Chapter II: The Christian Period in Egypt (3)

Arianism took refuge from the Egyptians within the camps of the Greek soldiers. One church was dedicated to the honour of St. George, the late bishop, within the lofty towers of the citadel of Babylon, which was the strongest fortress in Egypt; and a second in the city of Ptolemais, where a garrison was stationed to collect the toll of the Thebaid. St. George became a favourite saint with the Greeks in Egypt, and in those spots where the Greek soldiers were masters of the churches this Arian and unpopular bishop was often painted on the walls riding triumphantly on horseback and slaying the dragon of Athanasian error. On the other hand, in Alexandria, where his rivals politics and opinions held the upper hand, the monastery of St. Athanasius was built in the most public spot in the city, probably that formerly held by the Soma or royal burial-place; and in Thebes a cathedral church was dedicated to St. Athanasius within the great courtyard of Medinet-Abu, where the small and paltry Greek columns are in strange contrast to the grand architecture of Ramses III. which surrounds them.

In former reigns the Alexandrians had been in the habit of sending embassies to Constantinople to complain of tyranny or misgovernment, and to beg for a redress of grievances, when they thought that justice could be there obtained when it was refused in Alexandria. But this practice was stopped by Theodosius, who made a law that the Alexandrians should never send an embassy to Constantinople, unless it were agreed to by a decree of the town council, and had the approbation of the prefect. The weak and idle emperor would allow no appeal from the tyranny of his own governor.

We may pass over the banishment of John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, as having less to do with the history of Egypt, though, as in the cases of Arius and Nestorius, the chief mover of the attack upon him was a bishop of Alexandria, who accused him of heresy, because he did not come up to the Egyptian standard of orthodoxy. But among the bishops who were deposed with Chrysostom was Palladius of Galatia, who was sent a prisoner to Syênê. As soon as he was released from his bonds, instead of being cast down by his misfortunes, he proposed to take advantage of the place of his banishment, and he set forward on his travels through Ethiopia for India, in search of the wisdom of the Brahmins. He arrived in safety at Adule, the port on the Red Sea in latitude 15°, now known as Zula, where he made acquaintance with Moses, the bishop of that city, and persuaded him to join him in his distant and difficult voyage.

From Adule the two set sail in one of the vessels employed in the Indian trade; but they were unable to accomplish their purpose, and Palladius returned to Egypt worn out with heat and fatigue, having scarcely touched the shores of India. On his return through Thebes he met with a traveller who had lately returned from the same journey, and who consoled him under his disappointment by recounting his own failure in the same undertaking. His new friend had himself been a merchant in the Indian trade, but had given up business because he was not successful in it; and, having taken a priest as his companion, had set out on the same voyage in search of Eastern wisdom. They had sailed to Adule on the Abyssinian shore, and then travelled to Auxum, the capital of that country. From that coast they set sail for the Indian ocean, and reached a coast which they thought was Taprobane or Ceylon. But there they were taken prisoners, and, after spending six years in slavery, and learning but little of the philosophy that they were in search of, were glad to take the first opportunity of escaping and returning to Egypt. Palladius had travelled in Egypt before he was sent there into banishment, and he had spent many years in examining the monasteries of the Thebaid and their rules, and he has left a history of the lives of many of those holy men and woman, addressed to his friend Lausus.

When Nestorius was deposed from the bishopric of Constantinople for refusing to use the words Mother of God as the title of Jesus mother, and for falling short in other points of what was then thought orthodoxy, he was banished to Hibe in the Great Oasis. While he was living there, the Great Oasis was overrun by the Blemmyes, the Roman garrison was defeated, and those that resisted were put to the sword. The Blemmyes pillaged the place and then withdrew; and, being themselves at war with the Mazices, another tribe of Arabs, they kindly sent their prisoners to the Thebaid, lest they should fall into the hands of the latter. Nestorius then went to Panopolis to show himself to the governor, lest he should be accused of running away from his place of banishment, and soon afterwards he died of the sufferings brought on by these forced and painful journeys through the desert.

About the same time Egypt was visited by Cassianus, a monk of Gaul, in order to study the monastic institutions of the Thebaid. In his work on that subject he has described at length the way of life and the severe rules of the Egyptian monks, and has recommended them to the imitation of his countrymen. But the natives of Italy and the West do not seem to have been contented with copying the Theban monks at a distance. Such was the fame of the Egyptian monasteries that many zealots from Italy flocked there, to place themselves under the severe discipline of those holy men. As these Latin monks did not understand either Koptic or Greek, they found some difficulty in regulating their lives with the wished-for exactness; and the rules of Pachomius, of Theodorus, and of Oresiesis, the most celebrated of the founders, were actually sent to Jerome at Rome, to be by him translated into Latin for the use of these settlers in the Thebaid. These Latin monks made St. Peter a popular saint in some parts of Egypt; and in the temple of Asseboua, in Nubia, when the Christians plastered over the figure of one of the old gods, they painted in its place the Apostle Peter holding the key in his hand.

They did not alter the rest of the sculpture; so that Ramses II. is there now seen presenting his offering to the Christian saint. The mixed group gives us proof of the nations decline in art rather than of its improvement in religion.

Among the monks of Egypt there were also some men of learning and industry, who in their cells in the desert had made at least three translations of the New Testament into the three dialects of the Koptic language; namely, the Sahidic of Upper Egypt, the Bashmuric of the Bashmour province of the eastern half of the Delta, and the Koptic proper of Memphis and the western half of the Delta. To these were afterwards added the Acts of the council of Nicæa, the lives of the saints and martyrs, the writings of many of the Christian fathers, the rituals of the Koptic church, and various treatises on religion.

Other monks were as busy in making copies of the Greek manuscripts of the Old and New Testament; and, as each copy must have needed the painful labour of months, and often years, their industry and zeal must have been great. Most of these manuscripts were on papyrus, or on a manufactured papyrus which might be called paper, and have long since been lost; but the three most ancient copies on parchment which are the pride of the Vatican, the Paris library, and the British Museum, are the work of the Alexandrian penmen.

Copies of the Bible were also made in Alexandria for sale in western Europe; and all our oldest manuscripts show their origin by the Egyptian form of spelling in some of the words. The Beza manuscript at Cambridge, and the Clermont manuscript at Paris, which have Greek on one side of the page and Latin on the other, were written in Alexandria. The Latin is that more ancient version which was in use before the time of Jerome, and which he corrected, to form what is now called the Latin Vulgate. This old version was made by changing each Greek word into its corresponding Latin word, with very little regard to the different characters of the two languages. It was no doubt made by an Alexandrian Greek, who had a very slight knowledge of Latin.

Already the papyrus on which books were written was, for the most part, a manufactured article and might claim the name of paper. In the time of Pliny in the first century the sheets had been made in the old way; the slips of the plant laid one across the other had been held together by their own sticky sap without the help of glue. In the reign of Aurelian, in the third century, if not earlier, glue had been largely used in the manufacture; and it is probable that at this time, in the fifth century, the manufactured article almost deserved the name of paper. But this manufactured papyrus was much weaker and less lasting than that made after the old and more simple fashion. No books written upon it remain to us. At a later period, the stronger fibre of flax was used in the manufacture, but the date of this improvement is also unknown, because at first the paper so made, like that made from the papyrus fibre, was also too weak to last. It was doubtless an Alexandrian improvement. Flax was an Egyptian plant; paper-making was an Egyptian trade; and Theophilus, a Roman writer on manufactures, when speaking of paper made from flax, clearly points to its Alexandrian origin, by giving it the name of Greek parchment. Between the papyrus of the third century, and the strong paper of the eleventh century, no books remain to us but those written on parchment.

The monks of Mount Sinai suffered much during these reigns of weakness from the marauding attacks of the Arabs. These men had no strong monastery; but hundreds of them lived apart in single cells in the side of the mountains round the valley of Feiran, at the foot of Mount Serbal, and they had nothing to protect them but their poverty. They were not protected by Egypt, and they made treaties with the neighbouring Arabs, like an independent republic, of which the town of Feiran was the capital. The Arabs, from the Jordan to the Red Sea, made robbery the employment of their lives, and they added much to the voluntary sufferings of the monks.

Nilus, a monk who had left his family in Egypt, to spend his life in prayer and study on the spot where Moses was appointed the legislator of Israel, describes these attacks upon his brethren, and he boasts over the Israelites that, notwithstanding their sufferings, the monks spent their whole lives cheerfully in those very deserts which Gods chosen people could not even pass through without murmuring. Nilus has left some letters and exhortations. It was then, probably, that the numerous inscriptions were made on the rocks at the foot of Mount Serbal, and on the path towards its sacred peak, which have given to one spot the name of Mokatteb, or the valley of writing. A few of these inscriptions are in the Greek language.

The Egyptian physicians had of old always formed a part of the priesthood, and they seem to have done much the same after the spread of Christianity. We find some monks named _Parabalani_, who owned the Bishop of Alexandria as their head, and who united the offices of physician and nurse in waiting on the sick and dying. As they professed poverty they were maintained by the state and had other privileges; and hence it was a place much sought after, and even by the wealthy. But to lessen this abuse it was ordered by an imperial rescript that none but poor people who had been rate-payers should be _Parabalani_; and their number was limited, first to five hundred, but afterwards, at the request of the bishop, to six hundred. A second charitable institution in Alexandria had the care of strangers and the poor, and was also managed by one of the priests.

Alexandria was fast sinking in wealth and population, and several new laws were now made to lessen its difficulties. One was to add a hundred and ten bushels of grain to the daily alimony of the city, the supply on which the riotous citizens were fed in idleness. By a second and a third law the five chief men in the corporation, and every man that had filled a civic office for thirty years, were freed from all bodily punishment, and only to be fined when convicted of a crime. Theodosius built a large church in Alexandria, which was called after his name; and the provincial judges were told in a letter to the prefect that, if they wished to earn the emperors praise, they must not only restore those buildings which were falling through age and neglect but must also build new ones.

Though the pagan philosophy had been much discouraged at Alexandria by the destruction of the temples and the cessation of the sacrifices, yet the philosophers were still allowed to teach in the schools. Syrianus was at the head of the Platonists, and he wrote largely on the Orphic, Pythagorean, and Platonic doctrines. In his Commentary on Aristotles Metaphysics he aims at showing how a Pythagorean or a Platonist would successfully answer Aristotles objections. He seems to look upon the writings of Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus as the true fountains of Platonic wisdom, quite as much as the works of the great philosopher who gave his name to the sect. Syrianus afterwards removed to Athens, to take charge of the Platonic school in that city, and Athens became the chief seat of Alexandrian Platonism.

Olympiodorus was at the same time undertaking the task of forming a Peripatetic school in Alexandria, in opposition to the new Platonism, and he has left some of the fruits of his labour in his Commentaries on Aristotle. But the Peripatetic philosophy was no longer attractive to the pagans, though after the fall of the catechetical school it had a strong following of Christian disciples. Olympiodorus also wrote a history, but it has long since been lost, with other works of a second-rate merit. He was a native of the Thebaid, and travelled over his country. He described the Great Oasis as still a highly cultivated spot, where the husbandman watered his fields every third day in summer, and every fifth day in winter, from wells of two and three hundred feet in depth, and thereby raised two crops of barley, and often three of millet, in a year. Olympiodorus also travelled beyond Syênê into Nubia, with some danger from the Blemmyes, but he was not able to see the emerald mines, which were worked on Mount Smaragdus in the Arabian desert between Koptos and Berenice, and which seem to have been the chief object of his journey.

Proclus came to Alexandria about the end of this reign, and studied many years under Olympiodorus, but not to the neglect of the platonic philosophy, of which he afterwards became such a distinguished ornament and support. The other Alexandrians under whom Proclus studied were Hero, the mathematician, a devout and religious pagan, Leonas, the rhetorician, who introduced him to all the chief men of learning, and Orion, the grammarian, who boasted of his descent from the race of Theban priests. Thus the pagans still held up their heads in the schools. Nor were the ceremonies of their religion, though unlawful, wholly stopped. In the twenty-eighth year of this reign, when the people were assembled in a theatre at Alexandria to celebrate the midnight festival of the Nile, a sacrifice which had been forbidden by Constantine and the council of Nicsea, the building fell beneath the weight of the crowd, and upwards of five hundred persons were killed by the fall.

It will be of some interest to review here the machinery of officers and deputies, civil as well as military, by which Egypt was governed under the successors of Constantine. The whole of the Eastern empire was placed under two prefects, the pretorian prefect of the East and the pretorian prefect of Illyricum, who, living at Constantinople, like modern secretaries of state, made edicts for the government of the provinces and heard the appeals. Under the prefect of the East were fifteen consular provinces, together with Egypt, which was not any longer under one prefect. There was no consular governor in Egypt between the prefect at Constantinople and the six prefects of the smaller provinces. These provinces were Upper Libya or Cyrene, Lower Libya or the Oasis, the Thebaid, Ægyptiaca or the western part of the Delta, Augustanica or the eastern part of the Delta, and the Heptanomis, now named Arcadia, after the late emperor. Each of these was under an Augustal prefect, attended by a _Princeps, a Cornicula-rius, an Adjutor_, and others, and was assisted in civil matters by a _Commentariensis_, a corresponding secretary, a secretary _ab actis_, with a crowd of _numerarii_ or clerks.

The military government was under a count with two dukes, with a number of legions, cohorts, troops, and wedges of cavalry, stationed in about fifty cities, which, if they had looked as well in the field as they do upon paper, would have made Theodosius II. as powerful as Augustus. But the number of Greek and Roman troops was small. The rest were barbarians who held their own lives at small price, and the lives of the unhappy Egyptians at still less. The Greeks were only a part of the fifth Macedonian legion, and Trajans second legion, which were stationed at Memphis, at Parembole, and at Apollinopolis; while from the names of the other cohorts we learn that they were Franks, Portuguese, Germans, Quadri, Spaniards, Britons, Moors, Vandals, Gauls, Sarmati, Assyrians, Galatians, Africans, Numid-ians, and others of less known and more remote places. Egypt itself furnished the Egyptian legion, part of which was in Mesopotamia, Diocletians third legion of Thebans, the first Maximinian legion of Thebans which was stationed in Thrace, Constantines second Flavian legion of Thebans, Valens second Felix legion of Thebans, and the Julian Alexandrian legion, stationed in Thrace. Beside these, there were several bodies of native militia, from Abydos, Syênê, and other cities, which were not formed into legions. The Egyptian cavalry were a first and second Egyptian troop, several bodies of native archers mounted, three troops on dromedaries, and a body of Diocletians third legion promoted to the cavalry. These Egyptian troops were chiefly Arab settlers in the Thebaid, for the Kopts had long since lost the use of arms. The Kopts were weak enough to be trampled on; but the Arabs were worth bribing by admission into the legions. The taxes of the province were collected by a number of counts of the sacred largesses, who wrere under the orders of an officer of the same title at Constantinople, and were helped by a body of counts of the exports and imports, prefects of the treasury and of the mints, with an army of clerks of all titles and all ranks. From this government the Alexandrians were exempt, living under their own military prefect and corporation, and, instead of paying any taxes beyond the custom-house duties at the port, they received a bounty in grain out of the taxes of Egypt.

Soon after this we find the political division of Egypt slightly altered. It is then divided into eight governments; the Upper Thebaid with eleven cities under a duke; the Lower Thebaid with ten cities, including the Great Oasis and part of the Heptanomis, under a general; Upper Libya or Cyrene under a general; Lower Libya or Parastonium under a general; Arcadia, or the remainder of the Heptanomis, under a general; Ægyptiaca, or the western half of the Delta, under an Augustalian prefect; the first Augustan government, or the rest of the Delta, under a _Corrector_; and the second Augustan government, from Bubastis to the Red Sea, under a general. We also meet with several military stations named after the late emperors: a Maximianopolis and a Dioclesianopolis in the Upper Thebaid; a Theodosianopolis in the Lower Thebaid, and a second Theodosianopolis in Arcadia. But it is not easy to determine what villages were meant by these high-sounding names, which were perhaps only used in official documents.

The empire of the East was gradually sinking in power during this long and quiet reign of Theodosius II.; but the empire of the West was being hurried to its fall by the revolt of the barbarians in every one of its widespread provinces. Henceforth in the weakness of the two countries Egypt and Rome are wholly separated. After having influenced one another in politics, in literature, and in religion for seven centuries, they were now as little known to one another as they were before the day when Fabius arrived at Alexandria on an embassy from the senate to Ptolemy Philadelphus.

Theological and political quarrels, under the name of the Homoousian and Arian controversy, had nearly separated Egypt from the rest of the empire during the reigns of Constantius and Valens, but they had been healed by the wisdom of the first Theodosius, who governed Egypt by means of a popular bishop; and the policy which he so wisely began was continued by his successors through weakness. But in the reign of Marcian (450--457) the old quarrel again broke out, and, though it was under a new name, it again took the form of a religious controversy. Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, died in the last reign; and as he had succeeded his uncle, so on his death the bishopric fell to Dioscorus, a relation of his own, a man of equal religious violence and of less learning, who differed from him only in the points of doctrine about which he should quarrel with his fellow-Christians. About the same time Eutyches, a priest of Constantinople, had been condemned by his superiors and expelled from the Church for denying the two natures of Christ, and for maintaining that he was truly God, and in no respect a man. This was the opinion of the Egyptian church, and therefore Dioscorus, the Bishop of Alexandria, who had no right whatever to meddle in the quarrels at Constantinople, yet, acting on the forgotten rule that each bishops power extended over all Christendom, undertook of his own authority to absolve Eutyches from his excommunication, and in return to excommunicate the Bishop of Constantinople who had condemned him. To settle this quarrel, a general council was summoned at Chalcedon; and there six hundred and thirty-two bishops met and condemned the faith of Eutyches, and further explained the Nicene creed, to which Eutyches and the Egyptians always appealed. They excommunicated Eutyches and his patron Dioscorus, who were banished by the emperor; and they elected Proterius to the then vacant bishopric of Alexandria.

In thus condemning the faith of Eutyches, the Greeks were excommunicating the whole of Egypt. The Egyptian belief in the one nature of Christ, which soon afterwards took the name of the Jacobite faith from one of its popular supporters, might perhaps be distinguished by the microscopic eye of the controversialist from the faith of Eutyches; but they equally fell under the condemnation of the council of Chalcedon. Egypt was no longer divided in its religious opinions. There had been a party who, though Egyptian in blood, held the Arian and half-Arian opinions of the Greeks, but that party had ceased to exist. Their religion had pulled one way and their political feelings another; the latter were found the stronger, as being more closely rooted to the soil; and their religious opinions had by this time fitted themselves to the geographical boundaries of the country. Hence the decrees of the council of Chalcedon were rejected by the whole of Egypt; and the quarrel between the Chalcedonian and Jacobite party, like the former quarrel between the Athanasians and the Arians, was little more than another name for the unwillingness of the Egyptians to be governed by Constantinople.

Proterius, the new bishop, entered Alexandria supported by the prefect Floras at the head of the troops.

But this was the signal for a revolt of the Egyptians, who overpowered the cohort with darts and stones; and the magistrates were driven to save their lives in the celebrated temple of Serapis. But they found no safety there; the mob surrounded the building and set fire to it, and burned alive the Greek magistrates and friends of the new bishop; and the city remained in the power of the rebellious Egyptians. When the news of this rising reached Constantinople the emperor sent to Egypt a further force of two thousand men, who stormed Alexandria and sacked it like a conquered city, and established Proterius in the bishopric. As a punishment upon the city for its rebellion, the prefect stopped for some time the public games and the allowance of grain to the citizens, and only restored them after the return to peace and good order.

In the weak state of the empire, the Blemmyes, and Nubades, or Nobatæ, had latterly been renewing their inroads upon Upper Egypt; they had overpowered the Romans, as the Greek and barbarian troops of Constantinople were always called, and had carried off a large booty and a number of prisoners. Maximinus, the imperial general, then led his forces against them; he defeated them, and made them beg for peace. The barbarians then proposed, as the terms of their surrender, never to enter Egypt while Maximinus commanded the troops in the Thebaid; but the conqueror was not contented with such an unsatisfactory submission, and would make no treaty with them till they had released the Roman prisoners without ransom, paid for the booty that they had taken, and given a number of the nobles as hostages. On this Maximums agreed to a truce of a hundred years.

The people now called the Nubians, living on both sides of the cataract of Syênê, declared themselves of the true Egyptian race by their religious practices. They had an old custom of going each year to the temple of Isis on the isle of Elephantine, and of carrying away one of the statues with them and returning it to the temple when they had consulted it. But as they were now being driven out of the province, they bargained with Maximums for permission to visit the temple each year without hindrance from the Roman guards. The treaty was written on papyrus and nailed up in this temple. But friendship in the desert, says the proverb, is as weak and wavering as the shade of the acacia tree; this truce was no sooner agreed upon than Maximinus fell ill and died; and the Nubades at once broke the treaty, regained by force their hostages, who had not yet been carried out of the Thebaid, and overran the province as they had done before their defeat.

By this success of the Nubians, Christianity was largely driven out of Upper Egypt; and about seventy years after the law of Thedosius L, by which paganism was supposed to be crushed, the religion of Isis and Serapis was again openly professed in the Thebaid, where it had perhaps always been cultivated in secret. A certain master of the robes in one of the Egyptian temple came at this time to the temple of Isis in the island of Philæ, and his votive inscription there declares that he was the son of Pachomius, a prophet, and successor by direct descent from a yet more famous Pachomius, a prophet, who we may easily believe was the Christian prophet who gathered together so many followers in the island of Tabenna, near Thebes, and there founded an order of Christian monks. These Christians now all returned to their paganism. Nearly all the remains of Christian architecture which we meet with in the The-baid were built during the hundred and sixty years between the defeat of the Nubians by Diocletian, and their victories in the reign of Marcian.

The Nubians were far more civilised than their neighbours, the Blemmyes, whom they were usually able to drive back into their native deserts. We find an inscription in bad Greek, in the great temple at Talmis, now the village of Kalabshe, which was probably written about this time. A conqueror of the name of Silco there declares that he is king of the Nubians and all the Ethiopians; that in the upper part of his kingdom he is called Mars, and in the lower part Lion; that he is as great as any king of his day; that he has defeated the Blemmyes in battle again and again; and that he has made himself master of the country between Talmis and Primis. While such were the neighbours and inhabitants of the Thebaid, the fields were only half-tilled, and the desert was encroaching on the paths of man. The sand was filling up the temples, covering the overthrown statues, and blocking up the doors to the tombs; but it was at the same time saving, to be dug out in after ages, those records which the living no longer valued.

On the death of the Emperor Marcian, the Alexandrians, taking advantage of the absence of the military prefect Dionysius, who was then fighting against the Nubades in Upper Egypt, renewed their attack upon the Bishop Proterius, and deposed him from his office. To fill his place they made choice of a monk named Timotheus Ælurus, who held the Jacobite faith, and, having among them two deposed bishops, they got them to ordain him Bishop of Alexandria, and then led him by force of arms into the great church which had formerly been called Caesars temple. Upon hearing of the rebellion, the prefect returned in haste to Alexandria; but his approach was only the signal for greater violence, and the enraged people murdered Proterius in the baptistery, and hung up his body at the Tetrapylon in mockery. This was not a rebellion of the mob. Timotheus was supported by the men of chief rank in the city; the _Honorati_ who had borne state offices, the _Politici_ who had borne civic offices, and the _Navicularii_, or contractors for the freight of the Egyptian tribute, were all opposed to the emperors claim to appoint the officer whose duties were much more those of prefect of the city than patriarch of Egypt. With such an opposition as this, the emperor would do nothing without the greatest caution, for he was in danger of losing Egypt altogether. But so much were the minds of all men then engrossed in ecclesiastical matters that this political struggle wholly took the form of a dispute in controversial divinity, and the emperor wrote a letter to the chief bishops in Christendom to ask their advice in his difficulty. These theologians were too busily engaged in their controversies to take any notice of the danger of Egypts revolting from the empire and joining the Persians; so they strongly advised Leo not to depart from the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, or to acknowledge as Bishop of Alexandria a man who denied the two natures of Christ. Accordingly, the emperor again risked breaking the slender ties by which he held Egypt; he banished the popular bishop, and forced the Alexandrians to receive in his place one who held the Chalcedonian faith.

On the death of Leo, he was succeeded by his grandson, Leo the Younger, who died in 473, after a reign of one year, and was succeeded by his father Zeno, the son-in-law of the elder Leo. Zeno gave himself up at once to debauchery and vice, while the empire was harassed on all sides by the barbarians, and the provinces were roused into rebellion by the cruelty of the prefects. The rebels at last found a head in Basilicus, the brother-in-law of Leo. He declared himself of the Jacobite faith, which was the faith of the barbarian enemies, of the barbarian troops, and of the barbarian allies of the empire, and, proclaiming himself emperor, made himself master of Constantinople without a battle, and drove Zeno into banishment in the third year of his reign.

The first step of Basilicus was to recall from banishment Timotheus Ælurus, the late Bishop of Alexandria, and to restore him to the bishopric (A.D. 477). He then addressed to him and the other recalled bishops a circular letter, in which he repeals the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, and re-establishes the Nicene creed, declaring that Jesus was of one substance with the Father, and that Mary was the mother of God. The march of Timotheus to the seat of his own government, from Constantinople whither he had been summoned, was more like that of a conqueror than of a preacher of peace. He deposed some bishops and restored others, and, as the decrees of the council of Chalcedon were the particular objects of his hatred, he restored to the city of Ephesus the patriarchal power which that synod had taken away from it. Basilicus reigned for about two years, when he was defeated and put to death by Zeno, who regained the throne.

As soon as Zeno was again master of the empire, he re-established the creed of the council of Chalcedon, and drove away the Jacobite bishops from their bishoprics. Death, however, removed Timotheus Ælurus before the emperors orders were put in force in Alexandria, and the Egyptians then chose Peter Mongus as his successor, in direct opposition to the orders from Constantinople. But the emperor was resolved not to be beaten; the bishopric of Alexandria was so much a civil office that to have given up the appointment to the Egyptians would have been to allow the people to govern themselves; so he banished Peter, and recalled to the head of the Church Timotheus Salophaciolus, who had been living at Canopus ever since his loss of the bishopric.

But, as the patriarch of Alexandria enjoyed the ecclesiastical revenues, and was still in appearance a teacher of religion, the Alexandrians, in recollection of the former rights of the Church, still claimed the appointment. They sent John, a priest of their own faith and dean of the church of John the Baptist, as their ambassador to Constantinople, not to remonstrate against the late acts of the emperor, but to beg that on future occasions the Alexandrians might be allowed the old privilege of choosing their own bishop. The Emperor Zeno seems to have seen through the ambassadors earnestness, and he first bound him by an oath not to accept the bishopric if he should even be himself chosen to it, and he then sent him back with the promise that the Alexandrians should be allowed to choose their own patriarch on the next vacancy. But unfortunately Johns ambition was too strong for his oath, and on the death of Timotheus, which happened soon afterwards, he spent a large sum of money in bribes among the clergy and chief men of the city, and thereby got himself chosen patriarch. On this, the emperor seems to have thought only of punishing John, and he at once gave up the struggle with the Egyptians. Believing that, of the two patriarchs who had been chosen by the people, Peter Mongus, who was living in banishment, would be found more dutiful than John, who was on the episcopal throne, he banished John and recalled Peter; and the latter agreed to the terms of an imperial edict which Zeno then put forth, to heal the disputes in the Egyptian church, and to recall the province to obedience. This celebrated peace-making edict, usually called the Henoticon, is addressed to the clergy and laity of Alexandria, Egypt, Libya, and the Pentapolis, and is an agreement between the emperor and the bishops who countersigned it, that neither party should ever mention the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, which were the great stumbling-block with the Egyptians.

But in all other points the Henoticon is little short of a surrender to the people of the right to choose their own creed; it styles Mary the mother of God, and allows that the decrees of the council of Nicæa and Constantinople contain all that is important of the true faith. John, when banished by Zeno, like many of the former deposed bishops, fled to Rome for comfort and for help. There he met with the usual support; and Felix, Bishop of Rome, wrote to Constantinople, remonstrating with Zeno for dismissing the patriarch. But this was only a small part of the emperors want of success in his attempt at peace-making; for the crafty Peter, who had gained the bishopric by subscribing to the peace-making edict, was no sooner safely seated on his episcopal throne than he denounced the council of Chalcedon and its decrees as heretical, and drove out of their monasteries all those who still adhered to that faith. Nephalius, one of these monks, wrote to the emperor at Constantinople in complaint, and Zeno sent Cosmas to the bishop to threaten him with his imperial displeasure, and to try to re-establish peace in the Church. But the arguments of Cosmas were wholly unsuccessful; and Zeno then sent an increase of force to Arsenius, the military prefect, who settled the quarrel for the time by sending back the most rebellious of the Alexandrians as prisoners to Constantinople.

Soon after this dispute Peter Mongus died, and fortunately he was succeeded in the bishopric by a peacemaker. Athanasius, the new bishop, very unlike his great predecessor of the same name, did his best to heal the angry disputes in the Church, and to reconcile the Egyptians to the imperial government.

Hierocles, the Alexandrian, was at this time teaching philosophy in his native city, where his zeal and eloquence in favour of Platonism drew upon him the anger of the Christians and the notice of the government.

He was sent to Constantinople to be punished for not believing in Christianity, for it does not appear that, like the former Hierocles, he ever wrote against it. There he bore a public scourging from his Christian torturers, with a courage equal to that formerly shown by their forefathers when tortured by his. When some of the blood from his shoulders flew into his hand, he held it out in scorn to the judge, saying with Ulysses, Cyclops, since human flesh has been thy food, now taste this wine. After his punishment he was banished, but was soon allowed to return to Alexandria, and there he again taught openly as before. Paganism never wears so fair a dress as in the writings of Hierocles; his commentary on the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans is full of the loftiest and purest morality, and not less agreeable are the fragments that remain of his writings on our duties, and his beautiful chapter on the pleasures of a married life. In the Facetiæ of Hierocles we have one of the earliest jest-books that has been saved from the wreck of time. It is a curious proof of the fallen state of learning; the Sophists had long since made themselves ridiculous; books alone will not make a man of sense; and in the jokes of Hierocles the blunderer is always called a man of learning.

Ætius, the Alexandrian physician, has left a large work containing a full account of the state of Egyptian medicine at this time. He describes the diseases and their remedies, quoting the recipes of numerous authors, from the King Nechepsus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Hioscorides, down to Archbishop Cyril. He is not wholly free from superstition, as when making use of a green jasper set in a ring; but he observes that the patients recovered as soon when the stone was plain as when a dragon was engraved upon it according to the recommendation of Nechepsus. In Nile water he finds every virtue, and does not forget dark paint for the ladies eyebrows, and Cleopatra-wash for the face.

Anastasius, the next emperor, succeeding in 491, followed the wise policy which Zeno had entered upon in the latter years of his reign, and he strictly adhered to the terms of the peace-making edict. The four patriarchs of Alexandria who were chosen during this reign, John, a second John, Dioscorus, and Timotheus, were all of the Jacobite faith; and the Egyptians readily believed that the emperor was of the same opinion. When called upon by the quarrelling theologians, he would neither reject nor receive the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, and by this wise conduct he governed Egypt without any religious rebellion during a long reign.

The election of Dioscorus, however, the third patriarch of this reign, was not brought about peaceably. He was the cousin of a former patriarch, Timotheus Ælurus, which, if we view the bishopric as a civil office, might be a reason for the emperors wishing him to have the appointment. But it was no good reason with the Alexandrians, who declared that he had not been chosen according to the canons of the apostles; and the magistrates of the city were forced to employ the troops to lead him in safety to his throne. After the first ceremony, he went, as was usual at an installation, to St. Marks Church, and there the clergy robed him in the patriarchal state robes. The grand procession then moved through the streets to the church of St. John, where the new bishop went through the communion service. But the city was much disturbed during the whole day, and in the riot Theodosius, the son of Calliopus, a man of Augustalian rank, was killed by the mob. The Alexandrians treated the affair as murder, and punished with death those who were thought guilty; but the emperor looked upon it as a rebellion of the citizens, and the bishop was obliged to go on an embassy to Constantinople to appease his just anger.

Anastasius, who had deserved the obedience of the Egyptians by his moderation, pardoned their ingratitude when they offended; but he was the last Byzantine emperor who governed Egypt with wisdom, and the last who failed to enforce the decrees of the council of Chalcedon. It may well be doubted whether any wise conduct on the part of the rulers could have healed the quarrel between the two countries, and made the Egyptians forget the wrongs that they had suffered from the Greeks.

In the tenth year of the reign of Anastasius, A.D. 501, the Persians, after overrunning a large part of Syria and defeating the Roman generals, passed Pelusium and entered Egypt. The army of Kobades laid waste the whole of the Delta up to the very walls of Alexandria. Eustatius, the military prefect, led out his forces against the invaders and fought many battles with doubtful success; but as the capital was safe the Persians were at last obliged to retire, leaving the people ruined as much by the loss of a harvest as by the sword. Alexandria suffered severely from famine and the diseases which followed in its train; and history has gratefully recorded the name of Urbib, a Christian Jew of great wealth, who relieved the starving poor of that city with his bounty. Three hundred persons were crushed to death in the church of Arcadius on Easter Sunday in the press of the crowd to receive his alms. As war brought on disease and famine, they also brought on rebellion. The people of Alexandria, in want of grain and oil, rose against the magistrates, and many lives were lost in the attempt to quell the riots.

In the early part of this history we have seen ambitious bishops quickly disposed of by banishment to the Great Oasis; and again, as the country became more desolate, criminals were sufficiently separated from the rest of the empire by being sent to Thebes. Alexandria was then the last place in the world in which a pretender to the throne would be allowed to live. But Egypt was now ruined; and Anastasius began his reign by banishing, to the fallen Alexandria, Longinus, the brother of the late king, and he had him ordained a presbyter, to mark him as unfit for the throne.

Julianus, who was during a part of this reign the prefect of Egypt, was also a poet, and he has left us a number of short epigrams that form part of the volume of Greek Anthology which was published at Constantinople soon after this time. Christodorus of Thebes was another poet who joined with Julianus in praising the Emperor Anastasius. He also removed to Constantinople, the seat of patronage; and the fifth book of the Greek Anthology contains his epigrams on the winners in the horse-race in that city and on the statues which stood around the public gymnasium.

The poets song, like the travellers tale, often related the wonders of the river Nile. The overflowing waters first manured the fields, and then watered the crops, and lastly carried the grain to market; and one writer in the Anthology, to describe the country life in Egypt, tells the story of a sailor, who, to avoid the dangers of the ocean, turned husbandman, and was then shipwrecked in his own meadows.

The book-writers at this time sometimes illuminated their more valuable parchments with gold and silver letters and sometimes employed painters to ornament them with small paintings. The beautiful copy of the work of Dioscorides on Plants in the library at Vienna was made in this reign for the Princess Juliana of Constantinople. In one painting the figure of science or invention is holding up a plant, while on one side of her is the painter drawing it on his canvas, and on the other side is the author describing it in his book. Other paintings are of the plants and animals mentioned in the book. A copy of the Book of Genesis, also in the library at Vienna, is of the same class and date. A large part of it is written in gold and silver; and it has eighty-eight small paintings of various historical subjects. In these the story is well told, though the drawing and perspective are bad and the figures crowded. But these Alexandrian paintings are better than those made in Rome or Constantinople at this time.

With the spread of Christianity theatrical representations had been gradually going out of use. The Greek tragedies, as we see in the works of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, those models of pure taste in poetry, are founded on the pagan mythology; and in many of them the gods are made to walk and talk upon the stage. Hence they of necessity fell under the ban of the clergy. As the Christians became more powerful the several cities of the empire had one by one discontinued these popular spectacles, and horse-races usually took their place. But the Alexandrians were the last people to give up a favourite amusement; and by the end of this reign Alexandria was the only city in the empire where tragic and comic actors and Eastern dancers were to be seen in the theatre.

The tower or lighthouse on the island of Pharos, the work of days more prosperous than these, had latterly been sadly neglected with the other buildings of the country. For more than seven hundred years, the pilot on approaching this flat shore after dark had pointed out to his shipmate what seemed a star on the horizon, and comforted him with the promise of a safe entrance into the haven, and told him of Alexanders tower. But the waves breaking against its foot had long since carried away the outworks, and laid bare the foundations; the wall was undermined and its fall seemed close at hand. The care of Anastasius, however, surrounded it again with piles and buttresses; and this monument of wisdom and science, which deserved to last for ever, was for a little while longer saved from ruin. An epigram in the Anthology informs us that Ammonius was the name of the builder who performed this good work, and to him and to Neptune the grateful sailors then raised their hands in prayer and praise.

In 518 Justin I. succeeded Anastasius on the throne of Constantinople, and in the task of defending the empire against the Persians. And this task became every year more difficult, as the Greek population of his Egyptian and Asiatic provinces fell off in numbers. For some years after the division of the empire under the sons of Constantine, Antioch in Syria had been the capital from which Alexandria received the emperors commands. The two cities became very closely united; and now that the Greeks were deserting Antioch, a part of the Syrian church began to adopt the more superstitious creed of Egypt. Severus, Bishop of Antioch, was successful in persuading a large party in the Syrian church to deny the humanity of Christ, and to style Mary the mother of God. But the chief power in Antioch rested with the opposite party. They answered his arguments by threats of violence, and he had to leave the city for safety. He fled to Alexandria, and with him began the friendship between the two churches which lasted for several centuries. In Alexandria he was received with the honour due to his religious zeal. But though in Antioch his opinions had been too Egyptian for the Syrians, in Alexandria they were too Syrian for the Egyptians. The Egyptians, who said that Jesus had been crucified and died only in appearance, always denied that his body was liable to corruption. Severus, however, argued that it was liable to corruption before the resurrection; and this led him into a new controversy, in which Timotheus, the Alexandrian bishop, took part against his own more superstitious flock, and sided with his friend, the Bishop of Antioch. Severus has left us, in the Syriac language, the baptismal service as performed in Egypt. The priest breathes three times into the basin to make the water holy, he makes three crosses on the childs forehead, he adjures the demons of wickedness to quit him, he again makes three crosses on his forehead with oil, he again blows three times into the water in the form of a cross, he anoints his whole body with oil, and then plunges him in the water. Many other natives of Syria soon followed Severus to Alexandria; so many indeed that as Greek literature decayed in that city, Syriac literature rose. Many Syrians also came to study the religious life in the monasteries of Egypt, and after some time the books in the library of the monastery at Mount Nit-ria were found to be half Arabic and half Syriac.

Justin, the new emperor, again lighted up in Alexandria the flames of discord which had been allowed to slumber since the publication of Zenos peace-making edict. But in the choice of the bishop he was not able to command without a struggle. In the second year of his reign, on the death of Timotheus, the two parties again found themselves nearly equal in strength; and Alexandria was for several years kept almost in a state of civil war between those who thought that the body of Jesus had been liable to corruption, and those who thought it incorruptible. The former chose Gaianas, whom his adversaries called a Manichean; and the latter Theodosius, a Jacobite, who had the support of the prefect; and each of these in his turn was able to drive his rival out of Alexandria.