Cleopatra by Roller Duane W.;

Author:Roller, Duane W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2010-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Scholarship and Culture at the Court of Cleopatra

THE INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF THE COURT of Cleopatra VII was the most distinguished that Ptolemaic Alexandria had seen since the expulsion of many scholars from the city by Ptolemy VIII a century earlier. An astonishing number of personalities are known, although many are quite obscure today. Cleopatra presided over the last of the genuine Hellenistic courts, providing inspiration not only for the intellectual world of Augustan Rome but the Romanized kingdoms of that era, such as those of Herod the Great, Archelaos of Kappadokia, and Juba II of Mauretania. When Cleopatra died, many of her court’s scholars and artists went to Rome or the allied kingdoms. Yet analysis of the intellectual side of court life in Alexandria is difficult because not all the scholars who were studying in the city were attached to royalty, whereas in other places the circle around the monarch might be the only intellectual presence in a kingdom. But in Alexandria, especially in the latter days of Ptolemaic rule, one could work at the Mouseion and Library and have little if any contact with the royal family. Intellectual life continued in Alexandria after 30 B.C. without royal support: the facilities, not the court, drew scholars. Nevertheless what follows is an attempt to outline the scholarly life of Alexandria in the middle of the first century B.C., with the understanding that not all those mentioned may have benefited directly from royal patronage.

Cleopatra inherited the scholarly environment of her father. Among those associated with Ptolemy XII who survived into her era are the physician Chrysermos and his student Apollonios Mys; the philosophers Eudoros, Ariston, and Areios Didymos; and the royal tutors, the rhetorician Philostratos (for Cleopatra) and Theodotos of Chios (for Ptolemy XIII). All these except Theodotos and perhaps Chrysermos continued to be active into the Augustan period. As was the case under Ptolemy XII, medicine seems to have been the outstanding discipline of the era, with the queen herself part of its written output. The prominence of medicine in Alexandria at this time seems largely ascribable to the work of Herakleides of Taras, who was a strong proponent of medical empiricism (opposition to speculation and theory) and wrote a treatise on that topic and a significant work on pharmacology. His works survive in nearly a hundred fragments, quoted largely by Galen and Athenaios.1 One of his students was a certain Antiochis, probably from Tlos in Asia Minor, one of the most prominent female physicians known from antiquity.2

The younger generation included Philotas of Amphissa, the physician of Antonius’s son Antyllus in the 30s B.C., who often ate at his house. He survived the convulsions of the collapse of the reign, which included the death of his patient, eventually moving to Delphi and living until at least A.D. 15. In Delphi he became a friend of Plutarch’s grandfather Lamprias, supplying him with details, especially culinary, about the world of Cleopatra that Plutarch would eventually use in his biography of Antonius.3 Most of the other physicians at the court are obscure.

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