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Updated: June 13, 2025
Commodus may perhaps not have been the last emperor whose name and praises were carved in hieroglyphics; but all the great buildings in the Thebaid, which add such value to the early history of Egypt, had ceased before his reign.
The solitaries of the Thebaid found that they became selfish wild beasts, or went mad, if they remained alone; and they formed themselves into lauras, 'lanes' of huts, convents, under a common abbot or father. The evangelical converts of the last century formed themselves into powerful and highly organized sects.
The fact that verse-writing was an innocuous way of spending one's leisure doubtless drove many to it. CODRUS, or Cordus, was the author of an ambitious epic, the Theseid, composed on the scale, but without the wit, of the Thebaid. The stage, too, engaged many writers.
The Silvae, consisting as they do of comparatively short pieces, display the excellences of Statius to greater advantage. Of the thirty- two poems, six are in lyric metres, the rest being all written in the smooth graceful hexameters of which the author of the Thebaid was so accomplished a master. The subjects, for the most part of a familiar nature, are very various.
We all know they had an intense aversion to any savour of domesticity, and they never shaved, washed, dined, visited, had new clothes. Holiness, indeed! They were viveurs.... We have witnessed Religion without Theology, and why not an Unsectarian Thebaid? I sometimes fancy it needs only one brave man to begin.... If it were not for the fuss Euphemia would make I certainly should.
The Thebaid, or hilly country above Thebes in Egypt, was full of these hermits. When they banded together in brotherhoods they were called monks, and the women who did the like were called nuns. At this time there arose in Egypt a priest named Arius, who fell away from the true faith respecting our blessed Lord, and taught that he was not from the beginning, and was not equal with God the Father.
Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to convince himself of the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely before the feet of no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks to faith. I might be an ancient dweller in the Thebaid struggling towards dreams of celestial habitations, and confronted only by grotesque visions of hell. No matter what I do, I'm baffled.
There is a country in which man is not the sport of the seasons, in which he need have no anxieties for his future well-being a country in which the sunshines and heats vary very little from year to year. In the Thebaid heavy rain is said to be a prodigy.
The barbarians then proposed, as the terms of their surrender, never to enter Egypt while Maximinus commanded the troops in the Thebaid; but the conqueror was not contented with such an unsatisfactory submission, and would make no treaty with them till they had released the Roman prisoners without ransom, paid for the booty that they had taken, and given a number of the nobles as hostages.
Palladius had travelled in Egypt before he was sent there into banishment, and he had spent many years in examining the monasteries of the Thebaid and their rules, and he has left a history of the lives of many of those holy men and woman, addressed to his friend Lausus.
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