Alexandria and Apocalypse

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 4 examines the city of Alexandria, which by the Roman imperial period had long been acknowledged as the first city of Egypt. It argues that for Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale, Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon, and Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Story Alexandria was not only a symbol of the power of outsiders to control Egypt, but that it also provided a politically, intellectually, and symbolically charged image to represent resistance to that power. These texts draw on and respond to both Greek and Egyptian traditions—some ethnographic, some apocalyptic—in order to present three very different pictures of the city’s relationship to the rest of Egypt. The chapter shows how authors can work against the view of the city familiar from other Roman imperial literature to represent Alexandria as a labile landscape, one that, in Heliodorus at least, is always in danger of being unwritten and pulled down to its very foundations.