The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (36 page)

While the cornerstone of this work, like all the others, is the revelation and promotion of faith, and the assertion that such revelation is superior to philosophy, he does still have an eye toward the scholars of the museum. He insists that God’s truth is to be found both in revelation and in philosophy. He opens the fifth chapter of the work with a section entitled “Philosophy—the Handmaiden of Theology”:

 
Clement taught in Alexandria from 190 until 202, numbering among his pupils the same Origen who would later be called upon to write the rebuttal to Celsus’s pagan broadside and who would succeed him as dean of the Didascalia.

 
 
But if Christianity was finding a place in Alexandria, it could still be considered a dangerous and seditious sect in Rome. It challenged Roman authority; it refused to acknowledge the divinity of the emperor and preached that the meek and not the imperial family were the inheritors of the earth. Anti-Christian purges, just like the frequent anti-Jewish pogroms, remained common, and the Alexandrian mob which had been so easily roused against Philo’s friends was just as adeptly turned against Clement’s.

In 202 the emperor Septimius Severus, a North African himself, ordered a purge of the Alexandrian Christians. In the ensuing persecution the seventeen-year-old Origen saw his father martyred, engendering in him a lifelong hatred for the Romans. Clement fled the city and took shelter in Palestine. From there he traveled to Antioch to stay with his star pupil, Alexander, by then archbishop of the city, who reported his master’s death in a letter to Origen in 215.

Clement’s flight proved to be a decisive moment in the history of early Christianity and the history of his home city of Alexandria. As a scholar of the city, he had attempted to bridge the gap between Christian, Jew, and pagan with a hopefulness and generosity which might eventually have drawn these disparate groups together. As the church historian F. W. Farrar once said, Alexandria was in its time “the cradle of Christian theology” (
Lives of the Fathers
, book 1, pp. 262-63), but the early life of the child born in that cradle would prove violent and bloody enough to turn many church fathers away from Clement’s liberal views. A church born into purges and persecutions found his message too Hellenistic, too open to other philosophies, to the point where, some 1,500 years after his death, Pope Benedict XIV would have his name removed entirely from the church calendar.

A unique moment, when the old pagan and Jewish city and the new Christian one might have come together to set a new path, a new interpretation of the work the museum had striven for so many centuries to achieve, had been wasted. Instead, the seeds of a bitter and ultimately deadly struggle that would tear up the very roads and colonnades of the city itself were sown in their place. Imperial Rome and Christianity were on a collision course. If the infant religion was to survive, it would have to learn to fight even before it had learned to walk. Words were all well and good, but they had not safeguarded Clement in his city. His pupil Origen and the young catechumens had seen just how little the masters of the world cared for philosophy. If Rome wanted a fight, they could have it.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

INTO THE SOFT MACHINE

Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace

 
 
W
hile the talk in the markets and shops of Alexandria was now more often than not centered on the subject of religion, that was not yet the overriding consideration for either the provincial government or the museum. Rome had more serious worries than the growth of Christianity that were even now pressing on her borders.

The second half of the second century saw the emergence of a new threat to the Roman world order, not from within but from without. The barbarian German tribes, along with their Sarmatian allies, were massing along the northeastern frontiers of the empire, along the east banks of the Danube and Rhine, and threatening to flood into the empire itself.

It is an irony of history that the first emperor who tried to contain the threat was also one of its most sophisticated intellectuals, a man better suited to the museum and library in Alexandria than to the wilds of his empire’s frontiers. Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161-80) was also known as Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Philosopher, and the collection of imperial biographies known as the
Historia Augusta
says that “Plato’s judgement was always on his lips, that states flourished if philosophers ruled or rulers were philosophers” (Anonymous,
Historia Augusta,
27.7).

Sadly for this frail and thoughtful emperor, his rule would seem to prove otherwise. On his accession Marcus Aurelius had immediately taken his adoptive brother Lucius Verus into the emperorship with him, for the first time splitting the primary role in the empire between two people. It was a move born out of pity more than practicality, granting the man who had always been in his shadow an equal position that, unfortunately, he was unequal to. The timing also could not have been worse. At the very moment the two men were taking the imperial throne, hostilities were already breaking out on the British frontier along Hadrian’s Wall and along the Danube, while in the east the Parthians had seized the province of Armenia, destroying two whole Roman legions in the process. For the first time the empire appeared vulnerable, and Alexandrians, despite their chafing against Roman rule, must have prayed that their occupiers would prove up to the task of keeping the barbarians outside their protected and, as they saw it, civilized world.

Marcus Aurelius, for all his love of philosophy, could still prove a man of action. While choosing to tackle the Danube problem himself, he sent the dithering and indulgent Verus to deal with Parthia, along with his best general, Avidius Cassius. Avidius was also from an academic family, his father having been a rhetorician in Syria, but under Verus’s nominal command he fortunately showed himself also to be a great soldier, restoring peace in the East. For this he was rewarded with supreme command over the entire region, including Egypt, the same post Mark Antony had held before him. And it was perhaps this unfortunate precedent that then began to work on his mind.

Verus, for his part, returned west with a less welcome trophy—soldiers infected by a plague which then swept the ancient world. At the same moment the barbarians beyond the Danube finally broke out and swarmed into the empire, reaching Italy itself. In a mad scramble Marcus Aurelius recruited two new legions and saved the situation, eventually agreeing to peace terms and managing to take back Italy. On his triumphant return to Rome, his co-emperor Verus died of apoplexy in 169, removing at least one threat to Marcus Aurelius’s rule.

But the impenetrable facade of imperial might had been breached, and Egypt itself was encouraged to revolt. When Avidius Cassius quickly suppressed the rebellion, Marcus Aurelius must have believed he had finally found an ally he could trust. He was very wrong.

Avidius Cassius’s experience of imperial rule in the form of an ineffectual co-emperor had given him unusual ambition. Now as virtual ruler of the East, the inheritor of Mark Antony’s mantle and perhaps seduced by his dream, he struck. Hearing that Marcus Aurelius had been killed on the northern frontier (or at least claiming that to be the case), he proclaimed himself emperor, possibly encouraged in this by Marcus Aurelius’s own wife, Faustina. Faustina had long despaired of her husband’s frequent bouts of ill health, something which in these turbulent times she knew could have direct effects on her and her children. If her husband suddenly died there was no one to guarantee her safety, and any new imperial candidate would almost certainly begin his campaign to gain legitimacy by killing the true heirs—her children. Perhaps in Avidius she found a guarantor for her children, or at least saw the opportunity to force the hand of history. Whether Avidius knew he was bluffing when he announced the emperor’s death is uncertain, although the
Historia Augusta
is suspicious.

Nevertheless, Avidius evidently persuaded several senior officials to back his claim to the laurels, and among these was the governor of Alexandria, Lucius Maecianus, who had once been Marcus Aurelius’s tutor and who may have had ambitions of joint sovereignty with Avidius. Egypt and Alexandria stood once again on the brink of king making, but once again it would prove a false dawn.

Marcus Aurelius was not dead; indeed, he was marching back toward Rome, and from there he would perhaps sail across the Mediterranean to Egypt. Certainly the specter of this was enough to unnerve Avidius’s soldiers, and his three-month-old “empire” dissolved as quickly as it had appeared. Fearing the emperor’s retribution, one of Avidius’s own centurions turned on him and stabbed him to death. The assassination of the governor of Alexandria was not far behind.

It was with some trepidation then that the people of Alexandria turned out to greet their emperor when he arrived in their city in the winter of 176. No place had been more closely connected with the usurper, and the emperor could hardly be expected to leave the city unscathed. Julius Caesar had burnt the city and very possibly the precious library when he had arrived to remove the upstart Mark Antony, and many must have feared a reprise.

But Marcus Aurelius did nothing. Certainly he shed some crocodile tears for the dead Avidius, just as Caesar had “wept” for the murdered Pompey, protesting that he would have spared his life if only he had reached Egypt in time. The
Historia Augusta
says that on receiving Avidius’s head the emperor

 
It was, of course, a story Alexandrians had heard before, but provided he chose to play the victorious Octavian rather than the vengeful Caesar, they were happy to go along. And Marcus Aurelius had no desire to harm such a spiritual homeland. So instead of a bloodbath, the citizens of Alexandria enjoyed the company of their philosopher-emperor, and he in turn took delight in the open and vibrant civic life of the city as well as the intellectual life of the museum and library.

 
 
If the emperor needed a reason to preserve Alexandria he had only to walk through the gardens and lecture halls in the museum to find it, for this institution was still the training ground for some of the greatest minds in antiquity. One of those who had benefited from an education here was his personal physician and the greatest doctor in the Roman world, Galen.

Galen was born in Alexandria’s great rival city of Pergamum around 129, about a century and a half after Mark Antony had bequeathed the city’s two-hundred-thousand-volume library to his lover Cleopatra. Despite this loss, the city had thrived and become particularly famous for its temple and sanctuary of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, where people from across the empire came to seek cures both through prayer and through the ministrations of the doctors who gathered there. Galen’s father, Nicon, had been a successful and affluent architect, and he had given his son a broad classical education in mathematics, logic, grammar, and philosophy, embracing all four major schools—those of Plato and Aristotle as well as Stoicism and Epicureanism.

But it was to medicine that young Galen turned when he was just sixteen—according to legend, after his father had a dream revealing the youth’s destiny in the subject. In years to come, as Galen went on to become the greatest doctor in the Roman world, many of his patients must have thought that the dream had been sent by Asclepius himself. Galen began his studies at the Asclepian shrine in Pergamum before traveling on to study under other masters in Smyrna (now Izmir in Turkey), then in Corinth, before finally reaching the great medical school at Alexandria in 152. Alexandria was still the obvious place to finish an education in medicine in the second century, not simply because of its great heritage of physicians and anatomists but because in Alexandria, thanks to its Egyptian heritage, it was still possible to do there what could not be done elsewhere: dissect the human body. Such procedures were still taboo across most of the empire, and without a chance to look inside the body, most doctors were forced to rely on outward symptoms both to identify and to cure an ill. But here, Galen tells us, you could “look at the human skeleton with your own eyes. This is very easy in Alexandria, so that the physicians of that area instruct their pupils with the aid of autopsy” (Galen, quoted in translation by Kühn, vol. 2, p. 220).

These experiences gave Galen a passion for dissection, which would both make and, many centuries later, break his reputation. By opening human bodies, both living and dead, he was able to view the body as a machine, like one of Hero’s automatons, and brilliantly deduce its functions. In his later career he would repeat his investigations on animals in front of astounded crowds, while he challenged the other doctors of the empire to disagree with his findings. A particularly famous experiment involved a rather gruesome operation on a live pig. Cutting an incision down its back, he would slowly sever groups of spinal nerves to show their function. Of course all the while the pig would squeal, until he tied off the laryngeal nerve and the pig suddenly stopped. And so he proceeded, removing or tying off various vital pathways and identifying their purpose from the effect. He tied off animals’ ureters to demonstrate kidney and bladder function, and closed off veins and arteries to prove that, contrary to the popular theory of the day, they carried blood and not air.