Pharos and Pharillon

In E. M. Forster's Alexandria, history, legend, and personal reflection converge on a city shaped by sea, silt, empire, and imagination. He begins with the geography that made it possible and the two Alexandrias it created: ancient Pharos, the lighthouse city of myth and wonder, and Pharillon, its quieter, later successor. From Menelaus's comic landing to the Septuagint, from Greek ambition to Jewish scholarship, Pharos emerges as a crossroads where Africans, Greeks, Jews, and Arabs each left a mark, yet none could wholly possess it. The book then turns to the great lighthouse itself, marveling at its engineering, symbolism, and role in dynastic power, before tracing its long ruin through earthquakes and neglect, preserved only in memory, poetry, and the Fort of Kait Bey. Forster also follows Alexander the Great from his founding of the city to the revelatory, unsettling visit to Siwa, where divine praise expands his ambitions beyond Greece. Elsewhere, the decline of an Egyptian royal court, Philo's uneasy embassy to Caligula, and the comic-serious rise of Athanasius all reveal Alexandria as a place where faith, politics, and civilization are forever in flux. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.