AD 391

Destruction of the Serapeum of Alexandria

Destruction of Alexandria’s Serapeum amid religious conflict

The violence began around sacred objects carried into public and ridiculed — not around a library fire.

The wrong building

No reliable source records flames destroying the Great Library in the Mouseion in 391. The event attached to that year is the destruction of the Serapeum, a separate temple complex in Alexandria’s south-western Rhakotis quarter.

The Mouseion’s royal library and the Serapeum’s secondary collection were different institutions in different places.

The destruction is conventionally dated to 391, though 392 also appears in scholarship, and no exact day survives.

Ridicule, then street fighting

According to Socrates Scholasticus, Bishop Theophilus publicly exposed and mocked objects taken from pagan sanctuaries. The fighting that followed between pagan and Christian Alexandrians caused deaths and injuries, and several pagan teachers then fled the city.

Socrates learned about the riot partly from those teachers; he reports that one of them, Helladius, later boasted of having killed nine people himself.

Socrates also reports that Alexandria’s governor and the military commander assisted Theophilus in demolishing temples, that cult images were broken up or melted into utensils for the Alexandrian church, and that one image was kept for public display.

What happened to the books is unsettled

Other accounts give a different sequence: pagans barricaded themselves in the Serapeum after the street fighting, imperial authorities pardoned the rioters but ordered pagan images destroyed, and the cult statue of Serapis was attacked before the complex was levelled and Christianised.

Socrates’s account mentions neither a library nor burning books.

Dirk Rohmann argues from Orosius and other evidence that book chests were emptied and many books probably destroyed — which still does not establish that the Mouseion’s Great Library burned, or identify any particular work lost.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~0391.

What the sources leave uncertain

The destruction is conventionally dated to 391, but 392 also appears in scholarship; no exact day survives.
The narratives were written from sharply partisan Christian or pagan perspectives and conflict over whether the riot preceded authorization, whether demolition was immediately ordered and how the Serapeum’s conversion unfolded.
Russell concludes that later historians telescoped separate stages—the cult statue’s destruction and the precinct’s conversion—whose traditions may span 390–400.
Scholars disagree over the late Serapeum library. Some emphasize that the principal destruction narratives do not mention books; others use Orosius and late-antique descriptions to argue that books were plundered or destroyed.