Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Read Free

some merely need correction.”
    I am not as my mother’s brother, afraid of his own mobs.   If these were mine, I should stand for all to see they were mine.
    Mother is ever eager to see harm done to any, although not to her brother…for his power is the source of her own.   And I do hope she would have no harm done to me.   But as I am not entirely sure, I keep a close eye out.   I, Cyril, would see only those destroyed that God would see destroyed.   Demons are clever.   The trick is to become more clever than they.   Now that I am fourteen, I think I might be the equal of demons.
    A woman runs by, her mouth a black hole of shrieks, her hair a torch straight up from her head, her clothing aflame, her face, her arms, her legs crackling like a roasted goose.   Is she Christian or pagan?   Mother does not care, but I do.   If the woman is Christian, demons must pay for her torment.
    Uncle taps our driver’s shoulder.   “We’ve seen enough.”
    He lies.   We leave because his mob comes too close for his comfort.   Our driver whips the horses away.
    Poor old Mother.   How furious she must be to miss the rest of the burning, the screaming, the terror.
    There are two truths I hide in my heart.   One.   I am superior to both.   Two.   Neither can live forever.

Hypatia

    Oh, my city, my city.
    I have not cried this day, not within the burning Serapeum, not when I ran home through the streets past vile sights, vile sounds, vile deeds committed by both Christian and pagan alike, not even when I found Father would not speak, nor would he rage, nor would he remain with those who defend the temple, but had instead thrown the books he had saved across the floor, and himself across his bed.
    I turned away from a father who would not be seen in this way.
    Alexandria is not Rome, a cesspool of Herculean struggles to dominate by right of the sword.   It is not Athens, once lit with minds like suns, though nothing more now than a handful of Greeks amid a handful of stones.   It is not Constantinople, newly hewn from the ancient Greek city of Byzantion, where struts an emperor who would force all men to believe as he believes… if he believes—one can never be sure what truly furnishes the mind or the heart.   It is not even Egyptian, set many miles away from the River Nile which is and has ever been Egypt’s soul.
    It is Alexandria !   A city like no other city, however old that city might be and however famed…and it lies, as said Dio Chrysostom, “— at the conjuncture of the whole world .”   I think it possible no city to come will be as Alexandria is now.
    Seven centuries past, the great Alexander stood here, feet planted firm on a spit of hot white limestone between the Great Green Sea and a sweet water lake fed by the distant Nile.   In his hands he held the Persian Darius’ golden casket, and in the casket the work of Homer, a man he thought a god.   Rising before him shimmered the island he had dreamed of.   “ As Alexander was sleeping,” wrote Plutarch, “ he saw a remarkable vision…an island in the stormy sea off Egypt…they call it Pharos.”   Could the dreamer of Macedonia know this city would be his greatest, that it would feed the world?   Could he imagine his young body, embalmed in honey and encased in beaten gold, would lie in a rock crystal vault and that his friend from youth, his mentor, his most valorous general, the Greek Ptolemy, would become again Pharaoh, founding a dynasty that lasted until the seventh and greatest of the Cleopatras?
    In Alexander’s city which is my city, I am accustomed to walk among scholars from Britannia, to nod at Buddhist monks and Indian Brahmins, to laugh with women from Cathay, debate men from Palestine, even, on occasion, hear men of the north—whose eyes are like holes in their heads through which flows the blue sky—speak of medicine or metallurgy or war.   All the knowledge in the world is gathered here.   Here there are schools