The Birdcage of the Muses

In the third century BCE, the Ptolemaic imperial court at Alexandria was
the unchallenged center of culture and learning in the Hellenistic
world. Backed by the vast wealth and prestige of the Ptolemies, the city
of Alexandria became the symbolic capital of the world, the main hub of
a dynamic imperial network that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the
Black Sea. Many poets, philosophers, inventors, geographers, and other
men of letters migrated to that center to enjoy the generous patronage
of the Ptolemies.
The Birdcage of the Muses is the first
book-length historical study of the golden age of Ptolemaic cultural and
scientific patronage. Working from new approaches to premodern
imperialism, Rolf Strootman reconsiders the significance of Hellenistic
court poetry from the perspective of current empire studies and the
sociological study of the court, arguing that artistic, scholarly and
scientific production contributed to processes of elite integration in
the heterogeneous imperial world system controlled by the Ptolemies.
Rejecting the modernist view that poets, scholars and technicians were
autonomous outsiders to court society, the author is able to place these
men in the social milieu of the court, showing how their professional
behavior was ruled by the same mechanisms of gift exchange, etiquette
and competition that determined court society as a whole. The
Hellenistic Age was a period of intensified globalization, and it was
through the royal court that writers and scientists were able to gain
access to the extensive elite networks that connected communities
throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. Literary authors in particular
contributed themselves to the growth of interconnectivity by creating a
common 'Hellenistic' imperial culture and language, and through the
expression of imperial themes, notably the idea that the civilized world
was, or ought to be, a single oikoumene of which Alexandria was
the glorious, magnetic heart.