Alexandria · 754 AUC

Philo & Sophia

An introduction to the characters, and to the city around them

Philo Sophia Marcos Demetria One room The streets The words Who’s who For the teacher

Alexandria is a city built on an argument. Three hundred years before our story begins, a young king drew its outline in barley meal on the shore, and the seabirds came down and ate the line — which the priests said meant the city would feed the whole world. It has been feeding the world ever since: grain from the Nile, glass and linen and papyrus from its workshops, and, from the long colonnaded halls beside the harbour, something less easily weighed. Books. Hundreds of thousands of them, rolled and tagged and stacked in their pigeonholes, in a building where men and women are paid by the state to do nothing but read, argue, measure the earth, and disagree politely about verbs.

Into that building, most mornings, come three people who are about to matter a great deal to each other. A fourth comes in by the side door with a jar of ink under each arm, and has been mattering for some time without anyone having noticed.

Philo of the Delta Quarter

Twenty-six years old. Jewish. Alexandrian to his fingertips.

Philo lives in the east of the city, in the quarter by the sea that everyone calls the Delta — the Jewish quarter, though Jews have long since spilled out of it into every street in Alexandria. His family is old, rich, and extremely well connected. His father dines with the Roman prefect. His uncle holds the customs contract for the eastern frontier, which means that no shipload of cinnamon or pepper crosses into Egypt without a clerk of his uncle’s writing down the weight of it. There is a courtyard at home with a fig tree in it, a fountain, and three generations of people who all talk at once.

Philo could have had a very comfortable life counting cinnamon. He does not want it. What he wants is to understand — and the trouble with wanting to understand is that Philo has two educations quarrelling inside him, and he loves them both.

Every Sabbath since he was small he has sat in the synagogue while the Law is read aloud in Greek, and he knows those words the way he knows the sound of his mother’s footsteps. But he has also been schooled as any wealthy Alexandrian boy is schooled: Homer, geometry, rhetoric, the gymnasium. So he walks about the city with Moses in one hand and Plato in the other, convinced — stubbornly, cheerfully, sometimes annoyingly — that if he thinks hard enough he will find they are saying the same thing in two languages.

He is tall, untidy, and habitually late, because he stops to think in the middle of streets. He asks far too many questions. He has the wealthy man’s unconscious confidence and none of the wealthy man’s arrogance, which is a rare and disarming combination. And he has begun coming to the Library nearly every day, which is how he met the only person in Alexandria who can answer his questions faster than he can ask them.

Sophia

Thirty-two years old. Greek. Keeper of the catalogue, and terror of the idle.

Sophia works in the Library, and to say she works in it understates the case: she knows it by heart.

The Library’s contents are listed in a vast catalogue, a set of tables — the pinakes — begun by the poet Callimachus and added to ever since. A scholar who wants a particular work by a particular author may spend an afternoon hunting through the tables, then a second afternoon hunting through the shelves, and go home defeated. Scholars do not do this any more. They find Sophia.

She will listen with her head slightly tilted while a man describes a scroll he half-remembers — the one about the tides, he thinks, or perhaps the winds, by someone from Rhodes, or was it Cos? — and then she will say, without moving, third hall, fifth pigeonhole from the window, it is by Posidonius and the outer sheet is torn, mind your thumb. And it will be. The younger clerks have a private theory that she memorised the entire catalogue out of spite. The older ones have watched her do it in the dark during the lamp-oil shortage and have stopped theorising.

She teaches, too. Twice a day she takes a class in one of the alcoves off the great colonnade: grammar, logic, and the art of saying exactly what you mean and nothing else. Her pupils are mostly the sons — and a few of the daughters — of officials, merchants, and Roman families posted to Egypt. She is patient with slowness. She is patient with confusion. She is not remotely patient with laziness dressed up as cleverness, and she can dismantle a piece of it in one sentence, kindly, in front of everybody, without ever raising her voice.

Where she came from, she does not discuss. She arrived in Alexandria alone, some years ago, and worked her way from copying clerk to the position she holds now, which has no name because no woman has held it before. She is calm, dry, and very slightly amused by almost everything — including, lately, by a tall young man from the Delta quarter who keeps turning up with a list of questions on a wax tablet.

Marcos

Fifteen years old. Roman. Convinced he already knows.

Marcos is Sophia’s most difficult pupil, and quite possibly her best.

He was born in Rome and brought to Egypt two years ago when his father took up a post in the prefect’s administration. He has not forgiven anybody for this. Rome, he will tell you, is the centre of the world; Alexandria is a warehouse with columns; the Greeks had their turn and lost it; and grammar is something for clerks, since a man of his family will command, not copy.

He arrives late. He carves his name into the furniture. He answers questions he was not asked and sits in silence through the ones he was. When Sophia corrects him he smiles a slow, insolent smile and says yes, teacher, in a voice with a shrug folded inside it.

And yet. He is quick — genuinely, infuriatingly quick. He spots the hole in an argument before the rest of the class has finished hearing it. He remembers everything he pretends not to be listening to. Once, when he thought no one was watching, Sophia caught him copying out a passage of Euripides for the pleasure of it, and then hiding it under his cloak.

So she keeps him. She lets his rudeness slide off her like water off marble, sets him harder work than anyone else in the room, and waits. Philo, who is more easily provoked, thinks Marcos wants a good shaking. Sophia thinks Marcos is a boy who has been told all his life that he is superior and has never once been told that he is capable, and that these are not the same thing at all.

Added to this section:

What Sophia does not know is where the taste for Euripides came from. In Rome, on winter evenings, Marcos’s grandfather used to read the plays aloud to him by lamplight, doing all the voices, getting the meaning wrong rather often and the music right every time. His grandfather is still in Rome. Marcos has not said so to anyone, and does not intend to, and carves his name into Alexandria’s furniture with the air of a boy who would like it noted, please, that he is here.

Demetria

Thirteen years old. Greek by her father, Egyptian by her mother, and Alexandrian by the way she listens.

Demetria is the ninth pupil: the girl at the far end of the left-hand bench, nearest the window, who is the only person in the alcove not looking at the sea. She has seen it. It is where her father works.

She arrives on foot from the west of the city with a jar of ink under each arm and the fingers of her right hand permanently black. She does not arrive with a servant, or a cedar-wood tablet, or opinions. She arrives with a plain, level way of looking at people that Sophia’s other pupils find rather more unsettling than Sophia’s.

Her father, Nikandros, is a customs clerk — one of the men who stand on the quays with a stylus and write down the weight of the world as it comes off the ships. (Which means, though neither family has yet noticed, that he has spent eleven years writing down the weight of Philo’s uncle’s cinnamon.) Her mother, Thermouthis, is Egyptian, from Rhakotis, the old quarter on the western hill beyond the Serapeum, and sells ink, lamp-oil and offcuts of papyrus from a stall at the edge of the Emporium. Her grandmother, who is still in Rhakotis, speaks nothing but Egyptian and regards Greek as a form of decoration.

She is in the alcove because of the winter the lamp-oil ran short. The Library went dim hall by hall, and Sophia went on finding scrolls in the dark, and on the twelfth night a woman with a boatman’s shoulders appeared at the door of the third alcove with a jar of castor oil — the rank Egyptian kind, called kiki, that smells like burning pepper and stubbornly refuses to run out — and said, in bad Greek, that she had heard there was a lamp that needed filling. Thermouthis did not ask for anything. Sophia asked, instead, how old her daughter was, and whether she could read.

She could. Her father had taught her from the customs ledgers, so that she could add up, and, incidentally, spot a wrong sum at forty paces. So Demetria’s fees are paid in ink and oil, and the alcove has not been dark since — a fact that Marcos, whose father pays in silver, has never quite forgiven.

She speaks three languages and does not always know which one she is in. Greek at school; Egyptian at her grandmother’s; and, in between, the harbour talk — a quick, sing-song scramble of Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Egyptian that no scholar has ever written down and every porter in Alexandria understands. It has given her a gift the others lack: she hears words. She knows in her bones that a loaf can be asked for in four languages and that the loaf does not mind. When Sophia asks what a word is, the others reach for something clever. Demetria says what came out of her mouth.

It has also given her a habit. She makes mistakes that nobody else in the room makes — her other languages showing through her Greek, like the older writing under a scraped papyrus. Sophia keeps a private list of them. She says they are the most instructive sentences spoken in the alcove, because every one is a small map of the place where two languages disagree, and a pupil who never makes one has nothing to teach her.

Among the other three, she supplies what none of them would think to. Philo asks why does this matter. Sophia supplies the rule. Marcos objects. Demetria asks what she will actually say — to the fishmonger, to the tax-man, to her grandmother — on the way home. She is also the only one of the four who says I don’t understand out loud, at once, without embarrassment, which is a great service to everyone else, all of whom were about to nod and hope. And she is entirely unimpressed by Marcos. She treats his insolence as a haggler’s opening bid: something to be noted, politely discounted, and not taken personally.

Marcos has not worked out what to do about this. It is the first time in his life that anyone has priced him.

How they came to be in one room

It began with an argument about a word.

Philo had come to the Library to settle a question that had kept him awake: when the Law says that God spoke, and the world came to be — what sort of word is a word like that? A name? A command? A thing, or an act? He put the question to a clerk, who blinked at him. He put it to a second clerk, who sent him, with some relief, down the colonnade to the third alcove on the left.

Sophia was mid-lesson. Nine pupils sat on benches with wax tablets. She heard Philo out, standing in the doorway with the sea light behind him, and then said that his question was a good one but that he had asked it badly, because he had used one word — word — to mean four different things in a single breath, and until he could separate them he would only go round in circles.

From the back bench came a snort. Marcos, not looking up: “He can’t even ask properly and he’s here to learn about God.”

Sophia did not turn round. “Marcos will now tell us,” she said, “which four things. In order. Since he has clearly done the work.”

There was a long, delighted silence from eight pupils and a scarlet one from the ninth.

“Then we shall all find out together,” said Sophia. “Sir — you may as well sit down. Not there, that bench is broken. Beside the boy who knows everything; there is plenty of room there.”

And that is how Philo of the Delta quarter came to spend a year on a hard bench beside an insufferable Roman teenager, learning the parts of speech from the sharpest woman in Alexandria — and how all three of them came to discover that a question about grammar is almost never only a question about grammar.

On his way out that first day, Philo asked Sophia to write the date on his tablet, so he would remember it.

She wrote a number and handed it back without looking up: the first year of the hundred and ninety-fifth Olympiad. Marcos, gathering his things, glanced over Philo’s shoulder and snorted — to a Roman, he said, it was the seven hundred and fifty-fourth year since the founding of the City, and any other way of counting was provincial. Philo looked at both numbers for a moment, then, very deliberately, wrote a third beneath them: the year, as it was reckoned at home, since the world itself began.

Three numbers, one afternoon. None of them agreed, and none of them was wrong. Sophia watched him write the third and said nothing — but she did not laugh, as she generally did at Marcos, and Philo decided to count that as a small victory.

Added to this section:

He was almost at the door when somebody spoke behind him. It was the girl from the end of the left-hand bench, capping a jar of ink.

“You have left out the fourth,” said Demetria.

“The fourth?”

“The one that matters. The thirtieth year of Caesar. It is on every receipt my mother writes.”

“The tax-men,” said Marcos from the doorway, “are provincial.”

“The tax-men,” said Demetria, not looking up, “are the only people in Alexandria who are never wrong about the date.”

Sophia turned a page. “She is quite right,” she said. “Four numbers: one for each of the peoples of this city that has ever thought it worth counting anything. Marcos, you may carry her jars to the door.”

Philo wrote the fourth number under the other three. It was the first time that afternoon that he had been told something he had not thought to ask, and he was thoughtful all the way home — which, for Philo, meant he was late for supper by an hour and a half.

The streets of Alexandria

Who you meet on the long way home

Ask Demetria the way home from the Library and she will tell you there are two: the short way, which she takes when it rains, and the long way, which is the whole city. Take the long way with her and you will notice that she greets everybody, and that everybody answers in a different language.

Stentor the Herald

The crossroads of the Canopic Way and the Street of the Soma

Where the great avenue that runs the length of the city meets the street that leads to the tomb of Alexander, a man in a red cloak stands on an upturned wine jar and shouts. Stentor is the city’s crier — named, he says, for the loud man in Homer — and he reads out the prefect’s notices, the price of grain and the names of lost children in the same magnificent voice. He is never wrong about what was said. He is only occasionally wrong about who said it, and when. “The prefect says the ship will arrive tomorrow!” — “Yesterday you told us he said it would,” murmurs Demetria. “Then it will have arrived,” says Stentor, with dignity.

Eirene of Glass Row

Half-way along the Way, among the furnaces

Eirene blows glass — the thinnest, the clearest, the most extravagantly overpriced in Egypt, as she will tell you before you have asked — and cannot describe anything without comparing it to something bigger. “Better than yesterday’s! Clearer than the sea! Thinner than your promises, young man, and twice as likely to break!” A pupil who stands at her counter for five minutes goes home speaking in comparatives and superlatives, and cannot say why.

Gaius Fabricius, centurion

The Gate of the Moon, at the western end of the Way

Where the city gives way to Rhakotis, a centurion stands at the gate with a face like a closed door. Gaius Fabricius speaks a Greek that keeps trying to become Latin: short, square, and made almost entirely of orders. You may pass. You may not pass. You must show the seal. You should have shown it earlier. He does not mean to alarm anyone; he simply does not believe in wasting a verb. He has one soft spot, which is Demetria, who once told him — in Latin — that his helmet was on crooked, and was right.

Zenon the money-changer

The Emporium, beside the Great Harbour

The Emporium is where the world is weighed: hundreds of shops, a language for every quay. On its edge sits Zenon behind a counter of small silver scales, who has never in his life made an offer that was not conditional. If you give me ten, I shall give you nine and a half. If you had come yesterday, I would have given you ten. If it were up to me — which it is not — I would give you a drink. He also keeps, behind a curtain at the back, a table where sailors throw knucklebones for small stakes and argue about whether other people’s sentences are right. It is called the Golden Knucklebone. Sophia has never been in. Philo has been in once, and won.

Thermouthis of the ink stall

The Emporium, two stalls along, under a striped awning

Demetria’s mother sells ink, lamp-oil and offcuts of papyrus, and prices everything by the jar, the handful and the finger. How much ink? How many jars? A little oil or a lot? Two jars is ten obols; a jar and a half is a quarrel. She is the only person in Alexandria who has never confused much with many, and she regards this as a matter of ordinary honesty.

Further afield

Not all of them are on Demetria’s road. Some live in the places she has been told about, and has never quite forgiven for being too far away.

Old Yehuda, fisherman

The sea wall of the Delta quarter

Yehuda mends nets on the sea wall and remembers when the harbour used to be twice as busy, the fish used to be twice as big, and he used to be three cubits taller. Every year the past gets slightly better and the tense stays exactly the same. Philo has been listening to him since he was six years old, and can tell, from the verbs alone, which stories are true.

Salome, Philo’s grandmother

The courtyard with the fig tree

She presides over three generations who all talk at once, and she refers to everyone as he or she and expects you to know which of forty relatives she means. He told her that she said he would bring it to him. The household has survived this for decades by a sort of collective mind-reading. Visitors need a chart.

Quintus Valerius Nepos

The prefect’s offices

Marcos’s father is a senior clerk who has built a career on never being the subject of a sentence. In his world mistakes were made, and the grain has been delayed, and it has been decided, and nobody is ever told by whom. He is not a bad man. He is a man who has spent twenty years being careful, and his son has spent two hating it, and neither has noticed that they are describing the same thing.

Lysandros of the medical school

The Museum, beside the Library

A young physician who has cured one patient in three and questioned the other two into confessing. Where does it hurt? How long has it hurt? Have you eaten? Did you fall? What did you do next? He has never been heard to make a statement. Sophia says he is the finest interrogator in Alexandria, and that half the city goes to see him only for the pleasure of being asked something kindly.

Kleon, keeper of the Pharos

The far end of the long causeway

Kleon tends the fire at the top of the tower, and the fire tends him. He is the only man in Alexandria who gives directions properly: Along the causeway, across the second harbour, past the temple, between the two columns, up the steps, through the door, over the bridge, under the lamp. He has never once been lost or allowed anyone else to be. On the foot of the tower is cut a line that is nearly three hundred years old, and he reads it aloud to every ship: Sostratos of Knidos, to the Saviour Gods, on behalf of those who sail. It is, he says, the shortest speech ever made to the sea.

The words of Alexandria

Who guards the writing

Alexandria speaks five languages before breakfast: Greek in the Library, Latin in the prefect’s offices, Egyptian in Rhakotis, Hebrew and Aramaic in the Delta, and a scramble of all of them on the quays. It writes in as many hands. A decree of the prefect is cut in stone three times, once in each of the country’s scripts, so that nobody can say they were not told. It also keeps four calendars, which is why the same afternoon has four numbers. Ask the city what to call a stone and it will give you lithos, and lapis, and even, and a fourth answer from Rhakotis that Demetria refuses to translate. The people who guard all this writing are, on the whole, less charming than the people who sell fish.

Kallias the Corrector

The Examiner · the desk at the end of the long hall

Every new copy made in the Library is brought, before it may be shelved, to the desk of Kallias, whom the Library calls the Corrector and everybody else calls the Examiner. He reads the copy against the master, line by line, and where a line is wrong he does not cross it out. He makes a small mark in the margin — a short straight stroke called an obelos, which means a skewer, or, if you ask the copyists, a spit — and the line stays where it is, spitted, for ever. He is tall, grey and very quiet, and it is said that he can hear an error through a wall. Nobody has ever heard him raise his voice, and nobody has ever seen him mark a line that was right. That is what makes him frightening. It is also what makes him the only man in Alexandria whose “That is correct” is worth having. Sophia and Kallias have disagreed politely about verbs for eleven years, and it is not certain that either could do without the other.

Nestor of the Scribes’ Hall

The third row of forty copyists

Forty copyists sit in rows, each with a reader dictating and a reed to obey, and their chief has one enemy. Five different signs of the Greek alphabet now sound exactly alike, and have done for a century, and Nestor spends his working life fighting them. Every mistake in the twelfth hall can be traced to a copyist who heard one sound and wrote another. Sophia, translating, says the difficulty is the same in every language: there are always words that sound alike and mean nothing alike — their and there, to and too — and the only defence is to have looked at them.

Pinax, the Library cat

The empty pigeonhole in the third hall

Pinax sleeps in the pigeonhole where a lost tragedy of Aeschylus is supposed to be. He is named for the catalogue, because like the catalogue he can be found by anyone who knows where to look and by nobody who does not. The Egyptians consider him sacred, the clerks consider him a filing hazard, and Sophia considers him a colleague.

The book on the nail

Beside the door of the third alcove

Hanging on a nail by the door is a small, much-handled roll: the Art of Grammar of Dionysius the Thracian, who learned his trade in this very building a hundred years ago, counted the kinds of word, and found eight. Sophia teaches from it and disagrees with it in nine places, out of respect. Marcos calls it “the eightfold boredom.” Philo has read it twice: once for what it says, and once for what it leaves out.

The Sphinx

The steps of the Serapeum, at dusk

Nobody has met the Sphinx. Everybody knows someone who has. She is said to sit at dusk on the steps of the Serapeum, among the stone lions and the older sphinxes, and to ask one riddle of anybody who climbs after dark. Those who answer well are let through. Those who answer badly are — accounts differ — devoured, sent home to think, or made to write the sentence out fifty times. Marcos swears he saw her once, “huge, in the dark, with eyes,” which Demetria says was her grandmother’s cat. The riddle changes with the teller. The one that the children of Rhakotis tell goes like this:

I weigh nothing, and I can be broken.
I am given, and yet you keep me.
Give me, and you are bound; break me, and you are nothing.
What am I?

Anybody who has done Lesson One will know the answer: your word. The fourth sort.

Who’s who

One habit of speech each, and the grammar it is good for

Who	Where	Speaks in	Good for
Stentor the Herald	Crossroads of the Canopic Way	“He said that…”	Reported speech
Eirene	Glass Row	Comparing everything	Comparatives and superlatives
Gaius Fabricius	Gate of the Moon	Orders and permissions	Modal verbs (must, may, should)
Zenon	The Emporium	Bargains and offers	Conditionals; the Golden Knucklebone
Thermouthis	The ink stall	Jars, handfuls, fingers	Countable and uncountable; much and many
Old Yehuda	The Delta sea wall	“It used to be…”	Past habits; past simple and past continuous
Salome	Philo’s courtyard	“He said she said…”	Pronouns and what they refer to
Quintus Valerius Nepos	The prefect’s offices	“Mistakes were made”	The passive voice
Lysandros	The medical school	Questions, only questions	Question forms; present perfect
Kleon	The Pharos	Directions	Prepositions of place and movement
Kallias the Corrector	The Library	The mark in the margin	The Examiner: checking and correcting
Nestor	The Scribes’ Hall	Sounds that are alike	Spelling; words that sound the same
The Sphinx	The Serapeum steps	Riddles	Grammar riddles and challenges
Pinax; the book on the nail	The Library; the alcove	Silence; the eight kinds	Mascot; the parts of speech

A note for the teacher

The four main characters are built to carry the trivium between them, so the same four voices can run through every lesson:

Philo asks the big question and rushes at it — he supplies the why does this matter.
Sophia slows him down and makes the distinctions — she supplies the rule and the reason for the rule.
Marcos objects, sulks, and pokes holes — he supplies the obvious wrong answer, which is the most useful thing a character can supply, because a pupil at home is very often thinking exactly what Marcos just said out loud.
Demetria asks what one actually says — she supplies the use, and the honest “I don’t understand.” Her mistakes come from her other languages showing through her Greek, so they are the natural place to bring in a pupil’s own first-language errors. For a Spanish-speaking pupil, let Demetria make the mistake that pupil would make, and let Sophia treat it as interesting rather than wrong.

Marcos’s slow thaw over the course of a year’s lessons is a ready-made arc if you want one: begin him arrogant, let Sophia’s refusal to be impressed wear him down, and let him be the one who finally answers a hard question correctly — grudgingly, and without looking up. Demetria gives that arc a second thread: Marcos, who has never been priced, learns to buy a fish. Neither of them will admit that this is a friendship.

The walk-on characters are meant to be used lightly. Each has one habit of speech and one grammar point, so a single line from Stentor or Kleon can bring the rule back without a lecture. The Examiner (Kallias), the Sphinx and Zenon’s Golden Knucklebone are also the natural figures for games and tests.

What is invented here: Demetria’s age and family, the lamp-oil story, and every walk-on character. What is not: the city, its gates and quarters, the Pharos inscription, the obelos, the Scribes’ spelling trouble, the Dionysius roll and the thirtieth year of Caesar.

Four things called "Word"