The Darkening Age

by Catherine Nixey

  The worshippers of the old gods pleaded eloquently with the Christian elite for toleration. One of the most famous requests was sparked by a dispute over an altar. The Altar of Victory had stood in the Senate House in Rome for centuries, and for centuries Roman senators had made offerings at it before meetings of the Senate. It was an ancient custom, dating back to Augustus, and a revered one. But Christians began to find it increasingly intolerable that they had to share the Senate with idols and breathe what they saw as the polluting demonic smoke. After decades of to-ing and fro-ing, in AD 382 the Christian emperor Gratian ordered the altar out.

  Rome’s senators—at any rate those who were still worshippers of the old gods—were dismayed. Not only was this a gross break with tradition, it was a serious insult to the gods. The brilliant orator Symmachus wrote an appeal. First, he begged the emperor to allow religious difference among his subjects. Echoing Herodotus, Celsus, Themistius and many another before him, he observed that “each person has their own custom, each their own religious rite” and that mankind was ill-equipped to judge which of these was best, “since all reasoning is shrouded in ambiguity.” He doesn’t ask for any curbing of Christianity. It was, he said, “not possible to attain to so sublime a mystery by one route alone.” One can dismiss this as mere pragmatism and politics—and true, Symmachus was hardly in a position to ask for more. But that is too cynical: whether the Greco-Roman polytheism was truly “tolerant” or not, there is no doubt that the old ways were fundamentally liberal and generous. Men such as Symmachus had no wish to change that. Or, as he put it to his intolerant Christian rulers: “We offer you now prayers, not a battle.”59

  Symmachus might not have wanted a battle but a battle was precisely what the Christians saw themselves as fighting. For a Christian, reasoning was not shrouded in ambiguity: it was explicitly laid out in the Bible. And the Bible, on this point, was clear. As those thundering words of Deuteronomy had it, toleration of other religions and their altars was not what was required. Instead, the faithful were required to raze them to the ground.60 No Christian could agree with the relativistic quibbles of Symmachus. To a Christian there were not different but equally valid views. There were angels and there were demons. As the academic Ramsay MacMullen has put it, “there could be no compromise with the Devil.”61 And, as Christians made clear in a thousand hectoring sermons and a hundred fierce laws, objects associated with other religions belonged to the Dark Lord. “The Devil’s worship,” fulminated one Christian, “consists of prayers in the temples of idols, honours paid to lifeless idols, the lighting of lamps or burning of incense.”62 Symmachus lost. His plea was ignored.

  Then, some twenty years later, in AD 408, came one of the fiercest pronouncements yet. “If any images stand even now in the temples and shrines,” this new law said, “they shall be torn from their foundations . . . The buildings themselves of the temples which are situated in cities or towns or outside the towns shall be vindicated to public use. Altars shall be destroyed in all places.”63

  Rome’s ancient cults were collapsing. And yet though Symmachus lost—perhaps because he lost—his words still have a terrible power. “We request peace for the gods of our forefathers,” he had begged. “Whatever each person worships, it is reasonable to think of them as one. We see the same stars, the sky is shared by all, the same world surrounds us. What does it matter what wisdom a person uses to seek for the truth?”64

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  The Reckless Ones

  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

  —1 Corinthians 3:19

  THEY CALLED THEM THE “parabalani”—“the reckless ones.”1 At first, the name had been a compliment. Under the scorching heat of the Alexandrian sun, in this city at the crossroads of busy trading routes, someone needed to carry away the bodies of the sick and the weak—not to mention the merely unsavory poor—and do so swiftly, to protect everyone else.

  This was a city that knew how devastating a plague could be. A hundred and fifty years before, a new disease had arrived in Alexandria, then fanned out into the rest of the empire, killing millions. Then, a hundred or so years later, the Plague of Justinian struck. Its symptoms were even more abhorrent: buboes appeared, followed variously by coma, delirium, agonizing pain, “black pustules about as large as a lentil,” the vomiting of blood and, finally, death.2 The plague was more devastating than the last: twenty-five million people died.

  To deal with the dead and the dying in an ancient city was therefore an essential job and, like most essential jobs, a despised one. In fifth-century Alexandria, the men who stepped forward to do this work were the parabalani, the “reckless” young Christians brave enough to act as stretcher bearers in this medicine-free world.3 These men were in many ways at the bottom of society: they were not wealthy, or educated, or even literate, but they had muscle, they had faith—and they had strength in numbers.4 By the beginning of the fifth century there were an estimated eight hundred members of the parabalani in Alexandria alone: an army—and the word is used advisedly—of young men, devoted to the service of God.5

  Or more precisely, to the service of His representatives on earth: the bishops. As the scholar Peter Brown has pointed out, in cities across the empire at this time, powerful clerics were beginning to marshal huge followings of young men, strong believers, in both senses of the word. In Rome, those who flocked behind the bishop were the “fossores,” the diggers who mined out the city’s famous catacombs. In Antioch, it was the pallbearers who surrounded their patriarch. These men had all initially been gathered to do good Christian deeds—but they could and would be deployed to do terrible ones. The control that many bishops had over their flocks was firm to the point of unyielding. They were the gatekeepers of heaven and could shut those gates in the faces of those who displeased them. In the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops controlled de facto militaries of the faithful—and they were not afraid to use them. In Rome, the diggers upset an episcopal election with the use of “alarming” violence. As one bishop somewhat smugly observed, bishops were “the calmers of disturbances, and anxious for peace, except when even they are moved by some offence against God, or insult to the Church,” as Brown has observed.6

  Except. Brown has rightly drawn attention to that word. Peace could only be had at the Church’s say-so. The Lamb of God was now flanked by lions. The diggers in Rome were fearsome enough, but it was the parabalani in Alexandria who became infamous. Cross the bishop of Alexandria and, as locals knew to their cost, he might send some of the eight hundred parabalani to visit you. Argument incarnate, they massed outside the town hall, the theater and the law courts. Their mere presence was enough to bully opponents into submission. They have been described as a “terrorist charity”—a strange oxymoron, but a good one. These men did, at times, do good deeds but they also sowed fear. “Terror” is the word used in Roman legal documents about them.7

  One spring day in AD 415, the parabalani would go much further than merely threatening violence. On that day, they committed one of the most infamous murders in early Christianity.8

  Hypatia of Alexandria was born in the same city as the parabalani and yet a world away from them. While they spent their days toiling among the filthy and the dying, this aristocratic intellectual spent her days working with abstract mathematical theories and astrolabes. Hypatia was not only a philosopher; she was also a brilliant astronomer and the greatest mathematician of her generation. The Victorians, who became much taken with her, granted her other graces posthumously. One famous painting shows her draped naked against an altar, her nubile body shielded by little more than her tumbling tawny locks. A novel about her by the Reverend Charles Kingsley, author of the children’s novel The Water Babies, is rich in such breathless phrases as “the severest and grandest type of old Greek beauty” and in musings on her “curved lips” and the “glorious grace and beauty of every line.”9

  This, alas, is romantic bunk. Hypatia was, without doub
t, a beauty—but far from draping herself and her tumbling curls over altars, she always dressed in the austere and concealing uniform of a philosopher’s cloak. She was devoted to the life of the mind rather than of the flesh and remained a virgin. Any man bold enough to attempt to sway her from this resolve met with a bracing response. It is said that one of her students fell in love with her and, “not being able to control his passion,” confessed his feelings. Hypatia responded briskly. “She brought some of her sanitary towels and threw them before him, and said, ‘You love this, young man, and there is nothing beautiful about it.’”10 The relationship, understandably, went no further.

  By the early fifth century AD, Hypatia had become something of a local celebrity. Alexandria was a city that had, for hundreds of years, been in thrall to its intellectuals. Almost as soon as there had been a city in that spot, there had been a library; and almost as soon as there was a library, stories about the library, and particularly about its foundation, had started to accumulate. According to one story, Ptolemy II, the ruler of Alexandria, had written a letter to every king and ruler on earth begging them to send his library works by all kinds of authors, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians and all the others too.”11 Not just in Greek, either, but in every language. Men, too, were sought and experts enlisted from every nation to act as translators. “Each group of scholars was allocated the appropriate texts, and so a Greek translation of every text was made.”12

  Nothing was to be left out of this ambitious new collection—not even religion. Indeed, particularly not religion. It had been Alexander’s firmly held belief that to govern a people you needed to understand them—and who could hope to understand a people unless you knew what they worshipped? Understand that and you understood their souls; understand a nation’s soul and you could control it. Vast efforts were made with religious texts: two million lines of verse, said to be by the ancient Iranian prophet Zoroaster, were translated. The very first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was, according to legend, made here in the third century BC.

  This was intellectual conquest as much as academic inquiry and it could, at times, feel invasive. If you had docked in the city’s handsome port in the third century BC then your ship would have been boarded by the officials of King Ptolemy III Euergetes. These officers would then have conducted a brisk search of your ship, hunting not for contraband but for something that was, here, considered far more valuable: books. If any were found, they would be confiscated, taken off and copied. The copies—the librarians, well aware of the fallibility of scribes, preferred originals—would then be returned to the ships while the originals were labeled “from the ships” and taken to the Great Library itself.

  The Athenian government was written to and their official copies of the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides—believed to be the most accurate in existence—were requested. The Athenians, naturally, refused. Ptolemy III pressed them. He would pay a vast deposit, he said, fifteen talents, as proof of his good faith. Finally, the Athenians were persuaded and they sent their tragedies. The faithless Ptolemy made magnificent copies, on the finest writing materials—then sent these back across the sea. Athens got the money and the handsome new copies, but Alexandria had the best.

  It was a library of awesome ambition—and size. The number of scrolls that it held is contested, but estimates of the collection give an idea of its extent—and they are astonishing. One puts the library’s holdings at an implausibly high 700,000 volumes by the first century BC. Nonsense, probably, but there were perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls by the third century BC. Certainly there were so many that, for the first time, a system of categorizing the scrolls had to be invented to keep track of them all.

  This was easily the greatest library that the world had ever seen—or that it would see for centuries. The famous later monastic libraries were paltry by comparison: the earlier ones usually held around only twenty books, and even the major libraries of the twelfth century contained no more than five hundred or so—and naturally such collections were heavily weighted towards Christian texts. It took well over a millennium for any other collection to come close to what Alexandria had achieved in terms of volume, and longer still before any other library demonstrated such intellectual omnivorousness. By 1338, the library of the Sorbonne in Paris, the richest in the Christian world, offered a theoretical 1,728 works for loan—300 of which, as its registers noted, it had already managed to lose.13

  It wasn’t only books that Alexandria collected, but intellectuals. Scholars here were treated with reverence and to some marvelous facilities. Together, the Great Library and the Musaeum provided them with a charming existence: there were covered walkways to stroll through, gardens in which to rest and a hall to lecture in. Almost every need was catered for: academics were also given a stipend from public funds, board and lodging, and meals in an elegant, domed-roof dining hall. There may also have been, somewhat incongruously, a zoo.

  The intention of all this was to lure the empire’s intellectuals here—and it worked. Some of the most brilliant minds of the classical period flocked there to write, read, study, eat those free meals and, of course, to bicker. “In populous Egypt,” one vinegary observer wrote, “many cloistered bookworms are fed, arguing endlessly in the chicken-coop of the Muses.”14 The brilliant mathematician and physicist Archimedes, who famously stepped in a bath, noticed its water move and announced “Eureka!,” had studied here.15 So too did Euclid, whose mathematical textbook remained the basis of math education until the twentieth century. Eratosthenes, who worked out the circumference of the earth to an accuracy of 80 kilometers using little more than a stick and a camel, was also here, as too were the poet Callimachus; Aristarchus of Samos, who proposed the first heliocentric model of the solar system; the astronomer Hipparchus; Galen . . . The catalogue of Alexandria’s intellectuals is as remarkable as that of its books.

  Hypatia’s own father, Theon, had studied here. He was a mathematician of astonishing perspicacity, not to mention longevity: the commentaries he produced on Euclid were so authoritative that they form the foundation of modern editions of his texts. Read Euclid today, and you are reading, in part, the work of Hypatia’s father.

  Nothing lasts forever. As she stepped out on her daily ride through Alexandria in her chariot, Hypatia would have passed through a very different city to the one enjoyed by her forebears. As the fourth century opened, even its horizon had changed: the great temple of Serapis that had once dominated the city’s skyline had now gone; passing through the city she would have seen other desecrations—smaller but still shocking. After razing Serapis the Christians had gone on a victorious rampage through the city and its 2,500 shrines, temples and religious sites.16 Busts of Serapis that had (much like the Virgin Mary in Italian villages today) previously stood in streets, wall niches and above doorways had been removed—“cleansed.” The Christians had “so cut and filed [them] away that not even a trace or mention of [Serapis] or any other demon remained anywhere. In their place everyone painted the sign of the Lord’s cross on doorposts, entrances, walls and columns.”17 Later, with bolder finality, crosses were carved in.

  The city’s intellectual life had suffered. The final remnants of the Great Library had gone, vanishing along with the temple. Many of Alexandria’s intellectuals had gone too, fleeing to Rome, or elsewhere in Italy, or anywhere they could to get away from this frightening city.18

  Nevertheless, though much had gone, much remained. At the beginning of the fifth century, Alexandria still exerted a pull on the intellectuals of the empire and Hypatia moved in a gilded circle. It was said that anyone who wanted to study philosophy traveled vast distances to get to her, coming from as far afield as Rome, Libya and Syria. Some of Alexandria’s leading citizens petitioned her for advice which, it seems, she doled out with alarming frankness.19 Whenever anyone new and notable visited Alexandria, one of the first things they did was to pay Hypatia
a visit. Orestes, the aristocratic governor of Alexandria and one of the most important men in the city, had become a confidant, friend and a powerful ally—and, as it would turn out, a dangerous one.20

  In a world that was becoming increasingly riven along sectarian lines, Hypatia remained determinedly non-partisan in her behavior, treating non-Christian and Christian with meticulous equality. Orestes himself was a Christian. People of all faiths crowded in to hear her lecture and flocked to her house to hear her speak. Devotees gathered round her at all times. Those who were taught by her grew almost queasily rhapsodic in their praise: they were “fortune’s darlings” to be able to sit at the feet of this “luminous child of reason.”21 Many of Hypatia’s pupils had other, more concrete reasons to consider themselves blessed: they were some of the wealthiest and best-educated young men in the empire. When away from Alexandria, they wrote each other fondly affectionate letters from their country villas, extolling the virtues of simple rural life with the enthusiasm of those who have never had to do any simple rural work. When one student wished to show his affection for another, he bought him a horse. Now in her late middle age, Hypatia had established herself as one of the most respected figures in Alexandria. The entire city, as one later admirer gushed, “naturally loved her and held her in exceptional esteem.”22

  It was not true. In the spring of the year 415, relations between Christians and non-Christians in Alexandria were tense. The sky above the city might have been darkened by only a few scudding white clouds but in its streets the atmosphere—always quarrelsome—was more precarious than ever. To make matters worse the city had a new bishop, Cyril. After the zealot Theophilus, many Alexandrians must have hoped that their next cleric would be more conciliatory. He was not. But then his breeding hinted at as much—he was, after all, Theophilus’s nephew. And, true to family form, he was a thug. Cyril had not been in power long before he showed himself to be, if anything, more vicious than his uncle. Even Christians had reservations about this brutal and ambitious man: he was, as one council of bishops put it, “a monster, born and educated for the destruction of the Church.” And within a few years of his coming to power his violence had begun.