Vita Alex

lib. lxxx.

for him the respect which he lost by the weakness of his government. The Alexandrians, always ready to Lampridius, lampoon their rulers, laughed at his wish to be andri. thought a Roman; they called him the Syrian, the A.D. 222. high-priest, and the ruler of the synagogue. And well might they think slightly of his government when a pre- Dion fect of Egypt owed his appointment to the emperor's Cassius, want of power to punish him. Epagathus had headed a mutiny of the prætorian guards in Rome, in which their general Ulpian was killed; and Alexander, afraid to punish the murderers, made the ringleader of the rebels prefect of Egypt in order to send him out of the way; so little did it then seem necessary to follow the cautious policy of Augustus, or to fear a rebellion in that province. But after a short time, when Epagathus had been forgotten by the Roman legion, he was removed to the government of Crete, and then at last punished with death.

Diogenes

Proemium.

Suidas.

(33) Potamo, a teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, had formerly tried, though with very little success, to unite the followers of Plato and Aristotle, by show- Laertius, ing how far the doctrines of those two philosophers agreed. But in this reign he was followed in his attempt by Ammonius Saccas, who became the founder of a new and most important school of philosophy, that of the Alexandrian Platonists. It is much to be regretted that we know so little of a man who was able to work so great a change in the philosophy of the pagan world, and who had so great an influence on the opinions of the Christians. But he wrote nothing, and is only known to us through his pupils, in whose writings we trace the mind and system of the teacher. The most celebrated of these pupils were Plotinus, Herennius, and Origen, a pagan writer, Vit. Plotini. together with Longinus, the great master of the "sublime," who owns him his teacher in elegant literature. Ammonius was unequalled in the variety and depth of his knowledge, and was by his followers called heaven-taught. He aimed at putting an end to the triflings and quarrels of the philosophers by showing that all the unapius, great truths were the same in each system, and by pointing out where Plato and Aristotle agreed instead of where they differed; or rather by culling opinions out of both

Porphyrius,

Vit. Soph.

schools of philosophy, and by gathering together the scattered limbs of Truth, whose lovely form had been hewn to pieces and thrown to the four winds like the mangled body of Osiris.

Sect. xiii.

(34) As a critic Ammonius walked in the very highest path, not counting syllables and marking faulty lines, like the followers of Aristarchus, but leading the pupils in his lecture-room to admire the beauties of the great authors, and firing them with the wish to rival them. He pointed Longinus, out to them the passages in which Plato, to improve his style, had entered on a noble strife with Homer, and had tried in his prose to equal beauties of the post which age after age had stamped with its approval. Of these lectures Longinus was a hearer, and to them we owe much of his golden treatise on the Sublime in writing, a treatise written to encourage authors in the aim after excellence, and to instruct them in the art of taking pains. This work of Longinus is the noblest piece of literary criticism which came forth from the Museum. In it we find the Old Testament quoted for the first time by a pagan writer; it is quoted for its style only, but we may thence reasonably suppose that it was not unknown to his great master Ammonius, and may have been of use to him in his lectures on philosophy, as indeed the Jewish opinions seem to have coloured the writings of his followers.

Porphyrius,

(35) Plotinus was born at Lycopolis, and, after studying philosophy for many years, he entered the school Vit. Plotini. of Ammonius at the age of twenty-eight, where he studied for eleven years more. In the works of Plotinus we have the philosophy of the Greeks, freed from their mythology, taking up the form of a philosophical religion, a deism accompanied with a pure and high-toned morality, but clouded in all the darkness of metaphysics. Like the other Platonists, he enlarges on the doctrine of the trinity, though without using the word. He argues against the philosophy of the Gnostics, and points out that in calling the world evil, and the cause of evil, they were denying the goodness or power of the Creator, and lowering the model upon which their own characters were to be formed. He teaches that it is not enough for a man to have the virtues of society, or even to be without vices, but he must aim higher,

and take God for his model; and that after all his pains he will still fall far short of his aim; for though one man may be like another as a picture is like a picture, yet a good man can only be like God as a copy is like the original.

(36) In the Greek mythology the gods were limited in their powers and knowledge; they were liable to mistakes, to vicious passions, and to change of purpose. Like mankind, whose concerns they rather meddled with than governed, they were themselves under the all-powerful laws of fate; and they seemed to have been looked upon as agents or servants of a deity, while the deity himself was wanting. It was round this unfortunate framework that the pagans entwined their hopes and fears, their feelings of human weakness, of devotion, of duty, and of religion. By the philosophers indeed this had been wholly thrown aside as a fable; but they had offered to the ignorant multitude nothing in its place. Those who sneered at the baseless system of the many raised no fabric of their own. It remained for the Alexandrian Platonists, borrowing freely from the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Christians, to offer to their followers the beautiful philosophy of Plato in a form more nearly approaching what we could call a religion. The overwhelming feeling of our own weakness, and of the debt which we owe to some unseen power above us, was not confined to the Christians, though perhaps strongly called into being by the spread of their religion. It was this feeling that gave birth to the New Platonism of the Alexandrians, which the pagans then raised up as a rival to the religion of the New Testament. The same spirit which led

these Eclectic philosophers, in forming their own system, to make use of the doctrines of Aristotle as well as those of Plato, taught them to look also to Christianity for whatever would give a further strength to their philosophy. To swell the numbers of their forces, they counted among their allies many of the troops of the enemy. And in so doing they were followed unfortunately by the Christians, who, while they felt the strength of their own arguments and the superiority of their own philosophy, still, in order to help the approach of converts, and to lessen the distance which separated them from the philosophers, were willing to make large advances towards Platonism.

(37) But these pagan writers are hardly so well known as Origen, who on his return to Alexandria was the chief ornament of the Christian church. Origen was as well read in the poets and philosophers of Greece as in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures; and he pleaded the cause of his religion as well by the purity, piety, and humility of his life, as by the learning and ability of his writings. But he is

De Oratione,

cap. 44.

Homil. in
Levit. v.

now called a heretic because in his work on Prayer he writes against the custom of addressing prayers to Jesus. He has also been much blamed for arguing against the eternity of future punishments; as when men had not yet thought of making their own punishments lead to the amendment of the criminal, they did not see that they wronged their heavenly Father by thinking that his punishments were meant for vengeance. He reduced into a system the mystic method of interpreting the Scriptures which Philo and the Alexandrian Jews had used in their endeavour to make the Old Testament speak a meaning more agreeable to their philosophy. He said that every text has a threefold meaning, the historic, the moral, and the mystic, arising from the division of our powers into the bodily, the moral, and the intellectual; and he of course attached the greatest value to that sense which is furthest removed from the simple meaning of the words. The Old Testament was still the principal sacred volume of the Christians. Had Origen, like modern Christians, given his chief attention to the New Testament, he would perhaps have felt no need of this mode of interpretation, nor a wish to make the ancient records speak a more modern meaning. His chief work is his answer to Celsus, who had written an attack upon Christianity. Origen, however, was misled by the examples of Clemens and Ammonius, and like them attempted to unite with Christianity many of the dreams of Alexandrian Platonism. Indeed it is from the rise of the school of Ammonius, and from this spread of Platonism amongst the Christians, that we must date the wide division between Judaism and Christianity, which became broader and broader, till by the decrees of the council of Nicæa it was made into a gulf that now seems scarcely passable.

(38) Whoever makes an effort to be useful is soon called upon to make a second effort to bear the disappointment of

lib. vi.

his want of success. Such was the case with Origen; and in the tenth year of this reign he withdrew Eusebius, to Cæsarea, on finding himself made uncomfort- Eccl. Hist. able at Alexandria by the displeasure of Demetrius the bishop; and he left the care of the Christian A.D. 231. school to Heraclas, who had been one of his pupils. Origen's opinions met with no blame in Cæsarea, where Christianity was not yet so far removed from its early simplicity as in Egypt. The Christians of Syria and Palestine highly prized his teaching when it was no longer valued in Alexandria. He died at Tyre in the reign of Gallus. Many of his writings are addressed to his friend Ambrosius, at whose persuasion they were written, and who had mus, Cat. been recalled by him from the heresy of the Marcionites. Ambrosius was a deacon in the church and a rich man; he died before Origen, and was much blamed having left nothing by will to his friend, who was then old age and poverty.

Hierony

Scriptor.

Eutychii

(39) On the death of Demetrius, Heraclas, who had just before succeeded Origen in the charge of the Christian school, was chosen bishop of Alexandria; and Annales. Christianity had by that time so far spread through the cities of Upper and Lower Egypt that he found it necessary to ordain twenty bishops under him, while three had been found enough by his predecessor. From his being the head of the bishops, who were all styled fathers, Heraclas received the title of Papa, pope or grandfather, the title afterwards used by the bishops of Rome.

(40) Among the presbyters ordained by Heraclas was Ammonius Saccas, the founder of the Platonic school; but he afterwards forsook the religion of Jesus; and

Hieronywe must not mistake him for a second Alexandrian mus, Cat. Scriptor. Christian of the name of Ammonius, who can hardly have been the same person as the former, for he never changed his religion, and was the author of the Evangelical Canons, a work afterwards continued by Eusebius of Cæsarea.

(41) Among the pagans of Alexandria we may mention Herodian, the author of a history of Rome from the reign of Marcus Aurelius to his own times. It is written in an elegant style, and is more particularly valuable for a period