During the reign of Commodus, Pescennius Niger had been at the head of the legion that was employed in Upper Egypt in stopping the inroads of their troublesome neighbours, who already sometimes bore the name of Saracens. He was a hardy soldier, and strict in his discipline, while he shared the labours of the field and of the camp with the men under him. He would not allow them the use of wine; and once, when the troops that guarded the frontier at Syênê (Aswan) sent to ask for it, he bluntly answered, “You have got the Nile to drink, and cannot possibly want more.” Once, when a cohort had been routed by the Saracens, the men complained that they could not fight without wine; but he would not relax in his discipline. “Those who have just now beaten you,” said Niger, “drink nothing but water.” He gained the love and thanks of the people of Upper Egypt by thus bridling the lawlessness of the troops; and they gave him his statue cut in black basalt, in allusion to his name Niger. This statue was placed in his Roman villa.
But on the death of Pertinax, when Septimus Severus declared himself emperor in Pannonia, Niger, who was then in the province of Syria, did the same. Egypt and the Egyptian legions readily and heartily joined his party, which made it unnecessary for him to stay in that part of the empire; so he marched upon Greece, Thrace, and Macedonia. But there, after a few months, he was met by the army of his rival, who also sent a second army into Egypt; and he was defeated and slain at Cyzicus in Mysia, after having been acknowledged as emperor in Egypt and Syria for perhaps a year and a few months.
We find no Alexandrian coins of Niger, although we cannot allow a shorter space of time to his reign than one whole year, together with a few months of the preceding and following years. Within that time Severus had to march upon Rome against his first rival, Julian, to punish the praetorian guards, and afterwards to conquer Niger.
After the death of his rival, when Severus was the undisputed master of the empire, and was no longer wanted in the other provinces, he found leisure, in A.D. 196, to visit Egypt; and, like other active-minded travellers, he examined the pyramids of Memphis and the temples at Thebes, and laughed at the worship of Serapis and the Egyptian animals. His visit to Alexandria wras marked by many new laws. Now that the Greeks of that city, crushed beneath two centuries of foreign rule, had lost any remains of courage or of pride that could make them feared by their Roman master, he relaxed part of the strict policy of Augustus. He gave them a senate and a municipal form of government, a privilege that had hitherto been refused in distrust to that great city, though freely granted in other provinces where rebellion was less dreaded. He also ornamented the city with a temple to Rhea, and with a public bath, which was named after himself the Bath of Severus.
Severus made a law, says the pagan historian, forbidding anybody, under a severe punishment, from becoming Jew or Christian. But he who gives the blow is likely to speak of it more lightly than he who smarts under it; and we learn from the historian of the Church that, in the tenth year of this reign, the Christians suffered persecution from their governors and their fellow-citizens. Among others who then lost their lives for their religion was Leonides, the father of Origen. He left seven orphan children, of whom the eldest, that justly celebrated writer, was only sixteen years old, but was already deeply read in the Scriptures, and in the great writers of Greece. As the property of Leonides was forfeited, his children were left in poverty; but the young Origen was adopted by a wealthy lady, zealous for the new religion, by whose help he was enabled to continue his studies under Clemens. In order to read the Old Testament in the original, he made himself master of Hebrew, which was a study then very unusual among the Greeks, whether Jews or Christians.
In this persecution of the Church all public worship was forbidden to the Christians; and Tertullian of Carthage eloquently complains that, while the emperor allowed the Egyptians to worship cows, goats, or crocodiles, or indeed any animal they chose, he only punished those that bowed down before the Creator and Governor of the world. Of course, at this time of trouble the catechetical school was broken up and scattered, so that there was no public teaching of Christianity in Alexandria. But Origen ventured to do that privately which was forbidden to be done openly; and, when the storm had blown over, Demetrius, the bishop, appointed him to that office at the head of the school which he had already so bravely taken upon himself in the hour of danger. Origen could boast of several pupils who added their names to the noble list of martyrs who lost their lives for Christianity, among whom the best known was Plutarch, the brother of Heraclas. Origen afterwards removed for a time to Palestine, and fell under the displeasure of his own bishop for being there ordained a presbyter.