_Periegesis_, and aimed at the rank of a poet by writing
a treatise on geography in heroic verse. From this work he is named
Dionysius Periegetes. While careful to remind us that his birthplace
Alexandria was a Macedonian city, he gives due honour to Egypt and the
Egyptians. There is no river, says he, equal to the Nile for carrying
fertility and adding to the happiness of the land. It divides Asia from
Libya, falling between rocks at Syene, and then passing by the old and
famous city of Thebes, where Memnon every morning salutes his beloved
Aurora as she rises. On its banks dwells a rich and glorious race of
men, who were the first to cultivate the arts of life; the first to make
trial of the plough and sow their seed in a straight furrow; and the
first to map the heavens and trace the sloping path of the sun.

According to the traditions of the church, it was in this reign that
Christianity was first brought into Egypt by the Evangelist Mark, the
disciple of the Apostle Peter. Many were already craving for religious
food more real than the old superstitions. The Egyptian had been shaken
in his attachment to the sacred animals by Greek ridicule. The Greek had
been weakened in his belief of old Homer's gods by living with men
who had never heard of them. Both were dissatisfied with the scheme of
explaining the actions of their gods by means of allegory. The crumbling
away of the old opinions left men more fitted to receive the new
religion from Galilee. Mark's preaching converted crowds in Alexandria;
but, after a short stay, he returned to Rome, in about the eleventh
year of this reign, leaving Annianus to watch over the growing church.
Annianus is usually called the first bishop of Alexandria; and Eusebius,
who lived two hundred years later, has given us the names of his
successors in an unbroken chain. If we would inquire whether the early
converts to Christianity in Alexandria were Jews, Greeks, or Egyptians,
we have nothing to guide us but the names of these bishops. Annianus,
or Annaniah, as his name was written by the Arabic historians, was very
likely a Jew; indeed, the Evangelist Mark would begin by addressing
himself to the Jews, and would leave the care of the infant church to
one of his own nation. In the platonic Jews, Christianity found soil
so exactly suited to its reception that it is only by he dates that the
Therapeute of Alexandria and their historian Philo are proved not to be
Christian; and, again,