"His voice [that of Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, A. D. 412-444] inflamed or appeased the passions of the multitude: his commands were blindly obeyed by his numerous and fanatic parabolani, familiarized in their daily office with scenes of death; and the præfects of Egypt were awed or provoked by the temporal power of these Christian pontiffs. Ardent in the prosecution of heresy, Cyril auspiciously opened his reign by oppressing the Novatians, the most innocent and harmless of the sectaries. ... The toleration, and even the privileges of the Jews, who had multiplied to the number of 40,000, were secured by the laws of the Cæsars and Ptolemies, and a long prescription of 700 years since the foundation of Alexandria. Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of resistance; their houses of prayer were levelled with the ground, and the episcopal warrior, after rewarding his troops with the plunder of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the misbelieving nation. Perhaps he might plead the insolence of their prosperity, and their deadly hatred of the Christians, whose blood they had recently shed in a malicious or accidental tumult. Such crimes would have deserved the animadversions of the magistrate; but in this promiscuous outrage the innocent were confounded with the guilty." _E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 47. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25717_ "Before long the adherents of the archbishop were guilty of a more atrocious and unprovoked crime, of the guilt of which a deep suspicion attached to Cyril. All Alexandria respected, honoured, took pride in the celebrated Hypatia. She was a woman of extraordinary learning; in her was centred the lingering knowledge of that Alexandrian Platonism cultivated by Plotinus and his school. Her beauty was equal to her learning; her modesty commended both. ... Hypatia lived in great intimacy with the præfect Orestes; the only charge whispered against her was that she encouraged him in his hostility to the patriarch. ... Some of Cyril's ferocious partisans seized this woman, dragged her from her chariot, and with the most revolting indecency tore her clothes off and then rent her limb from limb." _H. H. Milman, History of Latin Christianity, book 2, chapter 3._ ALSO IN _C. Kingsley, Hypatia._ ALEXANDRIA: A. D. 616. Taken by Chosroes. See EGYPT: A. D. 616-628. ALEXANDRIA: A. D. 641-646. The Moslem Conquest.