the guidance of
Hypatia.

Trade and industry were checked by the unsettled state of the country,
and misery and famine were spreading over the land. The African tribes
of Mazices and Auxoriani, leaving the desert in hope of plunder, overran
the province of Libya, and laid waste a large part of the Delta. The
barbarians and the sands of the desert were alike encroaching on the
cultivated fields. Nature seemed changed. The valley of the Nile was
growing narrower. Even within the valley the retreating wraters left
behind them harvests less rich, and fever more putrid. The quarries were
no longer worth working for their building stone. The mines yielded no
more gold.

On the death of Arcadius, his son Theodosius was only eight years old,
but he was quietly acknowledged as Emperor of the East in 408, and he
left the government of Egypt, as heretofore, very much in the hands of
the patriarch. In the fifth year of his reign Theophilus died; and, as
might be supposed, a successor was not appointed without a struggle for
the double honour of Bishop of Alexandria and Governor of Egypt.

[Illustration: 257.jpg QUARRIES AT TOORAH ON THE NILE]

The remains of the Greek and Arian party proposed Timotheus, an
archdeacon in the church; but the Egyptian party were united in favour
of Cyril, a young man of learning and talent, who had the advantage of
being the nephew of the late bishop. Whatever were the forms by which
the election should have been governed, it was in reality settled by a
battle between the two parties in the streets; and though Abundantius,
the military prefect, gave the weight of his name, if not the strength
of his cohort, to the party of Timotheus, yet his rival conquered,
-and Cyril was carried into the cathedral with a pomp more like a pagan
triumph than the modest ordination of a bishop.

Cyril was not less tyrannical in his bishopric than his uncle had
been before him. His first care was to put a stop to all heresy in
Alexandria, and his second to banish the Jews. The theatre was the spot
in which the riots between Jews and Christians usually began, and the
Sabbath was the time, as being the day on which the Jews chiefly crowded
in to see the dancing. On one occasion the quarrel in the theatre ran
so high that the prefect with his cohort was scarcely able to keep them
from blows; and the Christians reproached the Jews with plotting to burn
down the churches. But the Christians were themselves guilty of the