Chapter II: The Christian Period in Egypt (2)

But this _patronage_ which the emperor wished to put down was weak compared to that of the bishops and clergy, which the law allowed and even upheld, and which was the great check to the tyranny of the civil governor. While the emperor at a distance gave orders through his prefect, the people looked up to the bishop as their head; and hence the power of each was checked by the other. The emperors had not yet made the terrors of religion a tool in the hands of the magistrate; nor had they yet learned from the pontifex and augurs of pagan Rome the secret that civil power is never so strong as when based on that of the Church.

On the death of Constantius, in 361, Julian was at once acknowledged as emperor, and the Roman world was again, but for the last time, governed by a pagan. The Christians had been in power for fifty-five years under Constantine and his sons, during which time the pagans had been made to feel that their enemies had got the upper hand of them. But on the accession of Julian their places were again changed; and the Egyptians among others crowded to Constantinople to complain of injustice done by the Christian prefect and bishop, and to pray for a redress of wrongs. They were, however, sadly disappointed in their emperor; he put them off with an unfeeling joke; he ordered them to meet him at Chalcedon on the other side of the straits of Constantinople, and, instead of following them according to his promise, he gave orders that no vessel should bring an Egyptian from Chalcedon to the capital; and the Egyptians, after wasting their time and money, returned home in despair. But though their complaints were laughed at, they were not overlooked, and the author of their grievances was punished; Artemius, the prefect of Egypt, was summoned to Chalcedon, and not being able to disprove the crimes laid to his charge by the Alexandrians, he paid his life as the forfeit for his mis-government during the last reign.

While Artemius was on his trial the pagans of Alexandria remained quiet, and in daily fear of his return to power, for after their treatment at Chalcedon they by no means felt sure of what would be the emperors policy in matters of religion; but they no sooner heard of the death of Artemius than they took it as a sign that they had full leave to revenge themselves on the Christians. The mob rose first against the Bishop George, who had lately been careless or wanton enough publicly to declare his regret that any of their temples should be allowed to stand; and they seized him in the streets and trampled him to death. They next slew Dracontius, the prefect of the Alexandrian mint, whom they accused of overturning a pagan altar within that building. Their anger was then turned against Diodorus, who was employed in building a church on a waste spot of ground that had once been sacred to the worship of Mithra, but had since been given by the Emperor Constantius to the Christians. In clearing the ground, the workmen had turned up a number of human bones that had been buried there in former ages, and these had been brought forward by the Christians in reproach against the pagans as so many proofs of human sacrifices. In his Christian zeal, Diodorus also had wounded at the same time their pride and superstition by cutting off the single lock from the heads of the young Egyptians. This lock had in the time of Ramses been the mark of youthful royalty; under the Ptolemies the mark of high rank; but was now common to all. Diodorus treated it as an offence against his religion. For this he was attacked and killed, with George and Dracontius. The mob carried the bodies of the three murdered men upon camels to the side of the lake, and there burned them, and threw the ashes into the water, for fear, as they said, that a church should be built over their remains, as had been sometimes done, even at that early date, over the bodies of martyrs.

When the news of this outrage against the laws was brought to the philosophical emperor, he contented himself with threatening by an imperial edict that if the offence were repeated, he would visit it with severe punishment. But in every act of Julian we trace the scholar and the lover of learning. George had employed his wealth in getting together a large library, rich in historians, rhetoricians, and philosophers of all sects; and, on the murder of the bishop, Julian wrote letter after letter to Alexandria, to beg the prefect and his friend Porphyrius to save these books, and send them to him in Cappadocia. He promised freedom to the librarian if he gave them up, and torture if he hid them; and further begged that no books in favour of Christianity should be destroyed, lest other and better books should be lost with them.

There is too much reason to believe that the friends of Athanasius were not displeased at the murder of the Bishop George and their Arian fellow-Christians; at any rate they made no effort to save them, and the same mob that had put to death George as an enemy to paganism now joined his rival, Athanasius, in a triumphal entry into the city, when, with the other Egyptian bishops, he was allowed to return from banishment. Athanasius could brook no rival to his power; the civil force of the city was completely overpowered by his party, and the Arian clergy were forced to hide themselves, as the only means of saving their lives. But, while thus in danger from their enemies, the Arians pro-hooded to elect a successor to their murdered bishop, and they chose Lucius to that post of honour, but of danger. Athanasius, however, in reality and openly filled the office of bishop; and he summoned a synod at Alexandria, at which he re-admitted into the church Lucifer and Eusebius, two bishops who had been banished to the Thebaid, and he again decreed that the three persons in the Trinity were of one substance.

Though the Emperor Julian thought that George, the late bishop, had deserved all that he suffered, as having been zealous in favour of Christianity, and forward in putting down paganism and in closing the temples, yet he was still more opposed to Athanasius. That able churchman held his power as a rebel by the help of the Egyptian mob, against the wishes of the Greeks of Alexandria and against the orders of the late emperor; and Julian made an edict, ordering that he should be driven out of the city within twenty-four hours of the command reaching Alexandria. The prefect of Egypt was at first unable, or unwilling, to enforce these orders against the wish of the inhabitants; and Athanasius was not driven into banishment till Julian wrote word that, if the rebellious bishop were to be found in any part of Egypt after a day then named, he would fine the prefect and the officers under him one hundred pounds weight of gold. Thus Athanasius was for the fourth time banished from Alexandria.

Though the Christians were out of favour with the emperor, and never were employed in any office of trust, yet they were too numerous for him to venture on a persecution. But Julian allowed them to be ill-treated by his prefects, and took no notice of their complaints. He made a law, forbidding any Christians being educated in pagan literature, believing that ignorance would stop the spread of their religion. In the churches of Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria, this was felt as a heavy grievance; but it was less thought of in Egypt. Science and learning were less cultivated by the Christians in Alexandria since the overthrow of the Arian party; and a little later, to charge a writer with Grascizing was the same as saying that he wanted orthodoxy.

Julian was a warm friend to learning and philosophy among the pagans. He recalled to Alexandria the physician Zeno, who in the last reign had fled from the Georgian faction, as the Christians were then called. He founded in the same city a college for music, and ordered the Prefect Ecdicius to look out for some young men of skill in that science, particularly from among the pupils of Dioscorus; and he allotted them a maintenance from the treasury, with rewards for the most skilful. At Canopus, a pagan philosopher, Antoninus, the son of Eustathius, taking advantage of the turn in public opinion, and copying the Christian monks of the The-baid, drew round him a crowd of followers by his self-denial and painful torture of the body. The Alexandrians flocked in crowds to his dwelling; and such was his character for holiness that his death, in the beginning of the reign of Theodosius, was thought by the Egyptians to be the cause of the overthrow of paganism.

But Egyptian paganism, which had slumbered for fifty years under the Christian emperors, was not again to be awaked to its former life. Though the wars between the several cities for the honour of their gods, the bull, the crocodile, or the fish, had never ceased, all reverence for those gods was dead. The sacred animals, in particular the bulls Apis and Mnevis, were again waited upon by their priests as of old; but it was a vain attempt. Not only was the Egyptian religion overthrown, but the Thebaid, the country of that religion, was fallen too low to be raised again. The people of Upper Egypt had lost all heart, not more from the tyranny of the Roman government in the north than from the attacks and settlement of the Arabs in the south. All changes in the country, whether for the better or the worse, were laid to the charge of these latter unwelcome neighbours; and when the inquiring traveller asked to be shown the crocodile, the river-horse, and the other animals for which Egypt had once been noted, he was told with a sigh that they were seldom to be seen in the Delta since the Thebaid had been peopled with the Blemmyes. Falsehood, the usual vice of slaves, had taken a deep hold on the Egyptian character. A denial of their wealth was the means by which they usually tried to save it from the Roman tax-gatherer; and an Egyptian was ashamed of himself as a coward if he could not show a back covered with stripes gained in the attempt to save his money. Peculiarities of character often descend unchanged in a nation for many centuries; and, after fourteen hundred years of the same slavery, the same stripes from the lash of the tax-gatherer still used to be the boast of the Egyptian peasant. Cyrene was already a desert; the only cities of note in Upper Egypt were Koptos, Hermopolis, and Antinoopolis; but Alexandria was still the queen of cities, though the large quarter called the Bruchium had not been rebuilt; and the Serapeum, with its library of seven hundred thousand volumes, was, after the capitol of Rome, the chief building in the world.

This temple of Serapis was situated on a rising ground at the west end of the city, and, though not built like a fortification, was sometimes called the citadel of Alexandria. It was entered by two roads; that on one side was a slope for carriages, and on the other a grand flight of a hundred steps from the street, with each step wider than that below it. At the top of this flight of steps was a portico, in the form of a circular roof, upheld by four columns.

Through this was the entrance into the great courtyard, in the middle of which stood the roofless hall or temple, surrounded by columns and porticoes, inside and out. In some of the inner porticoes were the bookcases for the library which made Alexandria the very temple of science and learning, while other porticoes were dedicated to the service of the ancient religion. The roofs were ornamented with gilding, the capitals of the columns were of copper gilt, and the walls were covered with paintings. In the middle of the inner area stood one lofty column, which could be seen by all the country round, and even from ships some distance out at sea. The great statue of Serapis, which had been made under the Ptolemies, having perhaps marble feet, but for the rest built of wood, clothed with drapery, and glittering with gold and silver, stood in one of the covered chambers, which had a small window so contrived as to let the suns rays kiss the lips of the statue on the appointed occasions. This was one of the tricks employed in the sacred mysteries, to dazzle the worshipper by the sudden blaze of light which on the proper occasions was let into the dark room. The temple itself, with its fountain, its two obelisks, and its gilt ornaments, has long since been destroyed; and the column in the centre, under the name of Pompeys Pillar, alone remains to mark the spot where it stood, and is one of the few works of Greek art which in size and strength vie with the old Egyptian monuments.

The reign of Julian, instead of raising paganism to its former strength, had only shown that its life was spent; and under Jovian (A.D. 363--364) the Christians were again brought into power. A Christian emperor, however, would have been but little welcome to the Egyptians if, like Constantius, and even Constantine in his latter years, he had leaned to the Arian party; but Jovian soon showed his attachment to the Nicene creed, and he re-appointed Athanasius to the bishopric of Alexandria. But though Athanasius regained his rank, yet the Arian bishop Lucius was not deposed. Each party in Alexandria had its own bishop; those who thought that the Son was of the same substance with the Father looked up to Athanasius, while those who gave to Jesus the lower rank of being of a similar substance to the Creator obeyed Lucius.

This curious metaphysical proposition was not, however, the only cause of the quarrel which divided Egypt into such angry parties. The creeds were made use of as the watchwords in a political struggle. Blood, language, and geographical boundaries divided the parties; and religious opinions seldom cross these unchanging and inflexible lines.

Every Egyptian believed in the Nicene creed and the incorruptibility of the body of Jesus, and hated the Alexandrian Greeks; while the more refined Greeks were as united in explaining away the Nicene creed by the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, and in despising the ignorant Egyptians. Christianity, which speaks so forcibly to the poor, the unlearned, and the slave, had educated the Egyptian population, had raised them in their own eyes; and, as the popular party gained strength, the Arians lost ground in Alexandria. At the same time the Greeks were falling off: in learning and in science, and in all those arts of civilisation which had given them the superiority. Like other great political changes, this may not have been understood at the time; but in less than a hundred years it was found that the Egyptians were no longer the slaves, nor the Greeks the masters.

On the death of Jovian, when Valentinian divided the Roman empire with his brother, he took Italy and the West for his own kingdom, and gave to Valens Egypt and the Eastern provinces, in which Greek was the language of the government. Each emperor adopted the religion of his capital; Valentinian held the Nicene faith, and Valens the Arian faith; and unhappy Egypt was the only part of the empire whose religion differed from that of its rulers. Had the creeds marked the limits of the two empires, Egypt would have belonged to Rome; but, as geographical boundaries and language form yet stronger ties, Egypt was given to Constantinople, or rather to Antioch, the nearer of the two Eastern capitals.

By Valens, Athanasius was forced for the fifth time to fly from Alexandria, to avoid the displeasure which his disobedience again drew down upon him. But his flock again rose in rebellion in favour of their popular bishop; and the emperor was either persuaded or frightened into allowing him to return to his bishopric, where he spent the few remaining years of his life in peace. Athanasius died at an advanced age, leaving a name more famous than that of any one of the emperors under whom he lived. He taught the Christian world that there was a power greater than that of kings, namely the Church. He was often beaten in the struggle, but every victory over him was followed by the defeat of the civil power; he was five times banished, but five times he returned in triumph. The temporal power of the Church was in its infancy; it only rose upon the conversion of Constantine, and it was weak compared to what it became in after ages; but, when the Emperor of Germany did penance barefoot before Pope Hildebrand, and a king of England was whipped at Beckets tomb, we only witness the full-grown strength of the infant power that was being reared by the Bishop of Alexandria. His writings are numerous and wholly controversial, chiefly against the Arians. The Athanasian creed seems to have been so named only because it was thought to contain his opinions, as it is known to be by a later author.

On the death of Athanasius, the Homoousian party chose Peter as his successor in the bishopric, overlooking Lucius, the Arian bishop, whose election had been approved by the emperors Julian, Jovian, and Valens. But as the Egyptian church had lost its great champion, the emperor ventured to re-assert his authority. He sent Peter to prison, and ordered all the churches to be given up to the Arians, threatening with banishment from Egypt whoever disobeyed his edict. The persecution which the Homoousian party throughout Upper Egypt then suffered from the Arians equalled, says the ecclesiastical historian, anything that they had before suffered from the pagans. Every monastery in Egypt was broken open by Lucius at the head of an armed force, and the cruelty of the bishop surpassed that of the soldiers. The breaking open of the monasteries seems to have been for the purpose of making the inmates bear their share in the military service of the state, rather than for any religious reasons. When Constantine embraced Christianity, he immediately recognised all the religious scruples of its professors; and not only bishops and presbyters but all laymen who had entered the monastic orders were freed from the duty of serving in the army. But under the growing dislike of military service, and the difficulty of finding soldiers, when to escape from the army many called themselves Christian monks, this excuse could no longer be listened to, and Valens made a law that monastic vows should not save a man from enlistment. But this law was not easily carried into force in the monasteries on the borders of the desert, which were often well-built and well-guarded fortresses; and on Mount Nitria, in particular, many monks lost their lives in their resistance to the troops that were sent to fetch recruits.

The monastic institutions of Egypt had already reached their full growth. They were acknowledged by the laws of the empire as ecclesiastical corporations, and allowed to hold property; and by a new law of this reign, if a monk or nun died without a will or any known kindred, the property went to the monastery as heir at law. One of the most celebrated of these monasteries was on Tabenna, where Pachomius had gathered round him thirteen hundred followers, who owned him as the founder of their order, and gave him credit for the gift of prophecy. His disciples in the other monasteries of Upper Egypt amounted to six thousand more. Anuph was at the head of another order of monks, and he boasted that he could by prayer obtain from heaven whatever he wished. Hor was at the head of another monastery, where, though wholly unable to read or write, he spent his life in singing psalms, and, as his followers and perhaps he himself believed, in working miracles. Sera-pion was at the head of a thousand monks in the Ar-sinoïte nome, who raised their food by their own labour, and shared it with their poorer neighbours. Near Nitria, a place in the Mareotic nome which gave its name to the nitre springs, there were as many as fifty cells; but those who aimed at greater solitude and severer mortification withdrew farther into the desert, to Scetis in the same nome, a spot already sanctified by the trials and triumphs of St. Anthony. Here, in a monastery surrounded by the sands, by the side of a lake whose waters are Salter than the brine of the ocean, with no grass or trees to rest the aching eye, where the dazzling sky is seldom relieved with a cloud, where the breezes are too often laden with dry dust, these monks cultivated a gloomy religion, with hearts painfully attuned to the scenery around them. Here dwelt Moses, who in his youth had been a remarkable sinner, and in his old age became even more remarkable as a saint. It was said that for six years he spent every night in prayer, without once closing his eyes in sleep; and that one night, when his cell was attacked by four robbers, he carried them all off at once on his back to the neighbouring monastery to be punished, because he would himself hurt no man. Benjamin also dwelt at Scetis; he consecrated oil to heal the diseases of those who washed with it, and during the eight months that he was himself dying of a dropsy, he touched for their diseases all who came to the door of his cell to be healed. Hellas carried fire in his bosom without burning his clothes. Elias spent seventy years in solitude on the borders of the Arabian desert near Antinoopolis. Apelles was a blacksmith near Achoris; he was tempted by the devil in the form of a beautiful woman, but he scorched the tempters face with a red-hot iron. Dorotheus, who though a Theban had settled near Alexandria, mortified his flesh by trying to live without sleep. He never willingly lay down to rest, nor indeed ever slept till the weakness of the body sunk under the efforts of the spirit. Paul, who dwelt at Pherma, repeated three hundred prayers every day, and kept three hundred pebbles in a bag to help him in his reckoning. He was the friend of Anthony, and when dying begged to be wrapt in the cloak given him by that holy monk, who had himself received it as a present from Athanasius. His friends and admirers claimed for Paul the honour of being the first Christian hermit, and they maintained their improbable opinion by asserting that he had been a monk for ninety-seven years, and that he had retired to the desert at the age of sixteen, when the Church was persecuted in the reign of Valerian. All Egypt believed that the monks were the especial favourites of Heaven, that they worked miracles, and that divine wisdom flowed from their lips without the help or hindrance of human learning. They were all Homoousians, believing that the Son was of one substance with the Father; some as trinitarians holding the opinions of Athanasius; some as Sabellians believing that Jesus was the creator of the world, and that his body therefore was not liable to corruption; some as anthropomorphites believing God was of human form like Jesus; but all warmly attached to the Mcene creed, denying the two natures of Christ, and hating the Arian Greeks of Alexandria and the other cities. Gregory of Nazianzum remarks that Egypt was the most Christ-loving of countries, and adds with true simplicity that, wonderful to say, after having so lately worshipped bulls, goats, and crocodiles, it was now teaching the world the worship of the Trinity in the truest form.

The pagans, who were now no longer able to worship publicly as they chose, took care to proclaim their opinions indirectly in such ways as the law could not reach. In the hippodrome, which was the noisiest of the places where the people met in public, they made a profession of their faith by the choice of which horses they bet on; and Christians and pagans alike showed their zeal for religion by hooting and clapping of hands. Prayers and superstitious ceremonies were used on both sides to add to the horses speed; and the monk Hilarion, the pupil of Anthony, gained no little credit for sprinkling holy water on the horses of his party, and thus enabling Christianity to outrun paganism in the hippodrome at Gaza.

During these reigns of weakness and misgovernment, it was no doubt a cruel policy rather than humanity that led the tax-gatherers to collect the tribute in kind. More could be squeezed out of a ruined people by taking what they had to give than by requiring it to be paid in copper coin. Hence Valons made a law that no tribute throughout the empire should be taken in money; and he laid a new land-tax upon Egypt, to the amount of a soldiers clothing for every thirty acres.

The Saracens* had for some time past been encroaching on the Eastern frontiers of the empire, and had only been kept back by treaties which proved the weakness of the Romans, as the armies of Constantinople were still called, and which encouraged the barbarians in their attacks.

* The name _Saraceni_ was given by the Greeks and Romans to
the nomadic Arabs who lived on the borders of the desert.
During the Middle Ages, the Muhammedans, coming from
apparently the same localities, were also called Saracens.

On the death of their king, the command over the Saracens fell to their Queen Masvia, who broke the last treaty, laid waste Palestine and Phoenicia with her armies, conquered or gained over the Arabs of Petra, and pressed upon the Egyptians at the head of the Red Sea. On this, Valens renewed the truce, but on terms still more favourable to the invaders. Many of the Saracens were Christians, and by an article of the treaty they were to have a bishop granted them for their church, and for this purpose they sent Moses to Alexandria to be ordained. But the Saracens sided with the Egyptians, in religion as well as policy, against the Arian Greeks. Hence Moses refused to be ordained by Lucius, the patriarch of Alexandria, and chose rather to receive his appointment from some of the Homoousian bishops who were living in banishment in the Thebaid. After this advance of the barbarians the interesting city of Petra, which since the time of Trajan had been in the power or the friendship of Rome or Constantinople, was lost to the civilised world. This rocky fastness, which was ornamented with temples, a triumphal arch, and a theatre, and had been a bishops see, was henceforth closed against all travellers; it had no place in the map till it was discovered by Burckhardt in our own days without a human being dwelling in it, with oleanders and tamarisks choking up its entrance through the cliff, and with brambles trailing their branches over the rock-hewn temples.

The reign of Theodosius, which extended from 379 to 395, is remarkable for the blow then given to paganism. The old religion had been sinking even before Christianity had become the religion of the emperors; it had been discouraged by Constantine, who had closed many of the temples; but Theodosius made a law in the first year of his reign that the whole of the empire should be Christian, and should receive the trinitarian faith. He soon afterwards ordered that Sunday should be kept holy, and forbade all work and law-proceedings on that day; and he sent Cynegius, the prefect of the palace, into Egypt, to see these laws carried into effect in that province.

The wishes of the emperor were ably followed up by Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria. He cleansed the temple of Mithra, and overthrew the statues in the celebrated temple of Serapis, which seemed the very citadel of paganism. He also exposed to public ridicule the mystic ornaments and statues which a large part of his fellow-citizens still regarded as sacred. It was not, however, to be supposed that this could be peaceably borne by a people so irritable as the Alexandrians. The students in the schools of philosophy put themselves at the head of the mob to stop the work of destruction, and to revenge themselves upon their assailants, and several battles were fought in the streets between the pagans and the Christians, in which both parties lost many lives; but as the Christians were supported by the power of the prefect, the pagans were routed, and many whose rank would have made them objects of punishment were forced to fly from Alexandria.

No sooner had the troops under the command of the prefect put down the pagan opposition than the work of destruction was again carried forward by the zeal of the bishop. The temples were broken open, their ornaments destroyed, and the statues of the gods melted for the use of the Alexandrian church. One statue of an Egyptian god was alone saved from the wreck, and was set up in mockery of those who had worshipped it; and this ridicule of their religion was a cause of greater anger to the pagans than even the destruction of the other statues. The great statue of Serapis, which was made of wood covered with plates of metal, was knocked to pieces by the axes of the soldiers. The head and limbs were broken off, and the wooden trunk was burnt in the amphitheatre amid the shouts and jeers of the bystanders. A conjectured fragment of this statue is now in the British Museum.

In the plunder of the temple of Serapis, the great library of more than seven hundred thousand volumes was wholly broken up and scattered. Orosius, the Spaniard, who visited Alexandria in the next reign, may be trusted when he says that he saw in the temple the empty shelves, which, within the memory of men then living, had been plundered of the books that had formerly been got together after the library of the Bruchium was burnt by Julius Cæsar. In a work of such lawless plunder, carried on by ignorant zealots, many of these monuments of pagan genius and learning must have been wilfully or accidentally destroyed, though the larger number may have been carried off by the Christians for the other public and private libraries of the city. How many other libraries this city of science may have possessed we are not told, but there were no doubt many. Had Alexandria during the next two centuries given birth to poets and orators, their works, the offspring of native genius, might perhaps have been written without the help of libraries; but the labours of the mathematicians and grammarians prove that the city was still well furnished with books, beside those on the Christian controversies.

When the Christians were persecuted by the pagans, none but men of unblemished lives and unusual strength of mind stood to their religion in the day of trial, and suffered the penalties of the law; the weak, the ignorant, and the vicious readily joined in the superstitions required of them, and, embracing the religion of the stronger party, easily escaped punishment. So it was when the pagans of Alexandria were persecuted by Theophilus; the chief sufferers were the men of learning, in whose minds paganism was a pure deism, and who saw nothing but ignorance and superstition on the side of their oppressors; who thought their worship of the Trinity only a new form of polytheism, and jokingly declared that they were not arithmeticians enough to understand it. Olympius, who was the priest of Serapis when the temple was sacked, and as such the head of the pagans of Alexandria, was a man in every respect the opposite of the Bishop Theophilus. He was of a frank, open countenance and agreeable manners; and though his age might have allowed him to speak among his followers in the tone of command, he chose rather in his moral lessons to use the mild persuasion of an equal; and few hearts were so hardened as not to be led into the paths of duty by his exhortations. Whereas the furious monks, says the indignant pagan, were men only in form, but swine in manners. Whoever put on a black coat, and was not ashamed to be seen with dirty linen, gained a tyrannical power over the minds of the mob, from their belief in his holiness; and these men attacked the temples of the gods as a propitiation for their own enormous sins. Thus each party reproached the other, and often unjustly. Among other religious frauds and pretended miracles of which the pagan priests were accused, was that of having an iron statue of Serapis hanging in the air in a chamber of the temple, by means of a loadstone fixed in the ceiling. The natural difficulties shield them from this charge, but other accusations are not so easily rebutted.

After this attack upon the pagans, their religion was no longer openly taught in Alexandria. Some of the more zealous professors withdrew from the capital to Canopus, about ten miles distant, where the ancient priestly learning was still taught, unpersecuted because unnoticed; and there, under the pretence of studying hieroglyphics, a school was opened for teaching magic and other forbidden rites. When the pagan worship ceased throughout Egypt, the temples were very much used as churches, and in some cases received in their ample courtyard a smaller church of Greek architecture, as in that of Medinet Abu. In other cases Christian ornaments were added to the old walls, as in the rock temple of Kneph, opposite to Abu Simbel, where the figure of the Saviour with a glory round his head has been painted on the ceiling. The Christians, in order to remove from before their eyes the memorials of the old superstition, covered up the sculpture on the walls with mud from the Nile and white plaster. This coating we now take away, at a time when the idolatrous figures are no longer dangerous to religion, and we find the sculpture and painting fresh as when covered up fourteen hundred years ago.

It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Egyptians, upon embracing Christianity, at once threw off all of their pagan rites. Among other customs that they still clung to, was that of making mummies of the bodies of the dead. St. Anthony had tried to dissuade the Christian converts from that practice; not because the mummy-cases were covered with pagan inscriptions, but he boldly asserted, what a very little reading would have disproved, that every mode of treating a dead body, beside burial, was forbidden in the Bible. St. Augustine, on the other hand, well understanding that the immortality of the soul without the body was little likely to be understood or valued by the ignorant, praises the Egyptians for that very practice, and says that they were the only Christians who really believed in the resurrection from the dead. The tapers burnt before the altars were from the earliest times used to light up the splendours of the Egyptian altars, in the darkness of their temples, and had been burnt in still greater numbers in the yearly festival of the candles. The playful custom of giving away sugared cakes and sweetmeats on the twenty-fifth day of Tybi, our twentieth of January, was then changed to be kept fourteen days earlier, and it still marks the Feast of Epiphany or Twelfth-night. The division of the people into clergy and laity, which was unknown to Greeks and Romans, was introduced into Christianity in the fourth century by the Egyptians. While the rest of Christendom were clothed in woollen, linen, the common dress of the Egyptians, was universally adopted by the clergy as more becoming to the purity of their manners. At the same time the clergy copied the Egyptian priests in the custom of shaving the crown of the head bald.

The new law in favour of trinitarian Christianity was enforced with as great strictness against the Arians as against the pagans. The bishops and priests of that party wrere everywhere turned out of their churches, which were then given up to the Homoousians. Theodosius summoned a council of one hundred and fifty bishops at Constantinople, to re-enact the Nicene creed; and in the future religious rebellions of the Egyptians they always quoted against the Greeks this council of Constantinople, with that of Nicasa, as the foundation of their faith. By this religious policy, Theodosius did much to delay the fall of the empire. He won the friendship of his Egyptian subjects, as well as of their Saracen neighbours, all of whom, as far as they were Christian, held to the Nicene creed. Egypt became the safest of his provinces; and, when his armies had been recruited with so many barbarians that they could no longer be trusted, these new levies wrere marched into Egypt under the command of Hormisdas, and an equal number of Egyptians were drafted out of the army of Egypt, and led into Thessaly.

When the season came for the overflow of the Nile, in the first summer after the destruction of the temples, the waters happened to rise more slowly than usual; and the Egyptians laid the blame upon the Christian emperor, who had forbidden their sacrificing the usual offerings in honour of the river-god.

The alarm for the loss of their crops carried more weight in the religious controversy than any arguments that could be brought against pagan sacrifices; and the anger of the people soon threatened a serious rebellion. Evagrius the prefect, being disturbed for the peace of the country, sent to Constantinople for orders; but the emperor remained firm; he would make no change in the law against paganism, and the fears of the Egyptians and Alexandrians were soon put an end to by a most plenteous overflow.

Since the time of Athanasius, and the overthrow of the Arian party in Alexandria, the learning of that city was wholly in the hands of the pagans, and was chiefly mathematical. Diophantus of Alexandria is the earliest writer on algebra whose works are now remaining to us, and has given his name to the Diophantine problems. Pappus wrote a description of the world, and a commentary on Ptolemys _Almagest_, beside a work on geometry, published under the name of his _Mathematical Collections_. Theon, a professor in the museum, wrote on the smaller astrolabe--the instrument then used to measure the star orbits--and on the rise of the Nile, a subject always of interest to the mathematicians of Egypt, from its importance to the husbandman. From Theons astronomical observations we learn that the Alexandrian astronomers still made use of the old Egyptian movable year of three hundred and sixty-five days only, and without a leap-year. Paul the Alexandrian astrologer, on the other hand, uses the Julian year of three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter, and he dates from the era of Diocletian. His rules for telling the day of the week from the day of the month, and for telling on what day of the week each year began, teach us that our present mode of dividing time was used in Egypt. Horapollo, the grammarian, was also then a teacher in the schools of Alexandria. He wrote in the Koptic language a work in explanation of the old hieroglyphics, which has gained a notice far beyond its deserts, because it is the only work on the subject that has come down to us.

The only Christian writings of this time, that we know of, are the paschal letters of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, which were much praised by Jerome, and by him translated into Latin. They are full of bitter reproaches against Origen and his writings, and they charge him with having treated Jesus more cruelly than Pilate or the Jews had done. John, the famous monk of the Thebaid, was no writer, though believed to have the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold the victory of Theodosius over the rebel Maximus; and, when the emperor had got together his troops to march against Eugenius, another rebel who had seized the passes of the Julian Alps, he sent his trusty eunuch Eutropius to fetch the holy Egyptian, or at least to learn from him what would be the event of the war. John refused to go to Europe, but he told the messenger that Theodosius would conquer the rebel, and soon afterwards die; both of which came to pass as might easily have been guessed.

On the death of Theodosius, in 395, the Roman empire was again divided. Arcadius, his elder son, ruled Egypt and the East, while Honorius, the younger, held the West; and the reins of government at once passed from the ablest to the weakest hands. But the change was little felt in Egypt, which continued to be governed by the patriarch Theophilus, without the name but with very nearly the power of a prefect. He was a bold and wicked man, but as his religious opinions were for the Homoousians as against the Arians, and his political feelings were for the Egyptians as against the Greeks, he rallied to his government the chief strength of the province. As the pagans and Arians of Alexandria were no longer worthy of his enmity, he fanned into a flame a new quarrel which was then breaking out in the Egyptian church. The monks of Upper Egypt, who were mostly ignorant and unlettered men, were anthropomorphites, or believers that God was in outward shape like a man. They quoted from the Jewish Scriptures that he made man in his own image, in support of their opinion. They held that he was of a strictly human form, like Jesus, which to them seemed fully asserted in the Nicene creed. In this opinion they were opposed by those who were better educated, and it suited the policy of Theophilus to side with the more ignorant and larger party. He branded with the name of Origenists those who argued that God was without form, and who quoted the writings of Origen in support of their opinion. This naturally led to a dispute about Origens orthodoxy; and that admirable writer, who had been praised by all parties for two hundred years, and who had been quoted as authority as much by Athanasius as by the Arians, was declared to be a heretic by a council of bishops. The writings of Origen were accordingly forbidden to be read, because they contradicted the anthropomorphite opinions.

The quarrel between the Origenists and the anthropomorphites did not end in words. A proposition in theology, or a doubt in metaphysics, was no better cause of civil war than the old quarrels about the bull Apis or the crocodile; but a change of religion had not changed the national character. The patriarch, finding his party the stronger, attacked the enemy in their own monasteries; he marched to Mount Nitria at the head of a strong body of soldiers, and, enrolling under his banners the anthropomorphite monks, attacked Dioscorus and the Origenists, set fire to their monasteries, and laid waste the place.

Theophilus next quarrelled with Peter, the chief of the Alexandrian presbyters, whom he accused of admitting to the sacraments of the church a woman who had not renounced the Manichean heresy; and he then quarrelled with Isidorus, who had the charge of the poor of the church, because he bore witness that Peter had the orders of Theophilus himself for what he did.

In this century there was a general digging up of the bodies of the most celebrated Christians of former ages, to heal the diseases and strengthen the faith of the living; and Constantinople, which as the capital of the empire had been ornamented by the spoils of its subject provinces, had latterly been enriching its churches with the remains of numerous Christian saints. The tombs of Egypt, crowded with mummies that had lain there for centuries, could of course furnish relics more easily than most countries, and in this reign Constantinople received from Alexandria a quantity of bones which were supposed to be those of the martyrs slain in the pagan persecutions. The archbishop John Chrysostom received them gratefully, and, though himself smarting under the reproach that he was not orthodox enough for the superstitious Egyptians, he thanks God that Egypt, which sent forth its grain to feed its hungry neighbours, could also send the bodies of so many martyrs to sanctify their churches.

We have traced the fall of the Greek party in Alexandria, in the victories over the Arians during the religious quarrels of the last hundred years; and in the laws we now read the citys loss of wealth and power. The corporation of Alexandria was no longer able to bear the expense of cleansing the river and keeping open the canals; and four hundred _solidi_--about twelve hundred dollars--were each year set apart from the custom-house duties of the city for that useful work.

The arrival of new settlers in Alexandria had been very much checked by the less prosperous state of the country since the reign of Diocletian. We still find, however, that many of the men of note were not born in Egypt. Paulus, the physician, was a native of Ægina. He has left a work on diseases and their remedies. The chief man of learning was Synesius, a platonic philosopher whom the patriarch Theophilus persuaded to join the Christians. As a platonist he naturally leaned towards many of the doctrines of the popular religion, but he could not believe in a resurrection; and it was not till after Theophilus had ordained him Bishop of Ptolemais near Cyrene that he acknowledged the truth of that doctrine. Nor would he then put away or disown his wife, as the custom of the Church required; indeed, he accepted the bishopric very unwillingly. He was as fond of playful sport as he was of books, and very much disliked business. He has left a volume of writings, which has saved the names of two prefects of Cyrene; the one Anysius, under whose good discipline even the barbarians of Hungary behaved like Roman legionaries, and the other Poonius, who cultivated science in this barren spot. To encourage Pasonius in his praiseworthy studies he made him a present of an astrolabe, to measure the distances of the stars and planets, an instrument which was constructed under the guidance of Hypatia.

Trade and industry were checked by the unsettled state of the country, and misery and famine were spreading over the land. The African tribes of Mazices and Auxoriani, leaving the desert in hope of plunder, overran the province of Libya, and laid waste a large part of the Delta. The barbarians and the sands of the desert were alike encroaching on the cultivated fields. Nature seemed changed. The valley of the Nile was growing narrower. Even within the valley the retreating wraters left behind them harvests less rich, and fever more putrid. The quarries were no longer worth working for their building stone. The mines yielded no more gold.

On the death of Arcadius, his son Theodosius was only eight years old, but he was quietly acknowledged as Emperor of the East in 408, and he left the government of Egypt, as heretofore, very much in the hands of the patriarch. In the fifth year of his reign Theophilus died; and, as might be supposed, a successor was not appointed without a struggle for the double honour of Bishop of Alexandria and Governor of Egypt.

The remains of the Greek and Arian party proposed Timotheus, an archdeacon in the church; but the Egyptian party were united in favour of Cyril, a young man of learning and talent, who had the advantage of being the nephew of the late bishop. Whatever were the forms by which the election should have been governed, it was in reality settled by a battle between the two parties in the streets; and though Abundantius, the military prefect, gave the weight of his name, if not the strength of his cohort, to the party of Timotheus, yet his rival conquered, -and Cyril was carried into the cathedral with a pomp more like a pagan triumph than the modest ordination of a bishop.

Cyril was not less tyrannical in his bishopric than his uncle had been before him. His first care was to put a stop to all heresy in Alexandria, and his second to banish the Jews. The theatre was the spot in which the riots between Jews and Christians usually began, and the Sabbath was the time, as being the day on which the Jews chiefly crowded in to see the dancing. On one occasion the quarrel in the theatre ran so high that the prefect with his cohort was scarcely able to keep them from blows; and the Christians reproached the Jews with plotting to burn down the churches. But the Christians were themselves guilty of the very crimes of which they accused their enemies. The next morning, as soon as it was light, Cyril headed the mob in their attacks upon the Jewish synagogues; they broke them open and plundered them, and in one day drove every Jew out of the city. No Jew had been allowed to live in Alexandria or any other city without paying a poll-tax, for leave to worship his God according to the manner of his forefathers; but religious zeal is stronger than the love of money; the Jews were driven out, and the tax lost to the city.

Orestes, the prefect of Alexandria, had before wished to check the power of the bishop; and he in vain tried to save the Jews from oppression, and the state from the loss of so many good citizens. But it was useless to quarrel with the patriarch, who was supported by the religious zeal of the whole population. The monks of Mount Nitria and of the neighbourhood burned with a holy zeal to fight for Cyril, as they had before fought for Theophilus; and when they heard that a jealousy had sprung up between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, more than five hundred of them marched into Alexandria to avenge the affronted bishop. They met the prefect Orestes as he was passing through the streets in his open chariot, and began reproaching him with being a pagan and a Greek. Orestes answered that he was a Christian, and he had been baptised at Constantinople. But this only cleared him of the lesser charge, he was certainly a Greek; and one of these Egyptian monks taking up a stone threw it at his head, and the blow covered his face with blood. They then fled from the guards and people who came up to help the wounded prefect; but Ammonius, who threw the stone, was taken and put to death with torture. The grateful bishop buried him in the church with much pomp; he declared him to be a martyr and a saint, and gave him the name of St. Thaumasius. But the Christians were ashamed of the new martyr: and the bishop, who could not withstand the ridicule, soon afterwards withdrew from him the title.

Bad as was this behaviour of the bishop and his friends, the most disgraceful tale still remains to be told. The beautiful and learned Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was at that time the ornament of Alexandria and the pride of the pagans. She taught philosophy publicly in the platonic school which had been founded by Ammonius, and which boasted of Plotinus as its pupil. She was as modest as she wras graceful, eloquent, and learned; and though, being a pagan, she belonged to neither of the rival Christian parties, yet, as she had more hearers among the Greek friends of the prefect than among the ignorant followers of the bishop, she became an object of jealousy with the Homoousian party. A body of these Christians, says the orthodox historian, attacked this admirable woman in the street; they dragged her from her chariot, and hurried her off into the church named Cæsars temple, and there stripped her and murdered her with some broken tiles. She had written commentaries on the mathematical works of Diophantus, and on the conic sections of Apollonius. The story of her life has been related in the nineteenth century by Charles Kingsley in the novel which bears her name.