You are not royalty, which is good. Royalty is a job with a short life expectancy. You are something better, useful. You clear the equivalent of $500k a year, which in this city means letters get answered, doors open, and guards recognize your face even if they do not know your name. You can skip a royal event without consequences, which is the real flex.

Your house sits near the Royal Quarter, stone and cool, designed for discretion rather than awe. Courtyard. Fountain. Mosaics that quietly signal you are doing well and have been for a while. The servants know the choreography. They appear, they vanish. Luxury here is not gold. It is control of the environment.

Breakfast is warm bread, fish from the morning catch, wine that came a long way on someone else’s ship. Then you go manage proximity to power. Grain contracts. Tax receipts. Ships that move papyrus, glass, spices, and things no one itemizes. Everyone knows where the money ultimately comes from. Everyone pretends not to notice. This is not flame. This is sustained heat.

By midday you drift through the Mouseion. You do not need to be brilliant. You just need to be present. The smartest men alive argue within earshot, casually rewriting mathematics and astronomy. You own scrolls. You lend them selectively. Knowledge is currency, and you have liquidity.

Lunch is social positioning with good olives. Greek is the default language even when it is not anyone’s first. Someone mentions the king’s latest procession. Someone else mentions how much gold it burned. The subtext is obvious. This city runs on spectacle and the king pays for it so you do not have to. You are doing very well, but you are doing well inside a system that can revoke access without warning.

In the afternoon you bathe. Cleanliness reads as status. You change into linen that would make a lesser man self conscious. You stop by a temple, Serapis maybe, because piety here is branding and the gods understand mixed portfolios.

At night Alexandria goes full display. Festivals, torchlight, accents from everywhere that matters. You drink with people who have been farther than most humans ever will. There are models and bottles, imported faces and imported wine, all of it signaling that this is the place to be seen enjoying yourself. It is excessive, but controlled. Again, not flame.

You walk home late. The harbor smells like salt and money. Tomorrow will look like today, and that is the point. You live extremely well in the most famous capital on Earth, surrounded by brilliance and leverage, close enough to power to feel the warmth, far enough away to sleep at night.

Life is good. For now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5589440&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310751#49612412)

Scale and Population

By the mid-3rd century BC, Alexandria likely housed 400,000–500,000 inhabitants (some ancient estimates and modern scholarly reconstructions place the total urban population around or exceeding 500,000, including slaves, metics, and transient populations). This made it one of the largest—if not the largest—cities on Earth at the time, surpassing Athens, Syracuse, or even Carthage during this window. The street grid (laid out by Dinocrates) featured the extraordinarily wide Canopic Way (the main east-west artery), broader than anything in classical Greece, running ~4–5 miles through a planned rectangular layout ~4 miles long by ~0.75–1 mile wide, divided into five major districts. Monumental Grandeur and Infrastructure The Pharos Lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders), completed under Ptolemy II, towered ~100–130 meters and served as both functional beacon and extravagant symbol of Ptolemaic power.

The Mouseion (precursor to the modern research institute) and the Great Library housed hundreds of thousands of scrolls, drawing scholars like Euclid, Archimedes (who visited), Callimachus, and Eratosthenes.

Massive royal palaces occupied perhaps a quarter or third of the city area along the eastern harbor, with luxurious gardens, pavilions, and the famous procession floats of the Ptolemaieia festival rivaling Olympic spectacle in opulence.

Economy and Wealth

Ptolemy II's administration ran one of the ancient world's most sophisticated command economies—a highly monetized, state-directed system extracting maximum revenue from Egypt's fertility while dominating Mediterranean and Red Sea trade. Ancient sources (e.g., Hieronymus of Cardia, cited in later texts) report Ptolemy II's annual royal revenue at ~14,800 silver talents plus 1.5 million artabas of wheat. (A silver talent ≈ 6,000 drachmas; this equates to enormous purchasing power—far beyond any Greek polis.)Alexandria itself functioned as:The export gateway for Egypt's grain surplus (feeding much of the Greek world),

Papyrus, glass, linen, and luxury manufactures,

Re-export hub for Arabian incense, Indian spices/pepper/cinnamon, East African ivory/ebony/feathers, and Mediterranean imports (timber, metals, wine, olive oil, fine pottery).

Merchants from Greece, Phoenicia, Asia Minor, Arabia, India, and beyond converged in its harbors. The state tightly controlled grain, oil, and other monopolies, generating vast fortunes while the royal court displayed staggering wealth (gold from Nubia/India/Spain, silver from Greece/Spain, exotic imports).Society and Culture A true melting pot: dominant Greek/Macedonian elite, large Jewish community (where the Septuagint translation occurred), native Egyptians, and traders from every direction. Polyglot, multi-ethnic, and religiously pluralistic—yet with sharp social stratification. The city pulsed with:Intellectual ferment (mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philology, poetry),

Lavish court-sponsored festivals,

Commercial buzz in warehouses and markets,

Naval power projecting Ptolemaic influence across the eastern Mediterranean.

In purchasing-power terms, the city's concentrated wealth during this "peak" era—when royal and elite resources flowed through Alexandria—might evoke a modern analogy of ~$500,000/year average "effective" per free adult household or elite-adjusted income in a high-inequality society, but scaled to an entire metropolis whose top-tier prosperity and infrastructure outshone anywhere else. It was the place where the Hellenistic world's money, brains, and ambition converged most intensely. Alexandria under Ptolemy II wasn't just rich—it was the glittering nerve center of a new cosmopolitan age.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5589440&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310751#49612635)