Pappus of Alexandria

“ After the exploits of Athanasius the Patriarchate of Alexandria became very powerful. In theory Egypt belonged to the Emperor, who sent a Prefect and a garrison from Constantinople; in practise it was ruled by the Patriarch and his army of monks. The monks had not been important so long as each lived alone, but by the 4th cent., they had gathered into formidable communities, whence they would occasionally make raids on civilisation like the Bedouins to-day. One of these communities was only nine miles from Alexandria (the “Ennaton”) , others lay further west, in the Mariout desert ”

“ Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian capital in the number of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring commercial spirit, in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and art: in the citizens there was a lively sense of their own national importance, and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any rate a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their street riots regularly and heartily. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But he had no spiritual authority over the Egyptians; to them he was an odious Greek official, disguised as a priest. (ii) The Monophysite or Coptic Patriarch, who opposed Chalcedon—a regular Egyptian monk, poor, bigoted and popular. Each of these Patriarchs claimed to represent St. Mark and the only true church; each of them is represented by a Patriarch in Alexandria to-day. Now and then an Emperor tried to heal the schism, and made concessions to the Egyptian faith. ”

“ Keeping the Greek religion themselves, they were favourably disposed towards the creeds of other nationalities under their dominion. Thanks to this broad-mindedness and tolerance which had become traditional in the Lagidas family, and which has only rarely been imitated—to the detriment of civilisation—in the history of European dynasties, Oriental and Hellenic culture could flourish side by side. This benign government attracted many scholars, scientists, poets, and philosophers. Alexandria became the intellectual metropolis of the world ”

“ This was very unlike Ptolemy, who was a wise, clear-headed man, with much of Alexander’s spirit of teaching and improving people under him, and who ruled so as to make himself much beloved in Egypt, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Palestine. The new city of Alexandria was his capital, and under him and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus it grew to be a great merchant city, and also a school of art, science, and philosophy almost as famous as Athens, and with a library containing all the chief books in the world, including the Old Testament. ”

“ In Nile water he finds every virtue, and does not forget dark paint for the ladies’ eyebrows, and Cleopatra-wash for the face.
Anastasius, the next emperor, succeeding in 491, followed the wise policy which Zeno had entered upon in the latter years of his reign, and he strictly adhered to the terms of the peace-making edict. The four patriarchs of Alexandria who were chosen during this reign, John, a second John, Dioscorus, and Timotheus, were all of the Jacobite faith; and the Egyptians readily believed that the emperor was of the same opinion. ”

“ Like other kings who have bought the praises of poets, orators, and historians, they may have misled the talents which they wished to guide, and have smothered the fire which they seemed to foster; but, in rewarding the industry of the mathematicians and anatomists, of the critics, commentators, and compilers, they seem to have been highly successful. It is true that Alexandria never sent forth works with the high tone of philosophy, the lofty moral aim and the pure taste which mark the writings of Greece in its best ages, and which ennoble the mind and mend the heart ”

“ The Copts are Monophysites—i.e. believe that after the Incarnation the Divine and the Human in Christ were united into a single nature. (p. 76) . This severs them from the rest of Christendom. Historically the Patriarchate is the opponent of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, from whom it split at the Council of Chalcedon, and it claims to represent Egyptian Christianity. In 960 the Patriarch went to reside at Cairo, and the custom has continued, though the title of “Patriarch of Alexandria” was retained: Besides his powers in Egypt, the Patriarch consecrates the Metropolitan of Abyssinia. ”

“ The trade down the Nile was larger than it had ever been before; the coasting trade on the Mediterranean was new; the people were rich and happy; justice was administered to the Egyptians according to their own laws, and to the Greeks of Alexandria according to the Macedonian laws: the navy commanded the whole of the eastern half of the Mediterranean; the schools and library had risen to a great height upon the wise plans of Ptolemy Soter; in every point of view Alexandria was the chief city in the world. ”

“ Marc Antony gave the whole collection of Pergamus (200,000 volumes) to Cleopatra, as the foundation of the new library of Alexandria. It was kept in apartments of the great temple of Serapis, which was broken down in A.D. 389 by Theophilus, archbishop of Alexandria, “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” ”

“ Eusebius, afterwards Bishop of Laodicea, was without the trenches trying to lessen the cruelties of the siege; and Anatolius, the Christian peripatetic, was within the walls, endeavouring to persuade the rebels to surrender. Gallienus in gratitude to his general would have granted him the honour of a proconsular triumph, to dazzle the eyes of the Alexandrians; but the policy of Augustus was not wholly forgotten, and the emperor was reminded by the priests that it was unlawful for the consular fasces to enter Alexandria. ”

“ Starting with the heroic figure of Alexander the Great, it inspects the dynasty of the Ptolemies, and in particular the career of the last of them, Cleopatra; an account of Ptolemaic literature and science follows, and closes this splendid period, to which I have given the title of “Greco-Egyptian.” The second period, called “Christian”, begins with the rule of Rome, and traces the fortunes of Christianity, first as a persecuted and then as a persecuting power: all is lost in 641, when the Patriarch Cyrus betrays Alexandria to the Arabs. ”

“ It is natural that so remote a community should lose touch with the theological niceties of the capital, and in 399 the Patriarch Theophilus was obliged to rebuke the monks for minimising the divine element in the Second Person. Their reply was startling. They crossed the desert, stormed Alexandria, and made the Patriarch apologise. A few years later he led an army into the Wady to punish them, but by now, oddly enough, they had veered to the opposite error; they minimised the human element. The truth is they represented native Egypt, the Patriarch the Hellenising coast. ”

“ The citizens flew to arms, and day after day was the battle fought in the streets of Alexandria between two parties, neither of whom was strong enough, even if successful, to have any weight in settling the fate of the Roman empire. Marius Secundus lost his life in the struggle. The prefect Basilianus fled to Italy to escape from his own soldiers; and the province of Egypt then followed the example of the rest of the East in acknowledging the new emperor. ”

“ It is not certain that even the great library at Pergamus, begun nearly half a century after that of Alexandria, had any such initiatory agent as Demetrius Phalereus, able as well as willing to go to the fountain-head of Platonism at Athens: nor could the kings of Pergamus claim aid from Alexandria, with which they were in hostile rivalry, and from which they were even forbidden (so we hear) to purchase papyrus. ”

“ The true reason was economic. He wanted to keep the Egyptian corn supply in his own hands, and thus control the hungry populace of Rome. Egypt, unlike the other Roman provinces, became a private appanage of the Emperor, who himself appointed the Prefect who governed it, and Alexandria turned into a vast imperial granary where the tribute, collected in kind from the cultivators, was stored for transhipment. It was an age of exploitation. Octavian posed locally as the divine successor of the Ptolemies, and appears among hieroglyphs at Dendyra and Philae. ”

“ It took place during the reign of the Emperor Heraclius, and we must begin by glancing at his curious career.
53Heraclius was an able and sensitive man—very sensitive, very much in the grip of his own moods. Sometimes he appears as a hero, a great administrator; sometimes as an apathetic recluse. He won his empire (610) by the sword; then the reaction came and he allowed the Persians to occupy Syria and Egypt almost without striking a blow. Alexandria fell by treachery. She was safe on the seaward side, for the Persians had no fleet, and her immense walls made her impregnable by land ”

“ Pride, avarice, idleness, anger, and envy are its dearly beloved progeny. I have seen this in Alexandria; I have seen rich men carried away by the vice of lust, which, like a river with a turbid flood, swept them into the gulf of bitterness."
The abbots Ephrem and Serapion, being informed of his strange proceeding, wished to behold him with their own eyes. Seeing from afar, on the river, the triangular sail which was bringing them to him, Paphnutius could not prevent himself from thinking that God had made him an example to all solitary monks. ”

“ Finding that the ancient capitals of the country—Thebes, Sais, and even Memphis itself—occupied positions which were no longer suited to the exigencies of the times, he founded opposite to the island of Pharos, in the township of Eakotis, a city to which he gave his own name. The rapid growth of the prosperity of Alexandria showed how happy the founder had been in the choice of its site: in less than half a century from the date of its foundation, it had eclipsed all the other capitals of the Eastern Mediterranean, and had become the centre of African Hellenism. ”

“ Coins are not seldom found that tell the story of these occupations. Those bearing the head of Ptolemy Physcon, Euergetes VII., found at Paphos and undoubtedly struck there, witness the residence on the island of that licentious and literary tyrant, whom a popular outburst had banished from Alexandria. Another with the head of Vespasian, and on the obverse an outline of the temple of Venus at Paphos, attests the Roman hospitality to the gods and religious rites of all their conquered provinces. ”

“ Instead of trying to govern against the will of the people, to thwart or overlook their wishes and feelings, his utmost aim was to guide them, and to make Alexandria a more agreeable place of settlement than the cities of Asia Minor and Syria, for the thousands who were then pouring out of Greece on the check given to its trading industry by the overthrow of its freedom. Though every thinking man might have seen that the new government, when it gained shape and strength, would be a military despotism ”

“ When, after the three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of the Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents and readings with the true odium gammaticum, and kings plunged deeper and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty, till the flood came, and swept them all away. Cleopatra, the Helen of Egypt, betrayed her country to the Roman ”

“ 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. ”

“ He governed Egypt during his short reign with great vigour. He led his army through the Thebaid, and drove back the barbarians with a courage and activity which had latterly been uncommon in the Egyptian army. Alexandria then sent no tribute to Rome. “Well! cannot we live without Egyptian linen?” was the forced joke of Gallienus, when the Romans were in alarm at the loss of the usual supply of grain. But Æmilianus was soon beaten by Theodotus, the general of Gallienus, who besieged him in the strong quarter of Alexandria called the Bruchium, and then took him prisoner and strangled him. ”

“ The inferior officers must have fulfilled their duties more faithfully than their superiors or the whole land would have been plunged in anarchy and destruction. The laws were administered, industry and commerce flourished, and Alexandria continued to be a large, populous and busy city, full of life and animation and adorned with many magnificent buildings. The Pharos steadily cast its beneficent light across the waters to be a guide to mariners; the Temple of Serapis, on its high platform, called attention to the worship of the gods ”