The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (44 page)

This was a problem Alexandrians would have to work out for themselves. In the face of the prefect’s anger Cyril seems to have made at least a tentative attempt at reconciliation, although his reported waving of the gospels under Orestes’ nose made it clear that any rapprochement would be on his terms and his terms alone. But Cyril’s provocation had now brought Orestes to the breaking point. Seeing his power eroding before him, the prefect decided finally to try to face Cyril down and rebuffed his overtures of peace. So Cyril turned back on his other tried and tested method of getting his own way.

His call went out again to the radical Nitrian monks of the desert, and some five hundred quit their monasteries and headed for the streets of Alexandria. There they came across Orestes riding in his chariot and surrounded him. Socrates tells us that “they called him a pagan idolater, and applied to him many other abusive epithets. He supposing this to be a snare laid for him by Cyril, exclaimed that he was a Christian, and had been baptized by Atticus the bishop at Constantinople” (Socrates Scholasticus,
Ecclesiastical History,
book 7, chapter 14).

This was not enough for the monks, who were intent on action, not argument. One of their number, Ammonius, seized a rock and threw it at the prefect. It struck him on the head and blood immediately began to pour down his face. In the ensuing panic Orestes’ own guards abandoned him, and it was only thanks to the intervention of other passersby, the ordinary people of Alexandria, that he got away.

The wounded prefect ordered the immediate arrest of Ammonius, who was caught and tortured to death. Two more letters were now dispatched to the emperor, one from Orestes decrying the patriarch’s behavior, the other from Cyril, claiming Ammonius, or “Thaumasius” (“the Wonderful”) as he now called him, as a martyr. The emperor’s response, once again, was silence, and Cyril and Orestes were left to resolve the problem alone. The race was now on to decide who would rule Alexandria—the state or the church, logic or belief. Only one could survive.

First blood seemed to go to Orestes. Cyril had overstepped the mark and misread popular opinion. The response in Alexandria was not what he had hoped for, and the Christians did not take “Saint Wonderful” to their hearts.

 
So Saint Wonderful slipped from sight, his elevation among the realms of the martyrs proving only temporary. Cyril would need another way of getting to the prefect if he wanted to exert his power over the city as a whole, and, fatally for her, he would find it in the quiet person of Hypatia.

Up to this point Hypatia had been invisible in the record. Philosophically she may well have felt that the squabbles of believers were unworthy of her consideration, but her regular contact with the authorities, and Orestes in particular, must have created within her a growing sense of dread. In this situation it was simply not enough to ignore Cyril and his attempts on power. With his brand of Christianity he intended to be the central core of the running of the city. His interpretation of religion was his politics, and by claiming to be executing the will of God he gave himself carte blanche to act in any way he saw fit. This was undoubtedly a threat to the freedoms of the city Hypatia loved, and she could do little but throw her considerable influence behind the moderate Orestes.

That Hypatia, who was now about sixty, had been distancing herself from her circle—perhaps to protect them as the situation deteriorated—is clear from one of Synesius’s last letters to her. In it he says:

 
But there was little happiness or good fortune to be had in Alexandria. Hypatia’s support for Orestes was a thorn in Cyril’s side. One chronicler tells of how he stopped at her house one day and was overcome with jealousy when he saw the huge crowds clamoring to hear her speak. She was widely respected in the city, had close connections with the council and government, and counted among her friends and pupils some of the most important people in the empire, including men at the imperial court. But she did have a weakness. Orestes was a moderate Christian, as had been many of Hypatia’s school, but Hypatia herself was apparently not a Christian at all. She was of the old Alexandria, the last of the Hellenes. This was the wedge that Cyril now drove between prefect and philosopher.

Cyril circulated a rumor that she was a practitioner of black magic—a sorceress who was “devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music” (R. H. Charles,
The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu
, 84.87-103). To the city mob who had little to do with the museum or library it must have had a certain ring of truth. What did go on in her secret meetings with her inner circle? Had her father not been an astrologer and alchemist? Even the tools of science she had learned to make at her father’s knee could be turned against her. Astrolabes, hydroscopes, and the like were not simply scientific tools, they were also regularly used for divination among the superstitious Alexandrians. So Cyril ensured that the slander spread that it was Hypatia who stood between him and Orestes—two good Christians—and she who was trying to undermine the religion and well-being of the state.

It was of course a lie, but a powerful one, and one which took deep root among Cyril’s most fervent supporters, the Parabolans. The job of the Parabolans was, in theory at least, to help ill and destitute Christians in the city to find a place in hospitals or almshouses, but under recent patriarchs they had become almost a private army. These poorly educated but fervently religious young men obeyed the patriarch without question and were only too happy to put their imposing presence (there were eight hundred of them) and any degree of force necessary behind his commands. It was this group, no doubt encouraged by Cyril, who now decided to take direct action against Hypatia.

Fired with hatred, this band was led by a man called Peter, a lector in the church whom the Christian chronicler John of Nikiu called a “perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ” (R. H. Charles,
The Chronicle of
John, Bishop of Nikiu,
84.87-103), and under his command the Parabolans now began searching the city for Hypatia. She was not hard to find, regularly riding in her chariot through the streets, very much living her life in public. They came across her as she was heading home, outside the Caesareum, the temple built for Mark Antony by Cleopatra shortly before their deaths, and since converted into a Christian church. There, by the three obelisks known as “Cleopatra’s Needles,” they surrounded her and dragged her from her chariot. In the street this most modest of women had her tribon torn from her and was stripped naked, but even her Parabolan attackers did not have the nerve to execute the next part of their plan in full public view. Dragging her inside the church, they threw her on the floor of the nave and, in the sort of rage that only blind zealotry brings, set upon her with broken pieces of roof tile, flaying her alive. Her torn and mutilated body was then carried beyond the walls to a place called Kinaron, where her remains were burned on a bonfire—a witch’s death. No one is recorded as having come to her aid. The last of the Alexandrian Hellenes was gone.

Cyril now had to work quickly to ensure that the blame for this horrific act did not fall directly on him, but he can only have been delighted at the outcome. Orestes now disappears from the historical record, either having been recalled by the emperor or simply having fled. Some Alexandrian councillors did attempt to intervene with the emperor, but Cyril’s friends at court ensured that the affair was hushed up, and the only response was a mild attempt to reorganize and reduce the numbers of Parabolans, taking their recruitment away from Cyril and resting it with the prefect. Even that did not last long, and by 418 Cyril had that power back as well. Cyril carefully portrayed the death of Hypatia as a fight between Christians and pagans, distancing himself in the process from the real cause of the tension, his attempt to seize power from a Christian prefect. John of Nikiu sums up perfectly how Cyril wished the story to be told: “All the people surrendered to the Patriarch Cyril and named him ‘the new Theophilus,’ for he destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city” (R. H. Charles,
The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu
, 84.87-103).

Socrates Scholasticus, himself a revered historian of the early church, took a more sober view: “This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort” (Socrates Scholasticus,
Ecclesiastical History,
book 7, chapter 15).

But Cyril had won and now settled down to live out his patriarchy more quietly. He died in June 444 after an episcopate of nearly thirty-two years. He would later be remembered as a doctor of the church and be raised to sainthood.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE SHIPWRECK OF TIME

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “A Few Figs from Thistles”

 
 
W
ith the death of Hypatia, her city also began to die. Philosophers were still to be found in the city’s streets, and the “Alexandrian school” continued quietly—ever more quietly—to refine pagan Neoplatonism. Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus were still read and talked of, but in truth the whole complexion of the city had changed.

In the streets violent religious extremism and an associated rise in ethnic tensions were fanning the flames of nationalism. Customs were changing, shunning the “foreign” Greek influence of Hypatia’s Hellenism, despite the fact it had been the cornerstone, indeed the very raison d’être, of the city. Even the language was slowly transforming, still written in a Greek alphabet but with the addition of six hieroglyphic characters, its structure now more influenced by ancient Egyptian. This new, hybrid language would eventually emerge as Coptic, the language of the Christians of Egypt.

After Theon we no longer hear of the work of the museum, if indeed it survived the antipagan policies of the emperors and patriarchs. It was, after all, a temple to the Muses, and as such ripe for suppression. As mystical religion had taken hold in the city, as control of the government had slipped from Alexandrian to Roman hands, so the whole nature of academic life in the city had slowly been changing. Academics were now obsessed with compiling and editing older works, not creating new thoughts and new books. The creators had been replaced by the codifiers and critics, who, in the manner of their theological counterparts who pored over the holy books in which they said all answers lay, searched for truth in old ideas rather than seeking out new ones. The spirit of adventure had left the halls of the museum; the minds which once reached beyond its colonnades to the ends of the earth and beyond, far into space, were gone.

And what of the books? The fate of the libraries of Alexandria is one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world. It would still be tragic, but at least convenient, if a single moment for their destruction could be found, a moment at which the curtain came down on the classical world and a new and darker age commenced. But it is not that simple. We know from the scholarly references which fill Synesius’s letters that he gained access to a large number of classical texts during his time in Alexandria, although he probably did not get these from one great central library. That institution had died, not with a bang but a whimper. It may well be that the majority of the ancient collection of the Ptolemies was destroyed when Julius Caesar burned the Egyptian fleet in the Great Harbor and the flames carried over the roofs of the old city. Livy tells us there were four hundred thousand scrolls in the collection at that time, and their loss might have inspired Mark Antony to present the library of Pergamum to Cleopatra as a lover’s gift.

Of course books were still created and collected after this date, although they may have been stored separately in either a library attached directly to the museum or in the daughter library in the Serapeum. It was perhaps from those shelves that Synesius took the works of Homer and Plato from which he so often quoted. But other books were probably even then missing, even then forgotten. Were Varro’s forty-two lost books of
Antiquities
still there? Were the “lost decades” of Livy’s Roman history still rolled up with the books that survive to this day? Very possibly not. The ravages of the fire of 48 BC, the literary pretensions and furious retributions of Roman emperors, and a simple dimming of the spark that had inspired the early Ptolemies to collect every book they could find had all taken their toll. There were already empty shelves in the libraries that Hypatia and her followers knew, and perhaps only a dim memory, preserved in Callimachus’s lists, of what treasures they once held.

But it had been in Hypatia’s own era that some of the final nails in Alexandria’s coffin were driven home. Emperor Theodosius’s order to shut all pagan temples in 391 had a profound effect upon learning in the city, not because Christianity opposed learning—Hypatia’s own circle proved the opposite—but because its more extreme proponents equated pre-Christian learning with paganism. The Serapeum had been created by the Ptolemies specifically to appeal to Egyptians and had been designed on an ancient Egyptian model, as not just a temple but a library and college. It was the logical home for the daughter library, but in finding a home in a pagan building the books themselves became tarred with the brush of paganism. Knowledge has always been the enemy of extremism, and for the most radical elements among Alexandria’s Christians, the books in the Serapeum were a threat. So they simply destroyed them.