“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 be 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
