Urban violence in Alexandria in Antiquity: a historical distortion?

Abstract

The paper draws attention to the metropolis of Alexandria in Egypt, the third biggest city of the late Roman world. Part of recent historiography tends to look very optimistically at the late antique city as a place of religious neutrality at least until the end of the fourth Century. Far from an irenic vision of the late antique urban communities, the latest monograph on late antique Alexandria pictured the city as a place of constant conflicts between Jews, Pagans and Christians. Religion in Alexandria seems to be the main source of urban unrest. In order to measure the relevance of this position, it is necessary to examine the events seen by contemporaries as episodes of urban violence so as to understand their motivations. In order to refute the postulate that Alexandria had a rebellious tradition and that it experienced a renewal of violent tensions at the end of Antiquity, this article proposes to expand the chronological boundaries by including the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in it.