Volume 52, Number 9 · May 26, 2005
The Ghost City
By Amos Elon
Alexandria: City of Memory
by Michael Haag
Yale University Press, 368 pp., $35.00
Alexandria, a shabby Mediterranean city of more than five million inhabitants, many of them packed into squalid slums, continues to attract attention less for what it is than for what it was. There are no conventional tourist sights although there is an ambitious new building cosponsored by UNESCO, which attempts to 'revive' the ancient Library of Alexandria. The city was founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, who needed a new capital for his world empire, and to whom, Plutarch claimed, Homer had appeared in a dream and led him to the site of the city, a narrow isthmus less than a mile wide between the sea and Lake Mariut. It was built on the mud of Ethiopia washed down by the Nile. In Homer's words,
Review, 4165 words
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