Archive for March, 2008

The novel I’m writing requires at least a workable map of Alexandria during the reign of Cleopatra, a fact made especially clear in chapters such as the one I’m writing now: in it, Cleopatra’s daughter, Selene, walks from the docks of the Great Harbor to the famed Great Library itself. I had thought that my earlier map would be sufficient for such needs, but I’m growing more and more concerned that it’s not. I think it has the Library, the mausoleum of Alexander the Great, and a few other locations in the wrong places.

So I’ve spent the greater part of this evening cobbling together the pages of notes I have on the city’s design — along with, oh, about ten Firefox tabs — and overlaying all the information onto an image from the enormously useful Google Earth.

It’s tough. Of ancient Alexandria we have only two points of certain reference on land. The first is Saad Zaghloul, a small public park where Cleopatra’s Needles once stood (they’re now in London and New York). These needles once stood in front of the Caesareum. The second is the misnamed Pompey’s Column, on the opposite side of the ancient city. This marks the site of the Serapeum, a large temple to Serapis in Cleopatra’s day. And that’s pretty much it. We have good reason to think that two of the main streets in modern Alexandria more or less follow the course of the two biggest streets in the ancient city, but even that doesn’t tell us much.

I really enjoy detective work like this. Was Alexander’s tomb beneath the mosque of Nebi Daniel? Or near the Attarine mosque? Or was it where St. Mark’s is now? Or somewhere else — closer to the royal palaces on the Lochian peninsula, perhaps? And what of the Great Library? It’s long thought to have been near Alexander’s mausoleum, but in 2004 archaeologists uncovered lecture halls up near Lochias (near where the modern Alexandrian Library is located).

Sigh. This sort of thing is a hell of a lot of fun, even it’s very often frustrating.

All for a good cause, though. All for a good cause. Selene needs to know where she’s walking, after all.

In the midst of writing a coming chapter of Four Shards, I realized that 31 BCE, the year of Antony and Cleopatra’s defeat at the Battle of Actium and thus the practical end of the rule of the Ptolemies (if not quite their physical end), was exactly 300 years after the founding of Alexandria by Alexander the Great.

Alas, I don’t think I’ll have the chance to describe what was no doubt a massive party in the city on the tricentennial — the founding was very likely in the first half of the year, a time period I skip to get to the action of the battle in September — but I should be able to make a background reference to it. I’m slipping nifty little facts like this all over the place, though it’s doubtful anyone but me will notice them all. Hell, I’ll probably forget half of them before too long.

Here’s another fun historical coincidence I’m trying to work into the book:

The island of Leucas (modern Lefkada), which lies southwest of Actium, was a great obstacle to Antony and Cleopatra’s plans to escape from Octavian. The wind was blowing north to south on the fateful day of the battle, so in order to raise sail and get away they needed to row all the way past Leucas, which was no small task with Octavian upon them. Anyway, many scholars now believe — and I agree with them — that this island, not the nearby island of Ithaca, is the real “Ithaka” of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey.

And even more fun than that? Alexander’s decision to found Alexandria where he did is said to be the result of a dream he had in which a hoary-locked old man came to him and recited the following lines (in Greek dactylic hexameter originally):

Now there is an island in the surging sea in front of Egypt, and men call it Pharos, distant as far as a hollow ship runs in a whole day when the shrill wind blows fair behind her. Therein is a harbor with good anchorage.

So what was the old man in Alexander’s dream quoting? You guessed it: Homer’s Odyssey (book four, specifically). And the island of Pharos? Why, that’s the island at the front of Alexandria’s harbor on which was built the Great Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Want more historical coincidence? The earliest known critical editions of Homer’s Odyssey (and Iliad) — a truly foundational act for the transmission and study of his truly foundational poetry — were executed at the Great Library at Alexandria by its first librarian, Zenodotus, and one of his successors, Aristarchus. It is to their hands, for instance, that we think we owe our current division of Homer’s works into books.

More? One of the most utilized early commentaries on the edition of Aristarchus (“the most historically important critical edition of the Homeric poems”) is from the pen of the polymath Didymus Chalcenterus (Didymus “Bronze Guts”), who was librarian of Alexandria — you’ll just never believe it — in 31 BCE.

And why stop there? Didymus just happened to be a friend of Varro, who had been proscribed by none other than Mark Antony …

Last night, in the Riverview Room here at The Citadel, James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (known to readers by many names, including Robert Jordan) was posthumously inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

As I told many of the other attendees of the induction ceremony, I would have been happy just to peek in through the windows. That I was asked to attend was thus positively thrilling (especially given the stiff wind off the river that would have frozen me to the glass outside). That I was subsequently asked not just to attend but to give one of the two main speeches of the evening — my own meant to summarize Rigney’s contribution to letters, the other (by the poet laureate of South Carolina) meant to summarize Rigney the man — left me nothing short of elated.

And nervous.

How do you encapsulate the literary life of a man who has touched millions of readers around the world? How do you sum up his contribution in ten all-too-brief minutes, addressed to an audience of poets and authors and friends and — most poignant of all — family? How do you put his impact into words?

Well, you don’t. You can’t. Or at least I can’t, anyway.

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