At about this time the chief controversy was as to whether Christ was of the same, or of similar substance with God the Father, this being the dispute which divided Christendom for centuries. This dispute and others not quite so metaphysical were brought to the ears of the emperor by Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, and Arius, the presbyter. The bishop had been enquiring into the belief of the presbyter, and the latter had argued against his superior and against the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son. The emperor's letter to the theologians, in this first ecclesiastical quarrel that was ever brought before a Christian monarch, is addressed to Alexander and Arius, and he therein tells them that they are raising useless questions, which it is not necessary to settle, and which, though a good exercise for the understanding, only breed ill-will, and should be kept by each man in his own breast. He regrets the religious madness which has seized all Egypt; and lastly he orders the bishop not to question the priest as to his belief, and orders the priest, if questioned, not to return an answer. But this wise letter had no weight with the Alexandrian divines. The quarrel gained in importance from being noticed by the emperor; the civil government of the country was clogged; and Constantine, after having once interfered, was persuaded to call a council of bishops to settle the Christian faith for the future. Nicaea in Bithynia was chosen as the spot most convenient for Eastern Christendom to meet in; and two hundred and fifty bishops, followed by crowds of priests, there met in council from Greece, Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, with one or two from Western Europe.

At this synod, held in the year 325, Athanasius, a young deacon in the Alexandrian church, came for the first time into notice as the champion of Alexander against Arius, who was then placed upon his trial. All the authority, eloquence, and charity of the emperor were needed to quell the tumultuous passions of the assembly. It ended its stormy labours by voting what was called the Homoousian doctrine, that Jesus was of one substance with God. They put forth to the world the celebrated creed, named, from the city in which they met, the Nicene creed, and they excommunicated Arius and his followers, who were then all banished by the emperor. The meeting had afterwards less difficulty in coming to an agreement about the true time of Easter, and in excommunicating the Jews; and all except the Egyptians returned home with a wish that the quarrel should be forgotten and forgiven.

This first attempt among the Christians at settling the true faith by putting fetters on the mind, by drawing up a creed and punishing those that disbelieved it, was but the beginning of theological difficulties. These in Egypt arose as much from the difference of blood and language of the races that inhabited the country as from their religious belief; and Constantine must soon have seen that if as a theologian he had decided right, yet as a statesman he had been helping the Egyptians against the friends of his own Greek government in Alexandria.

After a reasonable delay, Arius addressed to the emperor a letter either of explanation or apology, asserting his full belief in Christianity, explaining his faith by using the words of the Apostles' Creed, and begging to be re-admitted into the Church. The emperor, either from a readiness to forgive, or from a change of policy, or from an ignorance of the theological controversy, was satisfied with the apology, and thereupon wrote a mild conciliatory letter to Athanasius, who had in the meantime been made Bishop of Alexandria, expressing his wish that forgiveness should at all times be offered to the repentant, and ordering him to re-admit Arius to his rank in the Church. But the young Athanasius, who had gained his favour with the Egyptian clergy, and had been raised to his high seat by his zeal shown against Arius, refused to obey the commands of the emperor, alleging that it was unlawful to re-admit into the Church anybody who had once been excommunicated. Constantine could hardly be expected to listen to this excuse, or to overlook this direct refusal to obey his orders. The rebellious Athanasius was ordered into the emperor's presence at Constantinople, and soon afterwards, in 335, called before a council of bishops at Tyre, where he was deposed and banished. At the same council, in the thirtieth year of this reign, Arius was re-admitted into communion with the Church, and after a few months he was allowed to return to Alexandria, to the indignation of the popular party in that city, while Athanasius remained in banishment during the rest of the reign, as a punishment for his disobedience.

This practice of judging and condemning opinions gave power in the Church to men who would otherwise have been least entitled to weight and influence. Athanasius rose to his high rank over the heads of the elder presbyters by his fitness for the harsher duties then required of an archbishop. Theological opinions became the watchwords of two contending parties; religion lost much of its empire over the heart; and the mild spirit of Christianity gave way to angry quarrels and cruel persecutions.

Another remarkable event of this reign was the foundation of the new city of Constantinople, to which the emperor removed the seat of his government. Rome lost much by the building of the new capital, although the emperors had for some time past ceased to live in Italy; but Alexandria lost the rank which it had long held as the centre of Greek learning and Greek thought, and it felt a blow from which Rome was saved by the difference of language. The patriarch of Alexandria was no longer the head of Greek Christendom. That rank was granted to the bishop of the imperial city; many of the philosophers who hung round the palace at Constantinople would otherwise have studied and taught in the museum; and the Greeks, by whose superiority Egypt had so long been kept in subjection, gradually became the weaker party. In the opinion of the historian, as in the map of the geographer, Alexandria had formerly been a Greek state on the borders of Egypt; but since the rebellion in the reign of Diocletian it was becoming more and more an Egyptian city; and those who in religion and politics thought and felt as Egyptians soon formed the larger half of the Alexandrians. The climate of Egypt was hardly fitted for the Greek race. Their numbers never could have been kept up by births alone, and they now began to lessen as the attraction to newcomers ceased. The pure Greek names henceforth become less common; and among the monks and writers we now meet with those named after the old gods of the country.



Constantine removed an obelisk from Egypt for the ornament of his new city, and he brought down another from Heliopolis to Alexandria; but he died before the second left the country, and it was afterwards taken by his son to Rome. These obelisks were covered with hieroglyphics, as usual, and we have a translation said to be made from the latter by Hermapion, an Egyptian priest. In order to take away its pagan character from the religious ceremony with which the yearly rise of the Nile wras celebrated in Alexandria, Constantine removed the sacred cubit from the temple of Serapis to one of the Christian churches; and nothwithstanding the gloomy forebodings of the people, the Nile rose as usual, and the clergy afterwards celebrated the time of its overflow as a Christian festival.

The pagan philosophers under Constantine had but few pupils and met with but little encouragement. Alypius of Alexandria and his friend Iamblichus, however, still taught the philosophy of Ammonius and Plotinus. The only writings by Alypius now remaining are his Introduction to Music; in which he explains the notation of the fifteen modes or tones in their respective kinds of diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic. His signs are said to be Pythagorean. They are in pairs, of which one is thought to represent the note struck on the lyre, and the other the tone of the voice to be sung thereto. They thus imply accord or harmony. The same signs are found in some manuscripts written over the syllables of ancient poems; and thereby scholars, learned at once in the Greek language, in the art of deciphering signs, and in the science of music, now chant the odes of Pindar in strains not dissimilar to modern cathedral psalmody.

Sopator succeeded Iamblichus as professor of platonism in Alexandria, with the proud title of successor to Plato, For some time he enjoyed the friendship of Constantine; but, when religion made a quarrel between the friends, the philosopher was put to death by the emperor. The pagan account of the quarrel was that, when Constantine had killed his son, he applied to Sopator to be purified from his guilt; and when the platonist answered that he knew of no ceremony that could absolve a man from such a crime, the emperor applied to the Christians for baptism. This story may not be true, and the ecclesiastical historian remarks that Constantine had professed Christianity several years before the murder of his son; but then, as after his conversion he had got Sopator to consecrate his new city with a variety of pagan ceremonies, he may in the same way have asked him to absolve him from the guilt of murder.

On the death of Constantine, in 337, his three sons, without entirely dismembering the empire, divided the provinces of the Roman world into three shares. Constantine II., the eldest son, who succeeded to the throne of his father in Constantinople, and Constans, the youngest, who dwelt in Rome, divided Europe between them; while Constantius, the second son, held Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Egypt, of which possessions Antioch on the Orontes was at that time the capital. Thus Alexandria was doomed to a further fall. When governed by Rome it had still been the first of Greek cities; afterwards, when the seat of the empire was fixed at Constantinople, it became the second; but on this division of the Roman world, when the seat of government came still nearer to Egypt, and Antioch rose as the capital of the East, Alexandria fell to be the third among Greek cities. Egypt quietly received its political orders from Antioch. Its opinions also in some cases followed those of the capital, and it is curious to remark that the Alexandrian writers, when dating by the era of the creation, were now willing to consider the world ten years less old than they used, because it was so thought at Antioch. But it was not so with their religious opinions, and as long as Antioch and its emperor undertook to govern the Egyptian church there was little peace in the province.

The three emperors did not take the same side in the quarrel which under the name of religion was then unsettling the obedience of the Egyptians, and even in some degree troubling the rest of the empire. Constantius held the Arian opinions of Syria; but Constantine II. and Constans openly gave their countenance to the party of the rebellious Athanasius, who under their favour ventured to return to Alexandria, where, after an absence of two years and four months, he was received in the warmest manner by his admiring flock. But on the death of Constantine II., who was shortly afterwards killed in battle by his brother Constans, Constantius felt himself more master of his own kingdom; he deposed Athanasius, and summoned a council of bishops at Antioch to elect a new patriarch of Alexandria. Christian bishops, though they had latterly owed their ordination to the authority of their equals, had always received their bishoprics by the choice of their presbyters or of their flocks; and though they were glad to receive the support of the emperor, they were not willing to acknowledge him as their head. Hence, when the council at Antioch first elected Eusebius of AEmisa into the bishopric of Alexandria, he chose to refuse the honour which they had only a doubtful right to bestow, rather than to venture into the city in the face of his popular rival. The council then elected Gregory, whose greater courage and ambition led him to accept the office.

The council of Antioch then made some changes in the creed. A few years later, a second council met in the same place, and drew up a creed more near to what we now call the Athanasian; but it was firmly rejected by the Egyptian and Roman churches. Gregory was no sooner elected to the bishopric than he issued his commands as bishop, though, if he had the courage, he had not at the time the power to enter Alexandria. But Syrianus, the general of the Egyptian troops, was soon afterwards ordered by the emperor to place him on his episcopal throne; and he led him into the city, surrounded by the spears of five thousand soldiers, and followed by the small body of Alexandrians that after this invasion of their acknowledged rights still called themselves Arians. Gregory entered Alexandria in the evening, meaning to take his seat in the church on the next day; but the people in their zeal did not wait quietly for the dreaded morning. They ran at once to the church, and passed the night there with Athanasius in the greatest anxiety. In the morning, when Gregory arrived at the church, accompanied with the troops, he found the doors barricaded and the building full of men and women, denouncing the sacrilege, and threatening resistance. But the general gave orders that the church should be stormed, and the new bishop carried in by force of arms; and Athanasius, seeing that all resistance was useless, ordered the deacons to give out a psalm, and they all marched out at the opposite door singing. After these acts of violence on the part of the troops, and of resistance on the part of the people, the whole city was thrown into an uproar, and the prefect was hardly strong enough to carry on the government; the regular supply of grain for the poor citizens of Alexandria, and for Constantinople, was stopped; and the blame of the whole thrown upon Athanasius. He was a second time obliged to leave Egypt, and he fled to Rome, where he was warmly received by the Emperor Constans and the Roman bishop. But the zeal of the Athanasian party would not allow Gregory to keep possession of the church which he had gained only by force; they soon afterwards set fire to it and burned it to the ground, choosing that there should be no church at all rather than that it should be in the hands of the Arians; and the Arian clergy and bishops, though supported by the favour of the emperor and the troops of the prefect, were everywhere throughout Egypt driven from their churches and monasteries. During this quarrel it seems to have been felt by both parties that the choice of the people, or at least of the clergy, was necessary to make a bishop, and that Gregory had very little claim to that rank in Alexandria. Julius, the Bishop of Rome, warmly espoused the cause of Athanasius, and he wrote a letter to the Alexandrian church, praising their zeal for their bishop, and ordering them to re-admit him to his former rank, from which he had been deposed by the council of Antioch, but to which he had been restored by the Western bishops. Athanasius was also warmly supported by Constans, the emperor of the West, who at the same time wrote to his brother Constantius, begging him to replace the Alexandrian bishop, and making the additional threat that if he would not reinstate him he should be made to do so by force of arms.

Constantius, after taking the advice of his own bishops, thought it wisest to yield to the wishes or rather the commands of his brother Constans, and he wrote to Athanasius, calling him into his presence in Constantinople. But the rebellious bishop was not willing to trust himself within the reach of his offended sovereign; and it was not till after a second and a third letter, pressing him to come and promising him his safety, that he ventured within the limits of the Eastern empire. Strong in his high character for learning, firmness, and political skill, carrying with him the allegiance of the Egyptian nation, which was yielded to him much rather than to the emperor, and backed by the threats of Constans, Athanasius was at least a match for Constantius. At Constantinople the emperor and his subject, the Alexandrian bishop, made a formal treaty, by which it was agreed that, if Constantius would allow the Homoousian clergy throughout his dominions to return to their churches, Athanasius would in the same way throughout Egypt restore the Arian clergy; and upon this agreement Athanasius himself returned to Alexandria.

Among the followers of Athanasius was that important mixed race with whom the Egyptian civilisation chiefly rested, a race that may be called Koptic, but half Greek and half Egyptian in their language and religion as in their forefathers. But in feelings they were wholly opposed to the Greeks of Alexandria. Never since the last Nectanebo was conquered by the Persians, eight hundred years earlier, did the Egyptians seem so near to throwing off the foreign yoke and rising again as an independent nation. But the Greeks, who had taught them so much, had not taught them the arts of war; and the nation remained enslaved to those who could wield the sword. The return of Athanasius, however, was only the signal for a fresh uproar, and the Arians complained that Egypt was kept in a constant turmoil by his zealous activity. Nor were the Arians his only enemies. He had offended many others of his clergy by his overbearing manners, and more particularly by his following in the steps of Alexander, the late bishop, in claiming new and higher powers for the office of patriarch than had ever been yielded to the bishops of Alexandria before their spiritual rank had been changed into civil rank by the emperor's adoption of their religion. Meletius headed a strong party of bishops, priests, and deacons in opposing the new claims of the archiepiscopal see of Alexandria. His followers differed in no point of doctrine from the Athanasian party, but as they sided with the Arians they were usually called heretics.

By this time the statesmen and magistrates had gained a clear view of the change which had come over the political state of the empire, first by the spread of Christianity, and secondly by the emperor's embracing it. By supporting Christianity the emperors gave rank in the state to an organised and well-trained body, which immediately found itself in possession of all the civil power. A bishopric, which a few years before was a post of danger, was now a place of great profit, and secured to its possessor every worldly advantage of wealth, honour, and power. An archbishop in the capital, obeyed by a bishop in every city, with numerous priests and deacons under them, was usually of more weight than the prefect. While Athanasius was at the height of his popularity in Egypt, and was supported by the Emperor of the West, the Emperor Constantius was very far from being his master. But on the death of Constans, when Constantius became sovereign of the whole empire, he once more tried to make Alexandria and the Egyptian church obedient to his wishes. He was, however, still doubtful how far it was prudent to measure his strength against that of the bishop, and he chose rather to begin privately with threats before using his power openly. He first wrote word to Athanasius, as if in answer to a request from the bishop, that he was at liberty, if he wished, to visit Italy; but he sent the letter by the hands of the notary Diogenes, who added, by word of mouth, that the permission was meant for a command, and that it was the emperor's pleasure that he should immediately quit his bishopric and the province. But this underhand conduct of the emperor only showed his own weakness. Athanasius steadily refused to obey any unwritten orders, and held his bishopric for upwards of two years longer, before Constantius felt strong enough to enforce his wishes. Towards the end of that time, Syrianus, the general of the Egyptian army, to whom this delicate task was entrusted, gathered together from other parts of the province a body of five thousand chosen men, and with these he marched quietly into Alexandria, to overawe, if possible, the rebellious bishop. He gave out no reason for his conduct; but the Arians, who were in the secret, openly boasted that it would soon be their turn to possess the churches. Syrianus then sent for Athanasius, and in the presence of Maximus the prefect again delivered to him the command of Constantius, that he should quit Egypt and retire into banishment, and he threatened to carry this command into execution by the help of the troops if he met with any resistance. Athanasius, without refusing to obey, begged to be shown the emperor's orders in writing; but this reasonable request was refused. He then entreated them even to give him, in their own handwriting, an order for his banishment; but this was also refused, and the citizens, who were made acquainted with the emperor's wishes and the bishop's firmness, waited in dreadful anxiety to see whether the prefect and the general would venture to enforce their orders. The presbytery of the church and the corporation of the city went up to Syrianus in solemn procession to beg him either to show a written authority for the banishment of their bishop, or to write to Constantinople to learn the emperor's pleasure. To this request Syrianus at last yielded, and gave his word to the friends of Athanasius that he would take no further steps till the return of the messengers which he then sent to Constantinople.

But Syrianus had before received his orders, which were, if possible, to frighten Athanasius into obedience, and, if that could not be done, then to employ force, but not to expose the emperor's written commands to the danger of being successfully resisted. He therefore only waited for an opportunity of carrying them into effect; and at midnight, on the ninth of February, A.D. 356, twenty-three days after the promise had been given, Syrianus, at the head of his troops, armed for the assault, surrounded the church where Athanasius and a crowded assembly were at prayers. The doors were forcibly and suddenly broken open, the armed soldiers rushed forward to seize the bishop, and numbers of his faithful friends were slain in their efforts to save him. Athanasius, however, escaped in the tumult; but though the general was unsuccessful, the bodies of the slain and the arms of the soldiers found scattered through the church in the morning were full proofs of his unholy attempt. The friends of the bishop drew up and signed a public declaration describing the outrage, and Syrianus sent to Constantinople a counter-protest declaring that there had been no disturbance in the city.

Athanasius, with nearly the whole of the nation for his friends, easily escaped the vengeance of the emperor; and, withdrawing for a third time from public life, he passed the remainder of this reign in concealment. He did not, however, neglect the interests of his flock. He encouraged them with his letters, and even privately visited his friends in Alexandria. As the greater part of the population was eager to befriend him, he was there able to hide himself for six years. Disregarding the scandal that might arise from it, he lived in the house of a young woman, who concealed him in her chamber, and waited on him with untiring zeal. She was then in the flower of her youth, only twenty years of age; and fifty years afterwards, in the reign of Theodosius II., when the name of the archbishop ranked with those of the apostles, this woman used to boast among the monks of Alexandria that in her youth she had for six years concealed the great Athanasius.

But though the general was not wholly successful, yet the Athanasian party was for the time crushed. Sebastianus, the new prefect, was sent into Egypt with orders to seize Athanasius dead or alive, wherever he should be found within the province; and under his protection the Arian party in Alexandria again ventured to meet in public, and proceeded to choose a bishop. They elected to this high position the celebrated George of Cappadocia, a man who, while he equalled his more popular rival in learning and in ambition, fell far behind him in coolness of judgment, and in that political skill which is as much wanted in the guidance of a religious party as in the government of an empire.

George was born at Epiphania in Cilicia, and was the son of a clothier, but his ambition led him into the Church, as being at that time the fairest field for the display of talent; and he rose from one station to another till he reached the high post of Bishop of Alexandria. The fickle, irritable Alexandrians needed no such firebrand to light up the flames of discontent. George took no pains to conceal the fact that he held his bishopric by the favour of the emperor and the power of the army against the wishes of his flock. To support his authority, he opened his doors to informers of the worst description; anybody who stood in the way of his grasp at power was accused of being an enemy to the emperor. He proposed to the emperor to lay a house-tax on Alexandria, thereby to repay the expense incurred by Alexander the Great in building the city; and he made the imperial government more unpopular than it had ever been since Augustus landed in Egypt. He used the army as the means of terrifying the Homoousians into an acknowledgment of the Arian opinions. He banished fifteen bishops to the Great Oasis, besides others of lower rank. He beat, tortured, and put to death; the persecution was more cruel than any suffered from the pagans, except perhaps that in the reign of Diocletian; and thirty Egyptian bishops are said to have lost their lives while George was patriarch of Alexandria. Most of these accusations, however, are from the pens of his enemies. At this time the countries at the southern end of the Red Sea were becoming a little more known to Alexandria. Meropius, travelling in the reign of Constantine for curiosity and the sake of knowledge, had visited Auxum, the capital of the Hexumito, in Abyssinia. His companion Frumentius undertook to convert the people to Christianity and persuade them to trade with Egypt; and, as he found them willing to listen to his arguments, he came home to Alexandria to tell of his success and ask for support. Athanasius readily entered into a plan for spreading the blessings of Christianity and the power of the Alexandrian church. To increase the missionary's weight he consecrated him a bishop, and sent him back to Auxum to continue his good work. His progress, however, was somewhat checked by sectarian jealousy; for, when Athanasius was deposed by Constantius, Frumentius was recalled to receive again his orders and his opinions from the new patriarch. Constantius also sent an embassy to the Homeritse on the opposite coast of Arabia, under Theophilus, a monk and deacon in the Church. The Homerito were of Jewish blood though of gentile faith, and were readily converted, if not to Christianity, at least to friendship with the emperor. After consecrating their churches, Theophilus crossed over to the African coast, to the Hexumito, to carry on the work which Frumentius had begun. There he was equally successful in the object of his embassy. Both in trade and in religion the Hexumito, who were also of Jewish blood, were eager to be connected with the Europeans, from whom they were cut off by Arabs of a wilder race. He found also a little to the south of Auxum a settlement of Syrians, who were said to have been placed there by Alexander the Great. These tribes spoke the language called Ethiopie, a dialect of Arabic which was not used in the country which we have hitherto called Ethiopia.



The Ethiopie version of the Bible was about this time made for their use. It was translated out of the Greek from the Alexandrian copies, as the Greek version was held in such value that it was not thought necessary to look to the Hebrew original of the Old Testament. But these well-meant efforts did little at the time towards making the Hexumitae Christians. Distance and the Blemmyes checked their intercourse with Alexandria. It was not till two hundred years later that they could be said in the slightest sense to be converted to Christianity.

Though the origin of monastic life has sometimes been claimed for the Essenes on the shores of the Dead Sea, yet it was in Egypt that it was framed into a system, and became the model for the Christian world. It took its rise in the serious and gloomy views of religion which always formed part of the Egyptian polytheism, and which the Greeks remarked as very unlike their own gay and tasteful modes of worship, and which were readily engrafted by the Egyptian converts into their own Christian belief. In the reigns of Constantine and his sons, hundreds of Christians, both men and women, quitting the pleasures and trials of the busy world, withdrew one by one into the Egyptian desert, where the sands are as boundless as the ocean, where the sunshine is less cheerful than darkness, to spend their lonely days and watchful nights in religious meditation and in prayer. They were led by a gloomy view of their duty towards God, and by a want of fellow-feeling for their neighbour; and they seemed to think that pain and misery in this world would save them from punishment hereafter. The lives of many of these Fathers of the Desert were written by the Christians who lived at the same time; but a full account of the miracles which were said to have been worked in their favour, or by their means, would now only call forth a smile of pity, or perhaps even of ridicule.

"Prosperity and peace," says Gibbon, "introduced the distinction of the vulgar and the ascetic Christians. The loose and imperfect practice of religion satisfied the conscience of the multitude. The prince or magistrate, soldier or merchant, reconciled their fervent zeal, and implicit faith, with the exercise of their profession, the pursuit of their interest, and the indulgence of their passions; but the ascetics, who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the gospel, were inspired by the severe enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and the pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage, chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness. The ascetics fled from a profane and degenerate world to perpetual solitude, or religious society. Like the first Christians of Jerusalem, they resigned the use, or the property, of their temporal possessions; established regular communities of the same sex and a similar disposition, and assumed the names of hermits, monks, or anchorites, expressive of their lonely retreat in a natural or artificial desert. They soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised, and the loudest applause was bestowed on this divine philosophy, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools. The monks might indeed contend with the Stoics in the contempt of fortune, of pain, and of death; the Pythagorean silence and submission were revived in their servile discipline; and they disdained, as firmly as the Cynics themselves, all the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this divine philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model. They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, who had retired to the desert; and they restored the devout and contemplative life, which had been instituted by the Essenians, in Palestine and Egypt. The philosophic eye of Pliny had surveyed with astonishment a solitary people who dwelt among the palm trees near the Dead Sea; who subsisted without money, who were propagated without women, and who derived from the disgust and repentance of mankind a perpetual supply of voluntary associates. Antony, an illiterate youth of the lower part of The-baid, distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, and executed his monastic penance with original and intrepid fanaticism. After a long and painful novitiate among the tombs and in a ruined tower, he boldly advanced into the desert three days' journey to the eastward of the Nile; discovered a lonely spot, which possessed the advantages of shade and water, and fixed his last residence on Mount Colzim near the Red Sea, where an ancient monastery still preserves the name and memory of the saint. The curious devotion of the Christians pursued him to the desert; and, when he was obliged to appear at Alexandria, in the face of mankind, he supported his fame with discretion and dignity. He enjoyed the friendship of Athanasius, whose doctrine he approved; and the Egyptian peasant respectfully declined a respectful invitation from the Emperor Constantine. The venerable patriarch (for Antony attained the age of 105 years) beheld the numerous progeny which had been formed by his example and his lessons. The prolific colonies of monks multiplied on the sands of Libya, upon the rocks of the Thebaid, and in the cities of the Nile. To the south of Alexandria, the mountain and adjacent desert of Nitria were peopled by five thousand anchorites; and the traveller may still investigate the ruins of fifty monasteries, which were planted in that barren soil by the disciples of Antony. In the Upper Thebaid, the vacant island of Tabenna was occupied by Pachomius and fourteen hundred of his brethren. That holy abbot successively founded nine monasteries of men and one of women; and the festival of Easter sometimes collected fifty thousand religious persons, who followed his angelic rules of discipline. The stately and populous city of Oxyrrhynchos, the seat of Christian orthodoxy, had devoted the temples, the public edifices, and even the ramparts, to pious and charitable uses, and the bishop, who might preach in twelve churches, computed ten thousand females and twenty thousand males of the monastic profession."

The monks borrowed many of their customs from the old Egyptian priests, such as shaving the head; and Athanasius in his charge to them orders them not to adopt the tonsure on the head, nor to shave the beard. He forbids their employing magic or incantations to assist their prayers. He endeavours to stop their emulation in fasting, and orders those whose strength of body enabled them to fast longest not to boast of it. But he orders them not even to speak to a woman, and wishes them not to bathe, as being an immodest act. The early Christians, as being a sect of Jews, had followed many Jewish customs, such as observing the Sabbath as well as the Lord's day; but latterly the line between the two religions had been growing wider, and Athanasius orders the monks not to keep holy the Jewish Sabbath. After a few years their religious duties were clearly laid down for them in several well-drawn codes.

One of the earliest of these ascetics was Amnion, who on the morning of his marriage is said to have persuaded his young wife of the superior holiness of a single life, and to have agreed with her that they should devote themselves apart to the honour of God in the desert. But, in thus avoiding the pleasures, the duties, and the temptations of the world, Amnion lost many of the virtues and even the decencies of society; he never washed himself, or changed his garments, because he thought it wrong for a religious man even to see himself undressed; and when he had occasion to cross a canal, his biographer tells us that attendant angels carried him over the water in their arms, lest, while keeping his vows, he should be troubled by wet clothes.

In the religious controversies, whether pagan or Christian, Rome had often looked to Egypt for its opinions; Constans, when wanting copies of the Greek Scriptures for Rome, had lately sent to Alexandria, and had received the approved text from Athanasius. The two countries held nearly the same opinions and had the same dislike of the Greeks; so when Jerome visited Egypt he found the Church holding, he said, the true Roman faith as taught by the apostles. Under Didymus, who was then the head of the catechetical school, Jerome pursued his studies, having the same religious opinions with the Egyptian, and the same dislike to Arianism. But no dread of heresy stopped Jerome in his search for knowledge and for books. He obtained copies of the whole of Origen's works, and read them with the greatest admiration. It is true that he finds fault with many of his opinions; but no admirer of Origen could speak in higher terms of praise of his virtues and his learning, of the qualities of his head and of his heart, than Jerome uses while he timidly pretends to think that he has done wrong in reading his works.

At this time—the end of the eleventh century after the building of the city—the emperor himself did not refuse to mark on his Roman coins the happy renewal of the years by the old Egyptian astrological fable of the return of the phoenix.

From the treatise of Julius Fermicus against the pagan superstitions, it would seem that the sacred animals of the Egyptians were no longer kept in the several cities in which they used to be worshipped, and that many of the old gods had been gradually dropped from the mythology, which was then chiefly confined to the worship of Isis and Osiris. The great week of the year was the feast of Isis, when the priests joined the goddess in her grief for the loss of the good Osiris, who had been killed through jealousy by the wicked Typhon. The priests shaved their heads, beat their breasts, tore the skin off their arms, and opened up the old wounds of former years, in grief for the death of Osiris, and in honour of the widowed Isis. The river Nile was also still worshipped for the blessings which it scatters along its banks, but we hear no more of Amon-Ra, Chem, Horus, Aroeris, and the other gods of the Thebaid, whose worship ceased with the fall of that part of the country.



But great changes often take place with very little improvement; the fall of idolatry only made way for the rise of magic and astrology. Abydos in Upper Egypt had latterly gained great renown for the temple of Bisu, whose oracle was much consulted, not only by the Egyptians but by Greek strangers, and by others who sent their questions in writing. Some of these letters on parchment had been taken from the temple by informers, and carried to the emperor, whose ears were never deaf to a charge against the pagans. On this accusation numbers of all ranks were dragged out of Egypt, to be tried and punished in Syria, with torture and forfeiture of goods. Such indeed was the nation's belief in these oracles and prophecies that it gave to the priests a greater power than it was safe to trust them with. By prophesying that a man was to be an emperor, they could make him a traitor, and perhaps raise a village in rebellion. As the devotedness of their followers made it dangerous for the magistrates to punish the mischief-makers, they had no choice but to punish those who consulted them. Without forbidding the divine oracle to answer, they forbade anybody to question it. Parnasius, who had been a prefect of Egypt, a man of spotless character, was banished for thus illegally seeking a knowledge of the future; and Demetrius Cythras, an aged philosopher, was put to the rack on a charge of having sacrificed to the god, and only released because he persisted through his tortures in asserting that he sacrificed in gratitude and not from a wish thus to learn his future fate.

In the falling state of the empire the towns and villages of Egypt found their rulers too weak either to guard them or to tyrannise over them, and they sometimes formed themselves into small societies, and took means for their own defence. The law had so far allowed this as in some cases to grant a corporate constitution to a city. But in other cases a city kept in its pay a courtier or government servant powerful enough to guard it against the extortions of the provincial tax-gatherer, or would put itself under the patronage of a neighbour rich enough and strong enough to guard it. This, however, could not be allowed, even if not used as the means of throwing off the authority of the provincial government; and accordingly at this time we begin to find laws against the new crime of patronage. These associations gave a place of refuge to criminals, they stopped the worshipper in his way to the temple, and the tax-gatherer in collecting the tribute. But new laws have little weight when there is no power to enforce them, and the orders from Constantinople were little heeded in Upper Egypt.

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 emperor's 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 sun's 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 Pompey's 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 Becket's 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-sinoite 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 tempter's 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 soldier's 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 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 Caesar. 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 Ptolemy's 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 Theon's 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 Origen's 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 city's 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 AEgina. 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 Caesar's 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.

Arianism took refuge from the Egyptians within the camps of the Greek soldiers. One church was dedicated to the honour of St. George, the late bishop, within the lofty towers of the citadel of Babylon, which was the strongest fortress in Egypt; and a second in the city of Ptolemais, where a garrison was stationed to collect the toll of the Thebaid. St. George became a favourite saint with the Greeks in Egypt, and in those spots where the Greek soldiers were masters of the churches this Arian and unpopular bishop was often painted on the walls riding triumphantly on horseback and slaying the dragon of Athanasian error. On the other hand, in Alexandria, where his rival's politics and opinions held the upper hand, the monastery of St. Athanasius was built in the most public spot in the city, probably that formerly held by the Soma or royal burial-place; and in Thebes a cathedral church was dedicated to St. Athanasius within the great courtyard of Medinet-Abu, where the small and paltry Greek columns are in strange contrast to the grand architecture of Ramses III. which surrounds them.

In former reigns the Alexandrians had been in the habit of sending embassies to Constantinople to complain of tyranny or misgovernment, and to beg for a redress of grievances, when they thought that justice could be there obtained when it was refused in Alexandria. But this practice was stopped by Theodosius, who made a law that the Alexandrians should never send an embassy to Constantinople, unless it were agreed to by a decree of the town council, and had the approbation of the prefect. The weak and idle emperor would allow no appeal from the tyranny of his own governor.

We may pass over the banishment of John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, as having less to do with the history of Egypt, though, as in the cases of Arius and Nestorius, the chief mover of the attack upon him was a bishop of Alexandria, who accused him of heresy, because he did not come up to the Egyptian standard of orthodoxy. But among the bishops who were deposed with Chrysostom was Palladius of Galatia, who was sent a prisoner to Syene. As soon as he was released from his bonds, instead of being cast down by his misfortunes, he proposed to take advantage of the place of his banishment, and he set forward on his travels through Ethiopia for India, in search of the wisdom of the Brahmins. He arrived in safety at Adule, the port on the Red Sea in latitude 15 deg., now known as Zula, where he made acquaintance with Moses, the bishop of that city, and persuaded him to join him in his distant and difficult voyage.