The First Missionary War, Chapter 4
by Michael Routery

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The Serapeum of Alexandria

In 389, Theodosius made the pagan holidays into workdays, at least those that had not been appropriated by the Church. In 391, he outlawed blood sacrifice and decreed "no one is to go to the sanctuaries, walk through the temples, or raise his eyes to statues created by the labor of man". Not a law that the Church was to follow itself! In Egypt, Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, saw the opportunity to strike out and destroy the remaining temples. First, he obtained legal authority, over an abandoned temple, to turn it into a church. He stripped the pagan statues and art works and displayed them in his new church in a mocking fashion. He was good in the role of agent provocateur; the pagan population rose up in riots, as he may have planned, and he laid low for awhile. The pagan defenders now withdrew into the Serapeum, the most imposing of the city's remaining sanctuaries and proceeded to fortify it.

The Serapeum was by all accounts a building of startling size and striking beauty. Ptolemy lll had had it built in honor of Isis and Serapis, a syncretistic Greek/Egyptian deity who combined aspects of Osiris, Zeus, Pluto and the Egyptian 'Apis' bull. He was associated with both the dead and healing. The temple itself opened onto a courtyard surrounded by a complex of buildings which included housing for the priests, priestesses, and people who came for a retreat. It also housed part of the public collections of the city's fabled Library. People came for something called incubation: they would sleep in the temple with the intent of receiving a dream that would be healing or direct them towards a treatment or resolution of a problem. Sacred banquets were also given in the precincts. The statue of the god seemed even larger than it was because it had outstretched arms with hands that touched the walls of the temple. It was constructed of wood, metals and stones of contrasting colors. The body was painted dark blue, the clothing and sandals were covered with silver and golden grain and fruit spread from his headgear (calathus).¹⁵ According to Clement of Alexandria, the sculptor had used fragments of sapphire, hematite, emerald and topaz. There were seats by the statue where people could sit and meditate on the god, a kind and gentle god who set souls free according to, the pagan emperor, Julian the Transgressor. Here Isis became associated with the Greek goddess Demeter.

The situation turned into a siege, the defenders, rallied within, included the philosopher Olympius; troops swept the nearby streets but the complex was well fortified and the pagans who apparently had plenty of food stores, inside, maintained themselves. The stand-off continued, finally the prefect and the military governor of Egypt asked Theodosius to intervene. The emperor pardoned the resistors but declared that the temple must be destroyed (the evil extirpated). The support of the emperor rallied the Christian mobs who were goaded into action by the fanatical tirades of the bishop and in a tide-like frenzy the church mob succeeded in breaking through the barricades and smashing down the doors and swept through the sanctuary breaking, looting and tearing up everything they could get their hands on.

After the Serapeum was taken, the Christians pulled down the outer walls and sunlight fell on the interior, revealing walls covered with hieroglyphs. Sozomen, a Christian propagandist, making out ankhs, Egyptian 'crosses', symbolizing eternal life, declared that they had predicted the triumph of the Christian church. The mob halted before the awe inducing, enormous statue of Serapis, but the bishop urged the mob on and ordered an ax taken to the statue. A soldier got up the courage and hit the jaw with an ax, the statue, which was made from fitted-together pieces, collapsed and rats ran out from hollowed out sections to the glee of the Christians, according to Theodoret in the Ecclesiastical History. They chopped the statue up into little pieces and then, no doubt, its precious decorations carted off to church coffers, set it on fire. A manuscript depicts the bishop trampling on the shrine; finally, the Patriarch directed the torching of the entire sanctuary. This complex of buildings which had been the central symbol of the city was completely razed. according to Eunapius:

Men who had never heard of war boldly attacked stones and walls. They demolished the Serapeum! ... they made war on offerings. Courageously, they gave battle to the statues until they had vanquished and robbed them. Their military tactics consisted of stealing without being seen. As they could not carry away the pavement because of the weight of the stones that could hardly be moved, when they had simultaneously overturned everything in sight, these great and valiant warriors, whose hands though rapacious, were not stained with blood, declared that they had triumphed over the gods. They gloried in their sacrilege and impiety. In these 'sacred places 'monks' were installed, those creatures who resemble men but live like pigs.... In that period anyone who wore a black robe had despotic power! In the abode and in place of the gods, henceforward worship was rendered to the skeletons of a few wretched ex-convicts, slaves who deserved the whip: the 'martyrs'".¹⁶

The place was then covered with crosses.

Having such symbolic centrality, to so many of the inhabitants, its destruction would have been extremely dispiriting, psychologically, leaving the people demoralized and bound by despair. According to historian Robert Turcan, in this depressed state, "strong-arm monks and shock-troop Christians" terrorized many of the inhabitants into conversion. The Iseum in Memphis, the old capital of pharaonic Lower Egypt was closed around this time, its statues and sacred objects sent to a temple, at Menouthis, near Alexandria for safekeeping. An old prophecy (attributed to Hermes Trismegistus¹⁷) circulated among the broken Egyptians:

A time will come when it will seem that the Egyptians in the piety of their hearts, have honored their gods in vain, with a devoted cult.... The gods on leaving the earth, will return to heaven; they will abandon Egypt.... That holy earth, land of sanctuaries and temples, will be completely covered with coffins and corpses. O Egypt, Egypt nothing will remain of your religion but fables, and later, your children will not even believe them! ... the people abandoned, will all die, and then with neither gods nor men, Egypt will be nothing but a desert. It is to you that I speak, holy river, it is to you I announce the things to come: torrents of blood will swell your waters to their banks ... and there will be more dead than living ; as for those who survive, it is only by their language that they will be recognized as Egyptian: in their manners they will seem to be men of another race."¹⁸

Of course, the unfortunate Egyptians would even lose their language.

The Christians were pleased to use this prophetic text as propaganda and Augustine declared the prophecy was "the wild cry of the demons who foresee the punishment that await them".¹⁹ But the river god returned as always, in 392, fertilizing the country with his silt in the annual flooding and thereby sowing confusion among the depressed peasants who had expected the river to fail to rise due to the destruction of the Serapeum. The bishop ordered more temples pillaged in both Alexandria and Canopus, the resort city on the coast connected to Alexandria by a canal. Although, followers of Isis and Osiris hung on in both Egypt and Rome, they had been dealt a crippling blow. And Alexandria, itself, was to never recover its prestige, sinking into a sad decline, a city that for seven centuries had been one of the worlds most important intellectual, artistic, scientific and spiritual centers, a place where people from many cultures met and new syncretistic traditions had emerged. A city where Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin were all spoken and famed for its beauty, it was also associated throughout the Roman world with homoeroticism. With the Serapeum gone, many of the remaining intellectuals left for exile. Olympius had left before the fall of the Serapeum, having lost his nerve. He had claimed that the statues had lost their sacred energy, their dynamis, and he shipped for Italy where he faded from history. Two more of the defenders, Helladus and Ammonius emigrated to Constantinople where they taught literature and covertly served the priesthood of Zeus and Thoth-Hermes. Helladus had heroically killed nine of the zealot attackers, in hand to hand combat, a feat that I doubt many philosophers today would be capable of emulating. A poet, who had been involved in the defense, Palladus, remained although his stipend from the city was canceled. He wrote:

"The defuncts left the lively city
And we who continue to live bring the city to burial".²⁰

Finally, in the figure of Hypatia (370-415), the demise of Alexandria as city of philosophy can be said to meet its conclusion. Hypatia was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and astronomer and head of the platonic school at the Library/Museum. She was an independent woman who taught and lectured and whose life provides a glimpse of the remarkable women, who were able to make a place for themselves in the public sphere, in the late classical world. But her popularity, as one of the last pagan philosophers and a woman no less, met head on with the wrath of the intensely misogynist Patriarch Cyril who whipped his followers up into a hysterical hatred of Hypatia. In 415, the city was seething with discord, the Patriarch had ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the city and the secular authority, a Roman prefect, had tried to prevent this. In a move cementing Christian political control of the province, Cyril ordered his monks to murder the prefect. On a day shortly after the assassination, Hypatia, while driving through the city in her chariot, was set upon by a mob of Christian fanatics, who dragged her out of the chariot and into a nearby church where with grotesque cruelty they hacked her to pieces, with potsherds and broken glass, and then, triumphally, paraded through the streets with the grisly remains which they finally burned in a bonfire. (According to some accounts in the Library).²¹ Tolerance had evaporated into the desert air and the city, its famous library decimated, drifted into a fitful sleep. Still a couple of centuries later the Islamic conqueror found enough books (evidently mostly Christian) left to have them burned for fuel for his hot bath. A depressing end, for a Library that at its height is believed to have held a million works, in many languages, and functioned as a research center whose scientists measured with considerable accuracy (within 1%) the circumference of the planet²² and propounded the heliocentric nature of the solar system over 1700 years before Galileo.

Notes to this chapter

15. Turcan, p.78

16. quoted in Turcan p.127

17. Hermes Trismegistus was a wisdom figure of Alexandria, combining the Egyptian god of wisdom and keeper of hieroglyphs Thoth, and Hermes, Greek messenger of the gods.

18. quoted in Chuvin p.68

19. Ibid.

20. quoted in Chuvin p.66

21. see Ellen Brundige

22. The Librarian, Eratosthenes, wrote that "India could be reached sailing west from Spain".

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copyright ©1997 Michael Routery