Christianity
Alexandria
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 28 October 1999
The Library of Alexandria
The workshop in which religions were modelled was Alexandria in Egypt, the great city founded by the world’s conqueror, Alexander. Alexandria was the focal center of culture, knowledge, religious speculation and propagandism. It became the emporium for religion’s dogmas throughout the East and a place of resort for the disciples of nearly every system of religious faith then existing.
The library of Alexandria was the most famous library of classical antiquity. It was part of the school at Alexandria called the Museum (Greek, mouseion). The Alexandrian Museum, a temple devoted to the Muses, with its library, was a place for scholars from different cultures to meet and exchange learning and a repository for the knowledge of both East and West Curiously, while scholars agree on the Museum’s uniqueness and value, no substantial account of it survives the advent of Christian state power. The museum and library survived for many centuries but were partly destroyed in the civil war that occurred under the Roman Emperor Aurelian in the late 3rd century AD. Christians in 391 AD destroyed the rest including the library in the Serapeum which had hitherto been relatively unscathed.
The Alexandrian museum and library were founded and maintained by the long succession of the Ptolemies in Egypt from the beginning of the 3rd century BC. After Ptolemy I Soter, one of Alexander’s generals, made himself Pharaoh of Egypt, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalereus he set up a shrine devoted to the Muses—the Museum of Alexandria. This was not the first such temple dedicated to the divine patrons of arts and sciences—shrines of the Muses, besides being cult centres were also centres of festivals, literary societies and literary competitions—but coming only half a century after Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Zeno’s Stoa and the school of Epicurus, and situated in a wealthy cosmopolitan centre of international trade, the conditions were ready for it to thrive.
Demetrius had been a student of Aristotle along with Theophrastus and Alexander the Great. Theophrastus turned down the Pharaoh Ptolemy’s invitation in 297 BC to tutor his heir, and instead recommended Demetrius, who had recently been exiled from Athens. Demetrius had been tyrant of Athens for ten years, having been helped into power by Alexander’s successor Cassander, but had been driven out when they disagreed. The Alexandrian school was modelled on the Lyceum devoted to the studies of Aristotle in Athens, which in turn had been founded by Theophrastus modelled on Plato’s Academy.
A letter dated about 180-145 BC first mentions the library of Alexandria. The author, one Aristeas, a Jewish scholar is relating—about a century later—a romanticised account of the translation into Greek of the Jewish scriptures. Aristeas writes that Demetrius recommended Ptolemy Soter to gather a collection of books on kingship and ruling, like Plato’s philosopher kings, and furthermore to gather books of all the world’s people that he might better understand subjects and trade partners.
So, Ptolemy gave Demetrius the jobs of gathering extant books and scrolls and supervising the translation of the books of all nations into Greek. The translation of the Jewish scriptures began it and, at Demetrius’ suggestion, Ptolemy hired and housed 72 rabbis for the project. How far the ideal of an international library—incorporating not only all Greek literature but also translations into Greek from the other languages of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and India—was realized is not known. The library was in the main Greek, the only translation recorded being the Septuagint, but the whole absence of preserved information smacks of Christian censorship, and it is hard to believe that the scholars only ever were commisioned to translate the Jewish scriptures, although Jews and Christians like to believe it was God’s will it was so!
At the time of Demetrius, Greek libraries were usually collections of manuscripts by private individuals, such as Aristotle’s library of his own and other works. Egypt’s temples often had shelves containing an assortment of religious and official texts, as did Museums in the Greek world. It was Ptolemy I’s great ambition to possess all known world literature that went beyond these idiosyncratic collections to form a true library.
Ptolemy III wrote a letter ”to all the world’s sovereigns” asking to borrow their books. When Athens lent him the texts of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, he had them copied, returned the copies, and kept the originals. Supposedly, all ships that stopped in the port of Alexandria were searched for books which were given them same treatment, thus the term ”ship libraries” for the collection housed in the Museum. This unorthodox procedure did at least inspire the first systematic work in emendation and collation of classical texts without which none of the authors would have survived.
In about 235 BC, Ptolemy III also opened a second library, begun by his father, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, in the Temple of Serapis, the Serapeum. Serapis was a syncretical, Yehouah-like, universal god invented by the Ptolemies to help unify Greeks and their subject peoples. Serapis was a Lord of all—of heaven, earth and the dead—a synthesis of Zeus, Pluto, Osiris and the Apis bull. This new library, was in the Rhakotis or Egyptian sector. Copies of many of the Museum’s scrolls were made for it and it was open to everyone not just scholars. The Serapeum was designed to the same plan as the Museum. So, the library of Alexandria was really two—or later—even more libraries.
Archaeologists have found the remains of the Serapeum but have found no traces of the Museum. Old sources suggest the Museum was close to or perhaps part of the royal palace, whose grounds were in the Brucheium, the Greek sector of the city in the north east quarter. Most historians believe the library was in the shrine and not in a separate building, so the library was in the Museum. It was surrounded by courts, gardens, and a zoological park containing exotic animals. It had lecture halls, laboratories, observatories, living quarters, colonnades for scholars to wander along deep in thought or discussion, the gardens, the zoo and the shrine itself. According to Strabo, at its heart was a Great Hall and a circular domed dining hall with an observatory in its upper terrace. Classrooms surrounded it.
The Pharaoh appointed a priest as the administrator of the Museum and a librarian responsible for the scrolls. Both the museum and the library were organized in faculties, each with a presiding priest, and the salaries of the staff were paid by the Egyptian royal household. Later, according to an early Roman papyrus, they were paid from public funds. Most of the western world’s discoveries were recorded and debated there for the next 500 years.
Ptolemy Philadelphus invited scholars to the Museum to observe and study maths, geometry, medicine and astronomy, housing and funding them in the Brucheium, and continuing to assemble the library. Thirty to a hundred scholars lived permanently in the complex, researching, measuring, lecturing, publishing, collecting and editing Greek literature, criticising it and analysing its grammar. The library’s editorial program was to publish an Alexandrian canon of Greek poets. They divided works into ”books”, probably to suit the standard length of rolls, and introducted rules of punctuation and accentuation. They also translated Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Jewish, Indian, and other works. The city drew Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, and Jews into a unique and often uneasy coexistence.
Of course, there were many more scholars in Alexandria than those who were funded officially in the Museum. Many sought admission but were not accepted and became bitter about those who had their ”tenure”. A scathing Phlius of Timon wrote:
In the polyglot land of Egypt many now find pasturage as endowed scribblers, endlessly quarrelling in the Muses’ birdcage.
The physical shelves of the library consisted of pigeonholes or racks for the papyrus scrolls, the best of which were wrapped in linen or leather jackets. Parchment—vellum—was later used. In Roman times, manuscripts started to be written in codex (book) form, and began to be stored in wooden chests called armaria. The librarians housed new chests and shelves of papyri in the groups in which they were acquired, but the Alexandrians wanted to keep track of their holdings by a subject catalogue or bibliography. Its compilation was entrusted to Callimachus. The subject catalogue of the library’s holdings was called the Pinakes or Tables. Though now lost, it survived into the Byzantine period as a standard reference work of Greek literature. It followed Aristotle’s divisions of philosophy into the subdivisions of the observational and deductive sciences.
John Tzetzes records several centuries later that Callimachus cataloged 400,000 ”mixed” scrolls (probably those that contained more than one chapter, work, or even author, and 90,000 ”unmixed”, plus an additional 42,000 in the Serapeum. But it was still not comprehensive. All together, the Alexandrian libraries might have had over 700,000 scrolls in the late Ptolemaic period.
Notable Alexandrians and their Achievements
Demetrius of Phalereus, though he was never appointed a librarian, invited the scholar Euclid, whose Elements are well-known to be the foundation of geometry for many centuries, to Alexandria. Euclid’s successors, notably Apollonius of the second century BC, carried on his research in conics, as did Hipparchus in the second century AD. Alexandrians compiled and set down many of the geometric principles of earlier Greek mathematicians and also had access to Babylonian and Egyptian geometrical knowledge. This is one of the subjects in which the Museum excelled, producing its share of great geometers, right from its inception.
The first recorded librarian was Zenodotus of Ephesus, holding that post from the end of Ptolemy Soter’s reign until 245 BC. His successor was Callimachus of Cyrene, perhaps Alexandria’s most famous librarian. Apollonius of Rhodes, his younger rival and the writer of an epic, Argonautica, seems to have been Callimachus’ replacement.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Stoic geographer and mathematician who invented his ”sieve”, a method for finding new prime numbers, succeeded him in 235 BC. Eratosthenes compiled a catalogue of 44 constellations complete with background myths, as well as a list of 475 fixed stars. He calculated the circumference of the earth to within one per cent based on the measured distance from Aswan to Alexandria and the fraction of the whole arc determined by differing shadow-lengths at noon in those two locations. He further suggested that the seas were connected, that Africa might be circumnavigated, and that India could be reached by sailing westward from Spain. Finally, probably drawing on Egyptian and Near Eastern observations, he deduced the length of the year to 365 1/4 days and first suggested the idea of adding a leap day every four years.
Hipparchus of Bithynia, during the reign of Ptolemy VII, was credited with inventing longitude and latitude, importing the 360-degree circular system from Babylonia, calculating the length of a year within six minutes accuracy, amassing a sky-chart of constellations and stars, and speculated that stars might have both births and deaths. A fellow Museum scholar, the Stoic Cleanthus, accused him of blatant impiety. Hipparchus discovered and measured the procession of the equinoxes, the size and trajectory of the sun, and the moon’s path. 300 years later Ptolemy worked out mathematically his elegant system of epicycles to support the geocentric, Aristotelian view, and wrote a treatise on astrology, both of which were to become the medieval paradigm.
In 195 BC, Aristophanes, a Homeric scholar not the comic playwright, took up the position of librarian and updated Callimachus’ Pinakes. The last recorded librarian was Aristarchus of Samothrace, the astronomer. He applied Alexandrian trigonometry to estimate the distances and sizes of the sun and moon, and also postulated a heliocentric universe. He took up the position of librarian in 180 BC and was driven out during dynastic struggles among the Ptolemies. While the library and Museum persisted for many centuries afterwards, from that time onward scholars are simply recorded as Alexandrian, and no librarians are mentioned by name.
Archimedes was one of the early Alexandria-affiliated scholars to apply geometers’ and astronomers’ theories of motion to mechanical devices. Among his discoveries were the lever and—as an extension of the same principle—the Archimedes screw, a handcranked device for lifting water. He also figures in the tale of the scientist arising from his tub with the cry of “eureka” after discovering that water is displaced by physical objects immersed in it. Archimedes is credited with the discovery of “pi”.
Hydraulics was an Alexandria-born science which was the principle behind Hero’s Pneumatics, a long work detailing many machines and “robots” simulating human actions. The distinction between practical and fanciful probably did not occur to Hero in his thought-experiments, which included statues that poured libations, mixed drinks, drank, and sang (via compressed air). He also invented a windmill-driven pipe organ, a steam boiler which was later adapted for Roman baths, a self-trimming lamp, and the candelaria, in which the heat of candle-flames caused a hoop from which were suspended small figures to spin.
The study of anatomy, tracing its roots to Aristotle was conducted extensively by many Alexandrians, who may have taken advantage both of the zoological gardens for animal specimens and Egyptian burial practices and craft for human anatomy. One of its first scholars, Herophilus, both collected and compiled the Hippocratic corpus and embarked on studies of his own. He first distinguished the brain and nervous system as a unit, as well as the function of the heart, the circulation of blood, and probably several other anatomical features. His successor Eristratos concentrated on the digestive system and the effects of nutrition and postulated that nutrition as well as nerves and brain influenced mental diseases. Finally, in the second century AD, Galen drew upon Alexandria’s vast researches and his own investigations to compile fifteen books on anatomy and the art of medicine.
Alexandria from the Time of Caesar
When Julius Caesar entered Alexandria in 48 BC to end the dynasty of the Ptolemies, the Museum was already 200 turbulent years old but had preserved the science and literature of the Hellenistic era. Since the Alexandrian library no longer exists it was destroyed at some subsequent point in history and an astonishing collection of Greek and Near Eastern literature was lost.
Impartial scholars have blamed Christian anti-pagan bigots at the end of the fourth century AD for the destruction, but Christians claim that Julius Caesar had burnt the library when he occupied the city on that occasion five centuries before—the greatest calamity of the ancient world, they bemoan! Yet no one denies that the library and its community of scholars continued flourishing after the Hellenistic era of the Ptolemies into the time of the Roman Empire after Caesar with no noticeable disruption and then through the continuing turbulence of a cosmopolitan and volatile city for hundreds more years.
During the Roman civil wars Julius Caesar supported Cleopatra against her brother Ptolemy XIV and was besieged by the latter’s army and fleet in Alexandria’s Royal Precinct where the Museum was thought to have been. Eventually Caesar was relieved by the arrival of the Roman fleet, and crushed and killed Ptolemy XIV in the Battle of the Delta thus conquering the kingdom of Egypt.
Livy wrote an account of the Alexandrine war, now lost, but quoted by subsequent scholars including Seneca. Livy apparently says 40,000 rolls were destroyed when Caesar set fire to the docks to block Ptolemy’s fleet and the flames spread into some nearby warehouses containing scrolls and grain. Scholars have hotly disputed whether these scrolls kept in warehouses alongside grain had anything to do with the Museum. P M Fraser claims the Royal Precinct was near enough to the docks to be ignited. For him, the loss of 40,000 volumes explains why the Museum’s library seems to have gradually lost prestige to the Serapeum. Others say the fire was apocryphal or confused with later fires, or that these books were copies waiting to be shipped to other libraries. There can be no doubt that copying books must have become a major industry once the library had been set up.
Didymus, Tryphon and Theon researched in the Museum not long after Caesar had destroyed all these treasures so, if any books were lost in this fire, copies of important works must have survived and the library’s collection not significantly damaged by the incident. Julius Caesar himself must have spent time in the library because the Julian calendar which he adopted, with twelve months, 365 days, and a leap year was identical to the Alexandrian Aristarchus’ calendar of 239 BC deduced from Eratosthenes.
Strabo, the geographer who studied at the Library and who lived in Alexandria from 25-20 BC, witnessed Caesar’s conquest of Egypt and subsequent changes made in the Ptolemaic state. His description of the library is the most detailed until that of a fourth century scholar, John Tzetzes, and by its brevity shows just how little is preserved about the institution:
The Museum is part of the Royal Quarter and it has a cloister and an arcade and a large house in which is provided the common meal of the men of learning who share the Museum. And this community has common funds, and a priest in charge of the Museum, who was appointed previously by the kings, but now by Caesar.
Strabo’s contemporary, Vitruvius, describes a festival of the Muses in Alexandria, almost certainly based at the Museum. This festival might have been of religious significance but whether it was or not it suggests that the Museum was still healthy despite Caesar’s actions.
Under the Romans, in addition to the old divisions set up by Callimachus in the 250’s BC, with its ten halls each devoted to a branch of literature, science, or philosophy, contemporary libraries were now divided into Greek and Roman sections. Since the Royal Precinct was no longer a restricted area, the Museum, like the Serapeum, was now available to the public.
The first century AD saw many fine Alexandrian scholars, Strabo, Didymus, the son of a fishmonger, who by his humble birth showed that Egyptians could become scholars, Tryphon, Theon, Heraclides, Celsus and later Galen. Though some scholars drifted away, the Museum continued to be foremost in philosophy, with the schools of the Neoplatonists and the popular Cynics. Meanwhile, Museums built on the Alexandrian model sprung up all over the empire. But the only remaining mention of the Alexandrine Museum in the first century is that of Suetonius who tells us it was substantially enlarged by the scholarly Emperor Claudius.
The Jews in Alexandria
Before 330 BC, Alexander had subjected the whole of Western Asia, including Judaea. The Greek invasions dispersed many of the “Chosen People”—the people chosen by the Persian chancellery to colonize Yehud, the “Promised Land”, and set up the temple state. Many Jews were forced from their own country—Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy Soter, carried off one hundred thousand of them. By then, over a century since the temple state was set up, Jews believed God had promised them the land, and they would possess it forever. Many were deported to Egypt or they fled there still convinced they had been chosen by God.
Jews came to be a large minority of the population of Alexandria, living beside the Egyptian Greeks in their own quarter, governed by an ethnarch and originally exempted from many taxes. Their ethnarch was replaced by a Council of Elders under Augustus. The political and religious institutions of Alexandria with its three million inhabitants, were liberal and tolerant in spirit, though the mob was volatile. A vast medley of religious doctrines and speculative dogmas were preached and propagated by their disciples.
The shattered condition of their Persian imposed religion under the Greeks, with all its conventional practices suspended, left Judaism vulnerable to adaptations from surrounding customs and facilitated the adoption of yet more of the aspects of the other eastern religions. The Jewish priesthood, after the demise of the Persians, copied features they liked from the religions of their neighbours and conquerers, and grafted their doctrines into Judaism, as the Old Testament shows allegorically. In Alexandria, an excellent opportunity arose for doing this, excelling in this respect any other time. The Ptolemies favoured the Jewish religion in the century (c 300-200 BC) they ruled Palestine, and they rewrote the Jewish scriptures to put them in the Alexandrine library, where the world could read them! Judaism became widely known for the first time since it was founded by the Persians.
Because Ptolemy Philadelphus had set up the Museum library and later the Serapeum had followed and was open to the public, the city offered the perfect opportunity for propagating and syncretizing religions. Theological schools arose and a stimulating mix of Pagan, Jewish and eastern thought developed. Ideas were adapted not only from the other theologies common in Alexandria, but, through the founder of Neoplatonism, Ammonius, Buddhism and Hinduism from India. Men of every philosophy and every faith met, exchanged ideas and borrowed religious doctrines, revising their own religions in the light of others’ wisdom:
The disciples of these various systems of religion had intercourse with each other long before the time of Christ, which would necessarily bring about a uniformity in the doctrines and general character of each system.Sir William Jones
The schools of Alexandria claimed to teach sublime doctrines concerning God and the divine, and persuaded different peoples to study their mysteries and adopt them as their own. Gibbon says contact with the foreigners of Alexandria greatly changed Jewish theology. Jewish faith, from a form of Zoroastrianism under the Persians, was influenced by the Grecian school of Pythagoras. By the year 150 BC, these foreign inluences had wrought visible changes in Jewish notions and habits of thought. Neoplatonism, invented at the Museum during the Hellenistic era, portrayed the world as a flawed copy of its ideal and recommended avoidance of the material world and concentration on the perfection of the soul which could be successively reincarnated, until it at last achieved a Buddha-like enlightenment, a source of the Gnostic beliefs.
God itself was made up of a trinity, and, conversed with man through “sophia”. Soon, the Jewish theologian, Philo, could discuss a mother goddess figure, Sophia, spirit of wisdom, the messenger from Yehouah, whose “logos” or reason would otherwise be incomprehensible to humanity. Thus, Neoplatonist thought would be incorporated into Christianity.
For a long time before it emerged into history, Christianity was a Jewish sect. Its first disciples and founders had been Jews—Essenes. Some Jews loyal to the Persian religion were called Hasidim who split and some became Essenes. Finally, Essenes disappeared from history at the time Christians first appeared in history. Essenian Jews set forth in their creed all the leading doctrines of Christianity hundreds of years before the advent of Christ including, it seems, the divine incarnation. The doctrine of the incarnation—God manifest in the flesh—was known from the Ganges and even the shores of the Yellow Sea to the Aegean. It arose from Zoroastrianism and spread from Persia east and west through conquest and mercantilism, Persia being at the center of the world. It became the basis of the Buddhist religion. It inspired Greek philosophy and became pure Platonism.
The New Testament account of the start of Christianity is fragmentary. It leaves nine tenths of Christ’s history a blank—twenty-seven years out of the thirty—and leaves even the time of his birth a blank. The researches of the learned, though long and ably conducted, have been unable to fix the time of Christ’s birth. Indeed, astonishingly, in view of the dogmatic beliefs of its followers, nothing can be fixed with certainty in early Christianity. The appearance of an aspect of God amongst men by human birth might always have been a doctrine of the Jewish religion, though evident now only in its Essenian branch. In claiming these doctrines, Christianity acknowledges its Essene roots.
Mistaken over the objectives of a noted Essene leader, Jesus, the gentile disciples of the hybrid faith internationalised it in the Roman Empire under the name Christianity, a taunt of their opponents who called anyone who believed anything so ridiculous messianists (christiani) from the Jewish name of the Avatar of God, the Messiah or Christ. The New Testament does tell us the disciples of the Christian faith were not always known by the same name, and were not at first called Christians.
It was in the city of Antioch the disciples were first called Christians.Acts 11:36
What were they called before then? The disciples were first known as Christians at Antioch and the Essenes departed from history about the same time. This is a broad hint the Christians were Essenes, that the New Testament Nazarenes were Essenes, or a school of disciples of Essenes. For a short period, the gentile Essenes, the Christians, and the Jewish Essenes overlapped, with the Jewish church dominant, but gentile bishops felt no loyalty to the Jewish church and quickly broke away, no doubt with a sigh of relief in Jerusalem.
A little later, after the Jewish war, the Jerusalem church of the Jewish Essenes was dispersed. It finally disappeared into the Arabian desert after the revolution of Bar Kosiba. It remained known to some of the western Christians for a few hundred more years but, it seems, was eventually absorbed into Islam after having a clear influence on the formation of the thoughts of Mohammed.
The Decline and Destruction of the Pagan Schools in Alexandria
During his visit to Alexandria in 130 AD following an uprising, the Emperor Hadrian restored the city, founded a new library in the Caesareum, discussed philosophy at the Museum, and started a campaign to attract sophists such as Dionysius of Miletus and Polemon of Laodikeia to the Museum. This brought a revival of Alexandrian scholarship in the second century. Septimius Severus later visited similarly in 199-200 AD, rebuilding parts of the city. But the mob mocked his successor, Caracalla, when he visited to worship the Apis bull. Enraged, the Emperor ordered the city plundered and its youth massacred. Though he cut off the imperial revenue to the Museum and banished all foreigners from it, it still apparently survived. The city though had been dealt its death blow and declined thereafter.
Laelius Mussius Aemilianus, the city prefect, took advantage of riots to seize the granaries and declare himself emperor. The Emperor Galliensus sent Theodotus, his best general, to besiege the rebel faction holed up in the Royal Precinct, and eventually put down the insurrection. Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, described first hand the havoc wreaked by the siege but mentions neither library nor Museum which must have been affected.
Another war in the 270s between the desert oasis of Palmyra and Alexandria damaged both cities severely when Queen Zenobia conquered the Egyptian capitol and declared herself emperor only to be defeated by the Roman Emperor Aurelian. This war further seems to have damaged the library’s collection. Finally, Diocletian had to quell yet another revolt under the pretender Domitian, eventually destroying much of the Brucheium quarter. The clashes between Christians and Pagans in Alexandria had by this time become violent and Diocletian issued an edict to destroy Christianity. He also ordered all the Museum’s books on metallurgy to be burned, implying that at least part of the collection had survived until then. Egyptian Christianity memorializes this half-century of persecution by beginning its calendar with 254 AD, the start of their Era of the Martyrs.
Though, according to tradition, Christianity was introduced by S Mark who preached there in the mid first century, the Emperor Hadrian revealingly thought it was a perversion of the cult of Serapis. The Eucharist, resurrection, and reverence to the Mother were developed in Alexandria during this period. Precedents in the cult of Serapis were its bread of Cybele, wine of Dionysus and resurrection of Osiris, and the God’s consort Isis with her attributes of the Goddesses Cybele and Demeter.
The Christian religion at Alexandria began as a popular movement of the masses, but evolution of the philosophical parts of the religion paved the way for Medieval theological schools. Branches of thought such as Arianism and Gnosticism were to be developed here, and, although later declared heretical, grew side by side with what later became Christian orthodoxy.
Gnosticism held that the world was created by the Demiurge, offspring of the true God and Sophia, who was the Yehouah of the Old Testament. God pitied humanity and sent Christ to help them reunite with Himself. Some held that Jesus had been a man and the Christ His spirit after death. The Ophites, an offshoot of the Gnostics with Cretan influences, carried the religion a step further, worshipping snakes and the divine mother Sophia. Sophia had sent the serpent of Eden to warn Eve and Adam that Yehouah was the Demiurge and that they should seek wisdom or knowledge to link with the true God. If modern readers should think these people barmy they should consider the orthodox S Anthony. He was the first patron saint of Alexandria for the orthodox Christians of the fourth century, but thought ”bathing was sinful and was consequently carried across the canals of the delta by an angel”.
Within twenty years of the abdication of Diocletian, Constantine became sole Emperor and declared Christianity Rome’s official religion. By 391 AD, the Emperor Theodosius commanded all paganism to be stamped out signalling the end of the Museum. Throughout the fourth century, the power of the church grew. A mob of bigoted Nitrian monks became the army of the Patriarch of Alexandria and enforced his will. After the edict of Theodosius, the Patriarch Theophilus led the mob to demolish the Serapeum. Perhaps the library at the Caesareum survived for no sources mention its destruction. References to Alexandrian scholars persist a little while longer.
In 412 AD, Theophilus’s nephew Cyril succeeded him. This Patriarch exercised ever more control of the city. Hypatia was the daughter of the Museum’s last great mathematician Theon, officially head of the Neoplatonist school. She was a philosopher and astronomer, superior to her father and so considered the inellectual head of the Neoplatonist school. Her eloquence, modesty, beauty and intellect attracted a large number of pupils including the Christian bishop Synesius, whose correspondence with her has preserved some of her work. Hypatia symbolized learning and science, which Christians considered pagan, and so she attracted Christian hatred and jealousy of Paganism with its heretical scientific teachings.
Damascius writes in his Life of Isidore, related in the Byzantine encyclopedia, The Suda:
Thus it happened one day that Cyril, bishop of the opposition sect [ie Christianity] was passing by Hypatia’s house, and he saw a great crowd of people and horses in front of her door. Some were arriving, some departing, and others standing around. When he asked why there was a crowd there and what all the fuss was about, he was told by her followers that it was the house of Hypatia the philosopher and she was about to greet them. When Cyril learned this he was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder and the most heinous form of murder at that.
The conflict between secular and religious authority was decided in 415 AD, when the Roman prefect, the pagan, Orestes, officially still in charge of the province, objected to Cyril’s order that all Jews be expelled from the city. Cyril’s army of monks murdered the prefect. This was his chance to eliminate Hypatia too.
Cyril claimed she was an advisor to Orestes and apparently encouraged his monks to murder her. Marauding through the city, they came across Hypatia driving home from her own lectures without an attendant. She was dragged from her carriage by the mob, stripped, flayed, and burned alive as a witch in the library of the Caesareum. Cyril was made a saint for his efficient work.
Socrates Scholasticus, in his Ecclesiastical History describes her death:
[The Christians] waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles [ostrakois, literally oystershells]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.
After her death the scholars left in droves and Alexandria became steadily less stable. It was overrun by the monks who evolved into the Copts, incorporating old Alexandrian prejudices against foreigners with the new prejudice against any scientific or classical knowledge. Too turbulent even to bow to the Emperor, Alexandria eventually revolted against Constantinople, wound up with two factions contending between two Patriarchs, and eventually fell to Moslem conquerors who, being no less bigoted than the Christians, had the last of the library burned as fuel in the bath-houses of the city in 686 AD.
That the Alexandrian Museum was a centre of learning for scholars of all kinds was its downfall when the world was taken over by the bigots—the Christians. It endured the civil strife of the Hellenistic period, a dynastic war, conquest by Rome and further civil and political turbulence. But it could not withstand the determined intolerance of Christianity which the city of Alexandria itself nurtured.
Details of the Alexandrian library is adapted from articles by Ellen N Brundige which can be seen in the original on her interesting personal page. Her references can also be consulted here.
