Roman and Byzantine periods
The decline of the Ptolemies in the 2nd and 1st centuries bce was matched by the rise of Rome. Alexandria played a major part in the intrigues that led to the establishment of imperial Rome.
It was at Alexandria that Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, courted Julius Caesar and claimed to have borne him a son. Her attempts at restoring the fortunes of the Ptolemaic dynasty, however, were thwarted by Caesar’s assassination and her unsuccessful support of Mark Antony against Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian. In 30 bce Octavian (later the emperor Augustus) formally brought Alexandria and Egypt under Roman rule. The city held the key to the Egyptian granary on which Rome increasingly came to rely.
St. Mark, author of the second gospel in the New Testament, is said to have preached in Alexandria in the mid-1st century ce. Several outstanding Bible scholars and theologians of the early Christian era were educated in Alexandria, including Origen (c. 185–c. 254), who contributed to an evolving synthesis of Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy and who headed the city’s famous catechetical school. Alexandria’s Christian community continued to grow in numbers and influence and resisted Rome’s attempts to impose emperor worship. State-directed persecutions and spontaneous attacks by pagans upon Christians occurred intermittently; Diocletian initiated a particularly vicious campaign in 303 in which many Egyptian Christians were martyred, a number of them in Alexandria. Nevertheless, persecution failed to stem the growing spiritual movement, and the empire finally legalized Christianity under Constantine I, though the new alliance with the state set the stage for schisms within the church.
Among the first doctrinal questions to rend the church was a dispute between two Alexandrian prelates, Athanasius and Arius, over the nature of Jesus Christ’s relationship to God the Father. The issue was addressed in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, which affirmed Christ’s full deity and branded Arianism—the belief that Christ, though preexistent, was inferior to God—as heresy. Arianism, however, had many imperial champions, and this sharpened the conflict between the Alexandrian church and the state. The doctrinal issue was not finally settled until the Council of Constantinople in 381. By the close of the 4th century, elements of the Christian establishment in Alexandria had also mobilized against the remnants of paganism, destroying the temple of Serapis; other violent clashes broke out between rival gangs and factions based in the city around this time.
During the course of the 4th century, the patriarchs of Alexandria consolidated their position over Egypt’s clergy. The pope of Alexandria, as the post of patriarch was also known, exercised great influence in the church and vied with the patriarch of Constantinople for ecclesiastical preeminence in the eastern Roman Empire. A decisive break occurred at the Council of Chalcedon in 451; the council deposed Dioscorus, the Alexandrian pope, and adopted a Christological statement that was regarded by Egyptian Christians as compromising belief in the divine Son. For dogmatic and political reasons, the Egyptian Monophysite church rejected the Chalcedonian formula and resisted Constantinople’s attempts to bring it into line. A dissident church developed to oppose state-supported orthodoxy and became a focus of indigenous Egyptian loyalties. Disaffection with Byzantine rule created the conditions in which Alexandria fell first to the Persians, in 616, and then to the Arabs, in 642.