_Book the First:_ THE SEEKING
I
Beautiful even with the trench and wall of Diocletian's comparatively
recent siege scarring the orchards and vineyards of Lake Mareotis,
splendid even though her broken canals and aqueducts had never been
repaired, and part of her western quarter still displayed heaps of
calcined ruins where had been temples, palaces and academies,
Alexandria lay shimmering under the African sun. Between the
turquoise of the Mediterranean on the north and west, the beryl green
of the Delta on the east, and the flaming opal of the Desert south
and again east of the Delta, the Queen city of the dead old
Ptolemies, set about with vineyards, fair orchards and stately
palm-groves stretching in a broad band of shade and fruitfulness from
the Lake across the Desert, and fringing both sides of the Nilotic
canal, well merited the title: "Queen Emerald of the Jewelled
Girdle," bestowed upon her by the librarian who unloaded upon
Posterity a geographical treatise in heroic verse.
The vintage of Egypt was in full swing, the figs and dates were being
harvested. Swarms of wasps and hornets, armed with formidable
stings, yellow-striped like the dreaded nomads of the south and
eastern frontiers, greedily sucked the sugary juices of the ripe
fruit. Flocks of fig-birds twittered amongst the branches, being
like the date-pigeons, almost too gorged to fly. Half-naked,
earth-brown or tawny-skinned native labourers, hybrids of mingled
races, with heads close-shaven save for a topknot; dwellers in
mud-hovels, drudges of the water-wheel, cut down the heavy
grape-clusters with sickle-shaped copper knives.
Ebony, woolly-haired negroes in clean white breech-cloths, piled up
the gathered fruit in tall baskets woven of reeds and lined with
leaves. Copts with the rich reddish skins, the long eyes and
boldly-curving profiles of Egyptian warriors and monarchs as
represented on the walls of ancient temples of Libya and the Thebaïd,
moved about in leather-girdled blue linen tunics and hide sandals,
keeping account of the laden panniers, roped upon the backs of
diminutive asses, and carried to the wine-presses as fast as they
were filled. There would be a glut of the thin sweet drink that was
exported in clay flagons with round bases; a vintage as disesteemed
in the era of the last Queen Cleopatra by the wine-bibbing
Alexandrians, as to-day under the joint sway of the Emperor
Diocletian and his co-regent, the swineherd Maximianus.
The negroes sang as they set snares, and the fig-birds beloved of the
epicurean fell by hundreds into the limed horse-hair traps. Greek,
Egyptian and negro girls, laughing under garlands of hibiscus,
periwinkle and tuberoses, coaxed the fat morsels out of the black men
to carry home for a supper-treat; while acrobats, comic singers,
sellers of cakes, drinks and sweetmeats, with strolling jugglers and
jesters, and Jewish fortune-tellers of both sexes, assailed the
workers and the merrymakers with importunities, and made harvest in
their own way.
Despite the scars left by the siege of Diocletian,--whose clemency in
stopping the pillage of the city was recalled by a bronze statue of
the tyrant, placed on the summit of a column in the middle of the
Serapium,--Alexandria was still not only mistress of her own huge
trade in corn, but the port through which the European trade of India
and Arabia passed.
The Great Port and its fellow basin of Eunostus were crowded with
shipping both native and foreign, the quays were choked with
merchandise of innumerable kinds, and thronged with men of all the
world's known nations. The copper-hued Egyptian, the diamond-eyed,
sharp-witted Greek, the olive-skinned, aquiline-featured Hebrew with
his furred robe, high headdress, long beard and side-curls, jostled
the supple Italian, the lively Gaul, the slow Boeotian, and the
Ethiopian cloaked with leopard-skins, displaying ivory rings in his
dark ears, and on his arms and fingers, and ivory suns and moons
suspended from a thread of sacred knots upon his naked breast. Here
merchants from the scarce-known Tsin State, south of Hind,
pig-tailed, slant-eyed men in cartwheel hats of woven grass,
embroidered silks and felt-soled shoes--again encountered, on this
neutral soil of Egypt, their ancient enemy, the Tartar. Here also
were Hindu Buddhist pilgrims wearing yellow robes, and carrying
begging-bowls and armpit-crutches, Fire-worshippers in snowy white,
and Persian merchants in long-sleeved caftans and tall lambskin
headdresses. The nomad of the Desert--his black leather head-veil
bound by thongs about his lean, brown temples, his great striped
mantle of camel's hair cast about his painted nakedness, bartering
spices and frankincense from Arabia Felix, for gold and silver
jewellery and strings of pink and blue pearls from the eastern shores
of the Red Sea to deck his womankind, rubbed shoulders with the
Scythian, thick of tongue, solid of bone and heavy of shoulder,
bow-legged with continual riding, his shaggy head protected by a
cone-shaped cap of hairy horse-hide, his back cloaked, his feet shod,
and his loins clouted with tanned horse-leather, which also covered
his brass-nailed shield and sheathed his short iron sword. And among
the slaves of many nations, staggering under great crates and bales
between the quays and the warehouses, were seen huge semi-naked men
with matted yellow hair, and blue or grey eyes; whose white skins
were decorated with animals, birds and flowers traced in blue
pigment, and upon whose limbs were soldered the heavy bronze anklet
and armlet, with rings to accommodate a chain, often needed by the
refractory slave.
"They are Britons," the Alexandrians would say, fanning themselves
and smiling. "We have mercenaries of the race in our Tenth Legion,
but these are dull fellows, too stupid to fight. What can you expect
from a country that produces nothing but tin and oysters? Strong
slaves and comely enough, but dangerous when goaded. And in
captivity they never laugh!"
A charge which could not be laid to the accusers, for ground as they
were to the earth beneath the iron heel of a despotic Roman
government, the Alexandrians laughed in season and out. They made
their successive rulers dread to provoke the onslaughts of their
waspish ridicule. Wit was the point of the dagger that could find
its way through a tyrant's harness, a venomed jest could make him
writhe with much more safety to the community than the contents of
the poison-phial dropped into the dish before its cover was put on,
and the steward's clay seal affixed. They were tepid in their
religion, vain, proud, boastful and spiteful, unstable in their
friendships, languid in business, indifferent to reputation, fickle
in friendship, furious in lust, unrelenting in vengeance, merciless
in jealousy, cold in their natural affections, and faithless in love.
They wrote no histories, but had a cultured taste in cookery,
perfumes, dress, music and dancing; erotic poetry, and exotic vice;
and on the stars of the theatre, of the Gymnasium and the Hippodrome,
they lavished all the enthusiasm they possessed. The famous
charioteer, the great singer or dancer, the comic actor whose jokes
set the whole city in a roar; the unconquerable wrestler, or
swordsman, or pugilist who happened to be the idol of the moment,
daily walked surrounded by his admirers on the promontory of Lochias,
or in the public gardens under the palm-groves, attired in the
scarlet robes of the ultra-fashionable, loaded with jewelled
necklaces, carrying in gem-encrusted fingers a golden-handled fan of
flamingo or parrots' feathers, and wearing scented garlands on his
crimped and perfumed hair. Banquets were given to famous
fighting-cocks, which, perched at the right hand of the couch of the
host, fed upon sesame from golden platters, and sipped distilled
water from precious bowls of white and purple Murrhine spar.
Amidst the luxury and corruption of this city, whose roaring floods
of traffic rolled between buildings marvellously diverse in their
mingling of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Semitic styles of
architecture, the clash of creeds was never wanting, and ancient
faiths and newer revelations struggled for supremacy. The glorious
psalms of David, rising from the Synagogue, mingled with the shrill
rattle of the sistrum, and the strains of the hymn addressed to Isis,
the goddess of the Throned Moon. Serapis, lord of the under-world,
was yet worshipped though the Serapium lay in ruins,--the Persian
Mithra had his following, and the annual festival of Pan was
celebrated in the temple--wrought in pink African granite to the
semblance of a phallus, that dwarfed every other building in
Alexandria save the Lighthouse of the Pharos, soaring four hundred
feet above its base of Cyclopæan rock. And a purer and more radiant
light than that of the Pharos burned in Alexandria, where the
Mysteries of the Catholic Church of CHRIST were celebrated in temples
converted from the service of the deities of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
The four hundred columns of the ruined Serapium overhung the
quadrangle of thick-walled, buttressed stone buildings where the
Christian Patriarch, his clergy, monks, deacons and aspirants were
unpretendingly housed. Of his followers, religious and secular,
thirty thousand mustered in Alexandria, whilst the lay helpers,
organised in the vast Guild of the Parabolani, literally "_those who
expose themselves to danger_" laboured by day and night amongst the
miserable, the homeless, the famine-bitten and the fever-stricken,
rotting in the purlieus, the prisons and the poorest quarters of the
city, sufferers chiefly of Greek and Egyptian nationality, for the
population of the teeming Jewish quarter were as always, charitable
to their own. Thus Christian schools and orphanages were set up,
supported and instructed; hospitals established, staffed and
maintained; catechumens brought to the priests for instruction, and
the dead buried with all decency by Christian men who went forth in
the coarse habit of sackcloth, with the cowl that covered the entire
face, and only showed the eyes.
The persecution of Maximianus, much more severe than that following
the issue of the New Law of Diocletian, had now exposed the
disgraceful practices of these besotted dupes. For weeks past the
city had buzzed and stung like a veritable nest of hornets, poked
into venomous life by the secret activities of Arius the Presbyter,
the open malevolence of the Pagans, and the bitter enmity of the Jews.
The deceased Prefect of Egypt had been a ruler not favourably
disposed towards the Christians. By his successor, Mettius Rufus,
the savage Imperial edict was ruthlessly enforced.
Christian prelates, priests, monks, nuns, deaconesses and catechumens
had been arrested, imprisoned, executed or tortured by the soldiers
of the Third Egyptian Legion,--far more accustomed of late years to
quelling street riots and displaying their glittering harness and
handsome persons at military and civic spectacles, than to making
wholesale battues of unarmed and unresisting men and women.
Detachments of cohorts stationed throughout Libya were sent to raid
the hermitages, monasteries and nunneries on the Nile banks and upon
the borders of the Desert. At Mount Nitria and in Scete as at
Scyras, they had made many captures; though at Tabenna in the
Thebaïd, where the venerable Abbot Pachomius had gathered about him
thirteen hundred followers, so stout a resistance was made by the
monks, with staves, great stones and boiling pitch and water, that
three maniples of soldiers of the Fourth Lusitanian Legion, compelled
to abandon the siege, returned, to exhibit their wounds and burns to
Perocles, the military prefect of Apollinopolis, entreating him with
tears of rage, to send them back in sufficient force to wipe out the
shame of defeat sustained at such abominable hands.
All classes of society were sifted by a process which netted a number
of suspects. Amongst the labourers in the vineyards, the toilers on
the quays, in the thronged marts of commerce, as amongst the crowds
at the baths, the lecture-halls, the theatre, the Gymnasium and the
Hippodrome, moved close-lipped, silent men in plain clothing, with
sharp, greedy ears and keen, observant eyes. These were called The
Listeners, and carried in the sleeve short rods tipped with a gilt
Roman Eagle, and the maw of that fierce and bloody bird was never
satisfied. Apostasy was rewarded by temporary immunity. Obduracy
merited what it received, in banishment to the mines, forfeiture of
property, exile, slavery or torture to the death. Many persons
accused, even before coming into Court, renounced the Faith and
reverted to Paganism, or after imprisonment and some degree of
torture, sacrificed, and were set free. Yet others escaped into
Syria, where the law, though the same in effect, was less
unmercifully carried out. But others who held public posts were
fettered by their official duties, and even had it been possible,
would have scorned to seek safety in flight.
"_Whither wouldst thou go, O My Servant
Whom I have chosen to die for Me?_"
In the case of certain men and women, wealthy or poor, highly placed
or humble, the Voice that speaks to the destined martyr cried and
would not be shut out. Thus the comic singer Metras whose impromptu
verses were wont to set the whole city in a roar, the famous
retiarius Apollos, conqueror in twenty battles against armed
gladiators, and the aged historian Sinias, confessed themselves
Christians and were dragged away to death.
Hesychius, the editor of the Septuagint, heard the call as he worked
amongst the rolls of papyri in his study, and like others, he
sustained the ordeal and claimed the crown and palm. And it came to
the noble Roman, Philoremus Florens Fabius, Prætor of the taxes of
Egypt, and a personal friend of the Prefect: Fabius, who sat daily in
public as a judge in Alexandria, purple-robed, attended by lictors,
_librarii_ and _commentarienses_; surrounded by a guard of the Third
Egyptian Legion; deciding all causes relative to the taxes, and
administering the law....