rimell · asper (Eds.)

Imagining Empire

isbn 978-3-8253-6754-1

Imagining Em

pire

his volume investigates space in Greek and Latin literature as a real and imaginary dimension in which social relations, identities, power and knowledge are materialized, represented and (re)performed. The twelve contributors focus on Hellenistic Alexan-dria and late Republican to early Imperial Rome, yet the essays range from Greece, Egypt, and Italy to the Black Sea, Asia, and North Africa, taking in Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Caesar, Sallust, Cicero, Virgil, Statius, and Juvenal along the way. As well as offering innovative interpretations of key texts from the third century BCE to the second century CE, the volume attempts to respond critically and imaginatively to the still-burgeoning body of work on space across the humanities in the wake of post-colonialist and post-structuralist thinking, and considers its potentially challenging implications for Classics as an evolving fi eld of study.

rim

ell · asper

(Eds.)

Imagining Empire Political Space

in Hellenistic andRoman Literature

victoria rimellmarkus asper (Eds.)

bibliothekder klassischenaltertumswissenschaften

Herausgegeben von

jürgen paul schwindt

Neue Folge · 2. Reihe · Band 153

victoria rimellmarkus asper (Eds.)

ImaginingEmpirePolitical Space in Hellenisticand Roman Literature

UniversitätsverlagwinterHeidelberg

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isbn 978-3-8253-6754-1

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

List of Contributors ix

IntroductionVICTORIA RIMELLYou Are Here: Encounters in Imperial Space 1

SUSAN STEPHENSThe Geopolitics of Imagining Ancient Alexandria 11

BENJAMIN ACOSTA-HUGHESThe Homeric Shore of Alexandria: A Narrative of a Culture in Motion 23

WILLIAM G. THALMANNSpace and the Imperial Imaginary in Apollonius’ Argonautika 55

MARKUS ASPERImagining Political Space: Some Patterns 63

INGO GILDENHARDSpace and Spin: Geopolitical Vistas in the 40s 75

THERESE FUHRER‘Leave the City, Catiline!’ – Sallust on Imperial Space and Outlawing 99

ULRICH SCHMITZERMapping Foundations: The Italian Network of City Foundationsin the Poetic and Antiquarian Tradition 111

ELENA GIUSTIVirgil’s Carthage: A Heterotopic Space of Empire 133

ALESSANDRO BARCHIESIColonial Readings in Virgilian Geopoetics: The Trojans at Buthrotum 151

vi Contents

ALEXANDER KIRICHENKOBeatus carcer / tristis harena: The Spaces of Statius’ Silvae 167

TOM GEUEFree-Range, Organic, Locally-Sourced Satire: Juvenal Goes Global 189

Abbreviations 217

Bibliography Cited 219

Index locorum 239

Index rerum nominumque 251

Acknowledgements

This volume presents in revised form the papers delivered at a conference entitled‘Imagining Spaces of Empire’ which took place at Humboldt-University at Berlinin May 2013. It was funded and organized by TOPOI II ‘Space and Knowledge inAncient Civilisations’. Among the speakers was Ivana Petrovic who, to our regret,decided against publishing her paper with us; in addition to the speakers at theconference, Tom Geue was invited to contribute to the volume. The event was thesecond meeting on Greco-Latin poetry that was initiated by the Vienna Quartet(the first took place at Vienna University and its proceedings were published underthe title “The Door Ajar” in 2013).We would like to extend sincere thanks to those people who helped organize

and facilitate the conference, especially Dr. Arianna Zischow and Eva-MariaMateo Decabo, and to all the speakers. Markus Asper has to thank TOPOI II forresearch leave in 2016 which greatly eased the emergence of this volume, and forfunding our three brilliant research assistants, Janine Hoch, Markus Heim, andJenny Teichmann who took great care in preparing the manuscript for print anddid an especially great job with the indices. Many thanks also to the series editorat Universitätsverlag Winter, Jürgen Paul Schwindt, for accepting the volume andfor his meticulous criticism.

Victoria Rimell (Warwick)Markus Asper (Berlin)

List of Contributors

Benjamin Acosta-Hughes is Professor and Chair of the Classics Department at theOhio State University. He is author most recently of Arion’s Lyre: Archaic Lyricinto Hellenistic Poetry (Princeton 2010) and (with Susan Stephens) Callimachusin Context: From Plato to the Augustan Poets (Cambridge 2015) as well as manyarticles, with a particular focus on Hellenistic poetry.

Markus Asper is Professor of Greek at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has pub-lished on Hellenistic poetry, especially Callimachus, and the literatures of ancientGreek science. He is currently writing a book on narratives in science writing.

Alessandro Barchiesi, Professor of Latin Literature at New York University, haspublished books and articles on Augustan poetry, Horace, Virgil and Ovid, on Im-perial epic and on the ancient novel (a number of his papers are available chezacademia.edu). He is the editor of a recently completed multi-author commentaryon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the author of Homeric Effects in Virgilian Narra-tive (Princeton 2014).

Therese Fuhrer is Chair of Latin at the LMU Munich, and was previously Profes-sor of Latin at the Universities of Trier, Zurich, Freiburg, and the Free Universityof Berlin. She is the author and editor of several books and has published on topicsranging from early and Hellenistic Greek poetry through Republican and Augus-tan poetry and prose to Augustine. She is currently engaged in a number of majorresearch projects in the field of Neronian and Flavian literature, Roman rhetoric,and Late Antiquity.

Tom Geue is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Latin at the University of St An-drews. His work revolves around what it means to be an author under the Romanprincipate, and he is especially interested in anonymous and pseudonymous texts.He is currently polishing his doctoral thesis for publication (Satirist without Qual-ities: Juvenal and the Poetics of Anonymity), and working on a new monograph(The Muted Voice): both projects are interested in the special magic of the literarytext as a technology of absence and anonymity.

Ingo Gildenhard is Reader in Classics and the Classical Tradition at CambridgeUniversity and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He has published widelyon Latin literature, Roman culture and the classical tradition, and is the author ofThe Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought (with Michael Silk and Rose-mary Barrow), Wiley-Blackwell 2014, Creative Eloquence: The Construction of

x List of Contributors

Reality in Cicero’s Speeches, Oxford 2011, and Paideia Romana: Cicero’s Tus-culan Disputations, Cambridge 2007.

Elena Giusti is Junior Research Fellow in Classics at St Johns College, Cambridge.She is currently working on a book on Carthage and the Punic Wars in Virgil’sAeneid, and on historical and political ‘absent presences’ in the literature of theAugustan period.

Alexander Kirichenko is a Heisenberg Fellow of the Deutsche Forschungsgemein-schaft at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has published twomonographs (ACom-edy of Storytelling: Theatricality and Narrative in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses andLehrreiche Trugbilder: Senecas Tragödien und die Rhetorik des Sehens) togetherwith a number of articles on Greek and Roman poetry, and co-edited (with FaroukGrewing and Benjamin Acosta-Hughes) The Door Ajar: False Closure in Greekand Roman Literature and Art. He is currently working on Callimachus and The-ocritus.

Victoria Rimell is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Warwick. Shehas published books on Petronius, Ovid, Martial and the Ancient Novel, and is theauthor most recently of The Closure of Space in Roman Poetics: Empire’s InwardTurn (Cambridge, 2015). She is currently working on Senecan philosophy.

Ulrich Schmitzer is Professor of Latin at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is au-thor of Zeitgeschichte in Ovids Metamorphosen (Stuttgart: Teubner 1990), Vel-leius Paterculus und das Interesse an der Geschichte im Zeitalter des Tiberius(Heidelberg: Winter 2000) and Ovid. Eine Einführung (Hildesheim: Olms 22011).He has edited several books (among them Enzyklopädie der Philologie, Göttingen:Ruprecht 2013) and has been co-editor of Gymnasium. Zeitschrift für Kultur derAntike und Humanistische Bildung since 2002. He is currently completing a bookon the perception of Roman topography in Latin poetry.

Susan Stephens is Sara Hart Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classicsat Stanford University. Her work includes Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments,co-authored with Jack Winkler (Princeton, 1995), Seeing Double: InterculturalPoetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003), Callimachusin Context. From Plato to Ovid (Cambridge, 2012) with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes,and Callimachus: The Hymns (Oxford, 2015). Her current project is a short bookon the poets of Alexandria that incorporates the approaches of her earlier work.

William Thalmann is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the Uni-versity of Southern California. He has published on ancient drama, Greek epicpoetry, class and ideology in ancient texts, and ancient slavery. His most recentbook is Apollonius of Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism (Oxford UniversityPress, 2011). He is currently working on a study of the poetry of Theocritus.

IntroductionYou Are Here: Encounters in Imperial Space

Victoria Rimell

As geographers Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift put it in a volume published back in2000 (when the number of publications on space and spatiality across the human-ities reached a millennial apex) “space is the everywhere of modern thought”.1Since then, it has become somewhat of a cliché to refer at the start of such a volumeto the later half of the twentieth century’s ‘spatial turn’ – the term used by EdwardSoja in his 1989 book Postmodern Geographies to capture what Foucault had al-ready perceived as a contemporary shift in cultural and intellectual focus fromhistory (or time) to space, in the context of structuralism, postmodernism and latecapitalism. Foucault’s official announcement of l’époque de l’espace in his 1967lecture (belatedly published in 1984) has been much qualified and critiqued: asmany have said, and as this volume also echoes, it makes no sense to talk aboutspace as separate from time, or (as Soja and Lefebvre were among the first toemphasise) of ‘imagined’, ‘virtual’ or culturally constructed space as distinct fromreal, geographical space.2 Space has emerged as a central concern across the hu-manities precisely because we no longer construe it as a static, atemporal backdropto the movement of human action, to cultural-political forces, to the flow of nar-rative, or to processes of self-fashioning. Rather, spaces of all kinds (geographical,geopolitical, architectural, urban, domestic, bodily, metaphorical, fantastic) areseen to be both complicit in and produced by those dynamic forces, which aremore often varied, overlapping and rhizomatic than linear or two-dimensional.This understanding of space has brought together and fostered dialogue betweengeographers and philosophers, social scientists and philologists, historians and lit-erary theorists.3 It has underpinned postcolonial studies of the ideological, social

1 Crang and Thrift 2000: 1.2 Foucault 1984, Soja 1989, Lefebvre 1991, cf. Bakhtin 1981: 84-258.3 For a useful and well-designed guide to the ways in which the work of 52 key thinkers

from many different fields has contributed to the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the socialsciences and humanities, see Hubbard, Kitchin and Valentine 2004. See also Cramptonand Elden 2007, and Warf and Arias 2008.

2 Victoria Rimell

and material structures of colonial power, and has framed all recent analysis of theimaginative geographies of empire on which colonial power relies.4This volume situates itself broadly within the still burgeoning body of work

across the humanities (and specifically in the context of the TOPOI research clus-ter based in Berlin) that investigates space as a real and imaginary dimension inwhich social relations, identities, power and knowledge are materialised, repre-sented and (re)performed. Yet within that expansive frame, we also aim to makea small but distinctive contribution to the study of space within the field of classi-cal philology, which thus far has tended either to focus specifically on narrativetexts, with an emphasis on the critical tools and strategies of narratology (see es-pecially Purves 2010, de Jong 2012, and Skempis-Ziogas 2014), or to focus on asingle genre (see for example Paschalis and Frangoulidis 2002, Rehm 2002, Sea-ford 20125), or to zoom in exclusively on a single city (for example Edwards 1996and Larmour-Spencer 2007 on Rome, after Nicolet 1991).6 This eclectic volumeis concerned for the most part with literary texts, covering epic (Homer, Apollo-nius, Virgil), the epistle and oration (Cicero, Sallust), Roman satire (Juvenal), Hel-lenistic and Roman lyric, epigram and occasional poetry, plus historiography anddrama, from archaic Greece to second century imperial Rome, but not primarilywithin a narratological frame. Many of the contributors (Acosta-Hughes, Bar-chiesi, Schmitzer, Stephens) are interested in material culture, in visual art andarchaeological evidence, as well as in how texts of many different genres and reg-isters function dynamically as political or geopolitical acts (see especially the pa-pers by Gildenhard, Fuhrer, Giusti, Barchiesi and Kirichenko). They are all awarethat to experience actual or imagined imperial space(s) as heterogeneous and met-amorphic, malleable in the service of power, and as moving sets of relations withwhich all observers and commentators actively engage, is not to imply that suchspaces are ‘empty’ cultural constructs. For classicists in particular, the contributorsshow, the topic of space in its postmodern configuration is an immensely fertileone in part because it facilitates discussion of what we (think we) know of thematerial and socio-political reality of the ancient world alongside detailed analysisof imaginative structures projected both by ancient texts and by the history ofscholarship that has ensured those texts survival into the 21st century. As Edward

4 In Classics see especially the work of Barbara Goff (e.g. Goff 2005), Emily Greenwood(e.g. Greenwood 2010), Lorna Hardwick (e.g. Hardwick and Gillespie 2007) and Phi-roze Vasunia (e.g. Vasunia 2013).

5 Other recent work in Greek and Latin literature which is aware of and responds to de-bates on space (in the light of e.g. Bachelard 1957, Foucault 1977 and 1986, Said 1978and 1993, Soja 1989 and 1996, Lefebvre 1991) includes Jaeger 1997, Barchiesi 2006,Bexley 2009, Lindheim 2010, Asper 2011, Jones 2011, Pogorzelski 2011, Thalmann2011, Willis 2011, Gilhuly and Worman 2014, Keith 2014, Rimell 2015.

6 For an astute overview of recent studies of space by classicists, from the point of viewof a historian, see Scott 2012: 1-13.

Introduction 3

Said put it in Culture and Imperialism, “Just as none of us is outside or beyondgeography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.”7 Theinterdisciplinary framework within which any new study of space in the ancientworld must operate reminds us of the extent to which the literary imaginary inter-acts with, is shaped by and affects ‘real-world space’ and what might be identifiedas broader historical-political processes: such a project underscores that classicalphilologists can no longer justify isolating their endeavour from the ‘outside’ ofmaterial culture, of socio-political structures, or of the project of interpretationmore generally. Likewise, historians and archaeologists must also be literary crit-ics, and all classicists − as they attempt to analyse texts, objects, sites and themesthrough the multiple filters of cultural and political history and of classical schol-arship itself − are always already doing ‘reception’.Indeed, the topic of imperial space in the ancient world brings to the fore a

highly provocative nexus of issues in classics that are touched on throughout thisvolume. To begin with, classicists exploring the concept of imperial space areovertly entwined in (critiques of) the role classics has played in the Western tradi-tion in perpetuating and celebrating imperial power, and are especially invested inthe on-going project across disciplines to disentangle Western geography fromcolonialism and imperialism, and to handle the patent ironies of post-colonial dis-course. Secondly, our field has caught up, and is perhaps still catching up, with abody of work that defines itself as or is fed into what we might call postmoderngeography just at a time when Classics itself as a subject is undergoing a rapidmetamorphosis which can be mapped spatially and is as we speak reconfiguringintellectual space. While ancient Greek is effectively no longer taught in highschools (the exception being Italian licei classici, select British private schools anda few German Humanistische Gymnasien), Latin is being squeezed out of the cur-riculum at an increasing pace in Europe; yet while all things Western, especiallyin US and increasingly in UK universities, are hurriedly being ousted by the moreappealing label of ‘global’, the study of what is known as ‘Western Classics’ inChina and in Asia generally is growing, and – alongside the continuing wideningboth of the classical canon and the reach of reception studies into areas such asSouth America and India8 – will undoubtedly revolutionise the way we think aboutthe subject and our own sense of identification with it in coming years.Much of the ever-growing body of work on space and spatiality since the 1980s

has highlighted its genesis in a response to contemporary globalisation or moregenerally – as May and Thrift put it – to our “increasingly complex and differen-tiated social world”,9 as well as to the ways in which post-Newtonian science, thesocial sciences, cultural studies and philosophy have articulated both the empirical

7 Said 1993: 7.8 Cf. Laird 2006 and Vasunia 2013.9 May and Thrift 2001: i.

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reality and our experiences of that world. The intellectual assumptions and trajec-tories of classicists are of course just as immersed as those of scholars in otherfields in these rapidly evolving discourses, debates, models and actual geopoliticalcircumstances. But postmodern geography offers particular implications and stim-ulations for the study of the ancient world and for classical scholarship that remainunderexplored. As well as contributing to developing a much wider and more de-tailed historical account of conceptions and representations of imperial space inthe Western tradition (most studies of specifically imperial space have focused onEuropean empire building between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries10), thecontributors to this volume draw on postmodern thought to knock perspectives onancient imperial space off their conventional axis. In plunging into the moving,three-dimensional complexity of ancient space (and of the process of approachingand mapping its multiple configurations), they veer away from more two-dimen-sional schemata which have tended to rely on a series of (ancient as well as mod-ern) spatial dichotomies: centre and periphery, civilisation and wilderness, the fa-miliar and unknown, East and West, citizen and exile.11 The volume begins withtwo papers (Stephens, Acosta-Hughes) which scrutinise the weight of many ofthese oppositions as they emerge in both Hellenistic culture and the classical tra-dition, asking what it is for us – as archaeologists, art historians, or philologistsworking on Greek texts – to know ancient Alexandria, a site which exemplifiesthe extent to which the ancient world is fragmented, submerged, faded or com-pletely opaque to modern interpreters, and accessible only through stratum uponstratum of representation. Much of what was ancient Alexandria has long beenunderwater, and these papers dive deep in their attempt to revisit and critique Hel-lenocentric viewpoints on the city, and to re-examine (faint traces of) Hellenisticliterature’s intense engagement with Egypt.As we move on through Hellenistic literature, William Thalmann and Markus

Asper negotiate space as an intricate network of flows and of layered temporali-ties, even or especially in works (such as Apollonius’ Argonautica) which take uson a linear journey. The sense of space in literature as continually moving andinvolving manifold pathways as the reader or listening public actively engageswith its narratives and designs emerges in many of the papers: to do philology inthe light of postmodern geography is to approach ancient texts not as static arte-facts offering themselves up to archaeological investigation but as live realms inwhich the coordinates of culture are being not just visualised and represented butmediated, shifted, warped or dreamt up anew. Thus for Therese Fuhrer and Ingo

10 E.g. Said 1978, Edney 1990, Ogborn and Withers 2004, Butlin 2009.11 Cf. Skempis and Ziogas 2014: 6-7 on “the dichotomy between East and West”, the

“polarity between center and periphery”, and “the contradistinctions between war andpeace, village and city …, national identity and ethnic otherness … civilization andwilderness … and indoor and outside space” in Greek and Roman epic.

Introduction 5

Gildenhard, Sallust and Cicero involve us in their textual mapping of political to-pographies which are energised – even activated – by incongruities, overlaps andinsecurities, while for Tom Geue, satire’s own fleshy borders, at once rigid andflaccid, solid and porous, encompass and produce empire as a churning, corporealflow that we cannot not go with (or be engulfed by) as we view, hear and speakthis poetry. New understandings of space, approached differently by each of thecontributors, prompt fresh perspectives on the relationship between content andform, text and world: the volume as a whole implicitly reframes the study andinterpretation of ancient texts as the process of entering into a series of open-endedencounters or conversations which may impact on our experience of modern aswell as ancient worlds.Examining (intervening) in such spatialities is an epistemological challenge in

part because it makes us acutely aware of the extent to which the discourses bothof imperial power and knowledge and of classical scholarship rely on loaded spa-tial metaphors. It reveals, too, the inadequacy of academic language as a tool tocommunicate the non-linear or multidimensional, as well as the impossibility ofgetting outside a critical idiom of margins, fields, borders, faultlines and thresh-olds that is endemic in academic discourse across the humanities: we necessarilyproject mappings of our own critical discourse in the process of analysing ancientrepresentations and uses of space. As Ulrich Schmitzer argues in his paper, it isimportant to interrogate the often simplistic structures and perspectives that weproject through this standard vocabulary. Schmitzer discusses how we tend uncrit-ically to mirror key elite texts in polarising Rome-as-epicentre and ‘outside’ Rome– Italy, the provinces, empire’s outer borders. His aim is to shift our focus, toinvestigate how provincial towns like Patavium in the North of Italy had their ownsophisticated stories of identity and foundation with which Rome engaged throughthe Republican and into the Augustan period, but was also motivated to suppress.Similarly, in his paper on Virgil’s Aeneid, which has many points of contact withElena Giusti’s paper on Virgil’s oneiric Carthage, Alessandro Barchiesi suggeststhat we can read the ‘path’ of this intensively ‘mapped’ epic as east-bound as wellas west-bound: in this re-reading, we are encouraged to adopt multiple, potentiallyconflicting spatiotemporal perspectives simultaneously, so that Trojan exile isreminiscent of future Roman colonisation, already tracing or ‘re-enacting’ firstcentury geopolitics at points of nodal tension in Rome’s expanding empire.Rather than homing in directly on the epicentres of (the study of) the Greco-

Roman world – Athens and Rome – contributors continually come back to thesekey sites from elsewhere: from Egypt (Stephens, Acosta-Hughes) and RepublicanItaly (Fuhrer, Gildenhard, Schmitzer), from Nicopolis (Barchiesi) and the BlackSea (Thalmann) but also from North Africa (Giusti, on Virgil), and Persia (Geue,on Juvenal). Through a range of tangled and by no means harmonious culturalstrategies, imperial space(s) can be seen to shrink, expand, move and overlapwithin urban landscapes and within the virtual territories of literary texts: Augus-tus creates the illusion of an Alexandria imported into and transforming his new

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monumental Rome (Acosta-Hughes); Virgil’s Carthage is a site of intense spatio-temporal dislocation, both Rome’s oriental, feminine other and its mirror image(Giusti), and Domitian’s boundless empire in Statius’ Silvae can only be graspedand fully controlled when visualised in a series of microcosms which betray thefragility, as much as the strength, of totalising power (Kirichenko). Rather thanreaffirming the extent to which Rome’s spatial dominion under the Principate isenacted and monumentalised in Augustan and imperial poetry, the essays in thesecond half of this volume pivot around points of crisis and instability where actualand virtual imperial space is taking shape, and being shaped, amid a swirl of con-tested memories, desires and myths.The papers fall into three sections and are arranged in a roughly chronological

pattern, beginning with Hellenistic Alexandria, extending through RepublicanRome, and culminating in Augustan and Imperial Rome.Susan Stephens’ paper discusses how a series of ever-evolving competing nar-

ratives, each with their own political or intellectual agenda, bring both ancient andmodern Alexandria into being. She views Alexandria as a test-case of modernclassicists’ Hellenocentrism (it has often been regarded as a Greek colony on theedge of Egypt, of interest largely for its role in the history of Greece and Rome),and also as a fascinating border-city where Western academic discourse meetsboth a lingering orientalising imaginary and the rapidly changing political exigen-cies of twenty-first century Egypt. The ways in which archaeologists and classicalhistorians imagine ancient Alexandria, Stephens reminds us, are inseparable fromthe history of how the city has been represented, and cultural biases and objectiveswill inevitably colour any view, however grounded in scientific evidence. Yet injuxtaposing disparate narratives and worlds that are rarely considered together,and in reviewing key evidence on Alexandria’s foundations, its temples and itsfamous library, Stephens widens our view, and gives us tools to critique and con-nect radically different readings of this liminal ‘city of dreams’.Benjamin Acosta-Hughes’s contribution is also focused on Alexandria and on

Egypt’s Mediterranean shore more generally, both as they are represented in ar-chaic and Hellenistic poetry and in Greco-Roman culture from Homeric epic toAugustan Rome, and as they are conjured up as places of mystery and alteritythrough the Western tradition. Acosta-Hughes takes as his starting point the blackgranite statue of a Ptolemaic queen (thought by some to be Arsinoe-Aphrodite,from the temple of Zephyrium) recently discovered by archaeologists at a site nowunder water at the Canopic mouth of the Nile. The statue’s apparent blending ofGreco-Roman and Ptolemaic features makes it an intriguing symbol, he suggests,of the liminal site itself, construed as a threshold and point of intense interactionbetween Europe and Africa. This paper takes us on a wide-ranging tour of Greekliterature from the Odyssey, Iliad, Herodotus’ Histories and Euripides’ Helen, toCallimachus and Theocritus, tracing the divinities and myths that spin connectionsand contrasts between Greece and Egypt and contribute to a developing imaginaryof a ‘Greek’ Alexandria. Finally, we are transported (via Julius Caesar’s sojourn

Introduction 7

in Alexandria from 48-47 BCE, and Cleopatra VII’s stay in Rome in or from 46BCE) into mid-first century BCE Rome, where we see the first clear architecturalmarkers of Rome’s appropriation of – but also its multifaceted, creative exchangewith – Egypt, a politically highly charged space throughout the late Republic andinto the early Empire. By the time Augustus imports large obelisks and other mon-uments to Rome, alongside his building program in Egypt itself, an ‘Egyptianis-ing’ politics functions not only as a spectacular assertion of Roman imperialpower, but also as a means to bridge distances in the geographical imagination,and to evoke a sense of continuity, even fusion, between Egyptian Rome and Ro-man Egypt.William Thalmann analyses space and place in Apollonius’ Argonautica from

a post-colonial perspective, and suggests that the text both reproduces and chal-lenges colonial constructions of Greek imperial space. The presence of the Argo-nauts at a site, he notes, very often involves imagining (and implicitly legitimatingor naturalising) future Greek colonisation: local history is buried, the colonisedare represented as consenting to and benefiting from their new rulers, and Greekmastery of space is associated with civility and enlightenment. But Apollonius,Thalmann argues here, also explores the limits and precariousness of Greek con-quest of space as the Argonauts wander into increasingly alien geography. We aretransported into space in which the old binaries of Greek and barbarian, self andother, begin to lose their monumental power, and in which the colonised can beheard to speak their story.Markus Asper explores various visual models for understanding strategies of

configuring imperial space in Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Callim-achus’ Aetia. While we cannot recover exactly how ancient readers of these textsmay have visualised Greek geographical coordinates, modern diagrammatic rep-resentations of the relationships between such coordinates as they are laid out inpoetic narratives reveal a number of fascinating patterns that suggest specific pos-sibilities for ancient imaginary geographies. It is only through detailed, creativereading of these texts, Asper argues, that we are able to see geographical designs– circles, paths, webs – which potentially do important political and/or (to useBarchiesi’s useful term) geopoetic work. Callimachus comes to exemplify the ex-tent to which Hellenistic poetry can be seen to be a privileged medium for gener-ating and vivifying political, cultural and ethnic alliances or interactions.Ingo Gildenhard’s paper deals with Roman geographies of power in the 40s

BCE in Caesar’s Bellum Civile and Cicero’s Letters, and specifically with howthese texts perform and materialise in their very structure, rhythm and diction aseries of geopolitical maps. In the Bellum Civile, Caesar’s movement throughspace (first Italy, then beyond) coincides with and traces his transforming politicalpriorities and evolving identity from republican-conservative to (more or less ex-plicitly) autocratic leader. BC 1 amounts to a master-class in political spin, manu-facturing and asserting control over a virtual process whereby the violation ofboundaries is airbrushed away and the exploded geo-political coordinates of the

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res publica are swiftly replaced by a new, reassuring, civilised order. The secondpart of the paper investigates how Cicero positions himself within Caesar’s worldin, and bymeans of, the epistolary networks andmediations of his correspondence.The focus here is on how Cicero attempts to maintain a notional ‘republic of let-ters’ through epistolary exchanges with exiled republicans, with the aim of reviv-ing a res publica in Rome itself. At the same time, the letters chronicle the gradualautocratic deformation of the civic culture and public sphere that accompaniesCaesar’s rise to dictatorship and the emergence of a ‘court society’. The letter formitself catalyses the tracking and remaking of perspectives on an emerging, trans-formed political reality, shaping reorientations, negotiations, compromises andqualifications, as well as an uneasy movement (as letters are sent back and forth)between a chaotic present and a hoped for yet fading future.Therese Fuhrer focuses on Sallust’s first Catilinarian oration and on the polar-

ising ‘moral topography’ envisaged in the wake of Catiline’s expulsion fromRome in 63 BCE. Sallust’s text, Fuhrer argues, offers a subtle political commen-tary on the complexity and inherent contradictions of Roman imperial space, andon the impossibility of reducing that space to a flat, reassuring map in which loyalmembers of the state and public enemies are clearly separated within a preciselydemarcated terrain. While influential individuals and groups assert the power toremake geography in real and symbolic terms, the ‘counter-site’ of Sallust’s Rome(and of his text) also calls those claims into question, revealing the space of empireas constituted by multiple overlapping interests and viewpoints. The outlawing ofCatiline, as a result, is destined to fail symbolically and to expose the fiction ofabsolute security.Ulrich Schmitzer’s investigation of what we know of foundation narratives de-

veloped in Italy outside of Rome from around the third century BCE onwards per-forms its own remapping of ancient Italian geography, and of modern scholarlyconstructions of Roman-Italian space. Focusing on the role of Aeneas’ companionAntenor in foundation narratives and on the construction of Hellenic-Trojan space,he reveals a complex cartography in which Italic communities and cities fed off,transformed and competed against each other’s aetiologies. Towns like Patavium(modern Padua) had their own historiography and complex stories of foundation,most of which have been lost: yet the project of uncovering and assembling theirtraces reveals the extent to which dominant Rome-centred narratives were alsobolstered by the subtle or not so subtle erasure of competing towns’ claims to sig-nificance. Rome is to some extent a special case, but its apparent exclusivity isalso misleading, concealing a dynamic network of interrelationships, alliances andpoints of conflict between towns jostling for unique prestige, in which mythic or‘historical’ tales of origin fundamentally shape the experience of space and place.More generally, Schmitzer (alongside several other contributors) suggests thatfoundation myths need their own internal contradictions as well as doubles, an-titheses and competitors, in order to constitute themselves as vibrant and reper-formable.

Introduction 9

Alessandro Barchiesi’s reassessment of what he terms Virgilian ‘geopoetics’ takesus into the Augustan age and into Roman empire proper. This paper examines theAeneid as a poem obsessed with location and engaged in drafting – through theTrojans’ itinerary – an intricate and ever-evolving map of the Roman world in thefirst century BCE. Focusing on the theme of colonisation, Barchiesi reads the Tro-jan colony at Buthrotum in book three as a test-case for a key phenomenon in theOdyssean half of the Aeneidwhereby sites that resonate as ethically, culturally andpolitically complex for contemporary Rome become poetic laboratories for pro-ducing and contesting versions of (proto-)Roman identity. The coast of Epirus,paradigmatically (and, as this paper shows, archaeological evidence from the areacan help us better appreciate the intense cultural interactions happening here in thesecond and first centuries BCE as they emerge transformed in Virgil’s narrative),comes to stand for the experiment of a Roman colony in Greece, and for the trans-formation of the Trojan exiles into settlers and colonisers. The result is not somuch a reaffirmation of a ‘propagandistic’ Aeneid, as a rethinking of the extent towhich this text explores the potential pressures that colonisation, or Rome’s repro-duction of itself, put on the security and stability of the imperial project.Elena Giusti’s paper on Virgil’s and Foucault’s Carthage works in tandemwith

Barchiesi’s analysis of the Aeneid, and recalls Susan Stephens’ heterotopic Alex-andria. Like Alexandria, Carthage is a coastal city that survives in Western litera-ture and art as a template for the colonial imagination. Giusti takes up art historianKay Dian Kruz’s suggestion that in his three ‘Carthaginian’ paintings WilliamTurner portrays the city as a Foucaultian ‘heterotopia’, and proceeds to examinein detail how Foucault’s concept might illuminate our understanding of Virgil’srepresentation of Carthage in Aeneid 1 and 4. Curiously, Foucault was himselfliving in the town of Sidi Bou Saïd in the upper Gulf of Carthage when he wrote‘Des espaces autres’, the essay in which he elaborates his definition of heterotopicspaces, while his partner Daniel Defert described the experience of writing thereat the time as a ‘lived heterotopia’. Through Foucault, Giusti develops a closereading of Virgil’s Carthage episode that is fully alert to its numerous temporaland spatial contradictions, its almost unchartable layers of history, artifice and il-lusion, and to its complex and paradoxical relationship with (Virgilian and Augus-tan constructions of) Rome.Alexander Kirichenko transports us into the late first century, and into the in-

tense domestic and urban enclosures of Statius’ Silvae: the parrot’s cage in Silvae2.4, which as the bird chirps back its master’s words conjures the illusion of em-pire miniaturised and enclosed as well as the poet’s confinement within literarytradition; the Flavian amphitheatre in Silvae 2.5, a parallel microcosmic prison fora different sort of animal in which we see boundless imperial power distilled andhoned, in disquieting contrast to the safe private domains depicted in 2.4, 2.2 andelsewhere; and the same arena in Silvae 1.6, when it becomes the site for an enor-mous Saturnalian feast given by Domitian, featuring exotic foods and entertainers

10 Victoria Rimell

from all over the empire. Kirichenko discusses in detail the tensions and insecuri-ties that link Statius’ representation of private and public spaces in empire. Both‘arenas’ engineer reassuring instantiations of an imperial power to demarcate anddefine, and at the same time operate as overly dense constructions whose veryintensity and ambition renders them brittle, perhaps doomed to self-destruct.Tom Geue brings us up to the beginning of the second century and to the limen

of this volume. He discusses how the poetics of Roman satire reproduce the impe-rial logic of urbs as orbis, and how Juvenal in particular, in the last two poems ofeach of his last two books, copes with cramming vast imperial space into its urbanarena only to shrink back from it. The question, as Geue analyses in detail, iswhether this reactionary localism can sustain satire’s trademark intensity, andwhether indeed this idiosyncratic twist on the intensifying dynamic of imperialretreat is set up to inspire empire’s (and satire’s) monstrous revenge.That this volume’s final threshold takes the form of an open question reflects

the experimental spirit and ambitious scope of the conference in Berlin where mostof the essays collected here were first given as papers. The book as a whole tracesa maze of paths through ancient imperial space that does not aim comprehensivelyto map a field of study, but rather to suggest new routes into understanding whatare fast becoming familiar issues, tropes, vistas and dynamic structures.

The Geopolitics of Imagining Ancient Alexandria

Susan Stephens

Imagining ancient Alexandria presents an unusually difficult challenge, and notsimply because so much of that ancient city has been destroyed. The greater ob-stacle is that unlike an Athens or a Rome, Alexandria lies outside of the intellectualworld in which modern classical scholars have been formed, while for Egyptianscholars the city’s ancient Greek past has given way to an Arab/Muslim, and there-fore much later, narrative. Moreover, Alexandria’s spatial and political dislocationfrom its Macedonian-Greek origins manifests itself as a recurring liminality: clas-sical scholars only consider the city as it impacts the stories of Greece or Rome,and when they do look at Alexandria itself it is often regarded as not in Egypt, butmerely ad Aegyptum – a Greek colony, like Cyrene, simply perched on the edgeof an older and fundamentally alien culture, and ignoring that older culture as bestit could.1 Modern Alexandria suffers a similar fate. It is often described as ʻcos-mopolitanʼ – code for the very large non-Muslim populations of Greeks, Syrians,Turks, and Jews, who have been essential players in its history for millennia.2 Forthe West, modern Alexandria is the city of Constantine Cavafy and Laurence Dur-rell, a city of foreigners, outside of time, named a “city of memory” or a “city ofdreams”.3 But this very liminality made it an ideal location for Hosni Mubarak toexhibit his pro-western credentials by building the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a newAlexandrian library in 2001, in a location as close as (mainly western) archaeolo-gists could determine to the site of the original. This new construction receivedqualified praise from presses in Western Europe and the United States at the sametime that it was ignored by most Arab nations. Critics, even in the state-controlledEgyptian press, saw it as a waste of resources far better spent in alleviating thecrippling poverty engulfing the Egyptian state.4

1 See e.g. Green 1996: 3-4. The evidence Green cites is Roman, not Ptolemaic.2 See Hala Halim’s trenchant commentary on Alexandrian cosmopolitanism as a product

of “Eurocentric colonial discourse”, in Halim 2013: 3.3 E.g. Haag 2004 or Hughes’ TWC broadcast: Alexandria: City of Dreams. See also

Green 1996: 1-5.4 Stephens 2010: 268.

12 Susan Stephens

Thus how one imagines an ancient space depends, in the first instance, on whatevidence is available, how that evidence is filtered, what subset of ancients is per-mitted to speak, and which moderns are doing the imagining. While in an idealworld objective scholarly inquiry should rise above cultural particularity, this idealis by no means easy to achieve – scholars with a stake in imagining an ancientAlexandria will inevitably operate within a series of disciplinary boundaries andunexamined cultural biases. In what follows I examine how various modern schol-arly constituencies themselves imagine an ancient Alexandria and how this playsout in selecting and interpreting evidence. I am not interested in adjudicating orreconciling these disparate narratives, so much as recording their existence, forthey usually operate independently of each other, and within milieus that rarelyintersect. The discussion is organized around three key elements of the ancient city– its origins, its temples, and its library, and limited to two groups – scholars ofGreece and scholars of ancient Egypt – though it could easily include the Jews andthe Romans and their representative scholarly communities as well (see, for ex-ample, note 10, below).Thanks to the efforts of maritime archaeologists, the last twenty years have

produced an extraordinary amount of material from the harbor areas of Alexandria– from the vicinity of Pharos, excavated by Yves Empereur, and the palace quar-ters, excavated by Franck Goddio: statuary, inscribed blocks, and other objectsthat have lain within the harbor since at least the great earthquake that finally top-pled the lighthouse in 1303 CE, and quite possibly even longer.5 An unexpectedfeature of these discoveries has been the extent to which the recovered material isEgyptian: these are large objects like sphinxes and colossal statues of pharaohs aswell as inscriptions and smaller objects. Many are inscribed with names of earlierpharaohs, but other objects would seem to be post-pharaonic. The finds are suffi-ciently substantial and widely distributed that they cannot be accounted for as theresult of shipwreck or of individuals tossing unwanted objects into the harbor.They must at some stage have made a visible impact on the landscape, and theirexistence prompts the questions: when were they brought there? By whom? Egyp-tians? The first Ptolemies? The later Ptolemies? The Romans? Unfortunately mar-itime archaeology cannot tell us how long these items have been submerged, sohow the finds are interpreted depends, in large part, on how the questions raisedabove are answered. To see how this plays out in existing scholarship let us firstconsider narratives of the city’s origins.

1 The Origins of the City

For Egyptologists Alexandria had a pre-Greek history. It was either a series ofsmall villages or one large settlement, called Rhakotis, in origin either a military

5 See Nur 2010: 134-35.

The Geopolitics of Imagining Ancient Alexandria 13

fortification to protect against incursions of Libyans to the west or raiders fromthe sea, or it was a trading port. About this region Alan Rowe, for example, in his1953 survey of Dynastic sites wrote:

[The area] was a strong frontier fort from at least the middle of the 18th dynasty,around 1500 BC […] and in the reign of Ramesses II was still a great fort, a fortwhich remained with buildings until the arrival of Alexander the Great, when [it]became the western suburb of the new city.6

For Egyptologists, even if they debate the date of such a foundation, or its size –was it a military outpost, a series of small settlements, or a much larger town? –its Egyptian origin is not in question. Nor was its name: Re-kd (Ῥακῶτις in Greektransliteration), which dates to the Dynastic period and remained the official top-onym for the Greek city in Demotic documents like the Satrap decree of 311 BCEor in the archive of Hor.7 Rhakotis then would seem to guarantee a pre-Alexan-drian existence for the city. Although Hellenistic Greek writers do not use thisname, Strabo (17.1.6), writing at the beginning of the Roman Empire, regardedRhakotis as the name of the Egyptian quarter of Alexandria. As it happens, a goodportion of the harbor finds – those near Pharos – lie close to the site where thisquarter seems to have been located. Their discovery then would appear to supportthe thesis that a local Egyptian population was already present when Alexanderarrived, and that it was of some size and material presence. In this scenario, theseobjects were either allowed to remain in situ (or at least above ground) to adornthe emerging Greek city, or they were dumped in the harbor area to build the Hep-tastadion – the quay that connected the mainland to the island of Pharos. Whichalternative we choose is of some consequence for imagining the new city.The Greek narrative of Alexandria’s origins is a marked contrast. Alexander

founded the city either as a result of a prophecy (Alexander Romance 1.33.2) or adream (Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 26.4-9); he chose the empty site across fromPharos for his new city, and laid out its perimeter himself (Arrian 1.5.1, Curtius4.8.1). Alexander founded it; Greek architects designed it; there is no mention ofpreviously existing Egyptians, either people or monuments. Because he cites sup-posedly trustworthy sources like Ptolemy I, Arrian’s account is unquestioned bymodern historians, yet he wrote at least five centuries later than the city’s founda-tion, and his sources were not necessarily without their own biases. (For example,Ptolemy I promoted the cult of Alexander, having diverted his corpse from itsjourney to the Siwah oasis to Memphis in Egypt; 8 it would have been in his bestinterests to promote Alexander as city founder in the Greek mode and to gloss over

6 Alan Rowe 1953: 137.7 Ray 1976, where throughout Alexandria is Re-kd. See the index, 184-85.8 See Erskine 2002: 163-79.

14 Susan Stephens

prior settlement.) What historians do question is the importance and/or existenceof the prior Egyptian settlement called Rhakotis.9 Recently the Demotist MarkDePauw has suggested that the root of the name Rhakotis could mean “under con-struction”; this philological observation was developed by M. Chauveau to arguethat Egyptians had no previous stake in this location, but were brought there towork on the new city, which in their own language they simply called “construc-tion site”, and the name stuck – perhaps even as a native joke or expression ofcontempt.10 Thus the city can be imagined as wholly Greek, and the native popu-lations, to the extent that they existed, were never more than the itinerant workersnecessary for its large scale building projects.Maritime archaeologists have not resolved this matter. Although they have dis-

covered evidence for human occupation on the site for over a millennium and con-firmed the presence of “ceramic sherds [and] lithic fragments from Middle andUpper Egypt”11, far from settling the question, they have introduced new elements,or rather continued to consider an older hypothesis: whether the main actors wereMinoans, Greeks or Cretans.12 They write:

Further exploratory work is now required to determine who these early settlers mayhave been, whether Egyptian, Greek, Minoan, or other, where they settled and thenature of their occupation.13

What does this mean for the harbor finds of Egyptian materials? If Rhakotis is nomore than a “construction site”, or a Minoan, or even an earlier Greek site, thenthese objects could not have been there when Alexander arrived, but were laterimported. Then the question becomes: who brought them, which leads to a con-sideration of the Ptolemies themselves. Did they acquire these Egyptian monu-ments, and if so how early? The dates matter – when Yves Empereur discovereda colossal statue of a Ptolemy as pharaoh, he identified it as Ptolemy II, and sug-gested in more than one place, that a set of colossi of Ptolemy II as Pharaoh and

9 See e.g. Fraser 1972, vol, 2: 8-9 (notes 20-22).10 Chauveau 1999: 4-5. However, John Baines (2003: 61-63) disputed their claim on the

linguistic grounds that the word did not have the form of a newly coined toponym.Further arguments supporting Baines, on the basis of comparison with other Ptolemaictoponyms, may be found in Mueller 2006:11-15. The cultural stakes in this seeminglytrivial argument about a name can also be seen in Giambetti 2009: 26-27; she finds itnecessary to remove an earlier Egyptian presence in Alexandria in order to promote anearly (fourth cent. BCE) date for the presence of Jews in the city (and in the area ofRhakotis).

11 Stanley and Landau 2006: 49.12 See Fraser 1972 for the “Minoan hypothesis”.13 Cf. Stanley and Landau 2006. .

The Geopolitics of Imagining Ancient Alexandria 15

another set of Arsinoe as Isis would have lined the Heptastadion.14 If he was cor-rect, this would have made the early city very Egyptian looking indeed. But mostclassical scholars do not accept Empereur’s dating; both the male and female co-lossi have been reassigned to the second century BCE or later, on the basis of hairand clothing styles.15 There are analogous finds of pharaonica near the palacequarter, along the eastern harbor of the city. Much of this material has been relo-cated and repurposed from the Egyptian temple city of Heliopolis. Jean Yoyotteand Franck Goddio are agnostic about the dates at which the relocations occurred– they might have been early Ptolemaic; Paul Stanwick makes a case for late Ptol-emaic and Roman.16 Thus it was the last Ptolemies, if not Cleopatra herself, and/orEgypt’s Roman conquerors who adorned their palace areas with sphinxes andother native arts. By this reckoning, it was part of the later Ptolemies’ ideologicalrepositioning of themselves as Egyptian to curry favor with the natives.17 And sothe imagined city remains Greek in its formative stages and only with the later anddecadent Ptolemies or even the Romans do the Egyptian artifacts begin to creepinto the landscape.

2 Temple Foundation

Now let us turn to a consideration of the early city’s temples and its gods. Greekscholars consistently quote Arrian (3.1.5) and they unconsciously imagine a typi-cal Greek city filled with temples to the Olympian deities:

καὶ ἔδοξεν αὐτῷ ὁ χῶρος κάλλιστος κτίσαι ἐν αὐτῷ πόλιν καὶ γενέσθαι ἂνεὐδαίμονα τὴν πόλιν. πόθος οὖν λαμβάνει αὐτὸν τοῦ ἔργου, καὶ αὐτὸς τὰ σημεῖατῇ πόλει ἔθηκεν, ἵνα τε ἀγορὰν ἐν αὐτῇ δείμασθαι ἔδει καὶ ἱερὰ ὅσα καὶ θεῶνὧντινων, τῶν μὲν Ἑλληνικῶν,Ἴσιδος δὲ Αἰγυπτίας, καὶ τὸ τεῖχος ᾗ περιβεβλῆσθαι.

He [Alexander] decided that the site was the fairest in which to found a city, andthat the city would prosper. A longing for the task seized him, and he himself es-tablished the main points of the city – where the agora should be constructed, andhow many temples there should be, and of which gods, those of the Greek gods andof Egyptian Isis – and what the course of the city walls should be.

But what does Arrian actually say? He is certain about Isis, but the language aboutthe Greek gods is vague. He makes no effort to identify them when writing in thesecond century CE, and earlier writers, including Strabo, were not more informa-tive; Strabo could only describe what he saw a few years after Augustus’ defeat of

14 See e.g. the interview on Nova quoted in Stephens 2010: 277.15 Stanwick 2002: 17-18.16 Goddio and Clauss 2006: 370-82; Stanwick 2002: 19.17 See Arnold 1999: 209-224 on temple construction under the last Ptolemies.

16 Susan Stephens

Antony and Cleopatra, and apart from a passing mention of the Serapeum(17.1.10) and the temple of Arsinoe-Aphrodite at Cape Zephyrium (17.1.16), thefew temples he describes are not early Ptolemaic. (The Timonium, for example,was built at the behest of Marc Antony.) The earliest information of what templesto Greek divinities may have stood in early Alexandria comes from Callimachus.If we take the scholium to his Hymn to Demeter as evidence that the mise en scèneof that hymn was Alexandria18, then there must have been a Thesmophorion in hislifetime. Polybius (15.29.8) does indeed testify to this temple at the end of the thirdcentury, but Neil Hopkinson, in his commentary on the Demeter Hymn, has dis-missed the possibility of an Alexandrian location.19Although Peter Fraser, in his magisterial study of Ptolemaic Alexandria, as-

serts that “the history of Olympian deities in Alexandria began with an act of theFounder himself” (vol. 1, p. 193), quoting the passage of Arrian given above, byhis own testimony the evidence to support such a history is not robust. These aredirect quotes from Fraser’s subsequent narrative: “Zeus himself is not well repre-sented in surviving dedications fromAlexandria” (vol. 1, p. 194); “Zeus’s consort,Hera, has left very few traces in the capital” (vol. 1, p. 195); “Equally scanty aresurviving references to Athena, and to Apollo and Artemis” (vol. 1, p. 195). Whenthe Olympians do emerge they are identified with the Ptolemies: if a statue of ZeusSoter stood atop the Lighthouse, it was probably identified with Ptolemy I, whowith his wife Berenice I was deified as the Savior Gods (Theoi Soteres).20An earlyPtolemaic temple to Aphrodite is attested at Cape Zephyrium, though all the Greekpoets who mention it – Posidippus, Callimachus, probably Theocritus in Idyll 15,and Hedylus21 – indicate that it was really a temple to Arsinoe II, who had beenassociated with the goddess, as Arsinoe-Aphrodite.22 Arsinoe also had a mortuarytemple, built by her brother-husband, Ptolemy II, and apparently mentioned, againby Callimachus, in his Apotheosis for Arsinoe (fr. 394 Pf.). The temple was wellenough known in the Roman period that Pliny claims Ptolemy II had an obeliskimported from nearby Heliopolis to grace it.23 Another deity, though only half-

18 For the scholium see Pfeiffer 1949-53, vol. 2: 77.19 Hopkinson 1984: 32-39.20 See Fraser 1972, vol.1: 18-19 for the vexed question of to whom the Lighthouse was

dedicated.21 Posidippus, epp. 39, 116, 119 A-B; Callimachus, ep. 5 Pf. = 14 G-P and Aetia, fr. 110

Pf., Hedylus 4 G-P.22 The recent find of a black granite torso of a queen/goddess in the harbor near this site

generated the same disagreements about date: Yoyotte 2006: 173-75 argues for an iden-tification with Arsinoe II-Aphrodite; Albersmeier in Robinson and Wilson 2006: 196-198 thinks it represents a much later queen, possibly Cleopatra VII.

23 McKenzie 2007: 51 provides the standard, and almost unbelievable, account of thismortuary temple to Arsinoe II. It supposedly had a magnetic roof and an iron statue togive the appearance of Arsinoe ascending.

The Geopolitics of Imagining Ancient Alexandria 17

Olympian, Dionysus, is very prominent in the account of the Ptolemaia that isfound in Athenaeus and attributed to Callisthenes, but there is no hint of a templein that very long description.24 In fact, no temple is mentioned at all in Callisthe-nes’ account. There seems to have been a shrine to Thetis on Pharos – or at leastthat is one way of understanding a fragmentary passage of Callimachus’ Apothe-osis of Arsinoe (fr. 228.15 Pf.). But the fact remains that – Alexander the Founder’sintentions notwithstanding – no Olympian patron deity is ever attested for the earlycity and no remains of temples to any of these gods have ever been identified.25The Greek narrative about local Egyptian worship is best stated by Peter Fra-

ser: “Although Alexandria had a large native population, this has left virtually notrace in the field of religion.”26 This despite Arrian’s remark that the Founder es-tablished a temple to Egyptian Isis – the only deity Arrian identifies by name –information that is also found in the much later opening of the Alexander Ro-mance. If one of Alexander’s founding acts was the building of a temple to Isis,this surely presupposes a population for whom it was a cult center. And the impli-cation within the Alexander Romance is that he built it for local Egyptians alreadyresident, not a population that he anticipated would emigrate from the chora. Afestival to Isis was certainly celebrated in the city in 256 BCE, because Ptol-emy II’s chief financial officer, Apollonius, writes his estate manager as follows:“put as many of the thickest logs of dried wood as possible on a boat and sendthem immediately to Alexandria so that we may use them in the festival of Isis.”27This brief letter not only indicates that Isis was worshipped in the early city, butthat the crown took an interest in facilitating the event.In fact, much of the early third-century evidence Fraser cites for Greek divini-

ties might be better deployed in service of an Egyptian narrative. For example,Fraser tells us that Athena was clearly identified with Neith (Martin Bernal’s‘Black Athena’); her great temple at Sais (53 miles southeast of Alexandria) wassupported with massive donations by Ptolemy II and commemorated in an im-portant decree probably from the late 260s.28 The earliest dedication to Apollo,from the third century BCE, was found in the Alexandrian Serapeum, and in it thegod has a unique and otherwise unattested cult title: Bladous. Daniel Selden hasargued that Bladous is in fact a Greek rendering of an Egyptian phrase meaning‘Eye of the Dawn’ and that the title referred to Horus, with whom Apollo wasidentified as early as Herodotus (2.144.2).29 Artemis, to the extent that she was

24 Athenaeus 197C-203B = FGrH 627 F2. For a discussion of that text, see Rice 1983.Her index has no entry for ʻtempleʼ, though under ʻAlexandriaʼ she does list an Arsi-noeion, Berenikeion, a Homereion, and a Serapeum.

25 Strabo mentions a Poseideion, but there is nomention of this temple in an earlier source.26 Fraser 1972, vol. 1: 189.27 P. Cairo Zenon 59154.1-4, and see Perpillou-Thomas 1993: 94.28 Quack 2008: 284-85.29 Selden 1998: 289-90. Horus was often represented as an eye, particularly in amulets.