Amid this fizz of dissolving philosophies, this iconographic metamorphosis, there is a thrilling feeling of being present at the birth of medieval art. On all sides one can hear the soft ripping of gossamer as old pagan images emerge from the Alexandrian chrysalis transformed into the conventional Christian symbols, the same symbols and images that will carry on reappearing in gospel books and altarpieces, stained glass and frescoes, diptychs and triptychs, fixed and immutable for centuries to come.
Alexandria,
6
December
This afternoon, after a siesta, I returned to the garden of the Graeco-Roman Museum. There I sat in the shade of an orange tree, surrounded by fragments of Byzantine sculpture, reading John Moschos's account of the now buried city from which these sculptures had come.
Moschos and Sophronius spent so much time in Alexandria that in one of his books, Sophronius, a native of Damascus, actually refers to 'us Alexandrians'. The two monks probably paid their first visit to the city in the winter of 578-9, at the very beginning of their travels. They may have had the same weather I am having now: crisp, sunny days growing slowly colder and shorter. Nearly thirty years later the two monks returned, this time by sea, as refugees fleeing the sack of Antioch by the marauding Persian army. On both occasions, Alexandria was their base for an extensive exploration of the monasteries of desert Egypt, reaching, on their second trip, as far south as the Great Oasis.
During this second Alexandrian period, the two monks appear to have based themselves in the city on and off for the seven years between 607 and 614
a.d
. During this period Sophronius seems to have been suddenly struck down with blindness, then equally suddenly cured during a visit to the Shrine of Saints Cyrus and John at Menuthis (the shrine's own name eventually came to replace Menuthis, so that for the last thousand years the place has been known as Abukir). In gratitude for his miraculous healing, Sophronius wrote a book containing stories of some of the shrine's more remarkable cures, in the process of which he allows us an intriguing peek into what was contained in a Byzantine doctor's bag: if Sophronius is to be believed, a standard prescription was a compote of Bithynian cheese, wax, and roast crocodile.
Following Sophronius's cure, the two monks began to campaign energetically against the Monophysite leanings of the local Egyptians, tendencies that had already begun to lead to a schism between mainstream Orthodoxy (identified with Egypt's Greekspeaking, Alexandrian-based upper class) and the indigenous Coptic-speaking Egyptians (the word Copt simply deriving from the Greek term for a native Egyptian,
Aiguptios).
Finally, however, in the spring of 614, the Persian army caught up with the two monks. As the Persians breached the walls of the city and put it to the sword, Moschos and Sophronius were again forced to take ship. This time they were accompanied by John the Almsgiver, Alexandria's Orthodox Patriarch, whose biography Sophronius was later to write. In a state of some distress, the party stopped off in Cyprus, where the heartbroken Patriarch died. The boatload of refugees finally reached the safety of the walls of Constantinople some time later, probably towards the end of the year 615.
The burning city they left behind had clearly changed dramatically since the prosperous, free-thinking days of the second and third centuries
a.d
. This was not just because Alexandria was already full of penniless refugees fleeing the earlier Persian assault on Palestine; the change was more profound. For in Alexandria the triumph of Christianity had been effected by hordes of often fanatical Coptic monks who would periodically sweep down from their desert monasteries, attacking the pagans and their shrines, and burning any temples left undefended; in 392
a.d
. they finally succeeded in burning the Serapium, and with it the adjacent Alexandrian library, storehouse of the collected learning of antiquity.
The houses of the city's pagan notables were ransacked in the monks' search for idols; no one was safe. The most notorious outrage was the lynching of Hypatia, a neoplatonic philosopher of the School of Alexandria and a brilliant thinker and mathematician. She was pulled from her palanquin by a lynch-mob of monks, who stripped her, then dragged her naked through the streets of the town before finally killing her in front of the Caesarion and burning her body.
This murder was applauded by the monastic chroniclers. 'Hypatia was devoted to her magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music,' wrote Bishop John of Nikiu. 'She beguiled many people through her satanic wiles. [After her murder] all the people surrounded the Patriarch Cyril [who had instigated the mob] and called him "the new Theophilus" for he had [completed the work of Patriarch Theophilus who had burned the Serapium and] destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.' The pagans, understandably, were less enthusiastic: 'Things have happened the like of which haven't been seen through all the ages,' wrote one distraught student to his mother in Upper Egypt. 'Now it's cannibalism, not war.' 'If we are alive,' commented another, 'then life itself is dead.'
Nevertheless, there are hints that the intellectual spirit in the city had not died completely. According to Moschos's near-contemporary, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, 'even now in that city the various branches of learning make their voices heard; for the teachers of the arts are somehow still alive, the geometer's rod reveals hidden knowledge, the study of music has not yet dried up and some few still keep the fires burning in the study of the movement of the earth and stars. The study of medicine grows greater every day, so that a doctor who wishes to establish his standing in the profession can dispense with the need for any proof, by merely saying that he trained at Alexandria.' This seems to have been true: it was in Alexandria that Caesarius, brother of the theologian Gregory of Nazianzen, obtained the qualifications that won him the post of Byzantine Court Physician.
Certainly Alexandria seems to have brought the scholar in Moschos to the fore, and his account of his time in the city depicts him and Sophronius (who was, after all, a Sophist, a teacher of philosophy and rhetoric) engaged in high-minded intellectual pursuits. In one story the pair are attending lectures at the university by Theodore the Philosopher; in another talking to the cal-ligrapher and book illuminator Zoilus the Reader; on yet another occasion, in a charming picture of bookish Byzantine life, they are visiting a bibliophile named Cosmas the Lawyer.
'This wondrous man greatly benefited us,' wrote Moschos, 'not only by letting us see him and by teaching us, but also because he had more books than anybody else in Alexandria and would willingly supply them to those who wished. Yet he was a man of no possessions. Throughout his house there was nothing to be seen but books, a bed and a table. Any man could go in and ask for what would benefit him - and read it. Each day I would go in to him.'
The most intriguing story of all, however, concerns a visit to another scholar friend. The tale is set one hot summer afternoon sometime in the late 580s, with Moschos and Sophronius sheltering from the midday heat in the shade of the monumental
tetrapylon
at the centre of Alexandria. The monks had set out to visit another bibliophile friend, Stephen the Sophist, but Stephen's maid had shouted out of the top window that her master was fast asleep. So while they waited for the Sophist to finish his siesta, the pair amused themselves by eavesdropping on a conversation between three blind men who were also taking advantage of the
tetrapylon's
shade. They were passing the time by telling each other how they had lost their sight, and the last of the men told a strange and macabre story which Moschos records.
Before he lost his sight, said the blind man, he had been a grave-robber. One day he saw a richly-decked-out corpse being taken through the streets of Alexandria for burial in the Church of St John, and he had made up his mind to plunder the grave. When the funeral had finished, the man broke into the sepulchre and began to strip the tomb. Suddenly he gave a start: the dead man appeared to sit up before him and stretch out his hands towards the grave-robber's eyes. It was the last thing, said the blind man, that he ever saw.
Later on, Moschos heard a similar story about another grave-robber who had broken into a rich girl's tomb in the depths of the night. Again the corpse seemed to come to life, only this time the girl grabbed the robber: 'You came in here when you wanted to,' she said, 'but you will not go out of here as you will. This tomb will be shared by the two of us.' The corpse refused to let the robber go until he promised to repent and become a monk. In shock, the man agreed.
When I first read these stories I had assumed them to be pious superstition, like many of Moschos's other tales. But this afternoon, reading
The Spiritual Meadow
in the museum garden, I suddenly understood where such tales originated. For from the first century
a.d
. through to the early Byzantine period, it was the custom in Egypt to bury those who could afford it in mummy cases onto which were bound superb encaustic (hot wax) portraits of the deceased; in some cases - there are two fine examples in the Graeco-Roman Museum - full-length pictures were painted onto the mummy's winding sheet itself.
These mummy portraits throw a reflected beam of light on the lost world of classical portraiture, vanished now but for a few frescoes at Pompeii, and more importantly form a bridge between the painting of antiquity and the panel-painted icons of Byzantium. It can be no coincidence that the oldest icons in existence are to be found in St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, and that they are painted in the same encaustic technique as their Alexandrian mummy-portrait predecessors. If, as Otto Demus observed, 'the icon is the root-form of the European picture', then in these Graeco-Egyptian mummy-portraits we see the immediate genesis of the icon.
But it is as works of art that the mummy portraits are most striking. They are so real that you can almost hear the sitters speak - as Moschos's grave-robbers seem to have discovered. Even today, behind glass in a museum, the portraits are so astonishingly lifelike that they can still make you gasp as you find yourself staring eyeball to eyeball with a soldier who could have fought at Actium, or a society lady who may have known Cleopatra. There is something deeply hypnotic about the silent stare of these sad, uncertain Graeco-Roman faces, most of whom appear to have died in their early thirties. Their fleeting expressions are frozen, startled, as if suddenly surprised by death itself; their huge eyes stare out, as if revealing the nakedness of the departed soul. The viewer peers at them, trying to catch some hint of the upheavals they witnessed and the strange sights they must have seen in late antique Egypt. But the smooth neo-classical faces stare us down.
Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about these portraits is that they appear so astonishingly familiar: the colours and technique of some of them resemble Frans Hals, others Cezanne, and two thousand years after they were painted the faces still convey with penetrating immediacy the character of the different sitters: the fop and the courtesan, the anxious mother and the tough man of business, the bored army officer and the fat
nouveau-riche
matron, hung with gold, dripping with make-up. Indeed, so contemporary are the features, so immediately recognisable the emotions that play on the lips, that you have to keep reminding yourself that these sitters are not from our world, that they are masks attached to Graeco-Egyptian mummies, covering the desiccated corpses of people who possibly saw the world through the glass of an initiate in the cult of Isis, who maybe married their brother or sister (as late as the third century Diocletian was still trying to outlaw incest in Egypt) and who perhaps studied in the great Alexandrian library before it was burned to the ground by the howling monks of the Egyptian deserts.
As Andre Malraux put it, these mummy portraits 'glow with the flame of eternal life'. Certainly it is easy to imagine their effect on John Moschos's nervous grave-robbers breaking into a necropolis at night: no wonder they thought the dead had risen.
This evening, my final one in the city, following Miss Christina's directions I found my way along the tramlines to the gathering place of the last Greeks in Alexandria.