Tea at Trianon: 10 Reasons The Ancient City Of Alexandria Was An Intellectual Powerhouse

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 12, 2020

10 Reasons The Ancient City Of Alexandria Was An Intellectual Powerhouse

From The Collector:

From its inception, Alexandria was imbued with the spirit of curiosity. The first Ptolemy who ruled ancient Alexandria in the 3rd century BC was most likely tutored by the great Aristotle. Aristotle’s lifelong mission had been to amass all human knowledge and teach it to future generations. He founded the Lyceum in Athens, which was a true university in the modern sense.

At the Lyceum he built a great private library as well as a museum of objects, many of which had been sent back to him by Alexander the Great. But Athens was a declining power and it would be Alexander’s successors who drew to them the great minds of their day. Ptolemy would embark on an Aristotelian project of his own, collecting objects and books.

This intellectual ideal, whether it passed directly or not from Aristotle, became the ethos of the Ptolemaic dynasty and Ptolemy II was taught by one of Aristotle’s successors, the philosopher Strato of Lampsacus.

The huge importance of Aristotle as a founding influence cannot be overstressed. His philosophy had been based on observation and data collection as well as logical reasoning — in other words, an early attempt to develop the scientific method.

Alexandria’s culture of learning was a long way from the hopelessly abstract philosophical musing of other intellectual centers in the ancient world. A culture of rigorous empirical study arose on a large scale for the first time. (Read more.)