This practice of judging and condemning opinions gave power in the Church to men who would otherwise have been least entitled to weight and influence.  Athanasius rose to his high rank over the heads of the elder presbyters by his fitness for the harsher duties then required of an archbishop.  Theological opinions became the watchwords of two contending parties; religion lost much of its empire over the heart; and the mild spirit of Christianity gave way to angry quarrels and cruel persecutions.

Another remarkable event of this reign was the foundation of the new city of Constantinople, to which the emperor removed the seat of his government.  Rome lost much by the building of the new capital, although the emperors had for some time past ceased to live in Italy; but Alexandria lost the rank which it had long held as the centre of Greek learning and Greek thought, and it felt a blow from which Rome was saved by the difference of language.  The patriarch of Alexandria was no longer the head of Greek Christendom.  That rank was granted to the bishop of the imperial city; many of the philosophers who hung round the palace at Constantinople would otherwise have studied and taught in the museum; and the Greeks, by whose superiority Egypt had so long been kept in subjection, gradually became the weaker party.  In the opinion of the historian, as in the map of the geographer, Alexandria had formerly been a Greek state on the borders of Egypt; but since the rebellion in the reign of Diocletian it was becoming more and more an Egyptian city; and those who in religion and politics thought and felt as Egyptians soon formed the larger half of the Alexandrians.  The climate of Egypt was hardly fitted for the Greek race.  Their numbers never could have been kept up by births alone, and they now began to lessen as the attraction to newcomers ceased.  The pure Greek names henceforth become less common; and among the monks and writers we now meet with those named after the old gods of the country.

[Illustration:  199.jpg THE ISLAND OF RHODHA]

Constantine removed an obelisk from Egypt for the ornament of his new city, and he brought down another from Heliopolis to Alexandria; but he died before the second left the country, and it was afterwards taken by his son to Rome.  These obelisks were covered with hieroglyphics, as usual, and we have a translation said to be made from the latter by Hermapion, an Egyptian priest.  In order to take away its pagan character from the religious ceremony with which the yearly rise of the Nile wras celebrated in Alexandria, Constantine removed the sacred cubit from the temple of Serapis to one of the Christian churches; and nothwithstanding the gloomy forebodings of the people, the Nile rose as usual, and the clergy afterwards celebrated the time of its overflow as a Christian festival.