Alexandria through the eras
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Hellenistic Age
Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE and made the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt by his general Ptolemy I Soter, Alexandria became the wealthiest and most learned city of the Greek world. Its Museum and famous Library, patronized by the early Ptolemies, drew scholars from everywhere: Callimachus catalogued its holdings and revolutionized poetry; his pupil and rival Apollonius Rhodius composed the epic Argonautica; Lycophron worked among its tragedians; Euclid taught geometry and Eratosthenes measured the earth. Here too the city's large Jewish population produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah, beginning a deep Greek-Jewish intellectual encounter.
Roman Era
After Octavian's defeat of Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony in 30 BCE ended Ptolemaic rule, Alexandria became the capital of Roman Egypt and the empire's second city, its grain feeding Rome itself. In the second century CE Claudius Ptolemaeus produced his Almagest and Geography, works that fixed the astronomy and cartography of the West for over a millennium; the romancer Achilles Tatius and the historian Appian also wrote here. The city remained a turbulent crucible of Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish populations—scarred by communal violence yet unrivaled in learning.
Late Antiquity
Reorganized within Diocletian's restructured empire after 284 CE, Alexandria became a foremost center of Christian theology and bitter doctrinal conflict, seat of a powerful patriarchate. It retained brilliant pagan learning into late antiquity—the Neoplatonist and mathematician Hypatia taught here until her murder by a Christian mob in 415 CE—before the city passed out of Roman hands with the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE.