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Ptolemy Soter was himself an author, and the biographer of Alexander. As a man of enlightened understanding and cultivated taste, he took delight in the society of the Museum. He was in daily intercourse with the philosophers, listening to their discourses in the lecture-room, or entertaining them at his own table. At one of these literary dinners he is said to have asked Euclid for a shorter way to the higher mathematics than that by which the pupils were led in the lecture-room; when Euclid, as if to remind him of the royal roads of Persia which ran by the side of the public highways, but were kept clear and free for the king's use,-gave him the well-known reply, that there is no royal road to geometry.

Among the rhetoricians of the museum was the sophist Diodotus Cronus, with whom Ptolemy was in the habit of jesting, and who among other paradoxes maintained the non-existence of motion,arguing that motion was neither in the place from which bodies moved, nor in that to which bodies moved, and consequently had no existence. Cronus, however, by a fall, dislocated his shoulder; and when asked by Herophilus, who had been called to assist him, whether the fall had occurred at the place where the shoulder now was, or at that from which it had descended, he was by no means, contented with the application of his own argument, and begged the physician to begin at once by adjusting the dislocation.

The seven ablest literary men at the Museum, were called the Pleiades; and they had in charge

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the business of adjudging prizes and rewards to the pupils. At one of their public sessions, a chair accidentally vacant among them, was, for the moment, assigned to the grammarian Aristophanes. When the reading of the exercises was ended, and most of those present were agreed upon the one deemed best of all the compositions, Aristophanes dissented from the general judgment, and pointed to the very volume in the library from which this performance had been copied. Ptolemy. was struck with this test of the grammarian's acquirements, and soon afterwards promoted him to the post of librarian, then the most honorable office of the Museum. The Ptolmies reserved to themselves the right of appointment to office, and occasionally silenced the professors. Hegesias, in the midst of a discourse against the fear of death, was thus silenced, lest by his eloquence he might excité a passion for suicide among his hearers. But, while watching with solicitude over the business of oral instruction, they took no official notice of books. And Hegesias, no longer able to lecture, consoled himself by recording his opinions, and circulating them among his friends.

At a time when books were expensive and readers few, the influence of private reading could hardly be felt upon the social institutions or political destiny of the nation; and hence it was disregarded. Not so with oral instruction. Among the Greeks this had always been the common mode of enlightening the people, of amusing them, and of molding their opinions. Most of the poetry, and much of

the written history of the nation, were prepared for public recitation. Plato,* aware of the influence of such exercises, would have had a censorship upon the poets, that they might not be permitted to recite their compositions in public before submitting them to the judges and guardians of the law, and obtaining their approbation. The business of lecturing, therefore, was at Alexandria, as in the other cities, of more importance than that of composing for the private reader. The custom of appointing readers for familiarizing the people with Homer and other standard authors, had already been introduced here. And Hegesias, after the loss of his professorial chair, was occupied as the official reader of Herod

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Before the settlement of Egypt by the Greeks, papyrus was only in limited use among them. Their adoption of this material in the making of books, was an improvement almost equal to the modern invention of printing. To many of the people books were now known for the first time; and the new substance upon which they were written, replacing the wax tablets, the rolls of bark, the cloth, and other articles formerly employed, continued in general use until it was in turn superseded by the comparatively recent invention of writing paper. The Charta Pergamenta, or parchment, introduced two hundred years later than papyrus, was always too expensive for general use, and was, indeed, an invention of necessity by the scholars of Pergamus, when

* In the Laws, book vii. c. 9.

Ptolemy Euergetes, jealous of the rising reputation of the great library of that city, undertook to arrest its increase by prohibiting the export of papyrus from Egypt. Thus, two of our own words, parchment from Pergamus, and paper from papyrus, stand as monuments of the rivalry in the collecting of books, which once existed between Eumenes of Pergamus, and Euergetes of Egypt.

This rivalry continued until the kingdom of Pergamus was bequeathed to the Romans. And not. long after this event, when Julius Cæsar set fire to his own fleet in the harbor of Alexandria, the flames accidentally extending to the Museum, which stood in the immediate vicinity of the docks, the building was consumed; and with it perished in the flames that library which had been the growth of ages, and which, at this time, contained not fewer than 700,000 volumes. The Museum was soon afterwards rebuilt. And to supply, as far as possible, the loss of the library, Mark Anthony, when in power, presented to Cleopatra the 200,000 volumes which had hitherto been the greatest boast of Pergamus. This literary treasure was afterwards deposited in the Serapium, and Alexandria once more contained the largest library in the world.

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In connection with the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamus, it may be here observed that among the celebrated collections of earlier date, were those of Polycrates, king of Samos; of Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens; of Euclides, the Athenian of Nicorrates, the Samian; and of Aristotle and his librarian, Nelius. This latter collection, or at least

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the greater part of it, was purchased by Ptolemy Philadelphus, and, with other collections from Rhodes, constituted the nucleus of the first library of Alexandria.*

CHAPTER VI.

THE SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT ALEXANDRIA.

AMONG the earliest members of the Museum who devoted their attention to medicine, by far the most conspicuous were Herophilus and Erasistratus."

Herophilus was a native of Chalcedon, and pupil of Praxagoras of Cos. He was an original investigator; and, after Diocles of Carytus, the first of the Hippocratic school to distinguish himself as an anatomist. To him we owe many of the anatomical terms still in use. He was the first to direct attention to the pulse as an index of the varying conditions of health and disease; properly attributing the pulsation of the arteries to the action of the heart. He was familiar with the course of the lacteal vessels, and with their relation to the mesenteric glands. He experimented on living animals, and even on condemned criminals placed at his disposal in the prisons. He dissected human bodies. His

* Athenæus.-The Deipnosophists, book i. chapter iv.

See Galen, in numerous places; also Celsus, in his preface and elsewhere.

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