Iskindiriyya mariyya; Alexandrea ad Aegyptum; cosmopolitan Alexandria. Far more than the Egyptian folkloric catchphrase and the Roman epithet, it is the link between this city and cosmopolitanism that has acquired the ineluctability of the perennially self-evident.¹ This book asks the questions, Was Alexandria ever really cosmopolitan? And if it was, is it possible to speak of such a thing as anAlexandriancosmopolitanism? In other words, is there something sui generis about Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism? When, by whom, and why was its cosmopolitanism construed as exemplary?

Well into the nineteenth century this city and that concept had not been so firmly...

In the second volume of his studyL’Hellénisme et l’Égypte moderne, subtitledContribution de l’Hellénisme au développement de l’Égypte moderne(1930), Athanase G. Politis, the historian of the Greek community in Egypt, concludes with the chapter “La vie intellectuelle et artistique des Hellènes en Égypte,” a good portion of which is devoted to C. P. Cavafy. Underscoring the poet’s originality, Politis elaborates on the belatedness of recognition of Cavafy’s poetry, and the role therein of his idiosyncratic publishing patterns, before going on to expound a tripartite classification of his poems. The three categories, which Politis concedes are not impermeable, are...

When E. M. Forster arrived in Alexandria toward the end of 1915 to work for the Red Cross as a “searcher” of news of soldiers wounded or missing in action, he was suffering from writer’s block. An established novelist, he was grappling with an unfinished novel about India, a country he would be using as a “standard” against which his Egyptian experience was to be measured, and pronounced “a parody” thereof.¹ Egypt, he wrote to his Indian friend Syed Ross Masood soon after his arrival, seemed “vastly inferior to India,” its “inhabitants … of mud moving”²—a sentiment that six...

In 1961, a year after the last volume of Lawrence Durrell’sAlexandria Quartetwas published, Frantz Fanon presciently diagnosed inThe Wretched of the Earththe predicament of national consciousness in decolonized countries, decrying “the apathy of the national bourgeoisie, its mediocrity, and its deeply cosmopolitan nature.”¹ The obstacles facing the nascent nation-states, visible even at the time when he was writing in a rise in ethnic and religious chauvinism, were concomitant on the bourgeoisie’s dissociation from the people and its deep-seated mimicry of the West. Detecting in this class the “psychology of a businessman” and a propensity for “networking...

Spending a few days in Rome in 1957 as part of his annual trip to Europe, Bernard de Zogheb noted in his diary: “I went to mass at the Greek Catholic church round the corner: Saint Athanase. I wondered how many people in the congregation were Levantines.”¹ The reference to Levantines, though of a piece with some of the constituents of Greek Catholicism, is far from a random reflection prompted by the occasion. Levantinism, I would wager, was central to the sensibility and self-perception of this artist and librettist—that and his city, Alexandria. Whereas identification with one’s city, especially...

Foundation myths, for all the skepticism they arouse, not uncommonly return to haunt. The myth of an Alexander who founded Alexandria to become a cosmopolis returned with some force at the turn of the millennium. The occasion was the proposal of an equestrian statue of the Macedonian, to occupy a main intersection at one end of the oldest streets and close to his presumed burial site in the city he founded. The controversy that unfolded in 2000 centered on the vexed question of Alexander’s imperial/cosmopolitan legacy. Already, the city’s Hellenistic legacy and its revival, in the form of the concurrent...