The Monks of Nitria Attack the Prefect

Some of the monks who lived in the mountains of Nitria, men of a very fiery disposition, whom Theophilus had some time before unjustly armed against Dioscorus and his brothers, were again carried away by burning zeal and resolved to fight on Cyril’s behalf. About five hundred of them left their monasteries and came into the city. Meeting the prefect in his chariot, they called him a pagan idolater and threw many other insults at him. He suspected that this was a trap laid for him by Cyril, and he cried out that he was a Christian and had been baptized by Atticus the bishop at Constantinople. They paid little attention to his protests, and one of them, named Ammonius, threw a stone at Orestes that struck him on the head and covered him with the blood flowing from the wound. All his guards except a few fled, plunging into the crowd in every direction, afraid of being stoned to death. Meanwhile the people of Alexandria ran to the governor’s rescue and put the rest of the monks to flight. They seized Ammonius and handed him over to the prefect, who at once put him publicly to the torture. It was inflicted so severely that he died under it. Not long after, Orestes reported to the emperors what had taken place. [a]

Cyril, for his part, also sent his own account of the matter to the emperor. He had the body of Ammonius laid in a certain church, gave him the new name Thaumasius, ordered him to be enrolled among the martyrs, and praised his greatness of soul in church as that of a man who had fallen in a contest for the sake of godliness. But the more sober-minded, though Christians, did not accept Cyril’s partial judgment of him. They knew very well that he had suffered the punishment his rashness deserved, and that he had not died under torture because he refused to deny Christ. Cyril himself was aware of this, and he let the memory of the affair fade gradually into silence. But the hostility between Cyril and Orestes did not by any means end there. It was stirred up again by an event much like the one before.