Chapter III

“I have taken a city,” wrote the Arab conqueror of Alexandria, “of which I can only say that it contains 4000 palaces, 4000 baths, 400 theatres, 12,000 greengrocers, and 40,000 Jews.” It contained a lighthouse, too, for the Pharos was still perfect and functioned for a few years more, lighting the retreating fleets of Europe with its beams. Then a slow dissolution began, and it shrinks, looms through the mists of legend, disappears. The first, and the irreparable, disaster was the fall of the lantern in the eighth century, carrying with it scientific apparatus that could not be replaced. Annoyed (say the Arabs) with the magic mirror that detected or scorched their ships, the Christians made a plot, and sent a messenger to Islam with news of a treasure in Syria. The treasure was found, whereupon the messenger reported something supreme—the whole wealth of Alexander and other Pharaohs which lay in the foundations of the lighthouse. Demolition began, and before the Alexandrians, who knew better, could intervene, the mirror had fallen and was smashed on the rocks beneath. Henceforward the Pharos is only a stump with a bonfire on the top. The Arabs made some restorations, but they were unsubstantial additions to the octagon, which the wind could blow away. Structural repairs were neglected, and in the twelfth century the second disaster occurred—the fall of the octagon through an earthquake. The square bottom story survived as a watch-tower. Two hundred years later it vanished in a final earthquake, and the very island where it had stood modified its shape and became a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a strip of sand.

Though unable to maintain the lighthouse on earth, the Arabs did much for it in the realms of fancy, increasing its height to seven hundred feet, and endowing it with various magical objects, of which the most remarkable was a glass crab. There really were crabs at Alexandria, but of copper, quite small, and standing under Cleopatra’s Needle; America possesses one to-day. Oriental imagination mixed two monuments into one, and caused a Moorish army to invade the Pharos and to ride through its three hundred rooms. The entrance gate vanished, and they could not find their way out, but ever descending the spirals came at last to the glass crab, slipped through a crack in its back and were drowned. Happier, though equally obscure, was the fate of another visitor, the poet El Deraoui. Who sings:

A lofty platform guides the voyager by night, guides him with
its light when the darkness of evening falls.

Thither have I borne a garment of perfect pleasure among my
friends, a garment adorned with the memory of beloved
companions.

On its height a dome enshadowed me, and there I saw my friends
like stars.

I thought that the sea below me was a cloud, and that I had set
up my tent in the midst of the heavens.

Only occasionally does the note of disillusionment and bitterness creep in. Jelaled Din ibn Mokram complains that:

The visitor to Alexandria receives nothing in the way of
hospitality except some water and a description of Pompey’s
Pillar.

Those who make a special effort sometimes give him a little
fresh air too, and tell him where the Pharos is, adding a sketch
of the sea and its waves and an account of the large Greek
ships.

The visitor need not aspire to receive any bread, for to an
application of this type there is no reply.

As a rule, life in its shadow is an earthly ecstasy that may even touch heaven. Hark to Ibn Dukmak:

According to the law of Moses, if a man make a pilgrimage round
Alexandria in the morning, God will make for him a golden crown
set with pearls, perfumed with musk and camphor and shining from
the east to the west.

Nor were the Arabs content with praising the lighthouse: they even looked at it. “El Manarah,” as they called it, gave the name to, and became the model for, the minaret, and one can still find minarets in Egypt that exactly reproduce the design of Sostratus—the bottom story square, second octagonal, third round.

The Fort of Kait Bey, built in the fifteenth century and itself now a ruin, stands to-day where the Pharos once stood. Its area covers part of the ancient enclosure—the rest is awash with the sea—and in its containing wall are embedded a few granite columns. Inside the area is a mosque, exactly occupying the site of the lighthouse, and built upon its foundations: here, too, are some granite blocks standing with druidical effect at the mosque’s entrance. Nothing else can be attributed to the past, its stones have vanished and its spirit also. Again and again, looking at the mosque, have I tried to multiply its height by five, and thus build up its predecessor. The effort always failed: it did not seem reasonable that so large an edifice should have existed. The dominant memory in the chaos is now British, for here are some large holes, made by Admiral Seymour when he bombarded the Fort in 1882 and laid the basis of our intercourse with modern Egypt.

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THE RETURN FROM SIWA

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria. He came with Dinocrates, his architect, and ordered him to build, between the sea and the lake, a magnificent Greek town. Alexander still conceived of civilization as an extended Greece, and of himself as a Hellene. He had taken over Hellenism with the ardour that only a proselyte knows. A Balkan barbarian by birth, he had pushed himself into the enchanted but enfeebled circle of little city states. He had flattered Athens and spared Thebes, and preached a crusade against Persia, which should repeat upon a vaster scale the victories of Marathon and Salamis. He would even repeat the Trojan war. At the Dardanelles his archæological zeal was such that he ran naked round the tomb of Achilles. He cut the knot of Gordius. He appeased the soul of Priam.

Having annexed Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from the Persians, and having given his orders to Dinocrates, he left the city he was building, and rode with a few friends into the western desert. It was summer. The waters of Lake Mariout, more copious then than now, spread fertility for a space. Leaving their zone, he struck south, over the limestone hills, and lost sight of civilization whether of the Hellenic or non-Hellenic type. Around him little flat pebbles shimmered and danced in the heat, gazelles stared, and pieces of sky slopped into the sand. Over him was the pale blue dome of heaven, darkened, if we are to believe his historian, by flocks of obsequious birds, who sheltered the King with their shadows and screamed when he rode the wrong way. Alexander went on till he saw below him, in the fall of the ground, the canals and hot springs and olives and palms of the Oasis of Siwa.

Sekhet-Amit the Egyptians called it, and worshipped their god Amen there, whom the Greeks call Ammon, worshipped him in the form of an emerald that lay in a sacred boat, worshipped him as a ram also. Instead of the twin mud-cities of Siwa and Aghurmi, Alexander saw pylons and colonnades, and descending into the steamy heat of the Oasis approached a lonely and mysterious shrine. For what was it mysterious? Perhaps merely for its loneliness. The distance, the solitude of the desert, touch travellers even to-day, and sharpen the imaginations of men who have crossed in armoured cars, and whom no god awaits, only a tract of green. Alexander rode, remembering how, two hundred years before him, the Persians had ridden to loot the temple, and how on them as they were eating in the desert a sandstorm had descended, burying diners and dinner in company. Herein lay the magic of Siwa. It was difficult to reach. He, being the greatest man of his epoch, had of course succeeded. He, the Philhellene, had come. His age was twenty-five. Then took place that celebrated and extraordinary episode. According to the official account the Priest came out of the temple and saluted the young tourist as Son of God. Alexander acquiesced and asked whether he would become King of this World. The reply was in the affirmative. Then his friends asked whether they should worship him. They were told that they should, and the episode closed. Some say that it is to be explained by the Priest’s bad Greek. He meant to say Paidion (“my child”) and said Paidios (“O Son of God”) instead. Others say that it never took place, and Walter Savage Landor has imagined a conversation in the course of which the Priest scares the King by a snake. A scare he did get—a fright, a psychic experience, a vision, a “turn.” His development proves it. After his return from Siwa his aspirations alter. Never again does he regard Greece as the centre of the world.

The building of Alexandria proceeded, and copied or magnified forms from the perishing peninsula overseas. Dinocrates planned Greek temples and market-places, and they were constructed not slavishly but with intelligence, for the Greek spirit still lived. But it lived consciously, not unconsciously as in the past. It had a mission, and no missionary shall ever create. And Alexander, the heroic chaos of whose heart surged with desire for all that can and can not be, turned away from his Hellenic town-planning and his narrow little antiquarian crusade, and flung himself again, but in a new spirit, against the might of Persia. He fought her as a lover now. He wanted not to convert but to harmonize, and conceived himself as the divine and impartial ruler beneath whom harmony shall proceed. That way lies madness. Persia fell. Then it was the turn of India. Then the turn of Rome would have come and then he could have sailed westward (such was his expressed intention) until he had conquered the Night and eastward until he had conquered the Day. He was never—despite the tuition of Aristotle—a balanced young man, and his old friends complained that in this latter period he sometimes killed them. But to us, who cannot have the perilous honour of his acquaintance, he grows more lovable now than before. He has caught, by the unintellectual way, a glimpse of something great, if dangerous, and that glimpse came to him first in the recesses of the Siwan Oasis. When at the age of thirty-three he died, when the expedition that he did not seek stole towards him in the summer-house at Babylon, did it seem to him as after all but the crown of his smaller quests? He had tried to lead Greece, then he had tried to lead mankind. He had succeeded in both. But was the universe also friendly, was it also in trouble, was it calling on him, on him, for his help and his love? The priest of Amen had addressed him as “Son of God.” What exactly did the compliment mean? Was it explicable this side of the grave?

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EPIPHANY

During the last years of their lives the old King and Queen had seldom left the Palace. They sought seclusion, though for different reasons. The King, who was gay and shy, did not wish his pleasures to be observed. He had gathered a suitable circle of friends round him, and was content. There was Agathocles—who, by the way, was Prime Minister; there was Agathoclea—who, by the way, was the little prince’s nurse; there was Œnanthe, the mother of the two A.’s, an elderly but accomplished woman who knew how to shampoo. And there were one or two more, for instance the wife of a forage contractor who would say to the King, “Here, Daddy, drink this.” The King liked young women who called him Daddy; and he drank, and when he had drunk enough he would get up and dance, the others danced too, he would fall down, it was all delightful. But it was not a delight he desired his subjects to witness.

The Queen employed herself otherwise. Shut up in her own apartments, she meditated on the past. She thought of all the years when she had been on trial: the King had never cared for her, and, though negotiating for the marriage, had kept her waiting. Then came the Battle of Rafa. The Syrians were invading Egypt, and just as the Egyptian army was breaking she had ridden forth among the elephants, her hair streaming, her colour high, and had turned defeat into victory. She became the popular heroine, and he married her. But for nine years they had had no child. She could see no hope anywhere. The child had come, but the situation had not changed. Months passed, and still she sat in the Palace enclosure—the Fortress inside the fortress of the Royal City—and looked from the promontory that we now call Silsileh across the harbour to Pharos, and over the unvarying expanse of the sea.

Change came at last. One night, when the King fell down, he failed to get up again. Agathoclea paid him every attention, but he passed into a stupor and died in her arms. His friends were in despair. He had been such a jolly old King. And besides, what were they to do? The Queen, on the other hand, came forward in an unexpected light. There was no occasion for anxiety, she told them. She knew what to do quite well. She was now Regent, and her first act was to dismiss the ministry. Moreover, since he was now four years old, her son no longer required a nurse. The old heroic feelings came back to her. Life seemed worth living again; She returned to her apartments full of exaltation. She entered them. As she did so, the curtains, which had been soaked with inflammable oil in her absence, burst into flame. She tried to retire. The doors had been locked behind her, and she was burnt to death.

And the life of Alexandria went on as before. Œnanthe and her progeny still drove about in the state carriages. The King and Queen still failed to appear in public, and the Palace still rose inviolate inside the walls of the Royal City. Months passed, fourteen months.

When rumours began, the A.’s neglected to act. Inertia had served them so well that they did not know how to relinquish it. But rumours continued, and after many consultations they devised a pageant that had the feeblest effect. It was not true, they said, that the old King and Queen had died a year ago. But it was true that they were dead. They had died that very minute. Alas! Woe, oh woe! Here were their urns. Their little son was now King. Here he was. Agathocles had been appointed Regent. Here was the will. Agathoclea—here she was—would continue to be nurse. The people, sceptical and sullen, watched the display, which took place in a high gallery of the Palace, overhanging the town. The actors made their bow, and gathering up the exhibits retired. All went on as usual for a little longer.

It was the misgovernment of Agathocles that brought things to a crisis: that, and the report that of the two urns only one contained human remains: the other, which was supposed to hold the Queen, was a dummy. Perhaps the little boy would vanish next. They must see him, touch him. And they stormed the Palace. It was in vain that the Regent parleyed, threatened, or that Agathoclea repeated that she was the royal nurse. The soldiers joined the people, and they broke gate after gate. At last the Regent cried, “Take him!” and, flinging their King at them, fled. The child was already in tears. They put him on a horse, and led it outside to the racecourse, where were assembled more human beings than he had ever dreamt of, who shouted Epiphany! Epiphany! and pulled him off the horse and made him sit on a large seat. This was the world and he did not like it. He preferred his own little circle. Someone cried, “Shall we not punish your mother’s murderers?” He sobbed, “Oh yes—oh anything,” and it was so. The Regent and his sister had hidden in the Palace. Œnanthe had driven two miles away to the Thesmophorion, a sanctuary near the present Nouzha Gardens. All were dragged from their retreats, tortured, and killed, the women being stripped naked first.

Such were the circumstances of the accession of Ptolemy V., surnamed Epiphanes, 204 B.C.

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PHILO’S LITTLE TRIP

It was nearly a serious tumble—more serious than he anticipated. There were six in his party, all Hebrew gentlemen of position and intelligence, such as may be seen in these days filling a first-class carriage in the Cairo express on their way up to interview the Government. In those days the Government was not at Cairo but at Rome, and the six gentlemen were on their way to interview the Emperor Caligula. Observe them in their well-appointed little yacht, slipping out of the Mohammed Ali Square, which was then under water and part of the Eastern Harbour. Their faces are pale, partly from fasting, partly from anticipation, for the passage can be rough in February. And their mission was even more poignant than cotton. It concerned their faith. Jews at Alexandria had been killed and teased, and some Gentiles had, with the connivance of the Governor, erected a bronze chariot in their principal synagogue—not even a new chariot, for the horses had no tails or feet. It was a chariot once dedicated to—O Pollution!—Cleopatra. There it stood, and the Jews did not like to throw it down. And into their smaller synagogues, smaller objects, such as portraits of the Emperor, had been thrust. It is a delicate matter to complain to an Emperor about his own portrait, but Caligula was known to be a charming and reasonable young man, and the deputation had been selected for its tact.

As they crossed the harbour, the Temple of Cæsar stood out on the right, so impressive, so brilliant, that Philo could not repress his enthusiasm and recalled the view in after years.

It is a piece incomparably above all others (he writes). It
stands by a most commodious harbour, wonderfully high and large
in proportion; an eminent sea mark: full of choice paintings and
statues with donatives and oblatives in abundance; and then it
is beautiful all over with gold and silver: the model curious
and regular in the disposition of the parts, as galleries,
libraries, porches, courts, halls, walks, and consecrated
groves, as glorious as expense and art could make them, and
everything in its proper place; besides that, the hope and
comfort of seafaring men, either coming in or going out.

When would he see this temple as he came in? Although Cleopatra had begun it for Antony, and Augustus finished it for himself, it filled him with love, and he turned from it with reluctance to the coast on the left, really more important, because Jehovah had translated the entire Bible into Greek there. There stood those seventy huts! O wonder! It was one of the anecdotes with which he hoped to rivet the attention of Caligula, when they arrived at Rome.

That charming and reasonable young man had lately recovered from a severe illness, at which the whole civilized world rejoiced, and the Eternal City was full of embassies waiting to congratulate him. Among these, ominously enough, was a counter-deputation from Alexandria, strongly anti-Semite in tone. Philo watched it narrowly. The imperial invalid did not arrive till August, and at first things went pleasantly enough. He caught sight of the Jews one day as he was calling on his mother, seemed transported with delight and waved his hand to them, also sent a message that he would see them at once, but immediately left for Naples, and they had to follow him thither.

It was somewhere between Naples and Baiæ that the little trip came to its end. We cannot say where exactly, for the reason that the Emperor received the deputation over a considerable space of ground. He was continually on the trot throughout the audience, and they had to trot after him. He passed from room to room and from villa to villa, all of which, he told them, he had thrown open for their pleasure. They thanked him and tried to say more. He trotted on. With him ran the counter-deputation, and also a mob of concierges, housekeepers, glaziers, plumbers, upholsterers and decorators, to whom he kept flinging orders. At last he stopped. The Jews of Alexandria approached. And with a voice of thunder he cried, “So you are the criminals who say I am not a god.” It was shattering, it was appalling, it was the very point they had hoped would not be raised. For they worshipped Jehovah only. The counter-deputation shouted with delight, and the six Hebrew gentlemen cried in unison, “Caligula! Caligula! do not be angry with us. We have sacrificed for you not once but three times—first at your accession, secondly when you were ill, thirdly when——” But the Emperor interrupted them with merciless logic. “Exactly. For me and not to me,” and dashed off to inspect the ladies’ apartments. After him they ran, hopeless of removing Cleopatra’s chariot or of interesting him in the Septuagint. They would be lucky if they secured their lives. He climbed up to look at a ceiling. They climbed too. He ran along a plank; so did the Jews. They did not speak, partly from lack of breath, partly because they were afraid of his reply. At last, turning in their faces, he asked, “Why don’t you eat pork?” The counter-deputation shouted again. The Jews replied that different races ate different things, and one of them, to carry off the situation, said some people didn’t eat lamb. “Of course they don’t,” said the Emperor, “lamb is beastly.” The situation grew worse. A fit of fury had seized Caligula at the thought of lamb and he yelled, “What are your laws? I wish to know what your laws are!” They began to tell him and he cried out, “Shut those windows,” and ran away down a corridor. Then he turned with extraordinary gentleness and said, “I beg your pardon, what were you saying?” They began to tell him of their laws, and he said, “We’ll have all the old pictures hung together here, I think.” Stopping anew, he looked round at his shattered train of ambassadors and artisans, and smiling, remarked, “And these are the people who think I am not a god. I don’t blame them. I merely pity them. They can go.” Philo led his party back to Alexandria, there to meditate on the accident that had so spoilt their little trip: Caligula was mad.

Yet did it signify—signify in the long run? The history of the Chosen People is full of such contretemps, but they survive and thrive. Six hundred years later, when Amr took the city, he found 40,000 Jews there. And look at them in the railway carriage now. Their faces are anxious and eloquent of past rebuffs. But they are travelling First.

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CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA

When the assertions that were made at one time and another in the uplands of Palestine descended from their home, and, taking the ancient caravan route, crossed the River of Egypt and approached Alexandria, they entered into a new spiritual atmosphere where they were obliged to transform themselves or to perish. The atmosphere was not hostile to the assertions, indeed it welcomed them, but it insisted that, however unphilosophic they might be, they should wear the philosophic dress, that they should take some account of the assertions that had arrived previously, should recognize the existence of libraries and museums, should approach with circumspection the souls of the rich. Under these conditions they might remain. And exactly the same thing happened on two distinct occasions. We are here concerned with the second of the occasions, but it is convenient to glance at the first; it was soon after Alexandria had been founded, and Jews were flocking to her markets. An unexpected problem confronted them. Jehovah had said, “I Am that I Am,” and so long as they remained in Palestine this seemed enough. But now they had to face disquieting comments, such as “This statement predicates existence merely,” or “This statement, while professing merely to predicate existence, assumes the attribute of speech,” and they grew aware of the inaccessibility and illogicality of their national God. The result was a series of attempts on their part to explain and recommend Jehovah to the Greeks—culminating in the great system of Philo, who, by the doctrine of the Mediating Logos, ensured that the deity should be at the same time accessible and inaccessible: “The Logos,” he writes, “dwells on the margin between the Created and the Increate, and delights to serve them both.” And there, for a little, the matter rested.

But in Philo’s own lifetime a second assertion had been made among the Judæan hills. We do not know its original form—too many minds have worked over it since—but we know that it was unphilosophic and anti-social. For it was addressed to the uneducated and it promised them a kingdom. Following the usual route, it reached Alexandria, where the same fate overtook it: it had to face comments, and in so doing was transformed. It too evolved a system which, though not logical, paid the lip service to logic that a great city demands, and interspersed bridges of argument among the flights of faith. All Greek thinkers, except Socrates, had done the same, so that, on its intellectual side, the new religion did not break with the past; it consisted of an assertion in a philosophic dress, and Clement of Alexandria, its first theologian, used methods that were familiar to Philo two hundred years before. Not only did he bring allegory to bear upon the more intractable passages of Scripture, but he adapted the Philonian Logos and identified it with the Founder of the new religion. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.” Philo might have written this. St. John had added to it two statements distinctly Christian, namely, “The Word was God” and “The Word was made flesh.” And now Clement, taking over the completed conception, raised upon it a storied fabric such as the Alexandrians loved, and ensured that the deity should be at the same time accessible and inaccessible, merciful and just, human and divine. The fabric would have bewildered the fishermen of Galilee, and it had in it a flaw which became evident in the fourth century and produced the Arian schism. But it impressed the passing age; Clement, working in and through Alexandria, did more than even St. Paul to recommend Christianity to the Gentiles.

He was probably born in Greece about A.D. 150 and initiated into Mysteries there. Then he was converted and became head of the theological college in Alexandria, where he remained until his exile in 202. But little is known of his life and nothing of his character, though one may assume it was conciliatory: Christianity was not yet official, and thus in no position to fulminate. Of his treatises the “Exhortation to the Greeks” acknowledges several merits in pagan thought, while “The Rich Man’s Salvation” handles with delicacy a problem on which business men are naturally sensitive, and arrives at the comforting conclusion that Christ did not mean what He said. One recognizes the wary resident. And when he attacks Paganism he seldom denounces: he mocks, knowing this to be the better way. For the age is literal. It had lost resilience and spring, and if one pointed out to it that Zeus had behaved absurdly in Homer, it could summon no rush of instinct or of poetry with which to defend his worship. Demeter too! And shrines to the sneezing Apollo and to the gouty and to the coughing Artemis! Ha! Ha! Fancy believing in a goddess with the gout. Clement makes great play with such nonsense. For a new religion has, as far as persiflage is concerned, an advantage over an old one: it has not had time itself to evolve a mythology, and his adversaries could not retort with references to St. Simeon Stylites, or to the plague spot of St. Roch, or to St. Fina who allowed a devil to throw her mother down the stairs. They could only hang their heads and assent, and when Clement derided the priests in the idol-temples for their dirt, they could not foresee that in the following century dirt would be recommended as holy by the Church. They were caught by his genial air and by his “logic”; there is nothing morose about the treatises, and even to-day they are readable, though not quite in the way that the author intended.

A solemn assembly of Greeks, held in honour of a dead serpent,
was gathering at Pytho, and Eunomus sang a funeral ode for the
reptile. Whether his song was a hymn in praise of the snake or a
lamentation over it, I cannot say; but there was a competition
and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, at the
time when the grasshoppers, warmed by the sun, were singing
under the leaves along the hills. They were singing, you see,
not to the dead serpent of Pytho, but to the all-wise God, a
spontaneous song, better than the measured strains of Eunomus. A
string breaks in the Locrian’s hands; the grasshopper settles
upon the neck of the lyre and begins to twitter there as if upon
a branch: whereupon the minstrel, by adapting his music to the
grasshopper’s lay, supplied the place of the missing string. So
it was not Eunomus that drew the grasshopper by his song, as the
legend would have it, when it set up the bronze figure at Pytho,
showing Eunomus with his lyre and his ally in the contest. No,
the grasshopper flew of its own accord, and sang of its own
accord, although the Greeks thought it to have been responsive
to music.

How in the world is it that you have given credence to worthless
legends, imagining....

and blasts of theology ensue. But how grateful one is to Clement for mentioning the grasshopper, and how probable it seems, from the way he tells the story, that he had a faint consciousness of its beauty—just as his risqué passages emanate a furtive consciousness of their riskiness. His learning is immense: he is said to allude to three hundred Greek writers of whom we should not otherwise have heard, and one gladly follows him through the back-yards of the Classical world. The results of his ramble are most fully stated in two other of his treatises, the “Rug roll” and the “Tutor.” His verdict is that, though the poetry of Hellas is false and its cults absurd or vile, yet its philosophers and grasshoppers possessed a certain measure of divine truth; some of the speculations of Plato, for instance, had been inspired by the Psalms. It is not much of a verdict in the light of modern research; but it is a moderate verdict for a Father; he spares his thunders, he does not exalt asceticism, he is never anti-social.

Till the ground if you are a husbandman; but recognize God in
your husbandry. Sail the sea, you who love sea-faring; but ever
call upon the heavenly pilot. Were you a soldier on campaign
when the knowledge of God laid hold of you? Then listen to the
commander who signals righteousness.

Here he shows his respect for the existing fabric and his hope that it may pass without catastrophe from Pagan to Christian, a hope that could have found expression only at Alexandria, where contending assertions have so often been harmonized, and whose own god, Serapis, had expressed the union of Egypt and Greece.

Looking back—it is so easy now to look back!—one can see that the hope was vain. Christianity, though she contained little that was fresh doctrinally, yet descended with a double-edged sword that hacked the ancient world to pieces. For she had declared war against two great forces—Sex and the State—and during her complicated contest with them the old order was bound to disappear. The contest had not really begun in Clement’s day. Sex disquieted him, but he did not revolt against it like his successor Origen. The State exiled him, but it had not yet put forth, as it did under Diocletian, its full claims to divinity. He lived in a period of transition, and in Alexandria. And in that curious city, which had never been young and hoped never to grow old, conciliation must have seemed more possible than elsewhere, and the graciousness of Greece not quite incompatible with the Grace of God.

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ST. ATHANASIUS