In summer time, roughly during the same period [551 A.D.]
there was a violent earthquake in Constantinople and in many parts of the Empire, with
the result that several cities both on the islands and the mainland were
razed to the ground and their inhabitants wiped out. The lovely city of
Berytus [Beirut], the jewel of Phoenicia, was completely ruined and its world famous
architectural treasures were reduced to a heap of rubble, practically
nothing but the bare pavements of the buildings being left.
Many of the local inhabitants were crushed to death under the weight
of the wreckage, as were many cultivated young men of distinguished
parentage who had come there to study the Law. There was, in fact, a long
tradition of legal studies in the city, and the law schools conferred an aura
of peculiar privilege and distinction on the place.
At this point, then, the professors of law moved to the neighbouring
city of Sidon and the schools were transferred there, until Berytus was rebuilt.
The restored city was very different from what it had been in the past,
though it was not changed beyond recognition, since it still preserved a few
traces of its former self. But this rebuilding of the city and the subsequent
return of the schools was not to take place for some time yet.
At that time also some slight tremors were felt in the great metropolis
of Alexandria on the Nile, an altogether unusual occurrence for those parts.
All the inhabitants and particularly the very old were amazed at this
apparently unprecedented phenomenon. Nobody stayed indoors. The populace
congregated in the streets, seized with unwarranted panic at the suddenness
and novelty of the event.
I myself was in Alexandria at the time completing the prescribed
studies [Probably a training in rhetoric, as Mrs. Cameron points out (op. cit. pp. 140—141)]
which lead to the law course proper, and I must confess I was
quite overcome with fear considering the faintness of the tremors. What
really worried me, though, was the fact that people's houses there are not at
all strongly-built and quite incapable of standing up to even a small amount
of vibration, being frail and flimsy structures consisting of a single thickness
of stone.
There was alarm even among the educated section of the community
not, I think, at what had actually taken place, but because it
seemed reasonable to expect that the same thing would happen again
