chapter 28.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25717_

Gibbon's statement as to the destruction of the great library in the Serapeum is called in question by his learned annotator, Dr. Smith.

See above: B. C. 282-246.

ALEXANDRIA: A. D. 413-415. The Patriarch Cyril and his Mobs.

"His voice [that of Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, A. D. 412-444] inflamed or appeased the passions of the multitude: his commands were blindly obeyed by his numerous and fanatic parabolani, familiarized in their daily office with scenes of death; and the præfects of Egypt were awed or provoked by the temporal power of these Christian pontiffs. Ardent in the prosecution of heresy, Cyril auspiciously opened his reign by oppressing the Novatians, the most innocent and harmless of the sectaries. … The toleration, and even the privileges of the Jews, who had multiplied to the number of 40,000, were secured by the laws of the Cæsars and Ptolemies, and a long prescription of 700 years since the foundation of Alexandria. Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were levelled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the misbelieving nation. Perhaps he might plead the insolence of their prosperity, and their deadly hatred of the Christians, whose blood they had recently shed in a malicious or accidental tumult. Such crimes would have deserved the animadversions of the magistrate; but in this promiscuous outrage the innocent were confounded with the guilty."

_E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,