LOOKING FOR THE GREAT ALEXANDER

 

I suppose you could call it the Melting Monarch's Mummy Trick, or the Ebbing Emperor Illusion – except this was no illusion. On what would be latter be 11 June, 323 B.C.,  Alexander III of Macedonia died in Babylon, probably after being poisoned,  since assassination was the normal recall procedure in Macedonian politics. 

Very long books have been written about who poisoned Alexander and why, and you might find that interesting. I did. But the death of Alexander the Great was just the prologue to the second greatest act of prestidigitation in world history, when the mummy of the most famous man since Adam vanished from the center of one of the largest cities in the civilized world, from one of the most famous and often visited mausoleums in the world. 

One day he was there, and the next – poof - he was gone, never to be seen again. And it wasn't that anybody forgot about him. The day his corpse went walk-about, he was still the best known conquer in history. He was “The Great” with a capital “G”, for heavens sake. And then he was gone. And he is still gone. It must be a mystery; right?

His body lay in his tent for three days, unattended. Sound familiar?  His loyal follows paid no respects to the man they had followed into the mountains of Afghanistan and the plains of India because they were too busy arguing over who should inherit what parts of his empire and his fortune.  Alexander himself thought the best way to enhance his image would have been for his body to be thrown into the Euphrates River, so he would simply disappear- very mysterious. 

Instead, eventually, he was mummified after the Egyptian fashion, and placed in a casket carved to bear his image. This was supposedly then placed inside a gold sarcophagus, which would have made it very, very heavy. The intent was to ship his body back to Macedonia, where he would be buried next to his father.  But somewhere in Syria the procession was waylaid by cavalry under the command of Ptolemy, whom Alexander had assigned to run his province of Egypt.

After slaughtering the funeral procession, Ptolemy hijacked the mummy to the Egyptian holy city of Memphis, about 160 miles south of his new capital which Alexander had ordered built, and had named “Alexandria”. Under Macedonian tradition, by burying Alexander's corpus delicti,  Ptolemy was laying claim to his empire. But after twenty years of fighting, Ptolemy gave up his dreams of world-wide glory and had himself just crowned Pharaoh of Egypt. And the late Alexander the Great took up residence in the temple of Ptah in Memphis.

He stayed there for about fifty years before the son, Ptolemy Soma , had him shipped down river to Alexandria (above), where he was given his own tomb inside the Brucheum, the Greek quarter of the city. Then in about 210 B.C. the grandson, Ptolemy Philopater, built a larger shrine, the Mausoleum of the Ptolemies (later called just The Soma - Greek for "the body"), to house the mummies of his parents, grand and great-grand parents as well as the mummy of Alexander.

The new temple, designed to look as old as the ancient temples still dotting the landscape, stood at the corner of The Street of Soma and Canoptic Street – the 42^nd Street and Fifth Avenues of ancient Alexandria. Down the street from this temple of the divine were the Royal Palaces, what was left of the famous Library of Alexandria and the Temple of the Caesar's. 

For the next five hundred years they dragged the corpse out for special occasion, and for viewing by visiting dignitaries, including a Who's Who of classical Rome - Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Caesar Augustus, and one Roman Emperor after another. This dressed-up desiccated carcass had become an object of veneration, made divine by the faith imparted in the cadaver by the thousands who prayed and offered sacrifice to it. 

To facilitate them, the ninth Pharoh to bear the name Ptolemy - A.K.A. Hook Nose Ptolemy -  had the gold sarcophagus melted down, and Alexander's mummy was then encased in glass - which had been around in Egypt since 3,400B.C.E. -  the better for the tourists to see. The gold, went in the Ptolemy 9's  purse.

But it was not faith alone that persevered Alexander's corpse, it was also the tourist industry, which sprang up to serve the faithful and the curious who visited The Soma. There were hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops - everybody wanted souvenirs. When they caught Caesar Augustus trying to slip Alexander's nose into his pocket, he claimed it broke off by accident. They still made him leave it behind. 

The Emperor Caligula (above) was brazen enough that he broke the glass and walked out with the breastplate ripped right off of Alexander's chest. In the second century A.D., to protect the taxes produced by this industry, the Roman Emperor Septimus Severus closed The Soma to all but the richest visitors. Average folks still came to look at the building, but not as many.

You'd would think it would be easy to locate such a famous spot, even 2,000 years later, but just after daybreak on 21 July, 365 A.D. there was an 8.3 earthquake off Cyprus, 400 miles to the northwest. The shaking and tsunamis slammed into Alexandria, killing about 5,000 people, knocking down 50,000 houses and dropping the level of the entire coast about 20 feet. Needless to say, the morning after that morning, The Soma lost its importance to the city.  Probably Alexander's mummy had slipped into the harbor and most likely the survivors had more important things to worry about other than the dried out carcass of a long dead now heathen monarch.

The only reason to suspect The Soma and the corpse survived this temblor is the reprobate philosopher Libanius. He had resisted conversion to the new political correctness of Christianity.  For committing that sin he had been exiled from Constantinople. Yes, he was a pagan. But the dirty little secret of Christianity is that even pagans were appalled by the sins usually attributed by Christians to the pagans; sins like lust and greed. 

In describing greedy Christians in about 390 A.D. Libanius asked (above), “Who could be the friend of such as these? When they behave like this for money's sake, would they keep their hands off temple offerings or tombs?...And this evil...is universal, whether you mention Paltus or Alexandria where the corpse of Alexander is displayed..”  And that is the only mention of the tomb of Alexander after the earthquake of 365 A.D.   And since there is no record that Libanius ever visited Alexandria after his exile, I find this less than convincing, especially considering that Libanius died not long after writing this passage. Had he lived, maybe he would have corrected it.

There is a theory floating about that, in order to revitalize the local tourist industry the corpse of Alexander was re-named as the corpse of the Christian Saint Mark, and The Soma as the Church of St. Mark.  Why Christians would have done something like that, I have no idea. It just seems to me to be a lot of trouble to go to. 

After 365 A.D. the tourist industry of Alexandria certainly needed a new Alexander The Great, but the two things ancient Alexandria had after the earthquake was dead bodies, and salvaged stones for building new temples. And while it might be emotionally satisfying to blame religious fanatics for the loss of the Alexander's corpse, and it might be appealing to suppose Alexander the Great still exists, buried under St. Mark's square in Venice (above), it is far more likely that he ended up in the harbor of Alexandria, soaking like a packet of old freeze dried coffee, slowly losing his effervescence.

The real magic trick of history is that in the face of overwhelming evidence each generation continues to labor under the delusion that they invented sin and mystery, or at least identified it better.  And this column is certainly proof of  that.

- 30 - 

YEAR OF OUR LORD, 365 A.D.

I would call the year 365 the worst year for Christianity since Jesus got arrested. It began in January when hungry parties of Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine at Strasburg in Gaul. As a soldier risen from the ranks, the new Emperor in Constantinople, the sour faced Valentinian I, realized that if the Germans were having a hungry winter, then spring would bring a full scale invasion. He immediately ordered the commander of the two under strength legions in Gaul, Charietto, to call for support from the loyal tribes. And he started planing to move his court and his legions to the west.

The sour puss Valentinian (above)  had only taken on the purple in March of 364, at 43 years of age. He was smart and decisive. But he had little patience with intellectuals, and when the Christian leader Hillary of Potiers insisted the Emperor enforce persecutions of pagans and Christian heretics the Emperor threatened the old pain-in-the-butt with exile if he didn't shut up and go home.  Valentinian was a Christian, but with so many enemies outside the empire, he did not want to give anybody inside the empire - pagan or Christian - a reason to join them. To an ideologue like Hillary, such practical tolerance was an insult to God.

Hillary (above) had been waging war against the ideas of Bishop Arius of Alexandria since the Council of Nicoea, back in the year 325.  Eventually even Constantine the Great, who had convened the Council, got tired of Hillary's insistent calls for punishing any who suggested that God the father (Yawyeh) and God the Son (Jesus) were not the same persona. “Jesus that I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than God”, insisted  the “Hammer of the Arians”. And yet even after Arius died in an Alexandrian toilet after being poisoned in 336, his idea of God the father and the demigod his son, refused to be stamped out   Even after being dismissed by Valentinian I, and with the threat of exile hanging over his own head ,  Hillary could not keep his mouth or his pen shut. In the spring of 365 Hillary's condemnation of the Emperor became a minor best seller.

Like many a Christian ideologue since, the 55 year old Hillary divined the end of the world was coming because the Emperor refused to listen to him. And if anybody could see the end of the world coming, it would be Hillary of Poitiers, who had urged the Council of Nicocea (above) to include the “Book of Revelations” into the now holy bible.  That book prophesied that one of the signs of the “end of times” would be the rise and rule of the Antichrist. And wrote Hillary in the spring of  365, “the Antichrist is ruling.” - meaning, Valentiniano.  Now, normally, calling the Emperor the Anti-Christ would have cost Hillary an appendage. But, as expected, Valentiniano that spring, was pretty busy.

Back in Gaul, as winter turned to spring, Charietto sent scouts into the border forests, to attack the German raiders in their sleep. He paid these hunters by the kill, which they proved by bringing in German heads, which were then impaled on spikes around Gaulic villages as a morale builder. But the bloody tributes failed to inspire the population. So the general sought out the support of an aging pro Roman Gaulic, Chief,  Serverianus, who managed to raise a small force loyal to him. And that June, with his legions tied down protecting the major cities, Charietto was forced to use Severianus's men as a rapid response force.

Unfortunately the Germans ambushed the Gauls. Serverianus was thrown from his horse and killed. Charietto managed to slow the rout for a time, but when he was killed the remainder of the force was either slaughtered or scattered. And all of Gaul began to ask themselves what they were paying Roman taxes for. It started to seem as if Hillary had been right. God - father, son and Holy Ghost - were all intent on punishing the Roman world.

The Emperor Valentinian was already on the road to Gaul, and had reached the old Imperial villa at Mediana, in what is today southern Serbia, when word of the disaster reached him. He immediately dispatched an old political ally, Dagalaifus, to take charge of things on the ground in Gaul.  But the disaster highlighted, again,  that the Empire was too big for one man to rule. Valentinian had promised to name a co-ruler and he did so now, handing over Constantinople and the eastern half of his realm to his younger brother Valens . This division, in 365, would prove to be the ultimate break between east and west, Greek and Latin Christianity, but at the time it was merely a division of convenes. Valentinian then hurried on to Gaul, not pausing until he had reached the ancient circular fortress town of Rheims.

Meanwhile, roughly 17,000 feet beneath the merchant ships plying the surface between the bread basket of North Africa and the way station island of Crete, a truly earth shaking doomsday was looming. As yet unimagined by human minds, ancient Greece and the islands of the Aegean, birthplace of democracy and Western literature, was being held in place against the anvil of the European plate, while from the south the even larger hammer of the African plate was driving under the Aegean plate at an inch and a half a year, downward at a 30 degree angle and pulling the southern edge of Crete down with it. 

And off the island's southwest coast, just after dawn on 21 July, 365,  the rocks of the Aegean plate snapped, and the west coast of Crete suddenly popped 20 feet into the air.  Hillary of Poitiers may have prophesied this as the end of the world, but it had happened before. That was why Crete was there in the first place.

Almost two thousand years later the shaking would be estimated as an 8.5 earthquake on the classic Richter Scale. Survivor Ammianus Marcellinus would describe it as “...a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts” which made “the solidity of the whole earth...shake and shudder.” And he was 600 miles southeast of the epicenter. 

 A mere 20 miles from the point of break, at the base of a peninsula on the northwest coast of Crete, was the port of Phalasarna (above), a wealthy harbor for over six hundred years. That morning, 21 July, 365, the entire harbor and town was lifted nine feet out of the water. 

Walls and stairways cracked, homes and work shops collapsed and the stone supports for the piers (above) were lifted straight upward, leaving them high and dry. In a few moments it became a port without water. In the town, the dead outnumbered the living. And every town on Crete was damaged or destroyed by the quake.

The pagan writer Libanius attributed the disaster to the anger of Poseidon, the god of the sea and of earthquakes, as punishment for the heresy of Christianity. The world was, “Like a horse shaking off his rider...All the cities of Libya were destroyed...the greatest cities in Sicily lie in ruins, as do those in the Hellenes...beautiful Nicacea has been felled.”  Meanwhile the Christian writer Jerome described the collapse of the walls and houses of the city Ar Moab, east of the Dead Sea in Palestine, as the Christian God's wraith for the sin of paganism.

But the greater killer was the tsunami. To the west, 600 miles from the epicenter, the first 82 foot high tidal wave hit 70 minutes after the quake, washing up to a mile inland on Malta. On the south coast of Cyprus, 500 miles to the east,  the wave drowned the city of Kourion, killing at least 5,000, including craftsmen at their work benches. But the worst was what the wave did to the great city of Alexandria, on the Nile Delta.

Marcellinus was there when “...the sea was driven away...so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered...Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered...to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea....returning when least expected,  killed many thousands by drowning...the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses...hurled nearly two miles from the shore.”. The cost in Alexandria was at least 5,000 dead and 50,000 homes and apartments destroyed. Farmland in the rich Nile Delta was poisoned by salt water for a decade.

Where the island of Crete, north of the fault, had been raised in an instant by 9 feet or more, south of the fault, in Alexandria, the shore sank by 20 feet, submerging the harbor breakwaters, the famous lighthouse, even Cleopatra's tomb. 

And the House of the Dead, tomb of Alexander the Great, one of the greatest mausoleums in the world, was shattered by the earthquake and then smashed by the waves, its scattered stones scavenged until there was nothing left of it. For two centuries Alexandria would memorialize “The Day of Horror”.

In far off Reims, in northeastern France, Valentinian I's only concern was that in the midst of a Germanic invasion, he was suddenly told he could expect no revenues from the rich lands of north Africa and Sicily. Meanwhile in the east, his brother Valens was facing his own crises.

Upon becoming eastern Emperor, Valens (above) moved his legions to quell revolts in Mesopotamia, and had reached Cappadocian Ceasarea, 600 miles from Constantinople, when his father-in-law hit the fan.

As commander of the Martensian legion responsible for maintaining order in the capital, Pretronius Probus (the father-in-law) was running the city in Valens absence. But according to our old friend Marcellinus, Petronius, was “ a man ugly in spirit and in appearance...cruel, savage and fearlessly hard-hearted, never capable of giving or receiving reason” in his search for tax debts going back decades. He “...closed the houses of the poor and the palaces of the rich in great numbers....”

And according to the Catholic historian Gregory of Nazianzus, Pretonius even arrested (later Saint) Basil of Nazianzus, to squeeze money out of the church. It proved a repossession too far, and there was a general uprising in the city. “Each man was armed with the tool he was using, or with whatever else came to hand at the moment. Torch in hand, amid showers of stones, with cudgel's ready, all ran and shouted together in their united zeal....Nor were the women weaponless...” As dramatic as the story told by both historians may be, I suspect that what rose in Constantinople in the late summer of 365 was an “astro-turf” rebellion, for the benefit of a thug named Procopius, a distant relative of the departed Emperor Constantine the Great,. Propcopius  promised the upper classes a return of stability and prophets.

Learning of all this in September, Valens thought briefly about abdication, or even suicide. But his advisers (and his wife) would have none of that. So he hurried military expedition forward toward Constantinople.  The first two legions to approach the city were bribed by Probopius's upper crust bankers. This convinced several of Hillary's Church allies to also join the rebellion. Still on the march, Valens was infuriated at the betrayal.  The act fed his growing distrust of the Christian establishment. He threw his support behind the followers of the late Bishop Arius,   who were more understanding of the Emperor's need to raise revenues. The split between Latin and Greek Churches was growing wider by the minute.

It would be the next year before the rebel Procopius and his supporters would be tracked down and killed. And that same year, of 366,  the Germanic tribes would be forced back across the Rhine. For the time being.

In January of 367 defender of the Trinity, Hillary of Poitiers, who had prophesied the world was coming to an end in 365, instead died in exile.  But Christianity, both east and west, and all the world in between, survived.

This was proof again that Christianity could survive even its most fervent supporters, who always seem to confuse their personal doomsday with God's.

- 30 -

YEAR OF OUR LORD, 365

I would call the year 365 the worst year for Christianity since Jesus got arrested. It began in January when hungry parties of Germanic tribes crossed the Rhine at Strasburg in Gaul on raids. As a soldier risen from the ranks, the new Emperor in Constantinople, the sour faced Valentinian I, realized that if the Germans were having a hungry winter, then spring would bring a full scale invasion. He immediately ordered the commander of the two under strength legions in Gaul, Charietto, to call for support from the loyal tribes. And he started planing to move his court and his legions to the west.

The sour puss Valentinian (above)  had only taken on the purple in March of 364, at 43 years of age. He was smart and decisive. But he had little patience with intellectuals, and when the Christian leader Hillary of Potiers insisted the Emperor enforce persecutions of pagans and Christian heretics the Emperor threatened the old pain-in-the-butt with exile if he didn't shut up and go home.  Valentinian was a Christian, but with so many enemies outside the empire, he did not want to give anybody inside the empire - pagan or Christian - a reason to join them. To an ideologue like Hillary, such practical tolerance was an insult to God.

Hillary (above) had been waging war against the ideas of Bishop Arius of Alexandria since the Council of Nicoea, back in the year 325.  Eventually even Constantine the Great, who had convened the Council, got tired of Hillary's insistent calls for punishing any who suggested that God the father (Yawyeh) and God the Son (Jesus) were not the same persona. “Jesus that I know as my Redeemer cannot be less than God”, insisted  the “Hammer of the Arians”. And yet even after Arius died in an Alexandrian toilet after being poisoned in 336, his idea of God the father and the demigod his son, refused to be stamped out   Even after being dismissed by Valentinian I, and with the threat of exile hanging over his own head ,  Hillary could not keep his mouth or his pen shut. In the spring of 365 Hillary's condemnation of the Emperor became a minor best seller.

Like many a Christian ideologue since, the 55 year old Hillary divined the end of the world was coming because the Emperor refused to listen to him. And if anybody could see the end of the world coming, it would be Hillary of Poitiers, who had urged the Council of Nicocea (above) to include the “Book of Revelations” into the now holy bible.  That book prophesied that one of the signs of the “end of times” would be the rise and rule of the Antichrist. And wrote Hillary in the spring of  365, “the Antichrist is ruling.” - meaning, Valentiniano.  Now, normally, calling the Emperor the Anti-Christ would have cost Hillary an appendage. But, as expected, Valentiniano that spring, was pretty busy.

Back in Gaul, as winter turned to spring, Charietto sent scouts into the border forests, to attack the German raiders in their sleep. He paid these hunters by the kill, which they proved by bringing in German heads, which were then impaled on spikes around Gaulic villages as a morale builder. But the bloody tributes failed to inspire the population. So the general sought out the support of an aging pro Roman Gaulic, Chief,  Serverianus, who managed to raise a small force loyal to him. And that June, with his legions tied down protecting the major cities, Charietto was forced to use Severianus's men as a rapid response force.

Unfortunately the Germans ambushed the Gauls. Serverianus was thrown from his horse and killed. Charietto managed to slow the rout for a time, but when he was killed the remainder of the force was either slaughtered or scattered. And all of Gaul began to ask themselves what they were paying Roman taxes for. It started to seem as if Hillary had been right. God - father, son and Holy Ghost - were all intent on punishing the Roman world.

The Emperor Valentinian was already on the road to Gaul, and had reached the old Imperial villa at Mediana, in what is today southern Serbia, when word of the disaster reached him. He immediately dispatched an old political ally, Dagalaifus, to take charge of things on the ground in Gaul.  But the disaster highlighted, again,  that the Empire was too big for one man to rule. Valentinian had promised to name a co-ruler and he did so now, handing over Constantinople and the eastern half of his realm to his younger brother Valens . This division, in 365, would prove to be the ultimate break between east and west, Greek and Latin Christianity, but at the time it was merely a division of convenes. Valentinian then hurried on to Gaul, not pausing until he had reached the ancient circular fortress town of Rheims.

Meanwhile, roughly 17,000 feet beneath the merchant ships plying the surface between the bread basket of North Africa and the way station island of Crete, a truly earth shaking doomsday was looming. As yet unimagined by human minds, ancient Greece and the islands of the Aegean, birthplace of democracy and Western literature, was being held in place against the anvil of the European plate, while from the south the even larger hammer of the African plate was driving under the Aegean plate at an inch and a half a year, downward at a 30 degree angle and pulling the southern edge of Crete down with it. 

And off the island's southwest coast, just after dawn on 21 July, 365,  the rocks of the Aegean plate snapped, and the west coast of Crete suddenly popped 20 feet into the air.  Hillary of Poitiers may have prophesied this as the end of the world, but it had happened before. That was why Crete was there in the first place.

Almost two thousand years later the shaking would be estimated as an 8.5 earthquake on the classic Richter Scale. Survivor Ammianus Marcellinus would describe it as “...a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts” which made “the solidity of the whole earth...shake and shudder.” And he was 600 miles southeast of the epicenter. 

 A mere 20 miles from the point of break, at the base of a peninsula on the northwest coast of Crete, was the port of Phalasarna (above), a wealthy harbor for over six hundred years. That morning, 21 July, 365, the entire harbor and town was lifted nine feet out of the water. 

Walls and stairways cracked, homes and work shops collapsed and the stone supports for the piers (above) were lifted straight upward, leaving them high and dry. In a few moments it became a port without water. In the town, the dead outnumbered the living. And every town on Crete was damaged or destroyed by the quake.

The pagan writer Libanius attributed the disaster to the anger of Poseidon, the god of the sea and of earthquakes, as punishment for the heresy of Christianity. The world was, “Like a horse shaking off his rider...All the cities of Libya were destroyed...the greatest cities in Sicily lie in ruins, as do those in the Hellenes...beautiful Nicacea has been felled.”  Meanwhile the Christian writer Jerome described the collapse of the walls and houses of the city Ar Moab, east of the Dead Sea in Palestine, as the Christian God's wraith for the sin of paganism.

But the greater killer was the tsunami. To the west, 600 miles from the epicenter, the first 82 foot high tidal wave hit 70 minutes after the quake, washing up to a mile inland on Malta. On the south coast of Cyprus, 500 miles to the east,  the wave drowned the city of Kourion, killing at least 5,000, including craftsmen at their work benches. But the worst was what the wave did to the great city of Alexandria, on the Nile Delta.

Marcellinus was there when “...the sea was driven away...so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered...Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered...to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea....returning when least expected,  killed many thousands by drowning...the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses...hurled nearly two miles from the shore.”. The cost in Alexandria was at least 5,000 dead and 50,000 homes and apartments destroyed. Farmland in the rich Nile Delta was poisoned by salt water for a decade.

Where the island of Crete, north of the fault, had been raised in an instant by 9 feet or more, south of the fault, in Alexandria, the shore sank by 20 feet, submerging the harbor breakwaters, the famous lighthouse, even Cleopatra's tomb. 

And the House of the Dead, tomb of Alexander the Great, one of the greatest mausoleums in the world, was shattered by the earthquake and then smashed by the waves, its scattered stones scavenged until there was nothing left of it. For two centuries Alexandria would memorialize “The Day of Horror”.

In far off Reims, in northeastern France, Valentinian I's only concern was that in the midst of a Germanic invasion, he was suddenly told he could expect no revenues from the rich lands of north Africa and Sicily. Meanwhile in the east, his brother Valens was facing his own crises.

Upon becoming eastern Emperor, Valens (above) moved his legions to quell revolts in Mesopotamia, and had reached Cappadocian Ceasarea, 600 miles from Constantinople, when his father-in-law hit the fan.

As commander of the Martensian legion responsible for maintaining order in the capital, Pretronius Probus (the father-in-law) was running the city in Valens absence. But according to our old friend Marcellinus, Petronius, was “ a man ugly in spirit and in appearance...cruel, savage and fearlessly hard-hearted, never capable of giving or receiving reason” in his search for tax debts going back decades. He “...closed the houses of the poor and the palaces of the rich in great numbers....”

And according to the Catholic historian Gregory of Nazianzus, Pretonius even arrested (later Saint) Basil of Nazianzus, to squeeze money out of the church. It proved a repossession too far, and there was a general uprising in the city. “Each man was armed with the tool he was using, or with whatever else came to hand at the moment. Torch in hand, amid showers of stones, with cudgel's ready, all ran and shouted together in their united zeal....Nor were the women weaponless...” As dramatic as the story told by both historians may be, I suspect that what rose in Constantinople in the late summer of 365 was an “astro-turf” rebellion, for the benefit of a thug named Procopius, a distant relative of the departed Emperor Constantine the Great,. Propcopius  promised the upper classes a return of stability and prophets.

Learning of all this in September, Valens thought briefly about abdication, or even suicide. But his advisers (and his wife) would have none of that. So he hurried military expedition forward toward Constantinople.  The first two legions to approach the city were bribed by Probopius's upper crust bankers. This convinced several of Hillary's Church allies to also join the rebellion. Still on the march, Valens was infuriated at the betrayal.  The act fed his growing distrust of the Christian establishment. He threw his support behind the followers of the late Bishop Arius,   who were more understanding of the Emperor's need to raise revenues. The split between Latin and Greek Churches was growing wider by the minute.

It would be the next year before the rebel Procopius and his supporters would be tracked down and killed. And that same year, of 366,  the Germanic tribes would be forced back across the Rhine. For the time being.

In January of 367 defender of the Trinity, Hillary of Poitiers, who had prophesied the world was coming to an end in 365, instead died in exile.  But Christianity, both east and west, and all the world in between, survived.

This was proof again that Christianity could survive even its most fervent supporters, who always seem to confuse their personal doomsday with God's.

- 30 -