‘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.’