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 bishop’s 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.