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Books: Hypatia

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Hypatia




'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 he 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.'

Orestes smiled.

'I certainly can have no objection to so good a purpose. But do you
not think that the battle between the gladiators and the Libyans
will have done that sufficiently beforehand? I can conceive nothing
more fit for that end, unless it be Nero's method of sending his
guards among the spectators themselves, and throwing them down to
the wild beasts in the arena. How thoroughly purified by pity and
terror must every worthy shopkeeper have been, when he sat uncertain
whether he might not follow his fat wife into the claws of the
nearest lion!'

'You are pleased to be witty, sir,' said Hypatia, hardly able to
conceal her disgust.

'My dearest bride elect, I only meant the most harmless of
_reductiones ad absurdum_ of an abstract canon of Aristotle, with
which I, who am a Platonist after my mistress's model, do not happen
to agree. But do, I beseech you, be ruled, not by me, but by your
own wisdom. You cannot bring the people to appreciate your designs
at the first sight. You are too wise, too pure, too lofty, too far-
sighted for them. And therefore you must get power to compel them.
Julian, after all, found it necessary to compel--if he had lived
seven years more he would have found it necessary to persecute.'

'The gods forbid that--that such a necessity should ever arise
here.'

'The only way to avoid it, believe me, is to allure and to indulge.
After all, it is for their good.'

'True,' sighed Hypatia. 'Have your way, sir.'

'Believe me, you shall have yours in turn. I ask you to be ruled by
me now, only that you may be in a position to rule me and Africa
hereafter.'

'And such an Africa! Well, if they are born low and earthly, they
must, I suppose, he treated as such; and the fault of such a
necessity is Nature's, and not ours.--Yet it is most degrading!--But
still, if the only method by which the philosophic few can assume
their rights, as the divinely-appointed rulers of the world, is by
indulging those lower beings whom they govern for their good--why,
be it so. It is no worse necessity than many another which the
servant of the gods must endure in days like these.'

'Ah,' said Orestes, refusing to hear the sigh, or to see the
bitterness of the lip which accompanied the speech--'now Hypatia is
herself again; and my counsellor, and giver of deep and celestial
reasons for all things at which poor I can only snatch and guess by
vulpine cunning. So now for our lighter entertainment. What shall
it be?'

'What you will, provided it be not, as most such are, unfit for the
eyes of modest women. I have no skill in catering for folly.'

'A pantomime, then? We may make that as grand and as significant as
we will, and expend too on it all our treasures in the way of
gewgaws and wild beasts.'

'As you like.'

'Just consider, too, what a scope for mythologic learning a
pantomime affords. Why not have a triumph of some deity? Could I
commit myself more boldly to the service of the gods! Now--who
shall it be?'

'Pallas--unless, as I suppose, she is too modest and too sober for
your Alexandrians?'

'Yes--it does not seem to me that she would be appreciated--at all
events for the present. Why not try Aphrodite? Christians as well
as Pagans will thoroughly understand her; and I know no one who
would not degrade the virgin goddess by representing her, except a
certain lady, who has already, I hope, consented to sit in that very
character, by the side of her too much honoured slave; and one
Pallas is enough at a time in any theatre.'

Hypatia shuddered. He took it all for granted, then--and claimed
her conditional promise to the uttermost. Was there no escape? She
longed to spring up and rush away, into the streets, into the
desert--anything to break the hideous net which she had wound around
herself. And yet--was it not the cause of the gods--the one object
of her life? And after all, if he the hateful was to be her
emperor, she at least was to be an empress; and do what she would--
and half in irony, and half in the attempt to hurl herself perforce
into that which she knew that she must go through, and forget misery
in activity, she answered as cheerfully as she could.

'Then, my goddess, thou must wait the pleasure of these base ones!
At least the young Apollo will have charms even for them.'

'Ah, but who will represent him? This puny generation does not
produce such figures as Pylades and Bathyllus--except among those
Goths. Besides, Apollo must have golden hair; and our Greek race
has intermixed itself so shamefully with these Egyptians, that our
stage-troop is as dark as Andromeda, and we should have to apply
again to those accursed Goths, who have nearly' (with a bow) 'all
the beauty, and nearly all the money and the power, and will, I
suspect, have the rest of it before I am safe out of this wicked
world, because they have not nearly, but quite, all the courage.
Now--Shall we ask a Goth to dance Apollo? for we can get no one
else.'

Hypatia smiled in spite of herself at the notion. 'That would be too
shameful! I must forego the god of light himself, if I am to see
him in the person of a clumsy barbarian.'

'Then why not try my despised and rejected Aphrodite? Suppose we
had her triumph, finishing with a dance of Venus Anadyomene. Surely
that is a graceful myth enough.'

'As a myth; but on the stage in reality?'

'Not worse than what this Christian city has been looking at for
many a year. We shall not run any danger of corrupting morality, be
sure.'

Hypatia blushed.

'Then you must not ask for my help.'

'Or for your presence at the spectacle? For that be sure is a
necessary point. You are too great a person, my dearest madam, in
the eyes of these good folks to be allowed to absent yourself on
such an occasion. If my little stratagem succeeds, it will be half
owing to the fact of the people knowing that in crowning me, they
crown Hypatia .... Come now--do you not see that as you must needs
be present at their harmless scrap of mythology, taken from the
authentic and undoubted histories of those very gods whose worship
we intend to restore, you will consult your own comfort most in
agreeing to it cheerfully, and in lending me your wisdom towards
arranging it? Just conceive now, a triumph of Aphrodite, entering
preceded by wild beasts led in chains by Cupids, the white elephant
and all--what a field for the plastic art! You might have a
thousand groupings, dispersions, regroupings, in as perfect bas-
relief style as those of any Sophoclean drama. Allow me only to
take this paper and pen--'

And he began sketching rapidly group after group.

'Not so ugly, surely?'

'They are very beautiful, I cannot deny,' said poor Hypatia.

'Ah, sweetest Empress! you forget sometimes that I, too, world-worm
as I am, am a Greek, with as intense a love of the beautiful as even
you yourself have. Do not fancy that every violation of correct
taste does not torture me as keenly as it does you. Some day, I
hope, you will have learned to pity and to excuse the wretched
compromise between that which ought to be and that which can be, in
which we hapless statesmen must struggle on, half-stunted, and
wholly misunderstood--Ah, well! Look, now, at these fauns and
dryads among the shrubs upon the stage, pausing in startled wonder
at the first blast of music which proclaims the exit of the goddess
from her temple.'

'The temple? Why, where are you going to exhibit?'

'In the Theatre, of course. Where else pantomimes?'

'But will the spectators have time to move all the way from the
Amphitheatre after that--those--'

'The Amphitheatre? We shall exhibit the Libyans, too, in the
Theatre.'