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 back 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 farsighted 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, be 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
