The Sarcophagus—Canon Curtis's Lecture.—Canon Curtis read a highly interesting paper at the British Institute on Thursday last, containing, as the lecturer modestly put it, "Some conjectures respecting the —so-called—Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great, now in the Imperial Museum."
Canon Curtis prefaced his lecture by a statement of his impression concerning the other sarcophagus known as "The Mourning Women." Speaking of the figures on one side only of the sarcophagus, he suggested that they might represent not so many different persons, but one and the same person under different phases of emotion. The lecturer presented this expression of opinion tentatively, and then passed on to his subject as follows:—
"The youth of Pella one whole world confined;
Within earth's narrow bounds he fum'd and pin'd
As if shut up in banishment the while
On Gyara's rocks or on Seriphus' isle;
But, when within that brick-girt town he went,
With one sarcophagus he was content."
So moralised the Roman satirist Juvenal.[1] Where is that sarcophagus at the present day—that sarcophagus in which he was laid after he had been carried off by fever in Babylon? Some say that it is at our very doors—proud to believe that the tomb of Alexander the Great is now preserved in the city of the Great Constantine. Others doubt, having learnt, it may be, that the sarcophagus was conveyed from Egypt to the British Museum in London Guide to the Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum. But it is now agreed by Egyptologists that the sarcophagus, supposed before to be Alexander's, is in reality the tomb of a Pharaoh, Nectanebo I, King of Egypt, 378-360 B.C.
No one has yet proved that the sarcophagus discoved at Sidon, and now on view in the Stamboul Museum, was Alexander's; on the contrary, writers, both Greek and Roman, are at one in attesting that his remains were taken to Egypt. Diodorus Siculus,[2] Strabo,[3] Suetonius,[4] Pausanias[5] have written to this effect. According to Pausanias, Alexander was buried at Memphis; his coffin was removed thence to Alexandria, for it was in that city that the remains of the hero were visited by Cæsars. At Alexandria, Augustus, whose visit Suetonius relates, gazed on the body and laid on it reverently a chaplet, and showered flowers over it. Vain Caligula ordered Alexander's breastplate to be taken out of the coffin there and sent to him that he might deck himself with it for the Circensian games at Rome.
