nsferred to Egypt.]

In the reign of Theodosius the Great, the pagan religion and pagan
knowledge were together destroyed. This emperor was restrained by no
doubts, for he was very ignorant and, it must be admitted, was equally
sincere and severe. Among his early measures we find an order that if
any of the governors of Egypt so much as entered a temple he should be
fined fifteen pounds of gold. He followed this by the destruction of the
temples of Syria. At this period the Archbishopric of Alexandria was
held by one Theophilus, a bold, bad man, who had once been a monk of
Nitria. It was about A.D. 390. The Trinitarian conflict was at the time
composed, one party having got the better of the other. To the monks and
rabble of Alexandria the temple of Serapis and its library were doubly
hateful, partly because of the Pantheistic opposition it shadowed forth
against the prevailing doctrine, and partly because within its walls
sorcery, magic, and other dealings with the devil had for ages been
going on. We have related how Ptolemy Philadelphus commenced the great
library in the aristocratic quarter of the city named Bruchion, and
added various scientific establishments to it. Incited by this example,
Eumenes, King of Pergamus, established out of rivalry a similar library
in his metropolis. With the intention of preventing him from excelling
that of Egypt, Ptolemy Epiphanes prohibited the exportation of papyrus,
whereupon Eumenes invented the art of making parchment. The second great
Alexandrian library was that established by Ptolemy Physcon at the
Serapion, in the adjoining quarter of the town. The library in the
Bruchion, which was estimated to contain 400,000 volumes, was
accidentally, or, as it has been said, purposely burned during the siege
of the city by Julius Caesar, but that in the Serapion escaped. To make
amends for this great catastrophe, Marc Antony presented to Cleopatra
the rival library, brought for that purpose from Pergamus. It consisted
of 200,000 volumes. It was with the library in the Bruchion that the
Museum was originally connected; but after its conflagration, the
remains of the various surviving establishments were transferred to the
Serapion, which therefore was, at the period of which we are speaking,
the greatest depository of knowledge in the world.

[Sidenote: The temple of Serapis.]

The pagan Roman emperors had not been unmindful of the great trust they
had thus inherited from the Ptolemie