He was sent to Constantinople to be punished for not believing in Christianity, for it does not appear that, like the former Hierocles, he ever wrote against it.  There he bore a public scourging from his Christian torturers, with a courage equal to that formerly shown by their forefathers when tortured by his.  When some of the blood from his shoulders flew into his hand, he held it out in scorn to the judge, saying with Ulysses, “Cyclops, since human flesh has been thy food, now taste this wine.”  After his punishment he was banished, but was soon allowed to return to Alexandria, and there he again taught openly as before.  Paganism never wears so fair a dress as in the writings of Hierocles; his commentary on the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans is full of the loftiest and purest morality, and not less agreeable are the fragments that remain of his writings on our duties, and his beautiful chapter on the pleasures of a married life.  In the Facetiae of Hierocles we have one of the earliest jest-books that has been saved from the wreck of time.  It is a curious proof of the fallen state of learning; the Sophists had long since made themselves ridiculous; books alone will not make a man of sense; and in the jokes of Hierocles the blunderer is always called a man of learning.

AEtius, the Alexandrian physician, has left a large work containing a full account of the state of Egyptian medicine at this time.  He describes the diseases and their remedies, quoting the recipes of numerous authors, from the King Nechepsus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Hioscorides, down to Archbishop Cyril.  He is not wholly free from superstition, as when making use of a green jasper set in a ring; but he observes that the patients recovered as soon when the stone was plain as when a dragon was engraved upon it according to the recommendation of Nechepsus.  In Nile water he finds every virtue, and does not forget dark paint for the ladies’ eyebrows, and Cleopatra-wash for the face.

Anastasius, the next emperor, succeeding in 491, followed the wise policy which Zeno had entered upon in the latter years of his reign, and he strictly adhered to the terms of the peace-making edict.  The four patriarchs of Alexandria who were chosen during this reign, John, a second John, Dioscorus, and Timotheus, were all of the Jacobite faith; and the Egyptians readily believed that the emperor was of the same opinion.  When called upon by the quarrelling theologians, he would neither reject nor receive the decrees of the council of Chalcedon, and by this wise conduct he governed Egypt without any religious rebellion during a long reign.