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Rh city that was Queen of the world, that had given her name to all the Empire, was the Roman Pontiff always, without question, the first of the Patriarchs.

Before the rise of Constantinople the second city of the Empire was the Port of Egypt. Her only possible rival would have been Antioch; but Antioch was inland, whereas all the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean poured into the great harbour of Alexandria. And behind that harbour lay the greatest, richest, and most civilized city of the East. In the time of the Ptolemies the number of her inhabitants reached a million; she had, besides her Greeks and native Egyptians, a large and privileged colony of Jews. Her museum (in Cæsar's time it counted seven hundred thousand books), her sumptuous palace, her three great harbours, with the famous lighthouse, her philosophical schools, combined to make Alexandria one of the wonders of the world. As soon as the Christian faith began to spread beyond Palestine, no city called to its Apostles more clearly than Alexandria; nowhere was the new teaching more eagerly discussed than among the crowd of scholars of every race who had flocked together to use her library. Tradition said that St. Mark the Evangelist had been the first missionary and first Bishop of Alexandria; and his successors boasted through him a connection with St. Peter, who had ordained him and sent him as his own representative. This descent from St. Peter, however, is a later idea, and a conscious imitation of Rome and Antioch. St. Mark's first successors were Anianus, Abilius, Cerdon, &c.

Many causes combined to give the Bishop of Alexandria the first place among Eastern bishops. Besides the fame of his city and his claim of succession from St. Peter, there was his great Christian school of philosophy. Pantænus († c. 212) founded at Alexandria a catechetical school that became the first Christian university; his disciple, Titus Flavius Clemens (Clement of Alexandria, † 217), and most of all Origen († 254), the greatest scholar and most wonderful genius of his age, both