Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/130

108 THE DECLINE AND FALL HiB tyranny. The j>rize was not unworthy of his ambition. At a distance 415, '&c.' from the court, and at the head of an immense capital, the patriarch, as he was now styled, of Alexandria, had gradually usurped the state and authority of a civil magistrate. The public and private charities of the city were managed by his discretion ; his voice inflamed or appeased the passions of the nuiltitude ; his commands were blindly obeyed by his numerous and fanatic parahnUuii,-^ familiarised in their daily office with scenes of death ; and the praefects of Egypt were awed or pro- voked by the temj)Oi*al 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 interdiction of their religious worship a])peared in his eyes a just and meritorious act ; and he con- fiscated their holy vessels, Avithout aj)])rehending the guilt of sacrilege. The toleration and even the privileges of the Jews, who had nmltiplied to the number of forty thousand, were secured by the laws of the Caesars and Ptolemies and a long prescrij)tion of seven hundred 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 un- prepared, 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 unbelieving nation. Perhaps he might plead the insolence of their pros- perity, 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 animadversion of the magistrate ; but in this promiscuous outrage, the iiniocent were confounded with the guilty, and Alexandria was impoverished by the loss of a wealthy and industrious colony. The zeal of (Hist. Patriarch. Alexandrin. p. 106,108). The Abb^ Renaudot drew his materials from the Arabic history of Severus, bishop of Hermopolis Magna, or Ashmunein, in the xth century, who can never be tnisted, unless our assent is extorted by the internal evidence of facts. -•^The Farabolani of Alexandria were a charitable corporation, instituted during the plague of Gallienus, to visit the sick, and to bury the dead. They gradually enlarged, abused, and sold the privileges of their order. Their outrageous con- duct under the reign of Cjril provoked the emperor to depiive the patriarch of their nomination, and to restrain their number to five or six hundred. But these restraints were transient and ineffectual. See the Theodosian Code, 1. xvi, tit. ii., and lillemont, Mem. Ecclcs. torn. xiv. p. 276-278. [Cp. above, vol. ii. p. 319.J