Read Online Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria by Ki Longfellow - Free Book Online Page A

would drop down and down into a deep that if not the Underworld, would certainly do.
    If all goes well, and I do not die from the effort, the whole of Alexandria’s great library, sealed in jars, will rest in the caves by the birthday of the Persian godman Mithras, though now given as birthday to the Christian godman Jesus.   My new “family” grows used to these sorrows.   Listening to Lais, I hear whichever godman claims it as his date of birth, it is still the return of the Great God Sun.   What matter the new name they give him as he is the same godman?   I had never thought of this.   The same godman?   Of course!
    And so it goes.   Alexandria believes it has lost its library and grieves.   Christians, also believing, rejoice.   We few both grieve and rejoice.   The library lives, but as both Lais and Hypatia ask: at what cost?
    And I, Minkah of the Parabalanoi , know the precise location of each cave, each jar, each book.   A delicious irony.

Autumn, 391

    Hypatia

    Seated on a raised chair in a lecture hall granted me in the Caesarium in full view of all, I speak…and as I speak all listen as if I were the sage so many call me.
    I lecture on death.   I ask them: is it truly possible to steal a life, if, as is written in the Katha Upanishad, the Self is eternal and cannot die?   Should this be so, then one who “murders” does no more than transgress against the will of another, whose choice it is to live.   At bottom, a murderer offends not against the body, but against the spirit.
    Before me, a sea of uplifted faces stretching far to the back of the great hall begun for Mark Anthony by Cleopatra but finished by Octavian Augustus to honor himself, all seeking to hear as I am raised high in my philosopher’s cloak before them.   Not all are as mesmerized as is a young man from the city of Cyrene, Synesius by name.   Not all are pleased.   This would include the brother of Synesius, Euoptius who even now scowls at me from the first row of curved benches.   There could be no brothers who look less alike.   Or who act less alike.   Synesius listens as if I were Socrates, Euoptius as if I were Jezebel.
    And far from all understand.   But no face is a woman’s face for females are not welcome here.   All assume a female cannot learn, cannot reason.   She is useful, but only in service to men.   She causes lust, therefore is lustful.   She is weak so must be protected, even from herself.   Yet here they sit, scribbling in wax, forming groups to discuss what I have taught that day, following me wherever I go.   They preen before me.   They strut.   Some fall to their knees, expose their breast so that they might expose their heart.
    None were born blind; they see I have grown the breasts and belly of a woman.   None were born deaf: they hear my woman’s voice.   So I must wonder: what do they think I am?   Do they think me a monster, a chimera, a freak of nature?
    There are those, I believe, who do.
    I endure it all.   They have paid to hear me, and paid me well.   Most may lack curiosity and discipline, may never master a thing in this life save drink and dice and the begetting of children on women—even on me if I would allow them—and most are surely fools, but all share one important trait: ambition.   None can become prefects or politicians or rise in the new religion without the distinction of a degree.   And to receive such a degree from the increasingly famous Hypatia of Alexandria, ah!   As for rising in the new religion, many seek a place because as members of the clergy, they are exempt from taxes.   How else do the rich stay rich?
    But who has hired me to speak; who allows me these past four months to lecture in this huge hall remains the secret of Didymus the Blind.   I do not press him for answer.
    Musing thus, I have paused so long in my speaking, I must be poked to resume.   Who pokes me?   Minkah, my gadfly, my irritant, he who sobers me when I grow drunk on