Alexandria as a “Communicative City”: Pseudo-Justin’s De monarchia in the Alexandrian Media System between the Hellenistic and the Roman Period

The concept of a “communicative city” is a metaphor on that it focuses our attention on the communication patterns that connect people in cities and especially on the relationship between the urban context and communication phenomena, so that those who plan, design, develop, manage, and live in a city recognize the impact their activities have on communication and how communication affects citizens and city in turn. Such a model seems to work fairly well for some ancient Mediterranean urban systems, and this especially because some of these cities, on a typological level, emerge as from above hegemonic creations (or court cities), in which communication stands as an element directly driven by urban powers. The case of Hellenistic and Roman Alexandria, in its longue durée history, is quite emblematic. With this paper I aim at demonstrating how (1) Alexandria was a typical hegemonic city, i.e. a from above artificially constructed city (or a court city) in which communicative ecosystem served as a well-regulated instrument for fostering attachment around the dominant Greek hegemony; (2) how non-Greek groups of the city, in a more or less marginalized position, were involved in such a system for their communicative survival; concerning this last point, I will focus on a very curious case, that of the De monarchia, i.e. an anthology of supposed quotations from ancient Greek authors transmitted among Justin Martyr’s works. This anthologie du plagiat is probably a communicative testimony of the Hellenistic Jewish/Judaic Alexandrian system – in response and/or in relation to the hegemonic media system of the city – and it was only later attributed to Justin Martyr, especially when the apologist was assumed as one of the inventors of orthodox Christianity.