The Ptolemies’ unbounded intellectual ambitions, however, still reverberate. They began to be realized in the early third century BC, at the moment when Demetrius of Phalerum, the exiled Athenian statesman, docked in the Alexandrian harbor to advise Ptolemy on his library. Demetrius was a renowned student of Aristotle’s school and therefore brought the prestige the Ptolemies craved to their project, the wholesale relocation of world intellectual prowess to Alexandria.
