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CHAPTER XIX.

THE REIGNS OF THEODOSIUS I., ARCADIUS, AND THEODOSIUS II. A.D. 379-450.

A.D. 379.

Codex Theod. xvi. 1, 2.

(1) THE reign of THEODOSIUS 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 moreover 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.

viii. 8, 3.

Zosimus, lib. iv.

up by

lib. v.

(2) The wishes of the emperor were ably followed Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria. He cleansed Socrates, the temple of Mithra, and overthrew the statues in Eccl. Hist. 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 against their assailants. 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. Among these were Ammonius, the author of a valuable work on Greek synonyms, and Helladius, the author of a biographical

dictionary, which forms a part of the larger dictionary of Suidas.

(3) 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 Eccl. Hist. 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 colossal foot of white marble, which was brought from Alexandria, and is now in the British Museum, may be guessed from its size to have been part of this patchwork statue.

Rufinus,

lib. ii. 23.

(4) 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 Lib. vii. 36. Spaniard, who visited Alexandria in the next reign, and was the author of a short universal history full of bigotry and mistakes, may be trusted when he says that he saw in the temple the empty shelves, which, within the memory Lib. vi. 15. of men then living, had been plundered of the books that had formerly been got together after the library of the Bruchium was burnt by Julius Cæsar. In a work of such lawless plunder, carried on by ignorant zealots, many of these monuments of pagan genius and learning must have been wilfully or accidentally destroyed, though the larger number may have been carried off by the Christians for the other public and private libraries of the city. How many other libraries this city of science may have possessed we are not told, but there were no doubt many. Had Alexandria during the next two centuries given birth to poets and orators, their works, the offspring of native genius, might perhaps have been written without the help of libraries; but the labours of the mathematicians and grammarians prove

that the city was still well furnished with books, beside those on the Christian controversies.

Suidas.

(5) It would be dishonest not to point out in each persecution, whether by the pagans or by the Christians, the superiority in worth and character of the oppressed over their persecutors. 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 Bishop 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 path of duty by his exhortations. Whereas the Vit. Sofurious 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 Rufinus, miracles of which the pagan priests were accused, Eccl. Hist. was the having an iron statue of Serapis kept 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.

Eunapius,

phist.

lib. xi. 23.

(6) 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 Eccl. Hist. there, under the pretence of studying hieroglyphics, lib. xi. 26. a school was opened for teaching magic and other forbidden superstitions. When the pagan worship ceased throughout Egypt, the temples were very much used as

Rufinus,

churches, and in some cases the old temples received in their ample courtyard a smaller church of Greek architecture, as in that of Medinet Abou. In other cases Christian ornaments were added to the old walls, as in the rock temple of Kneph, opposite to Abou Simbel, where the figure of our Saviour with a glory round his head has been painted on the ceiling (see Fig. 124). 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.

Athanasius,

cap. xii.

(7) It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Egyptians, on embracing Christianity, at once threw off the whole 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 Vit. Antonii. 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, besides burial, was forbidden in the Bible as wicked. St. Augustine, on the other hand, well under- Sermo 349, standing that the immortality of the soul without de Resurrec. 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 figures of the Virgin Mary standing on the new moon, as she ascends up to heaven, seem borrowed from the goddess Isis, who in her character of the Dog-star rises heliacally in the same manner (see page 342). The tapers even now burnt before Heliodorus, the Roman Catholic altars had also from the earliest Ethiopica, times been 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 Herodotus, festival of the candles. The playful custom of lib. ii. 62. giving away sugared cakes and sweetmeats on the Moses twenty-fifth day of Tybi, our twentieth of January, Chorenensis, was then changed to be kept fourteen days earlier, and it still marks with us 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 to 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; "linen," says the book of Revelation, Ch. xix 8. "is what is appointed for the saints." At the same time

lib. i.

Hist. Arm.