Destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria

The Serapeum, founded by Ptolemy III on a rocky hill in the west of the city, was the grandest temple of Alexandria. It had once housed the “daughter library” of the Great Library, and in the 370s and 380s it was still a major pagan pilgrimage site where Neoplatonist philosophers taught. In 391 a law of Theodosius I forbade anyone to visit the sanctuaries or walk through the temples. According to the church historians Rufinus and Sozomen, Bishop Theophilus paraded the cult objects found in a temple of Dionysus that was being turned into a church (in another version, a mithraeum); enraged pagans attacked the Christians and then barricaded themselves in the Serapeum with Christian captives, urged on by the philosopher Olympius. The emperor pardoned the rioters but ordered the temples of Alexandria destroyed; the defenders fled, a soldier hacked the colossal cult statue of Serapis to pieces, and the temple was demolished — or, according to Sozomen, turned into a church. The pagan historian Eunapius, by contrast, describes an unprovoked raid on the temple and its treasures.

The date is usually given as 391, though some place the end of the temple in 392. A church was later built on the site, while the monastery of Metanoia arose at Canopus, on the site of the temple of Serapis there. Pompey’s Pillar, raised for Diocletian, still towers over the ruins. Whether any books were still kept in the Serapeum is not recorded: only Orosius explicitly mentions the destruction of books, and most historians doubt that a great library still existed by then. Peter Brown sees the event as the most spectacular episode in a long history of mob violence in Alexandria.