odotus, a pupil of Proclus, and had removed
to Alexandria. Salustius the Cynic was a Syrian, who had removed with
Isidorus from Athens to Alexandria. He was virtuous in his morals though
jocular in his manners, and as ready in his witty attacks upon the
speculative opinions of his brother philosophers as upon the vices of
the Alexandrians. These learned men, with Damascius and others from
Athens, were kindly received by the Persians, who soon afterwards, when
they made a treaty of peace with Justinian, generously bargained that
these men, the last teachers of paganism, should be allowed to return
home, and pass the rest of their days in quiet.

After the flight of the pagan philosophers, but little learning was left
in Alexandria. One of the most remarkable men in this age of ignorance
was Cosmas, an Alexandrian merchant, who wished that the world should
not only be enriched but enlightened by his travels. After making many
voyages through Ethiopia to India for the sake of gain, he gave up trade
and became a monk and an author. When he writes as a traveller about the
Christian churches of India and Ceylon, and the inscriptions which he
copied at Adule in Abyssinia, everything that he tells us is valuable;
but when he reasons as a monk, the case is sadly changed. He is of the
dogmatical school which forbids all inquiry as heretical. He fights
the battle which has been so often fought before and since, and is even
still fought so resolutely, the battle of religious ignorance against
scientific knowledge. He sets the words of the Bible against the results
of science; he denies that the world is a sphere, and quotes the Old
Testament against the pagan astronomers, to show that it is a plane,
covered by the firmament as by a roof, above which he places the kingdom
of heaven. His work is named _Christian Topography_, and he is himself
usually called Cosmas Indicopleustes, from the country which he visited.

During the latter years of the government of Apollinarius, such was
his unpopularity as a spiritual bishop that both the rival parties, the
Gaianites and the Theodosians, had been building places of worship for
themselves, and the more zealous Jacobites had quietly left the churches
to Apollinarius and the Royalists. But on the death of an archdeacon
they again came to blows with the bishop; and a monk had his beard torn
off his chin by the Gaianites in the streets of Alexandria. The emperor
was obliged to interfere, and h