DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14564#0206
ALEXANDRIA.
189
that we do not know to which of the two we should
assign the twin foundations which are the true glory of
the city, because they made it for at least seven centuries
the mainspring of the intellectual movement of the civil-
ised world. Like the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and
the Pharos of Alexandria, the Museum has given its
name to. a whole class of successors. But it was not a
treasury of statues and pictures ; the masterpieces of art
were at that time enshrined in temples and palaces.
True to its name, the Temple of the Muses was a uni-
versity, yet it contained in its precincts some of the
elements of an ideal museum, and thus the large scope of
its plan hints that a museum should be a university, and
that a university cannot be complete without collections,
an unconscious satire on the modern divorce of two
institutions most necessary to each other's life.
Nothing in Greece was the pattern of the Museum of
Alexandria. Although the Athenian youth had a regular
training, the idea of a centre not alone for instruction,
but also, it may be rather, for the prosecution of research,
was new to the Greeks. They owed it to the Egyptians,
and the very system of Heliopolis was carried on at
Alexandria. At each city the university was attached to
189
that we do not know to which of the two we should
assign the twin foundations which are the true glory of
the city, because they made it for at least seven centuries
the mainspring of the intellectual movement of the civil-
ised world. Like the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and
the Pharos of Alexandria, the Museum has given its
name to. a whole class of successors. But it was not a
treasury of statues and pictures ; the masterpieces of art
were at that time enshrined in temples and palaces.
True to its name, the Temple of the Muses was a uni-
versity, yet it contained in its precincts some of the
elements of an ideal museum, and thus the large scope of
its plan hints that a museum should be a university, and
that a university cannot be complete without collections,
an unconscious satire on the modern divorce of two
institutions most necessary to each other's life.
Nothing in Greece was the pattern of the Museum of
Alexandria. Although the Athenian youth had a regular
training, the idea of a centre not alone for instruction,
but also, it may be rather, for the prosecution of research,
was new to the Greeks. They owed it to the Egyptians,
and the very system of Heliopolis was carried on at
Alexandria. At each city the university was attached to