purpose
Anastasius had sent an embassy to the Homeritae on the southern coast
of Arabia, to persuade them to attack their northern neighbours. The
Homeritae held the strip of coast now called Hadramout. They were
enriched, though hardly civilised, by being the channel along which
much of the Eastern trade passed from India to the Nile, to avoid the
difficult navigation of the ocean. They were Jewish Arabs, who had
little in common with the Arabs of Yemen, but had frequent intercourse
with Abyssinia and the merchants of the Red Sea. Part of the trade of
Solomon and the Tyrians was probably to their coast. To this distant and
little tribe the Emperor of Constantinople now sent a second pressing
embassy. Julianus, the ambassador, went up the Nile from Alexandria,
and then crossed the Red Sea, or Indian Sea as it was also called, to
Arabia. He was favourably received by the Homeritae. Arethas, the king,
gave him an audience in grand barbaric state. He was standing in a
chariot drawn by four elephants; he wore no clothing but a cloth of gold
around his loins; his arms were laden with costly armlets and bracelets;
he held a shield and two spears in his hands, and his nobles stood
around him armed, and singing to his honour. When the ambassador
delivered the emperor's letter, Arethas kissed the seal, and then kissed
Julianus himself. He accepted the gifts which Justin had sent, and
promised to move his forces northward against the Persians as requested,
and also to keep the route open for the trade to Alexandria.

Justinian, the successor of Justin in 527, settled the quarrel between
the two Alexandrian bishops by summoning them both to Constantinople,
and then sending them into banishment. But this had no effect in healing
the divisions in the Egyptian church; and for the next half-century the
two parties ranged themselves, in their theological or rather political
quarrel, under the names of their former bishops, and called themselves
Gaianites and Theodosians. Nor did the measures of Justinian tend to
lessen the breach between Egypt and Constantinople. He appointed Paul to
the bishopric, and required the Egyptians to receive the decrees of the
council of Chalcedon.

After two years Paul was displaced either by the emperor or by his
flock; and Zoilus was then seated on the episcopal throne by the help
of the imperial forces. He maintained his dangerous post for about six
years, when the Alexandrians rose in open rebellion, o