Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Read Online Free PDF Page B

birth ourselves into can touch us and turn us but it cannot make us what we are not.
    And who am I?
    If Father had had a son, just one son, instead of three very different daughters, it would be this son he spent his life trying to make “perfect.”   But fate delivered him—me.   This, it is true, discouraged him, but it did not stop him.   Founded on the ideal forms of Plato— all “above” is perfect; all “below” a copy —Alexandria’s great mathematician insisted on rendering one of us ideal.
    Lais would not do.   She was already perfect with a perfection he did not understand and could not train.   Jone was no choice at all for numbers bored her, languages other than Greek did not interest her, and she refused to do other than read what she and she alone chose to read.
    This left him only me.   I would know all the sciences from mathematics to astronomy, would speak in a dozen tongues, write as Sappho, orate until men wept with the beauty of my thoughts.   I would be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom for its own sake, a historian who would know that nothing ever changes, but instead follows a simple repeating pattern of human need or greed.   Father decreed also that my body would be as well tended as my mind.   He saw me as Zenobia, Queen of Syria.   A century before I was born, Zenobia led the men of Syria and Palestine and Anatolia into the Black Lands, and when Rome would seize Egypt back, she had its prefect beheaded for such impertinence.   The woman could walk for days, even if she must scramble up one side of a perilous mountain and down the other.   She could ride hot-blooded horses without bridle or bit, using only pressure of knee and hand, or by a soft voice close to a soft ear, knowing them intimately by caring intimately for them.
    Father would have me do more.   I would row and I would sail, sensing my way by the winds, by the currents and by the stars.
    There would be no one like the person he and the best tutors in the world would make of me.   Or such was his plan, for Father hated the material and emotional chaos of this world and longed for the pure, immortal, and unchangeable world of the ideal form.   Like Plato, he believed that harmony of shape would reveal the sublime.
    But a mind is not clay, and though Father was, is —even in bed hiding his head—a master mathematician and a master astronomer, he was not a master potter.   A mind cannot be formed into whatever shape a man might choose.   A mind has a mind of its own.   Certainly mine does.   My mind seems often too small for all it contains.   There are times it seems too large.   And when I ride or sail or stare at the stars or wander in infinite number I become afraid of who, or what, I am…as if I were a wild thing, a mistake.
    Damara should have lived.   She should have given him his son.
    Lais, who would normally leave the table as quickly as I—for we each are fond of solitude and even more fond of our work—does not leave.   Instead, she scratches Paniwi’s arched back, and speaks.   “What if Father remains, as he swears he will, in bed?”
    I know immediately what she means.   She means that with the loss of the Serapeum, so too is Father’s position as Head of the Library lost.   Lost as well is his public funding.   If he does not form his own school or join others like himself to teach privately—and how shall that happen from bed?—who then will pay the servants and our taxes and the upkeep of our garden and the hundred and one other expenses that keep us in our fine house in the Royal Quarter?   Only a few streets away, under the Ptolemaic walls, the once rich Bruchion District is in ruins.   This is the doing of the Emperor Aurelian.   That Zenobia should capture Egypt so enraged him, he destroyed every park, every building, the whole of the royal docks, even the tomb of Alexander, and no one, not for the whole of a hundred years has rebuilt it.   But here on the Street of