S. Rappoport - History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

S >> S. Rappoport >> History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

[Illustration: 165.jpg COIN OF DOMITIANUS WITH LATIN INSCRIPTION]

His first battles were against the Africans and Marmaridae, who were
in arms on the side of Cyrene, and he next took the field against the
Palmyrenes and Saracens, who still claimed Egypt in the name of the
family of Zenobia. He employed the leisure of his soldiers in many
useful works; in repairing bridges, temples, and porticoes, and more
particularly in widening the trenches and keeping open the canals, and
in such other works as were of use in raising and forwarding the yearly
supply of grain to Rome. Aurelian increased the amount of the Egyptian
tribute, which was paid in glass, paper, linen, hemp, and grain; the
latter he increased by one-twelfth part, and he placed a larger number
of ships on the voyage to make the supply certain.

The Christians were well treated during this reign, and their patriarch
Nero so far took courage as to build the Church of St. Mary in
Alexandria. This was probably the first church that was built in Egypt
for the public service of Christianity, which for two hundred years had
been preached in private rooms, and very often in secret. The service
was in Greek, as, indeed, it was in all parts of Egypt: for it does
not appear that Christian prayers were publicly read in the Egyptian
language before the quarrel between the two churches made the Kopts
unwilling to use Greek prayers. The liturgy there read was probably very
nearly the same as that afterwards known as the _Liturgy of St. Mark_.
This is among the oldest of the Christian liturgies, and it shows its
country by the prayer that the waters of the river may rise to their
just measure, and that rain may be sent from heaven to the countries
that need it.

We learn from the historians that eight months were allowed to pass
between the death of Aurelian and the choice of a successor; and during
this time the power rested in the hands of his widow. The sway of a
woman was never openly acknowledged in Rome, but the Alexandrians and
Egyptians were used to female rule, and from contemporary coins we learn
that in Egypt the government was carried on in the name of the Empress
Severina. The last coins of Aurelian bear the date of the sixth year of
his reign, and the coins of Severina are dated in the sixth and seventh
years. But after Tacitus was chosen emperor by his colleagues of the
Roman senate, and during his short reign of six months (A.D. 276), his
authority was obeyed by the Egyptian legions under Probus, as is fully
proved by the Alexandrian coins bearing his name, all dated in the first
year of his reign.

[Illustration: 167.jpg COIN OF SEVERINA]

On the death of Tacitus, his brother Florian hoped to succeed to the
imperial power, and was acknowledged in the same year by the senate and
troops of Rome. But when the news reached Egypt it was at once felt by
the legions that Probus, both by his own personal qualities and by the
high state of discipline of the army under his command, and by his
success against the Egyptian rebels, had a better claim to the purple
than any other general. At first the opinion ran round the camp in a
whisper, and at last the army spoke the general wish aloud; they
snatched a purple cloak from a statue in one of the temples to throw
over him, they placed him on an earthen mound as a tribunal, and against
his will saluted him with the title of emperor. The choice of the
Egyptian legions was soon approved of by Asia Minor, Syria, and Italy;
Florian was put to death, and Probus shortly afterwards marched into
Gaul and Germany, to quiet those provinces.

After a year or two, Probus was recalled into Egypt by hearing that the
Blemmyes had risen in arms, and that Upper Egypt was again independent
of the Roman power. Not only Koptos, which had for centuries been an
Arab city, but even Ptolemais, the Greek capital of the Thebaid, was now
peopled by those barbarians, and they had to be reconquered by Probus
as foreign cities, and kept in obedience by Roman garrisons; and on his
return to Rome he thought his victories over the Blemmyes of Upper Egypt
not unworthy of a triumph.

By these unceasing wars, the Egyptian legions had lately been brought
into a high state of discipline, and, confident in their strength, and
in the success with which they had made their late general emperor of
the Roman world, they now attempted to raise up a rival to him in the
person of their present general Saturninus. Saturninus had been made
general of the Eastern frontier by Aurelian, who had given him strict
orders never to enter Egypt. "The Egyptians," says the historian,
meaning, however, the Alexandrians, "are boastful, vain, spiteful,
licentious, fond of change, clever in making songs and epigrams against
their rulers, and much given to soothsaying and augury." Aurelian well
knew that the loyalty of a successful general was not to be trusted in
Egypt, and during his lifetime Saturninus never entered that province.
But after his death, when Probus was called away to the other parts of
the empire, the government of Egypt was added to the other duties of
Saturninus; and no sooner was he seen there, at the head of an army that
seemed strong enough to enforce his wishes, than the fickle Alexandrians
saluted him with the title of emperor and Augustus. But Saturninus was
a wise man, and shunned the dangerous honour; he had hitherto fought
always for his country; he had saved the provinces of Spain, Gaul, and
Africa from the enemy or from rebellion; and he knew the value of his
rank and character too well to fling it away for a bauble. To escape
from further difficulties he withdrew from Egypt, and moved his
headquarters into Palestine. But the treasonable cheers of the
Alexandrians could neither be forgotten by himself nor by his troops;
he had withstood the calls of ambition, but he yielded at last to his
fears; he became a rebel for fear of being thought one, and he declared
himself emperor as the safest mode of escaping punishment. But he
was soon afterwards defeated and strangled, against the will of the
forgiving Probus.

On the death of Probus, in A.D. 283, the empire fell to Carus and his
sons, Numerianus and Carinus, whose names are found on the Alexandrian
coins, but whose short reigns have left no other trace in Egypt.

[Illustration: 169.jpg COIN OF TRAJAN'S SECOND LEGION]

At this time also we find upon the coins the name of Trajan's second
Egyptian legion, which was at all times stationed in Egypt, and which,
acting upon an authority that was usually granted to the Roman legions
in the various provinces, coined money of several kinds for their own
pay.

The reign of Diocletian, beginning in A.D. 285, was one of suffering to
the Egyptians; and in the fourth year the people rose against the Roman
government, and gave the title of emperor to Achilleus, their leader
in the rebellion. Galerius, the Roman general, led an army against the
rebels, and marched through the whole of the Thebaid; but, though the
Egyptians were routed whenever they were bold enough to meet the legions
in battle, yet the rebellion was not very easily crushed. The Romans
were scarcely obeyed beyond the spot on which their army was encamped.
In the fourth year of the rebellion, A.D. 292, Diocletian came to Egypt,
and the cities of Koptos and Busiris were besieged by the emperor in
person, and wholly destroyed after a regular siege.

When Diocletian reached the southern limits of Egypt he was able to
judge of the difficulty, and indeed the uselessness, of trying to hold
any part of Ethiopia; and he found that the tribute levied there was
less than the cost of the troops required to collect it. He therefore
made a new treaty with the Nobatae, as the people between the first and
second cataracts were now called. He gave up to them the whole of Lower
Ethiopia, or the province called Nubia. The valley for seventy miles
above Syene, which bore the name of the Dodecaschonos, had been held by
Augustus and his successors, and this was now given up to the original
inhabitants. Diocletian strengthened the fortifications on the isle
of Elephantine, to guard what was thenceforth the uttermost point of
defence, and agreed to pay to the Nobatae and Blemmyes a yearly sum of
gold on the latter promising no longer to harass Upper Egypt with their
marauding inroads, and on the former promising to forbid the Blemmyes
from doing so. What remains of the Roman wall built against the inroads
of these troublesome neighbours runs along the edge of the cultivated
land on the east side of the river for some distance to the north of the
cataract. But so much was the strength of the Greek party lessened, and
so deeply rooted among the Egyptians was their hatred of their rulers
and the belief that they should then be able to throw off the yoke,
that soon afterwards Alexandria declared in favour of Achilleus, and
Diocletian was again called to Egypt to regain the capital. Such was
the strength of the rebels that the city could not be taken without
a regular siege. Diocletian surrounded it with a ditch and wall, and
turned aside the canals that supplied the citizens with water. After a
tedious siege of eight months, Alexandria was at last taken by storm in
297, and Achilleus was put to death. A large part of the city was burnt
at the storming, nor would the punishment of the citizens have there
ended, but for Diocletian's humane interpretation of an accident. The
horse on which he sat stumbled as he entered the city with his troops,
and he had the humanity to understand it as a command from heaven that
he should stop the pillage of the city; and the citizens in gratitude
erected near the spot a bronze statue of the horse to which they owed so
much. This statue has long since been lost, but we cannot be mistaken in
the place where it stood. The lofty column in the centre of the temple
of Serapis, now well known by the name of Pompey's Pillar,* once held a
statue on the top, and on the base it still bears the inscription of
the grateful citizens, "To the most honoured emperor, the saviour of
Alexandria, the unconquerable Diocletian."

* See Volume X., page 317.

This rebellion had lasted more than nine years, and the Egyptians seemed
never in want of money for the purposes of the war. Diocletian was
struck with their riches, and he ordered a careful search to be made
through Egypt for all writings on alchemy, an art which the Egyptians
studied together with magic and astrology. These books he ordered to be
burnt, under a belief that they were the great sources of the riches by
which his own power had been resisted. Want and misery no doubt caused
this rebellion, but the rebellion certainly caused more want and misery.
The navigation of the Nile was stopped, the canals were no longer kept
cleared, the fields were badly tilled, trade and manufactures were
ruined. Since the rebellions against the Persians, Egypt had never
suffered so much. It had been sadly changed by the troubles of the last
sixty years, during which it had been six times in arms against Rome;
and when the rebellion was put down by Diocletian, it was no longer
the same country that it had been under the Antonines. The framework of
society had been shaken, the Greeks had lessened in numbers, and still
more in weight. The fall of the Ptolemies, and the conquest by Rome, did
not make so great a change. The bright days of Egypt as a Greek
kingdom began with the building of Alexandria, and they ended with
the rebellions against Gallienus, Aurelian and Diocletian. The native
Egyptians, both Kopts and Arabs, now rise into more notice, as the Greek
civilisation sinks around them. And soon the upper classes among the
Kopts, to avoid the duty of maintaining a family of children in such
troubled times, rush by thousands into monasteries and convents, and
further lessen the population by their religious vows of celibacy. In
the twelfth year of the reign, that in which Alexandria rebelled and
the siege was begun, the Egyptian coinage for the most part ceased.
Henceforth, though money was often coined in Alexandria as in every
other great city of the empire, the inscriptions were usually in Latin,
and the designs the same as those on the coins of Rome. In taking leave
of this long and valuable series of coins with dates, which has been
our guide in the chronology of these reigns, we must not forget to
acknowledge how much we owe to the labours of the learned Zoega. In
his _Numi AEgypti Imperatorii_, the mere descriptions, almost without a
remark, speak the very words of history.

The reign of Diocletian is chiefly remarkable for the new law which was
then made against the Christians, and for the cruel severity with which
it was put into force. The issuing of this edict in 304 A.D., which was
to root out Christianity from the world, took place in the twentieth
year of the reign, according to the Alexandrians, or in the nineteenth
year after the emperor's first installation as consul, as years were
reckoned in the other parts of the empire. The churches, which since
the reign of Gallienus had been everywhere rising, were ordered to be
destroyed and the Bibles to be burnt, while banishment, slavery, and
death were the punishments threatened against those who obstinately
clung to their religion. In no province of the empire was the
persecution more severe than in Egypt; and many Christians fled to
Syria, where the law, though the same, was more mildly carried into
execution. But the Christians were too numerous to fly and too few
to resist. The ecclesiastical writers present us with a sad tale of
tortures and of death borne by those who refused to renounce their
faith,--a tale which is only made less sad by the doubt how far
the writers' feelings may have misled their judgment, and made them
overstate the numbers.

But we may safely rely upon the account which Eusebius gives us of what
he himself saw in Egypt. Many were put to death on the same day, some
beheaded and some burnt. The executioners were tired, and the hearts of
the pagan judges melted by the unflinching firmness of the Christians.
Many who were eminent for wealth, rank, and learning chose to lay down
their lives rather than throw a few grains of wheat upon the altar, or
comply with any ceremony that was required of them as a religious test.
The judges begged them to think of their wives and children, and pointed
out that they were the cause of their own death; but the Christians were
usually firm, and were beheaded for the refusal to take the test.
Among the most celebrated of the Egyptian martyrs were Peter, Bishop of
Alexandria, with Faustus, Dius, and Ammonius, presbyters under him;
the learned Phileas, Bishop of Thmuis, Hesychius, the editor of the
Septuagint, and the Bishops Pachomius and Theodorus; though the pagans
must have been still more surprised at Philoromus, the receiver-general
of the taxes at Alexandria. This man, after the prefect of Egypt and
the general of the troops, was perhaps the highest Roman officer in the
province. He sat in public as a judge in Alexandria, surrounded by a
guard of soldiers, daily deciding all causes relating to the taxes of
Egypt. He was accused of no crime but that of being a Christian, which
he was earnestly entreated to deny, and was at liberty indirectly to
disprove by joining in some pagan sacrifice. The Bishops of Alexandria
and Thmuis may have been strengthened under their trials by their rank
in the church, by having themselves urged others to do their duty in the
same case, but the receiver-general of the taxes could have had nothing
to encourage him but the strength of his faith and a noble scorn of
falsehood; he was reproached or ridiculed by all around him, but he
refused to deny his religion, and was beheaded as a common criminal.

The ready ministers of this persecution were Culeianus, the prefect of
the Thebaid, and Hierocles, the prefect of Alexandria. The latter
was peculiarly well chosen for the task; he added the zeal of the
theologian to the ready obedience of the soldier. He had written against
the Christians a work named _Philalethes_ (the lover of truth), which we
now know only in the answer by Eusebius of Caesarea. In this he denounced
the apostles as impostors, and the Christian miracles as trifling; and,
comparing them with the pretended miracles of Apollonius of Tyana,
he pronounced the latter more numerous, more important, and better
authenticated than the former by the evangelists; and he ridiculed
the Christians for calling Jesus a god, while the pagans did not raise
Apollonius higher than a man beloved by the gods.

This persecution under Diocletian was one of the most severe that the
Christians ever underwent from the Romans. It did not, however, wholly
stop the religious services, nor break up the regular government of the
Church. In the catechetical school, Pierius, whom we have before spoken
of as a man of learning, was succeeded by Theognostus and then by
Serapion, whose name reminds us that the Egyptian party was gaining
weight in the Alexandrian church. It can hardly have been for his
superior learning, it may have been because his opinions were becoming
more popular than those of the Greeks, that a professor with an Egyptian
name was placed at the head of the catechetical school. Serapion was
succeeded by Peter, who afterwards gained the bishopric of Alexandria
and a martyr's crown. But these men were little known beyond their
lecture-room. In the twentieth year of the reign, on the death of Peter,
the Bishop of Alexandria, who lost his life as a martyr, the presbyters
of the church met to choose a successor. Among their number was Arius,
whose name afterwards became so famous in ecclesiastical history, and
who had already, even before he was ordained a priest, offended many by
the bold manner in which he stated his religious opinions. But upon him,
if we may believe a partial historian, the majority of votes fell in
the choice of a patriarch of Alexandria, and had he not himself modestly
given way to the more ambitious Alexander, he might perhaps have been
saved from the treatment which he afterwards suffered from his rival.

When, in the year 305, Diocletian and his colleague, Valerius Maximian,
resigned the purple, Egypt with the rest of the East was given to
Galerius, who had also as Caesar been named Maximian on his Egyptian
coins, while Constantius Chlorus ruled the West. Galerius in 307 granted
some slight indulgence to the Christians without wholly stopping
the persecution. But all favour was again withdrawn from them by his
successor Maximin, who had indeed misgoverned Egypt for some years,
under the title of Caesar, before the rank of Augustus was granted to
him. He encouraged private informers, he set townsman against townsman;
and, as the wishes of the emperor are quickly understood by all under
him, those who wished for his favour courted it by giving him an excuse
for his cruelties. The cities sent up petitions to him, begging that the
Christians might not be allowed to have churches within their walls. The
history of these reigns indeed is little more than the history of the
persecutions; and when the Alexandrian astronomers, dropping the era of
Augustus, began to date from the first year of Diocletian, the Christian
writers in the same way dated from the Era of the Martyrs.

It can be no matter of surprise to us that, in a persecution which
threatened all classes of society, there should have been many who, when
they were accused of being Christians, wanted the courage to undergo
the pains of martyrdom, and escaped the punishment by joining in a pagan
sacrifice. When the storm was blown over, these men again asked to be
received into the Church, and their conduct gave rise to the very
same quarrel that had divided the Christians in the reign of Decius.
Meletius, a bishop of the Thebaid, was at the head of the party who
would make no allowance for the weakness of their brethren, and who
refused to grant to the repentant the forgiveness that they asked for.
He had himself borne the same trials without bending, he had been
sent as a criminal to work in the Egyptian mines, and had returned to
Alexandria from his banishment, proud of his sufferings and furious
against those who had escaped through cowardice. But the larger part of
the bishops were of a more forgiving nature; they could not all boast of
the same constancy, and the repentant Christians were re-admitted
into communion with the faithful, while the followers of Meletius were
branded with the name of heretics.

In Alexandria, Meletius soon found another and, as it proved, a more
memorable occasion for the display of his zeal. He has the unenviable
honour of being the author of the great Arian quarrel, by accusing of
heresy Arius, at that time a presbyter of the church of Baucala near
Alexandria, and by calling upon Alexander, the bishop, to inquire into
his belief, and to condemn it if found unsound. Arius frankly and openly
acknowledged his opinions: he thought Jesus a created being, and would
speak of him in no higher terms than those used in the New Testament
and Apostles' Creed, and defended his opinions by an appeal to the
Scriptures. But he soon found that his defence was thought weak,
and, without waiting to be condemned, he withdrew before the storm to
Palestine, where he remained till summoned before the council of Nicaea
in the coming reign.

It was during these reigns of trouble, about which history is sadly
silent, when Greek learning was sinking, and after the country had
been for a year or two in the power of the Syrians, that the worship of
Mithra was brought into Alexandria, where superstitious ceremonies and
philosophical subtleties were equally welcome. Mithra was the Persian
god of the sun; and in the system of two gods, one good and the other
wicked, he was the god of goodness.

[Illustration: 179.jpg SYMBOL OF MITHRA]

The chief symbol in his worship was the figure of a young hero in
Phrygian cap and trousers, mounted on a sinking bull, and stabbing it
in sacrifice to the god. In a deserted part of Alexandria, called the
Mithrium, his rites were celebrated among ruins and rubbish; and his
ignorant followers were as ignorantly accused of there slaying their
fellow-citizens on his altars.

It was about the same time that the eastern doctrine of Manicheism was
said to have been brought into Egypt by Papus, and Thomas or Hernias.
This sect, if sect it may be called, owed its origin to a certain
Majus Mani, banished from Persia under the Sassanides; this Mani was
a talented man, highly civilised through his studies and voyages in
distant lands. In his exile he conceived the idea of putting himself
forward as the reformer of the religions of all the peoples he had
visited, and of reducing them all to one universal religion. Banished by
the Christians, to whom he represented himself as the divinely inspired
apostle of Jesus, in whom the Comforter had appeared, he returned to
Persia, taking with him a book of the Gospels adorned by extraordinary
paintings. Here he obtained at first the favour of the king and the
people, till finally, after many changes of fortune, he was pursued by
the magi, and convicted in a solemn disputation of falsifying religion;
he was condemned to the terrible punishment of being flayed alive, after
which his skin was to be stuffed and hung up over the gates of the
royal city. His teaching consisted in a mixture of Persian and
Christian-Gnostic views; its middle final point was the dualism of good
and evil which rules in the world and in the human breast.

According to Mani's creed, there were originally two principles, God in
His kingdom of light, and the demon with his kingdom of darkness, and
these two principles existed independently of each other. The powers
of evil fell into strife with each other, until, hurled away by their
inward confusion, they reached the outermost edge of their own kingdom,
and from there beheld the kingdom of light in all its glory. Now they
ceased their strife among themselves and united to do battle to the
kingdom of light. To meet them, God created the "original man" who,
armed with the five pure elements, light, fire, air, water, and earth,
advanced to meet the hostile powers. He was defeated, though finally
saved; but a part of his light had thus made its way into the realm of
darkness. In order gradually to regain this light, God caused the mother
of life to create the visible world, in which that light lies hidden as
a living power or world-soul awaiting its deliverance from the bonds of
matter. In order to accomplish this redemption, two new beings of light
proceed from God, viz.: Christ and the Holy Ghost, of whom the former,
Christus Mithras, has his abode in the sun and moon, the latter in the
ether diffused around the entire world. Both attract the powers of light
which have sunk into the material world in order to lead them back,
finally, into the everlasting realm of light. To oppose them, however,
the demons created a new being, viz.: man, after the example of the
"original man," and united in him the clearest light and the darkness
peculiar to themselves, in order that the great strife might be renewed
in his breast, and so man became the point of union of all the forces in
the universe, the microcosm in which two principles ever strive for the
mastery. Through the enticements of the material and the illusions
of the demon, the soul of light was held in bondage in spite of its
indwelling capacity for freedom, so that in heathenism and Judaism the
"son of everlasting light," as the soul of the universe, was chained
to matter. In order to accomplish this work of redemption more quickly,
Christ finally leaves his throne at God's right hand, and appears
on earth, truly in human form, but only with an apparent body; his
suffering and death on the cross are but illusions for the multitude,
although historical facts, and they serve at the same time as a symbol
of the light imprisoned in matter, and as a typical expression of
the suffering, poured out over the whole of nature (especially in the
plant-world), of the great physical _weltschmerz_. Christ, through his
teaching and power of attraction, began the deliverance of the light,
so that one can truly say that the salvation of the world proceeds
from rays which stream from the Cross; as, however, his teachings
were conceived by the apostles in a Jewish sense, and the Gospels
were disfigured, Mani appeared as the comforter promised by Christ
to accomplish the victory. In his writings only is the pure truth
preserved. Finally there will be a complete separation of the light from
the darkness, and then the powers of darkness will fall upon each other
again.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22