The Day the Christians Burned the Other Library

In the summer of 391 the Patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, secured an imperial decree from the Emperor Theodosius I authorizing the closure of the city’s pagan temples. He used the decree as cover for an attack on the Serapeum — the largest pagan temple in Egypt, the most important repository of books in Alexandria after the destruction of the Mouseion, and the cult center of the Hellenistic-Egyptian god Serapis. The attack involved a mob recruited from the city’s Christian population. It produced a brief armed standoff (the pagan defenders of the temple barricaded themselves inside for several days), an imperial response that pardoned the besieged on condition of conversion or exile, and then the systematic dismantling of the temple structure.

The temple library was destroyed with the temple. The cult statue of Serapis was hacked apart with axes. The Christian historians who reported the event — Rufinus of Aquileia writing about a decade later, Socrates Scholasticus writing fifty years later — were unanimous and triumphant: paganism in Alexandria had received its definitive blow. The classical world’s most famous library city had become, in a single summer’s work, a city without a library.

What had survived

The famous Library at Alexandria, founded under Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II in the early third century BC, was associated with the Mouseion — the royal research institute next to the palace, in the Brucheion district. The Mouseion’s main collection was destroyed, or at least very substantially damaged, during the fighting around Julius Caesar’s Alexandrian War in 48 BC. The exact extent of that loss is contested by modern scholarship: some books certainly survived; the Mouseion itself continued as an institution into the second century AD; but the building containing the central collection was probably burned.

The Serapeum, on a low hill called Rhakotis in the southwestern part of the city, had been founded by Ptolemy III in the third century BC as a satellite library to the Mouseion. It received a copy of every important book in the Mouseion. After the Mouseion fire of 48 BC, the Serapeum became, by default, the main public library of Alexandria. Strabo, visiting Alexandria around 25 BC, described it as the largest library remaining in the city. The 4th-century historian Aphthonius of Antioch, visiting before the destruction, reported that the Serapeum library was housed in a series of bookrooms on the upper floor of the temple’s southern wing. He estimated the surviving collection at “many tens of thousands of books.” The number is uncertain. The collection was definitely substantial, and it was definitely the most important library in the eastern Roman Empire in the late fourth century.

The temple complex itself was, by ancient standards, monumental. It sat on the highest ground in Alexandria, was visible from the Pharos lighthouse, and was approached by a flight of one hundred steps. The temple proper housed the colossal cult statue of Serapis — a seated, throned figure approximately fifteen feet tall, made of multiple materials (wood, ivory, marble, with the inner core probably wood and the outer surfaces inlaid). The statue was a syncretic Hellenistic-Egyptian image of a god derived from the Egyptian Osiris and Apis traditions, originally designed under Ptolemy I to provide a unified cult focus for Alexandria’s Greek and Egyptian populations.

How the violence started

The early 390s were a moment of accelerated Christianization throughout the Roman Empire. Theodosius I had issued a series of increasingly restrictive decrees against pagan worship between 380 and 391. The most consequential, the decree of February 391, banned all forms of public pagan sacrifice and ordered the closure of pagan temples. The decree was directed at the empire as a whole, but it gave individual bishops local enforcement discretion.

Theophilus had been Patriarch of Alexandria since 385. He was an unusually combative and politically capable bishop, distrusted both by the city’s pagan elite (who saw him as a fanatic) and by certain factions within his own church (who saw him as an opportunist). He had been looking for an occasion to move against the Serapeum, the most visible non-Christian institution in his city, for at least two years. The decree of February 391 gave him the legal cover.

The specific occasion for the riot of summer 391 is described by Rufinus and Socrates Scholasticus in compatible but not identical terms. Theophilus’s clergy were dismantling a smaller temple of Dionysus (or, in some accounts, Mithras) that had been ceded to the Christian community for use as a church. In the process they discovered a set of cult objects in the underground sanctuaries — heads or images that had been used in pagan initiation rituals. Theophilus had these objects paraded through the streets of Alexandria. The pagan population took this as a calculated provocation; the city’s pagan teachers, philosophers, and traditional aristocracy — led by a philosopher named Olympius — armed themselves and forcibly occupied the Serapeum, taking the building as their last refuge.

A brief siege followed. The pagan defenders held the temple for several days, during which they tortured and reportedly crucified several Christians who had been seized in the initial fighting. The Roman urban prefect, Evagrius, sent an appeal to the emperor at Constantinople asking for instructions. Theodosius’s response, received in Alexandria about two weeks later, granted the besieged pagans an amnesty on condition that they leave the temple; but he simultaneously authorized the destruction of the cult image and the surrender of the temple to the bishop.

The pagan defenders accepted the amnesty and dispersed. Theophilus’s mob then entered the temple.

What they did

The cult statue of Serapis was the first target. According to Rufinus, who was probably present in Alexandria during or shortly after the events, a Christian soldier was given an axe and ordered to strike the statue’s cheek. The soldier hesitated — the pagans had warned that touching the statue would cause the sky to fall — and then struck. The statue, made of materials less divine than legend implied, splintered. The soldier struck again. The head, made of jointed wood, came apart. A swarm of mice ran out from the cavities of the head. The mob laughed. The rest of the statue was dismantled over the following hours and its pieces were dragged through the streets to be burned in the city’s amphitheater.

The library was destroyed in the same campaign. The mechanics are not described in detail by any surviving source. The probable sequence was: the bookrooms were broken into; the books were piled in the temple courtyard and burned; the empty bookrooms were then demolished along with the rest of the temple. The number of books destroyed is unknown — somewhere between several thousand and several tens of thousands. There is no surviving inventory.

The temple structure itself was then systematically torn down over the following months. The cult building proper was demolished completely. The outer colonnade was reused for a Christian church, the Martyrion of John the Baptist and Elisha, which was constructed on the site over the following decade. The Serapeum’s columns were reused in the construction of various Alexandrian buildings; some of them have been identified in modern archaeology.

The single surviving above-ground component of the Serapeum is “Pompey’s Pillar” — a 27-meter granite column originally dedicated to the Emperor Diocletian in 297 AD, which stood in the outer precinct of the temple. The column survives because it was not part of the temple proper. It remains the tallest ancient monument in Alexandria.

The aftermath

The destruction of the Serapeum had immediate and substantial cultural consequences. The Alexandrian pagan intellectual community, which had been the largest in the empire, dispersed; many of its leading members took refuge in Athens (where the Academy continued for another century) or in private estates outside the city. The school of Neoplatonic philosophy that had been associated with the Serapeum’s intellectual life relocated to a private institutional setting. Its most famous teacher of the next generation would be Hypatia, the daughter of the Mouseion’s last attested member, Theon.

The cult of Serapis collapsed in Egypt within a generation. The last attested Serapis priests are recorded in the early fifth century; the cult appears to have been institutionally extinct by 450. The god himself survived as a literary reference in Christian theological writing for several centuries.

The library was definitively lost. The texts that had been in the Serapeum on the day of the destruction are now known, in most cases, only through Byzantine or Arabic copies derived from collections in other cities (Constantinople, Antioch, Caesarea). The total quantity of classical Greek literature lost in the Serapeum fire is unknown but probably substantial — perhaps a fifth or a third of what is now considered “lost classical literature” passed through the Serapeum at some point and is not represented elsewhere.

Theophilus continued as Patriarch of Alexandria until his death in 412. His nephew and successor, Cyril, would preside as patriarch during the murder of Hypatia in 415 — an event with which Theophilus’s destruction of the Serapeum is properly continuous. The early-5th-century Alexandrian pattern of patriarchal violence against the city’s surviving pagan and pagan-sympathetic intellectual life produced both events.

The Serapeum site is now an archaeological park in modern Alexandria. The catacombs beneath the temple — used in the Roman period for cult initiations — are accessible. The above-ground temple is gone.