I just ran across the source and can't "vouch" for it, though I have no reason to suspect anything in it is untrue. I do know the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria at the hands of a Christian mob occurred at roughly the same period of time Augustine was writing the City of God.
members.iinet.net.au
How and why was the library destroyed?
In 412 Theophilus' nephew Cyril succeeded him as Patriarch of Christianity. The Patriarch exercised control of Alexandria, and the conflict between secular and religious authority was decided in 415, when the Roman prefect Orestes, officially still in charge of the province, objected to Cyril's order that all Jews be expelled from the Alexandia. Cyril's army of monks murdered the prefect and were cannonized by him for this deed.
These same monks captured Hypatia, daughter of the Museum's last great mathematician Theon, who was the last keeper of the library. She was a Neoplatonist philosopher and astronomer whose teachings are partially recorded by one of her admirers and pupils, the Christian Synesius, and she was also supposedly an advisor to Orestes and one of the last members of the museum-library. Driving home from her own lectures without an attendant, this independent woman and scholar epitomized the suspect nature of Paganism and its heretical scientific teachings. She was dragged from her chariot by the mob, stripped, flayed, and finally burned alive in the library of the Caesareum as a witch. The Patriach Cyril was made a saint for this action. The library itself was ransanched of any gold or silver and then put to the torch.
My point in posting was to illustrate that clearly some serious religious compulsion was taking place in the Roman Empire at the time. The fact that not all non-Christian religions had yet been universally suppressed doesn't change that. |
