The Beacon at Alexandria by Gillian Bradshaw

First published: 1986

Subjects: Gender roles, health and illness, and religion

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical fiction

Time of work: 371-378 a.d.

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Ephesus, Alexandria, and Thrace, far-flung regions in the Roman Empire’s eastern Mediterranean area

Principal Characters:

• Charis/Chariton, the daughter of Theodoros of Ephesus, a brilliant medical student, physician to an archbishop, and head of a Roman military hospital
• Philon, the Jewish doctor who takes Chariton as an assistant
• Archbishop Athanasios, a figure at the center of the Arian/Nicene controversy in Alexandria
• Athanaric of Sardica, a Gothic agent of Rome who saves Chariton’s life and career because of a blood debt
• Fritigern, a Gothic nobleman, the husband of Lady Amalberga
• Festinus, the governor of Asia, who is betrothed to Charis

Form and Content

In order to explore the far frontiers and violent intrigues of the second century, most authors would probably not choose a female protagonist. The Roman Empire was a man’s world where women were generally property or playthings. Yet Gillian Bradshaw does just that in The Beacon at Alexandria. Charis, however, is an unlikely heroine whose story is told in three settings: Ephesus, where she grew up; Alexandria, where she learned medicine; and Thrace, where she practiced it. Whether Charis can experience life fully as a woman, as a doctor, and as a Roman citizen is the novel’s primary question.

More interested in nursing sick animals than in dreaming of marriage prospects, fifteen-year-old Charis feels that the “girl in the mirror, the demurely proper, overdressed doll” is not herself. Even though Festinus, the new governor of Asia, threatens her father’s wealth and reputation and physically assaults her, Charis is forced to become engaged to him. Rather than submit to a life of hollow pretense with such a cruel man, she runs away, disguised as a eunuch, to study medicine in Alexandria.

In this Egyptian city, the academic capital of the Roman world and the center of the Nicene/Arian power struggle in the Christian church, Charis, now called Chariton, finds it difficult to enter the closed medical community. Only a kindly Jewish doctor, Philon, will take her on as an assistant. He is a practitioner of the Hippocratic method of medicine, which has always attracted her. She learns to live as a man, soaks up the lectures, and gains valuable experience with Philon’s patients, finding herself eventually called to treat the Nicene archbishop, Athanasios. If he dies, Egypt will erupt in violence and Rome will impose an Arian archbishop. She saves his life but at the cost of her secret. Despite the knowledge that Charis is a woman, he makes her his doctor, but his power cannot protect her after his death. Only Athanaric, a Gothic agent of Rome whose life she has also saved, is able rescue her from the prospect of imprisonment and death by signing her on as an army doctor in his homeland of Thrace.

Charis runs the hospital competently and, through Athanaric, helps the family of Gothic nobleman Fritigern. Nevertheless, she is keenly aware that to maintain her much-loved art of healing, she has given up any chance of normal family life. This dilemma becomes secondary as conditions deteriorate along the frontier. She is kidnapped by the Goths and forced to meet their desperate medical needs. Fritigern’s wife, who had realized Charis’ gender at their first meeting, now exposes it to prevent her escape. She may be both a woman and doctor, but now she cannot be a Roman, an identity that she has come to value. It seems that all three roles are incompatible. When she is rescued by Athanaric, whom she has loved for years and who is fully aware of her true identity, Charis is given the chance for wholeness even as the Empire stumbles toward its inevitable death.

Critical Context

Gillian Bradshaw established her reputation as a novelist while still in college, receiving the Jule and Avery Hopwood Award for Fiction from the University of Michigan for Hawk of May (1980), the first volume in what would become an Arthurian trilogy. After completing a master’s degree in classics from Cambridge University, she continued to explore and re-create the latter days of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages. So seamlessly does she weave in the historical facts that give believability to her stories that the reader does not even notice these lessons. In The Beacon at Alexandria, for example, many fascinating snippets describe how medicine was learned and practiced at that time in history and what a primitive military hospital might have been like. These facts heighten the sense of loss that Bradshaw obviously projects at the death of the Roman Empire, even though she does not romanticize second century life. Two other books, while not constituting a formal trilogy with The Beacon at Alexandria, continue her exploration of life during the collapse of the Roman Empire: The Bearkeeper’s Daughter (1987) and Imperial Purple (1988).

Bradshaw did not write her books for a young adult audience, but they have been embraced by teenagers who although realizing the chasm between these civilizations and their own, recognize a commonality between their situations and those of Bradshaw’s characters. Any young woman who has been hindered from pursuing her dreams (although with far fewer obstacles) will see in her own circumstances a reflection of Charis’ story. The Beacon at Alexandria received the American Library Association’s Notable Book award.