Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

‘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.’

‘Combats in the Theatre sacred to Dionusos?’

‘My dear lady’—penitently—‘I know it is an offence against all the laws of the drama.’

‘Oh, worse than that! Consider what an impiety toward the god, to desecrate his altar with bloodshed?’

‘Fairest devotee, recollect that, after all, I may fairly borrow Dionusos’s altar in this my extreme need; for I saved its very existence for him, by preventing the magistrates from filling up the whole orchestra with benches for the patricians, after the barbarous Roman fashion. And besides, what possible sort of representation, or misrepresentation, has not been exhibited in every theatre of the empire for the last four hundred years? Have we not had tumblers, conjurers, allegories, martyrdoms, marriages, elephants on the tight-rope, learned horses, and learned asses too, if we may trust Apuleius of Madaura; with a good many other spectacles of which we must not speak in the presence of a vestal? It is an age of execrable taste, and we must act accordingly.’

‘Ah!’ answered Hypatia; ‘the first step in the downward career of the drama began when the successors of Alexander dared to profane theatres which had re-echoed the choruses of Sophocles and Euripides by degrading the altar of Dionusos into a stage for pantomimes!’

‘Which your pure mind must, doubtless, consider not so very much better than a little fighting. But, after all, the Ptolemies could not do otherwise. You can only have Sophoclean dramas in a Sophoclean age; and theirs was no more of one than ours is, and so the drama died a natural death; and when that happens to man or thing, you may weep over it if you will, but you must, after all, bury it, and get something else in its place—except, of course, the worship of the gods.’

‘I am glad that you except that, at least,’ said Hypatia, somewhat bitterly. ‘But why not use the Amphitheatre for both spectacles?’

‘What can I do? I am over head and ears in debt already; and the Amphitheatre is half in ruins, thanks to that fanatic edict of the late emperor’s against gladiators. There is no time or money for repairing it; and besides, how pitiful a poor hundred of combatants will look in an arena built to hold two thousand! Consider, my dearest lady, in what fallen times we live!’

‘I do, indeed!’ said Hypatia. ‘But I will not see the altar polluted by blood. It is the desecration which it has undergone already which has provoked the god to withdraw the poetic inspiration.’

‘I do not doubt the fact. Some curse from Heaven, certainly, has fallen on our poets, to judge by their exceeding badness. Indeed, I am inclined to attribute the insane vagaries of the water-drinking monks and nuns, like those of the Argive women, to the same celestial anger. But I will see that the sanctity of the altar is preserved, by confining the combat to the stage. And as for the pantomime which will follow, if you would only fall in with my fancy of the triumph of Aphrodite, Dionusos would hardly refuse his altar for the glorification of his own lady-love.’

‘Ah—that myth is a late, and in my opinion a degraded one.’

‘Be it so; but recollect, that another myth makes her, and not without reason, the mother of all living beings. Be sure that Dionusos will have no objection, or any other god either, to allow her to make her children feel her conquering might; for they all know well enough, that if we can once get her well worshipped here, all Olympus will follow in her train.’

‘That was spoken of the celestial Aphrodite, whose symbol is the tortoise, the emblem of domestic modesty and chastity: not of that baser Pandemic one.’

‘Then we will take care to make the people aware of whom they are admiring by exhibiting in the triumph whole legions of tortoises: and you yourself shall write the chant, while I will see that the chorus is worthy of what it has to sing. No mere squeaking double flute and a pair of boys: but a whole army of cyclops and graces, with such trebles and such bass-voices! It shall make Cyril’s ears tingle in his palace!’

‘The chant! A noble office for me, truly! That is the very part of the absurd spectacle to which you used to say the people never dreamed of attending. All which is worth settling you seemed to have settled for yourself before you deigned to consult me.’

‘I said so? Surely you must mistake. But if any hired poetaster’s chant do pass unheeded, what has that to do with Hypatia’s eloquence and science, glowing with the treble inspiration of Athene, Phoebus, and Dionusos? And as for having arranged beforehand—my adorable mistress, what more delicate compliment could I have paid you?’

‘I cannot say that it seems to me to be one.’

‘How? After saving you every trouble which I could, and racking my overburdened wits for stage effects and properties, have I not brought hither the darling children of my own brain, and laid them down ruthlessly, for life or death, before the judgment-seat of your lofty and unsparing criticism?’

Hypatia felt herself tricked: but there was no escape now.

‘And who, pray, is to disgrace herself and me, as Venus Anadyomene?’

‘Ah! that is the most exquisite article in all my bill of fare! What if the kind gods have enabled me to exact a promise from—whom, think you?’

‘What care I? How can I tell?’ asked Hypatia, who suspected and dreaded that she could tell.

‘Pelagia herself!’

Hypatia rose angrily.

‘This, sir, at least, is too much! It was not enough for you, it seems, to claim, or rather to take for granted, so imperiously, so mercilessly, a conditional promise—weakly, weakly made, in the vain hope that you would help forward aspirations of mine which you have let lie fallow for months—in which I do not believe that you sympathise now!—It was not enough for you to declare yourself publicly yesterday a Christian, and to come hither this morning to flatter me into the belief that you will dare, ten days hence, to restore the worship of the gods whom you have abjured!—It was not enough to plan without me all those movements in which you told me I was to be your fellow-counsellor—the very condition which you yourself offered!—It was not enough for you to command me to sit in that theatre, as your bait, your puppet, your victim, blushing and shuddering at sights unfit for the eyes of gods and men:—but, over and above all this, I must assist in the renewed triumph of a woman who has laughed down my teaching, seduced away my scholars, braved me in my very lecture-room—who for four years has done more than even Cyril himself to destroy all the virtue and truth which I have toiled to sow—and toiled in vain! Oh, beloved gods! where will end the tortures through which your martyr must witness for you to a fallen race?’

And, in spite of