The just steward

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.