The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (42 page)

But Theon also had philosophical interests that were very much of his own time. Amid the bitter recriminations of the Arian heresy it might seem that Christianity was already the only religion in town and that faith had been reduced to a matter of which Christian interpretation one chose to follow. This was not the case, however, and the uncertainty of their modern world encouraged even some of the philosophers of the museum to seek answers beyond logic in the more mystical aspects of Neoplatonism.

In this religiously charged atmosphere Theon had taken an interest in divination. In this city of soothsayers and priests he looked for divine truths in the books of the library and the circling of the stars. The chronicler Malalas tells us that he wrote commentaries on the books of the legendary father of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, and the mystical Orphic oracles. He is also said to have written a work entitled
On Signs and the Examination of Birds and the Croaking of Ravens
as well as treatises on the function of the star Sirius and the influence of the planetary spheres on the Nile River.

These may seem like unusual departures for a man who spent his days studying the very down-to-earth geometry of Euclid. But although Theon was at one level a scientist by any modern definition, in his eyes the world was a magical place, filled with omens and hints of the Platonic forms that lay beneath the veneer of reality. For him, to study the heavens was to study the minds of the gods, from which might be deduced not only the physical operation of the world, but clues to the future of individuals and nations. These thoughts found expression in poems attributed to him on astrological themes, one of which survives in the
Corpus Hermeticum,
a collection of texts of “secret wisdom” compiled during the Renaissance from various classical materials. In this Theon speaks of the seven sparkling spheres of heaven and how their interaction determines the lives of everyone on earth. To him destiny lay in the stars, in the crystal spheres whose mathematical precision reflected universal laws laid down by the supreme God behind all things, the everlasting Aion.

Nor was Theon alone in these beliefs. In this uncertain age it was not only the Christians, Jews, and pagan cults that looked to the supernatural for answers. In the museum itself Theon could have met, and probably knew well, other occultists such as Paulus of Alexandria and the anonymous writer now known to us simply as “the Astrologer of the Year 379.” It was against this background that the Christian patriarch Theophilus came to power in Alexandria in 385. In his eyes the paganism of Theon and the members of the museum was not simply harmless hocus-pocus but a threat, like any belief that deviated from the patriarch’s orthodox views. The early, bloody history of the church and its hard-won agreement on what was orthodox and what was heresy had made it combative. The Christians of the empire had often been persecuted for their beliefs, but now their moment in the sun had come. The empire was Christian, and for Theophilus that could mean only the destruction of paganism altogether. In June 391 an opportunity came to do just that: The news reached Alexandria that the emperor Theodosius had banned all pagan practices.

The focus of Theophilus’s attack would not be the museum itself but the Serapeum, home to the ancient Ptolemaic cult of Serapis and the location of the “daughter library.” As news of the edict of suppression spread, fear gripped the city’s pagans. The prophetic Antoninus, son of Sosipatra, had already foretold the fall of the temple, and a group of pagans now fearfully barricaded themselves inside, under the unlikely command of a cabal of philosophers.

These men were a cross section of an ancient world on the verge of disappearing. They included Olympius, a servant of Serapis, the seven-hundred-year-old god of the Ptolemies who had been forged by the Greeks to help them rule a foreign land; Ammonius, a priest of the Egyptian god Thoth, whom the Alexandrians associated with the Greek god Hermes but whose Egyptian roots lay in a religion older than the pyramids; Helladius, a priest of Ammon, the oracular god who had informed Alexander of his own divine origins at Siwa; the poet Palladas, known for his bitter epigrams written in the persona of a pagan schoolteacher forced to live in a Christian city; and finally Claudian, whose icy poetry would one day find him favor in Rome as court poet. But these eclectic representatives of Alexandria’s old guard were not there simply to await martyrs’ deaths; they intended to go out fighting.

From their stronghold they organized repeated sorties against the Christian mob, picking fights where they could and dragging away any Christian foolish enough to approach the compound unprotected. So bitter had the enmity between these groups become that reports speak of them crucifying those they caught. It must have made for an extraordinary and terrifying sight as Theophilus’s Christians and Olympius’s pagans became caught up in the white-hot zealotry of a religious war. It seems almost impossible today to imagine poets and philosophers battling in the streets with monks and Christian converts, but both were battling not for ideas but for beliefs—beliefs that both would die for.

In the end the pagans paid the highest price. The street battles dwindled into occasional skirmishes, and the pagans dug in inside the Serapeum had nowhere to go. When the running battle came to the attention of the Christian emperor he ordered his representatives in Egypt—the
praefectus augustalis
(prefect) and the
dux aegypti
(military commander)—to intervene. The pagans were ordered out of the Serapeum, and the Christian mob flooded in. Olympius and his compatriots had to watch as Bryaxis’s 750-year-old statue of Serapis, a wonder of the world to many who had seen it, was dragged out into the street and smashed with a soldier’s ax.

No reports survive of what happened when the mob reached the daughter library, which Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, who died in 402, claims in his
Weights and Measures
was still stored in the Serapeum. In fact his is the only source which claims the library was still there; all other descriptions of the temple’s sacking are silent on the issue, including even that of the vehemently anti-Christian Eunapius of Antioch, whom we might expect to put any thinkable atrocity at Theophilus’s door. So in this moment the fate of one of Alexandria’s great libraries again slips through our fingers. It may be that the collection had already been moved, althrough if so, we have no record of where it went. If it did remain in the Serapeum, then the centuries of writing kept in a pagan temple could only have raised suspicions. Whatever was contained in those scrolls belonged to the old world, the pagan world, and could have no place in the new Christian Alexandria. The early Christian writer Paulus Orosius in his
Seven Books of History Against the Pagans
does not mention specific temples but seems to think the destruction of books kept within them was commonplace: “Today there exist in temples book chests which we ourselves have seen, and, when these temples were plundered, these, we are told, were emptied by our own men in our time, which, indeed, is a true statement” (Paulus Orosius,
Seven Books of History Against the Pagans,
book 6, chapter 15).

So we must presume that the Serapeum library was destroyed. One thing alone is certain: If it was kept there or elsewhere, the daughter library was never heard of again.

Those philosophers who had actively fought to preserve the Serapeum now either fled, like Claudian, to Rome, or were deprived of their religious positions and state funding. Of the effect of the destruction on Alexandria and her pagan citizens we have only the cold verses of Claudian and the bitter and rueful lines of Palladas’s epigrams, in one of which he can’t help but compare the vicissitudes of his life with the fate of the seafarers whom he must have watched come and go through the Great Harbor of his city every day:

 
But not everyone had fought for or against Theophilus; not every Neoplatonist had cast off his philosopher’s robes to take up arms in the name of Serapis, Hermes, or paganism in general. Though Claudian had fled and Palladas had sunk into a sea of despair, their loss had not left the lecture halls of Alexandria empty quite yet.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

HYPATIA

Palladas,
Greek Anthology,
11

 
 
The highly charged religious atmosphere in Alexandria was making it a dangerous place to have an opinion—any opinion—and rough seas now buffeted what had once been the intellectual safe haven of the museum. Indeed, Theon is the last name we can definitely associate with the institution that has been at the center of our story since the earliest days of the city. He is its last known member, the last in that roll call of the most brilliant names in antiquity. But it is his daughter who will always be associated with its fall.

In the early years of the fifth century Theon’s daughter seemed to have emerged from the religious crisis of her father’s era unscathed. From early childhood she had been her father’s greatest collaborator, and we find her name first in his introduction to his commentary on the
Almagest:
“Commentary by Theon of Alexandria on Book III of Ptolemy’s Almagest, edition revised by my daughter Hypatia the Philosopher” (Theon, recorded in A. Rome,
Commentaires de Pappus et de Théon,
volume 3, p. 807).

Hypatia was the inheritor of her father’s mantle; indeed, many sources claim she was much more than that, and according to the philosopher Damascius “she was by nature more refined and talented than her father” (Damascius,
Life of Isidore,
excerpted in
The Suda
).

She was a mathematician of noted brilliance, writing commentaries on the works of Apollonius of Perge and the notoriously complicated
Arithmetica
of the third-century inventor of algebra, Diophantus. Indeed, it has been doubted whether, without her clear, patient explanations of the works of this famously opaque mathematician, his work, crucial in the development of modern mathematics, would even have survived. The bitter irony is that today none of Hypatia’s original works survive, and therein lies the key to one of Alexandria’s most tragic episodes, the beginnings of its disappearance back into the Egyptian sands.

Hypatia was born around 355 into the academic elite of Alexandria. At her father’s side she learned astronomy and mathematics as well as the practical skills first mastered by such luminaries of the museum as Eratosthenes and Archimedes, including the building of planispheres and astrolabes. But her interests went far beyond the stars into the realms of philosophy, a philosophy far removed from her father’s mystical occultism.

There is no evidence that Hypatia was ever herself a member of the museum, let alone the “last librarian,” as some have claimed. Indeed, after the death of her father we have no evidence for the museum or library, in the sense that Archimedes or Euclid might have understood them, existing at all. According to the church father Epiphanius of Salamis, whose life roughly coincided with Hypatia’s (he died in 403), the Brucheum quarter of the city where this institution had once stood among gardens, royal palaces, and summerhouses now made for a rather startling sight. In describing the founding of the library he makes the casual aside that it was “in the [part] called the Brucheum; this is a quarter of the city today lying waste” (Epiphanius of Salamis,
Weights and Measures,
chapter 9).

We do not know which of the various Roman emperors left the most beautiful quarter of this city in ruins. It may be that this iconic part of the city had never recovered from the fury of Caracalla. But as Alexandria stands on a geological fault line that produced a major earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 365, we can’t even be sure that it wasn’t simply nature that tore down the marble halls.

If the buildings of the old museum were gone, however, the idea of it was not dead, and the philosophy schools, now perhaps housed in the homes of the teachers, survived. From the late 380s Hypatia had formed her own such school in the city, attracting the sons of some of the most influential and wealthy men in the empire. Among them she lectured in the subjects her father had taught her—ethics, ontology, astronomy, and mathematics—but to a smaller and more select group she also taught philosophy, including the ancient pagan ideas of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle as well as the Neoplatonism of Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus.

This group of initiates became an intensely loyal family around Hypatia; they called each other “brother,” maintained their contacts over a lifetime, and would only hint to the outside world at what secrets they had heard in Hypatia’s house. But this was not a crypto-pagan cult, not simply another band of disinherited priests reminiscing over the old days like the embittered Palladas. Nor were they the augurs and fortune-tellers that Theon counted among his friends. They instead represented both the old and the new in the empire and the city—and as such represented perhaps a chance for Alexandria to reinvent itself, and so save itself, one last time.

The guarded nature of Hypatia’s pupils and her own fate make it hard to unlock the secrets of her school, but thanks to the surviving letters of one of her closest followers we can reconstruct something of her life and times and gain a window into a very unexpected world.

Synesius of Cyrene was a young and wealthy landowner from Alexandria’s sister city who came to Egypt’s capital in the 390s to gain what even then must have been considered a classical education. In his 156 surviving letters we gain tantalizing glimpses of the life of a fourth-century aristocrat in the city and at home. In a letter to his best friend, Herculian, later prefect of Constantinople, he remembers their arrival in Alexandria and their time with Hypatia, the “lady who . . . presides over the mysteries of philosophy”: