Hypatia. or New Foes with an Old Face

Philammon, after a sleepless night, and a welcome visit to the public baths, which the Roman tyranny, wiser in its generation than modern liberty, provided so liberally for its victims, set forth to the Prefect’s palace, and gave his message; but Orestes, who had been of late astonishing the Alexandrian public by an unwonted display of alacrity, was already in the adjoining Basilica. Thither the youth was conducted by an apparitor, and led up the centre of the enormous hall, gorgeous with frescoes and coloured marbles, and surrounded by aisles and galleries, in which the inferior magistrates were hearing causes, and doing such justice as the complicated technicalities of Roman law chose to mete out. Through a crowd of anxious loungers the youth passed to the apse of the upper end, in which the Prefect’s throne stood empty, and then turned into aside chamber, where he found himself alone with the secretary, a portly Chaldee eunuch, with a sleek pale face, small pig’s eyes, and an enormous turban. The man of pen and paper took the letter, opened it with solemn deliberation, and then, springing to his feet, darted out of the room in most undignified haste, leaving Philammon to wait and wonder. In half an hour he returned, his little eyes growing big with some great idea.

‘Youth! your star is in the ascendant; you are the fortunate bearer of fortunate news! His Excellency himself commands your presence.’ And the two went out.

In another chamber, the door of which was guarded by armed men, Orestes was walking up and down in high excitement, looking somewhat the worse for the events of the past night, and making occasional appeals to a gold goblet which stood on the table.

‘Ha! No other than my preserver himself! Boy, I will make your fortune. Miriam says that you wish to enter my service.’

Philammon, not knowing what to say, thought the best answer would be to bow as low as he could.

‘Ah, ha! Graceful, but not quite according to etiquette. You will soon teach him, eh, Secretary? Now to business. Hand me the notes to sign and seal. To the Prefect of the Stationaries—’

‘Here, your Excellency.’

‘To the Prefect of the Corn market—how many wheat-ships have you ordered to be unladen?’

‘Two, your Excellency.’

‘Well, that will be largess enough for the time being. To the Defender of the Plebs—the devil break his neck!’

‘He may be trusted, most noble; he is bitterly jealous of Cyril’s influence. And moreover, he owes my insignificance much money.’

‘Good! Now the notes to the Gaol-masters, about the gladiators.’

‘Here, your Excellency.’

‘To Hypatia. No. I will honour my bride elect with my own illustrious presence. As I live, here is a morning’s work for a man with a racking headache!’

‘Your Excellency has the strength of seven. May you live for ever!’

And really, Orestes’s power of getting through business, when he chose, was surprising enough. A cold head and a colder heart make many things easy.

But Philammon’s whole soul was fixed on those words. ‘His bride elect!’.... Was it that Miriam’s hints of the day before had raised some selfish vision, or was it pity and horror at such a fate for her—for his idol?—But he passed five minutes in a dream, from which he was awakened by the sound of another and still dearer name.

‘And now, for Pelagia. We can but try.’

‘Your Excellency might offend the Goth.’

‘Curse the Goth! He shall have his choice of all the beauties in Alexandria, and be count of Pentapolis if he likes. But a spectacle I must have; and no one but Pelagia can dance Venus Anadyomene.’

Philammon’s blood rushed to his heart, and then back again to his brow, as he reeled with horror and shame.

‘The people will be mad with joy to see her on the stage once more. Little they thought, the brutes, how I was plotting for their amusement, even when as drunk as Silenus.’

‘Your nobility only lives for the good of your slaves.’

‘Here, boy! So fair a lady requires a fair messenger. You shall enter on my service at once, and carry this letter to Pelagia. Why?—why do you not come and take it?’

‘To Pelagia?’ gasped the youth. ‘In the theatre? Publicly? Venus Anadyomene?’

‘Yes, fool! Were you, too, drunk last night after all?’

‘She is my sister!’

‘Well, and what of that? Not that I believe you, you villain! So!’ said Orestes, who comprehended the matter in an instant. ‘Apparitors!’

The door opened, and the guard appeared.

‘Here is a good boy who is inclined to make a fool of himself. Keep him out of harm’s way for a few days. But don’t hurt him; for, after all, he saved my life yesterday, when you scoundrels ran away.’

And, without further ado, the hapless youth was collared, and led down a vaulted passage into the guard-room, amid the jeers of the guard, who seemed only to owe him a grudge for his yesterday’s prowess, and showed great alacrity in fitting him with a heavy set of irons; which done, he was thrust head foremost into a cell of the prison, locked in and left to his meditations.

CHAPTER XX: SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER

‘But, fairest Hypatia, conceive yourself struck in the face by a great stone, several hundred howling wretches leaping up at you like wild beasts—two minutes more, and you are torn limb from limb. What would even you do in such a case?’

‘Let them tear me limb from limb, and die as I have lived.’

‘Ah, but—When it came to fact, and death was staring you in the face?’

‘And why should man fear death?’

‘Ahem! No, not death, of course; but the act of dying. That may be, surely, under such circumstances, to say the least, disagreeable. If our ideal, Julian the Great, found a little dissimulation necessary, and was even a better Christian than I have ever pretended to be, till he found himself able to throw off the mask, why should not I? Consider me as a lower being than yourself,—one of the herd, if you will; but a penitent member thereof, who comes to make the fullest possible reparation, by doing any desperate deed on which you may choose to put him, and prove myself as able and willing, if once I have the power, as Julian himself.’

Such was the conversation which passed between Hypatia and Orestes half an hour after Philammon had taken possession of his new abode.

Hypatia looked at the Prefect with calm penetration, not unmixed with scorn and fear.

‘And pray what has produced this sudden change in your Excellency’s earnestness? For four months your promises have been lying fallow.’ She did not confess how glad she would have been at heart to see them lying fallow still.

‘Because—This morning I have news; which I tell to you the first as a compliment. We will take care that all Alexandria knows it before sundown. Heraclian has conquered.’

‘Conquered?’ cried Hypatia, springing from her seat.

‘Conquered, and utterly destroyed the emperor’s forces at Ostia. So says a messenger on whom I can depend. And even if the news should prove false, I can prevent the contrary report from spreading, or what is the use of being prefect? You demur? Do you not see that if we can keep the notion alive but a week our cause is won?’

‘How so?’

‘I have treated already with all the officers of the city, and every one of them has acted like a wise man, and given me a promise of help, conditional of course on Heraclian’s success, being as tired as I am of that priest-ridden court at Byzantium. Moreover, the stationaries are mine already. So are the soldiery all the way up the Nile. Ah! you have been fancying me idle for these four months, but—You forget that you yourself were the prize of my toil. Could I be a sluggard with that goal in sight?’

Hypatia shuddered, but was silent; and Orestes went on—

‘I have unladen several of the wheat-ships for enormous largesses of bread: though those rascally monks of Tabenne had nearly forestalled my benevolence, and I was forced to bribe a deacon or two, buy up the stock they had sent down, and retail it again as my own. It is really most officious of them to persist in feeding gratuitously half the poor of the city! What possible business have they with Alexandria?’

‘The wish for popularity, I presume.’

‘Just so; and then what hold can the government have on a set of rogues whose stomachs are filled without our help?’

‘Julian made the same complaint to the high priest of Galatia, in that priceless letter of his.’

‘Ah, you will set that all right, you know, shortly. Then again, I do not fear Cyril’s power just now. He has injured himself deeply, I am happy to say, in the opinion of the wealthy and educated, by expelling the Jews. And as for his mob, exactly at the right moment, the deities—there are no monks here, so I can attribute my blessings to the right source—have sent us such a boon as may put them into as good a humour as we need.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Hypatia.

‘A white elephant.’

‘A white elephant?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, mistaking or ignoring the tone of her answer. ‘A real, live, white elephant; a thing which has not been seen in Alexandria for a hundred years! It was passing through with two tame tigers, as a present to the boy at Byzantium, from some hundred-wived kinglet of the Hyperborean Taprobane, or other no-man’s-land in the far East. I took the liberty of laying an embargo on them, and, after a little argumentation and a few hints of torture, elephant and tigers are at our service.’

‘And of what service are they to be?’

‘My dearest madam— Conceive.... How are we to win the mob without a show?.... When were there more than two ways of gaining either the whole or part of the Roman Empire—by force of arms or force of trumpery? Can even you invent a third? The former is unpleasantly exciting, and hardly practicable just now. The latter remains, and, thanks to the white elephant, may be triumphantly successful. I have to exhibit something every week. The people are getting tired of that pantomime; and since the Jews were driven out, the fellow has grown stupid and lazy, having lost the more enthusiastic half of his spectators. As for horse-racing, they are sick of it.... Now, suppose we announce, for the earliest possible day—a spectacle—such a spectacle as never was seen before in this generation. You and I—I as exhibitor, you as representative—for the time being only—of the Vestals of old—sit side by side.... Some worthy friend has his instructions, when the people are beside themselves with rapture, to cry, “Long live Orestes Caesar!”....Another reminds them of Heraclian’s victory—another couples your name with mine.... the people applaud.... some Mark Antony steps forward, salutes me as Imperator, Augustus—what you will—the cry is taken up—I refuse as meekly as Julius Caesar himself—am compelled, blushing, to accept the honour—I rise, make an oration about the future independence of the southern continent—union of Africa and Egypt—the empire no longer to be divided into Eastern and Western, but Northern and Southern. Shouts of applause, at two drachmas per man, shake the skies. Everybody believes that everybody else approves, and follows the lead.... And the thing is won.’

‘And pray,’ asked Hypatia, crushing down her contempt and despair, ‘how is this to bear on the worship of the gods?

‘Why.... why,.... if you thought that people’s minds were sufficiently prepared, you might rise in your turn, and make an oration—you can conceive one. Set forth how these spectacles, formerly the glory of the empire, had withered under Galilaean superstition.... How the only path toward the full enjoyment of eye and ear was a frank return to those deities, from whose worship they originally sprang, and connected with which they could alone be enjoyed in their perfection.... But I need not teach you how to do that which you have so often taught me: so now to consider our spectacle, which, next to the largess, is the most important part of our plans. I ought to have exhibited to them the monk who so nearly killed me yesterday. That would indeed have been a triumph of the laws over Christianity. He and the wild beasts might have given the people ten minutes’ amusement. But wrath conquered prudence; and the fellow has been crucified these two hours. Suppose, then, we had a little exhibition of gladiators. They are forbidden by law, certainly.’

‘Thank Heaven, they are!’

‘But do you not see that is the very reason why we, to assert our own independence, should employ them?’

‘No! they are gone. Let them never reappear to disgrace the earth.’

‘My dear lady, you must not in your present character say that in public; lest Cyril should be impertinent enough to remind you that Christian emperors and bishops put them down.’

Hypatia bit her lip, and was silent.

‘Well, I do not wish to urge anything unpleasant to you.... If we could but contrive a few martyrdoms—but I really fear we must wait a year or two longer, in the present state of public opinion, before we can attempt that.’

‘Wait? wait for ever! Did not Julian—and he must be our model—forbid the persecution of the Galilaeans, considering them sufficiently punished by their own atheism and self-tormenting superstition?’

‘Another small error of that great man.—He should have recollected that for three hundred years nothing, not even the gladiators themselves, had been found to put the mob in such good humour as to see a few Christians, especially young and handsome women, burned alive, or thrown to the lions.’

Hypatia bit her lip once more. ‘I can hear no more of this, sir. You forget that you are speaking to a woman.’

‘Most supreme wisdom,’ answered Orestes, in his blandest tone, ‘you cannot suppose that I wish to pain your ears. But allow me to observe, as a general theorem, that if one wishes to effect any purpose, it is necessary to use the means; and on the whole, those which have been tested by four hundred years’ experience will be the safest. I speak as a plain practical statesman—but surely your philosophy will not dissent?’

Hypatia looked down in painful thought. What could she answer? Was it not too true? and had not Orestes fact and experience on his side?

‘Well, if you must—but I cannot have gladiators. Why not a—one of those battles with wild beasts? They are disgusting enough but still they are less inhuman than the others; and you might surely take precautions to prevent the men being hurt.’

‘Ah! that would indeed be a scentless rose! If there is neither danger nor bloodshed, the charm is gone. But really wild beasts are too expensive just now; and if I kill down my present menagerie, I can afford no more. Why not have something which costs no money, like prisoners?’

‘What! do you rank human beings below brutes?’

‘Heaven forbid! But they are practically less expensive. Remember, that without money we are powerless; we must husband our resources for the cause of the gods.’

Hypatia was silent.

‘Now, there are fifty or sixty Libyan prisoners just brought in from the desert. Why not let them fight an equal number of soldiers? They are rebels to the empire, taken in war.’

‘Ah, then,’ said Hypatia, catching at any thread of self-justification, ‘their lives are forfeit in any case.’

‘Of course. So the Christians could not complain of us for that. Did not the most Christian Emperor Constantine set some three hundred German prisoners to butcher each other in the amphitheatre of Treves?’

‘But they refused, and died like heroes, each falling on his own sword.’

‘Ah—those Germans are always unmanageable. My guards, now, are just as stiff-necked. To tell you the truth, I have asked them already to exhibit their prowess on these Libyans, and what do you suppose they answered?’

‘They refused, I hope.’

‘They told me in the most insolent tone that they were men, and not stage-players; and hired to fight, and not to butcher. I expected a Socratic dialogue after such a display of dialectic, and bowed myself out.’

‘They were right.’

‘Not a doubt of it, from a philosophic point of view; from a practical one they were great pedants, and I an ill-used master. However, I can find unfortunate and misunderstood heroes enough in the prisons, who, for the chance of their liberty, will acquit themselves valiantly enough; and I know of a few old gladiators still lingering about the wine-shops, who will be proud enough to give them a week’s training. So that may pass. Now for some lighter species of representation to follow—something more or less dramatic.’

‘You forget that you speak to one who trusts to be, as soon as she has the power, the high-priestess of Athene, and who in the meanwhile is bound to obey her tutor Julian’s commands to the priests of his day, and imitate the Galilaeans as much in their abhorrence for the theatre as she hopes hereafter to do in their care for the widow and the stranger.’

‘Far be it from me to impugn that great man’s wisdom. But allow me to remark, that to judge by the present state of the empire, one has a right to say that he failed.’

‘The Sun-God whom he loved took him to himself, too early, by a hero’s death.’

‘And the moment he was removed, the wave of Christian barbarism rolled back again into its old channel.’

‘Ah! had he but lived twenty years longer!’

‘The Sun-God, perhaps, was not so solicitous as we are for the success of his high-priest’s project.’

Hypatia reddened—was Orestes, after all laughing in his sleeve at her and her hopes?

‘Do not blaspheme!’ she said solemnly.

‘Heaven forbid! I only offer one possible explanation of a plain fact. The other is, that as Julian was not going quite the right way to work to restore the worship of the Olympians, the Sun-God found it expedient to withdraw him from his post, and now sends in his place Hypatia the philosopher, who will be wise enough to avoid Julian’s error, and not copy the Galilaeans too closely, by imitating a severity of morals at which they are the only true and natural adepts.’

‘So Julian’s error was that of being too virtuous? If it be so, let me copy him, and fail like him. The fault will then not be mine, but fate’s.’

‘Not in being too virtuous himself, most stainless likeness of Athene, but in trying to make others so. He forgot one half of Juvenal’s great dictum about “Panem and Circenses,” as the absolute and overruling necessities of rulers. He tried to give the people the bread without the games.... And what thanks he received for his enormous munificence, let himself and the good folks of Antioch tell—you just quoted his Misopogon—’

‘Ay-the lament of a man too pure for his age.’

‘Exactly so. He should rather have been content to keep his purity to himself, and have gone to Antioch not merely as a philosophic high-priest, with a beard of questionable cleanliness, to offer sacrifices to a god in whom—forgive me—nobody in Antioch had believed for many a year. If he had made his entrance with ten thousand gladiators, and our white elephant, built a theatre of ivory and glass in Daphne, and proclaimed games in honour of the Sun, or of any other member of the Pantheon—’

‘He would have acted unworthily of a philosopher.’

‘But instead of that one priest draggling up, poor devil, through the wet grass to the deserted altar with his solitary goose under his arm, he would have had every goose in Antioch—forgive my stealing a pun from Aristophanes—running open-mouthed to worship any god known or unknown—and to see the sights.’

‘Well,’ said Hypatia, yielding perforce to Orestes’s cutting arguments. ‘Let us then restore the ancient glories of the Greek drama. Let us give them a trilogy of Aeschylus or Sophocles.’

‘Too calm, my dear madam. The Eumenides might do certainly, or Philoctetes, if we could but put Philoctetes to real pain, and make the spectators sure that he was yelling in good earnest.’

‘Disgusting!’

‘But necessary, like many disgusting things.’

‘Why not try the Prometheus?’

‘A magnificent field for stage effect, certainly. What with those ocean nymphs in their winged chariot, and Ocean on his griffin.... But I should hardly think it safe to reintroduce Zeus and Hermes to the people under the somewhat ugly light in which Aeschylus exhibits them.’

‘I forgot that,’ said Hypatia. ‘The Orestean trilogy will be best, after all.’

‘Best? perfect—divine! Ah, that it were to be my fate to go down to posterity as the happy man who once more revived Aeschylus’s masterpieces on a Grecian stage! But—Is there not, begging the pardon of the great tragedian, too much reserve in the Agamemnon for our modern taste? If we could have the bath scene represented on the stage, and an Agamemnon who could be really killed—though I would not insist on that, because a good actor might make it a reason for refusing the part—but still the murder ought to take place in public.’

‘Shocking! an outrage on all the laws of the drama. Does not even the Roman Horace lay down as a rule the—Nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet?’

‘Fairest and wisest, I am as willing a pupil of the dear old Epicurean as any man living—even to the furnishing of my chamber; of which fact the Empress of Africa may some day assure herself. But we are not now discussing the art of poetry, but the art of reigning; and, after all, while Horace was sitting in his easy-chair, giving his countrymen good advice, a private man, who knew somewhat better than he what the mass admired, was exhibiting forty thousand gladiators at his mother’s funeral.’

‘But the canon has its foundation in the eternal laws of beauty. It has been accepted and observed.’

‘Not by the people for whom it was written. The learned Hypatia has surely not forgotten, that within sixty years after the Ars Poetica was written, Annaeus Seneca, or whosoever wrote that very bad tragedy called the Medea, found it so necessary that she should, in despite of Horace, kill her children before the people, that he actually made her do it!’

Hypatia was still silent—foiled at every point, while Orestes ran on with provoking glibness.

‘And consider, too, even if we dare alter Aeschylus a little, we could find no one to act him.’

‘Ah, true! fallen, fallen days!’

‘And really, after all, omitting the questionable compliment to me, as candidate for a certain dignity, of having my namesake kill his mother, and then be hunted over the stage by furies—’

‘But Apollo vindicates and purifies him at last. What a noble occasion that last scene would give for winning them hack to their old reverence for the god!’

‘True, but at present the majority of spectators will believe more strongly in the horrors of matricide and furies than in Apollo’s power to dispense therewith. So that I fear must be one of your labours of the future.’

‘And it shall be,’ said Hypatia. But she did not speak cheerfully.

‘Do you not think, moreover,’ went on the tempter, ‘that those old tragedies might give somewhat too gloomy a notion of those deities whom we wish to reintroduce—I beg pardon, to rehonour? The history of the house of Atreus is hardly more cheerful, in spite of its beauty, than one of Cyril’s sermons on the day of judgment, and the Tartarus prepared for hapless rich people?’

‘Well,’ said Hypatia, more and more listlessly; ‘it might be more prudent to show them first the fairer and more graceful side of the old Myths. Certainly the great age of Athenian tragedy had its playful reverse in the old comedy.’

‘And in certain Dionysiac sports and processions which shall be nameless, in order to awaken a proper devotion for the gods in those who might not be able to appreciate Aeschylus and Sophocles.’

‘You would not reintroduce them?’

‘Pallas forbid! but give as fair a substitute for them as we can.’

‘And are we to degrade ourselves because the masses are degraded?’

‘Not in the least. For my own part, this whole business, like the catering for the weekly pantomimes, is as great a bore to me as it could have been to Julian himself. But, my dearest madam—“Panem and Circenses”—they must be put into good humour; and there is but one way—by “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,” as a certain Galilaean correctly defines the time-honoured Roman method.’

‘Put them into good humour? I wish to lustrate them afresh for the service of the gods. If we must have comic representations, we can only have them conjoined to tragedy, which, as Aristotle defines it, will purify their affections by pity and terror.’