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If the soldiers connived at the escape of Athanasius, they were all the less disposed to spare his flock. The outrages of Philagrius and Gregory were repeated by Syrianus and his successor, Sebastian the Manichee; and the evil work went on apace after the arrival of the new bishop in Lent 357.
The Bishops who refused to sign were scourged, tortured or exiled; the Pope was banished to Berea, where he was treated with harshness and cruelty. In the winter of the next year, a General called Syrianus came to Alexandria with a large army. He was an Arian, and the people suspected a plot. Athanasius asked him if he brought any message from the Emperor; Syrianus replied that he had none.
And what wonder is there, says Syrianus, if we should separate things which are so much distant from each other?
At the hour of midnight, twenty-three days after the signature of the treaty, Syrianus, duke of Egypt, at the head of five thousand soldiers, armed and prepared for an assault, unexpectedly invested the church of St. Theonas, where the archbishop, with a part of his clergy and people, performed their nocturnal devotions.
The doors of the sacred edifice yielded to the impetuosity of the attack, which was accompanied with every horrid circumstance of tumult and bloodshed; but, as the bodies of the slain, and the fragments of military weapons, remained the next day an unexceptionable evidence in the possession of the Catholics, the enterprise of Syrianus may be considered as a successful irruption rather than as an absolute conquest.
His coat of sheepskin, given him by Athanasius long years before, he sent with his dying blessing to the Patriarch, who cherished it as his most precious possession. The Alexandrians had not given in without a struggle. They had protested openly against the violence of Syrianus, proclaiming throughout the city that Athanasius was their true Patriarch and that they would never acknowledge another.
Synesius in his good-nature might dignify him with the name of brother, but to her he was a powerless pedant, destined to die without having wrought any deliverance on the earth, as indeed the event proved. Plutarch of Athens? He was superannuated. Syrianus? A mere logician, twisting Aristotle to mean what she knew, and he ought to have known, Aristotle never meant. Her father?
This was a Greek philosopher, who is often cited by Simplicius in his Commentary on the Predicaments, and must not therefore be confounded with Boetius, the roman senator and philosopher. In what manner then, says Syrianus, do ideas subsist according to the contemplative lovers of truth? And such is the mode of their subsistence according to Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato.
But Syrianus, the general of the Egyptian troops, was soon afterwards ordered by the emperor to place him on his episcopal throne; and he led him into the city, surrounded by the spears of five thousand soldiers, and followed by the small body of Alexandrians that after this invasion of their acknowledged rights still called themselves Arians.
Syrianus then sent for Athanasius, and in the presence of Maximus the prefect again delivered to him the command of Constantius, that he should quit Egypt and retire into banishment, and he threatened to carry this command into execution by the help of the troops if he met with any resistance.
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