Home › Charles Kingsley › Charles Kingsley: Alexandria

Charles Kingsley: Alexandria

The pleasure-loving people of Alexandria did not take kindly to the youth who so rudely interrupted the delicious spectacle which their prefect had staged for them, "Aphrodite Rising from the Sea."

It was Alexandria in the fifth century of our era. The city founded by a king who dreamed not in empires, but in continents, placed at the strategic point where it would command three of those great units, had achieved a pre-eminence in beauty, in vice, in learning, in turbulence, in the cosmopolitan character of its people. The three continents which Alexander would unite into one had poured into his city their best and their worst, and each strove desperately for supremacy. Many a man in those days must have thought that East in East and West in West, And never the twain shall wed, though meet they did in ways as tempestuous as the most violent of matrimony. The empire, nominally Christian in the persons of the rulers since the unsuccessful attempt of Julian to turn back the hands of time to the faith of paganism, found itself in constant clashes with the growing power of the church; Orestes, the imperial prefect, and Cyril, the militant bishop, vied with each other in despatches to Constantinople, each complaining at the other's usurpations; the army of legionaires and the vast throngs of monks each entertained a considerable respect for the fighting qualities of the other.

The Jews were in great numbers and were not in the happiest position between church and empire; while the descendants of Alexander's Macedonians, and Greeks from all quarters of the eastern Mediterranean, could not forget that they had once been the masters of Egypt. Constant conflict in the streets between the partizans of each side laid a fitting scene for Charles Kingsley's religious philosophic historical melodrama.