Civil War in Alexandria

Peace had barely returned when Dionysius went back to Alexandria. But faction and war broke out there again, and he could not oversee all the brothers in the city, now split between the two sides of the fighting. So once more, at the Passover feast, he spoke to them by letter, like a man in exile, though he was in Alexandria itself. [a] Later, writing another festal letter to Hierax, a bishop in Egypt, he mentions the faction of the Alexandrians in his day in these words: “As for me, what wonder is it if it is hard even to speak by letter with those who live far off, when it has become impossible for me to talk with myself, or to take counsel with my own soul? [d] Indeed, I need letters to reach my own heart: the brothers who share my house and my soul, fellow citizens of the same church. And how I could get the letters through seems beyond all means. A man could more easily cross, not just abroad, but from the East to the West, than travel from Alexandria to Alexandria itself. [e]

“The main street through the middle of the city is harder to cross and more impassable than that vast and trackless desert which Israel traveled through for two generations. Our calm harbors, once without a wave, have become an image of the sea that parted and stood like walls on either side, so that Israel could drive over it like a road, while the Egyptians were drowned on that highway. For often, from the killings committed in them, they look like a Red Sea. [g] The river that flows past the city has at times looked drier than the waterless desert, more parched than the one in which Israel, as they crossed it, grew so thirsty that they cried out against Moses, and water flowed for them out of the sheer rock from him who alone does wonders. [h] At other times it has risen so high that it has flooded all the country around, the roads and the fields, threatening to bring back the flood of waters that came in the days of Noah. And it always flows down defiled with blood and murder and drownings, as it became for Pharaoh by the hand of Moses, when it was changed into blood and stank. [i]

“And what other water could cleanse the water that cleanses everything? How could the ocean, so great and impassable for human beings, scour this bitter sea clean, if it were poured over it? Or how could the great river that flows out of Eden wash away this gore, even if it turned the four heads into which it divides into the single stream of the Gihon? [j] Or when could the air, fouled as it is by evil fumes on every side, become clean? For such vapors rise from the land, such winds from the sea, breezes from the river and steam from the harbors, that the dews are like the discharge of dead bodies rotting in all the elements around us. And yet people wonder and cannot understand where these constant plagues come from, where these severe illnesses come from, where all these kinds of deadly disease come from, where this varied and vast destruction of human life comes from, and why this very great city no longer holds so great a number of inhabitants, from little children up to the very old, as it once supported of those it used to call hale old men. Back then, the men from forty to seventy years of age were so much more numerous that their number cannot be filled up now, even when everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age has been written in and counted for the public grain allowance. [k] And the youngest in appearance have become like those who were the oldest of all in former days. Yet though they see the human race on earth always shrinking and wasting away like this, they do not tremble, while their own complete destruction grows and comes on.”