First-century Alexandria vied with Rome to be the greatest city of the Roman empire. More than half a million people lived in its cosmopolitan four square miles. It was a major centre for international trade and shipping.
Little remains of Alexandria's golden age. Few papyrus records of the city survive. Archaeologists' attempts to reveal its past have been frustrated by years of subsidence, earthquakes and continuous demolition and rebuilding. Our main guide to the city is Philo, an Alexandrian Jew, who, sometimes inadvertantly, incorporated information about his home city into his...

Philo was a Greek-educated but observant Jew who lived during the time of Jesus and Paul. According to the author, Philo's writings synthesized earlier Greek and Jewish perceptions of women. Although Philo accepts the female as good because created by God, Sly argues that Philo nevertheless saw women as necessarily subservient and under the control of men. Thus his writings express some of the earliest sources for repressive attitudes towards women, and suggest that similar attitudes exhibited by the church fathers may be traced through Philo to earlier traditions.