ABSTRACT
Egypt had been known to the Greeks as early as the Mycenaean era, and over the centuries they had enjoyed very positive relations with it, before installing themselves as its masters with the Ptolemies; they never viewed it with indifference. What I propose to do here is not to give a history of those relations, but solely to outline the ways in which the Greeks viewed Egypt, how, from Homer to the Neoplatonists, from the eighth century BC to the third AD, these views were developed and modified. I will pick out certain moments when the views on that strange country were formed and transformed, not from the standpoint of the degree of their reality or truth, but from that of the logic which, within Greek culture itself, organised them and gave them meaning. I will also show how the same theme, passed on and taken up again - the importance of the religious dimension, for example, heavily stressed from Herodotus to Porphyry - in fact witnessed a change in its scope in a Greek culture which itself was undergoing profound transformation.
