum, was substantially responsible for the systematic dismantling of Alexandrian Hellenistic-pagan religious institutions, and was succeeded by his nephew Cyril — under whose patriarchate Hypatia was murdered in 415.
Read the story →In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens. The Academy that traced its descent to Plato had operated for almost 900 years. Its surviving teachers, led by Damascius, walked east into Sasanian Persia. Five years later they walked back.
Read the story →Synesius of Cyrene studied Neoplatonism under Hypatia at Alexandria, became a reluctant Christian bishop of a Libyan port that was being raided by camel-mounted nomads, and wrote his old teacher letters about both. He died around 413. Hypatia was murdered two years later.
Read the story →Cleopatra and Mark Antony had three children. The boys died young. The daughter Cleopatra Selene II was raised by the wife of the man who had killed her parents and married off to a North African client king. She named her son Ptolemy. He was killed by Caligula.
Read the story →Hipparchus of Rhodes catalogued a thousand stars, invented trigonometry, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and may have built the original of the Antikythera mechanism. Almost none of his writing survives.
Read the story →According to Plutarch, Mark Antony stripped the library at Pergamon — the second-largest collection in the Hellenistic world — and gave its 200,000 volumes to Cleopatra. The story is probably exaggerated. The library was certainly emptied.
Read the story →Robert Koch went to Alexandria in 1883 to find the cause of cholera. He found it on the second day and confirmed it in Calcutta four months later. John Snow had been right thirty years earlier without ever seeing the bacterium.
Read the story →In 391 the Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperial authority, took a mob to the Serapeum and tore it apart. The temple had been the most important Egyptian library outside the Mouseion. After this day there was no library at Alexandria worth the name.
Read the story →He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
Read the story →Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.
Read the story →Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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