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It was not among the Jews alone that the solitary life was cultivated. In the Serapium of Thebes were also heathen monks leading a very similar life.
But these foreigners were looked upon with jealousy by the Egyptian monks as intruders on their endowments, and we meet with a petition addressed to Philometor by Ptolemy, the son of Glaucias, a monk in the temple of Serapis at Memphis, who styles himself a Macedonian, complaining that his cell had been violently entered and himself ill-treated because he was a Greek; and reminding the king that last year, when the king visited the Serapium, he had addressed the same petition to him through the bars of his window.
The new library, however, would seem to have been placed in a building somewhat separated from the temple, as when the temple of Serapis was burnt in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and again when it was in part destroyed by fire in the second year of this reign we hear of no loss of books; and two hundred years later the library of the Serapium, it is said, had risen to the number of seven hundred thousand volumes.
The Egyptian version of the Gospel story, being more appropriate to the Nile Valley than to the region from whence they came, the Greek colonists of Alexandria adopted it, but preferring to pay homage to Serapis, one of the ninth incarnations of God Sol, which they imported from Pontus, a Greek province of Asia Minor, they erected to his worship that celebrated temple known as the Grand Serapium; and, transferring the culture and refinement of Greece to the new city, it became, under the Ptolemian dynasty, a great seat of learning; the arts and sciences flourished, an immense library was collected, the various forms of Astral worship were represented and schools for the dissemination of the several phases of Grecian philosophy and Oriental Gnosticism were founded.
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