1Two hundred and forty years went by. The empire grew old. It split down the middle like a log, an eastern half and a western half, each with its own emperor. In the west the northern peoples came over the rivers for good, and in one terrible summer they sacked the city of Rome itself.
2And a great change came over the hearts of the people. A new faith had risen out of the east, a faith of mercy, that had begun among fishermen and slaves. It taught that the poor were blessed and that every soul was precious. For three hundred years its followers were hunted. They went to their deaths singing. Then an emperor took up the faith, and within a lifetime it was the faith of the empire.
3It gave much that was good. It fed widows and gathered up children left on hillsides. But it is a hard thing for any people to be hunted for three hundred years and then be handed the keys of the city. Some among them remembered mercy. Some remembered only the hunting. This must be said with care, for it is true of every people in every age, and whoever thinks their own kind is free of it has not read far.
4In Alexandria the great library was a memory. Fire and war and want had worn it down to a few rooms of books and a handful of scholars. The last of them whose name we know was a man named Theon, who studied the stars and numbers. Theon made a fresh, clear edition of Euclid's thirteen rolls, mending the errors that seven hundred years of copying had let in.
5Theon had a daughter. He taught her everything he knew, and before she was thirty she knew more than he did. Her name was Hypatia.
6She never married. She wore the plain rough cloak of a teacher, as men did, and she drove her own carriage through the streets. She taught the knowledge of numbers and of the heavens, and the old Greek search for what is true and how to live. She wrote on the curves that are made when a cone is cut. She helped her father with the tables of the stars. She knew how to make the brass plate that sailors and star-watchers use to find the hour of the night.
7Students came to her from every shore, and they were of every faith. Some held to the old gods. Some were Jews. A good many were Christians. One of these last, a young man from Cyrene, became a bishop afterward, and wrote to her all his life. He called her his mother and his sister and his teacher. He died before she did, and so he was spared what came.
8There was at that time a young man in the city named Amoun. He was Egyptian, the son of a coppersmith, and he was a Christian. He had come to Hypatia's hall at seventeen to sweep it. He stayed to learn. By the time of this story he was twenty-three, and he made the brass plates for her with his own hands, and she said they were better than her own.
9He loved her, as the young love a great teacher, with awe. She was past sixty then, grey and straight-backed, with a dry way of speaking. When he brought her a proof with a hole in it, she would look at it and say, "Almost. Which is a long way from yes," and hand it back. He lived for the day she would not hand one back.
10He prayed in the great church by the harbour on the Lord's day, and he studied with her the other six. She had never once spoken a word against his faith. When he asked her about it, she said, "You have told me that your God is truth. Then nothing true that I can teach you will take you further from him. If I teach you something false, the fault is mine, and you must tell me."
11But the city was going bad around them.
12There were two powers in Alexandria. One was the governor, a man named Orestes, sent by the emperor to keep order. The other was the new bishop, a man named Cyril, strong-willed and able, who had thousands at his call. Both were Christians. They could not abide each other. Each thought the city was his to rule. Their quarrel had already spilled blood. There had been riots between Christians and Jews, with dead on both sides, and the Jews had been driven out of a city where they had lived for seven hundred years. A band of monks from the desert had stoned the governor in his carriage and cut his head open.
13Orestes was a friend of Hypatia. He asked her advice, as the leading men of the city had long done, for she was known to be wise and to belong to no party. That was enough. In the wine shops and on the docks, a tale began to go around. It was the woman, people said. The philosopher. She was the reason the governor would not make peace with the bishop. She had bewitched him, with her numbers and her brass plates that read the stars. What was all that, if not sorcery?
14It was the season of the great fast before the spring feast. Tempers in the city were thin. He went to her house one evening, when the lamp was lit and she was working.
15"Teacher," he said, "you must leave the city."
16She did not look up from her table. "Must I? Hand me that rule."
17He handed it to her. "For a month. Two. There is a ship for Athens on the fourth day. I know these men. I stand next to them in church. They are not evil. They are frightened and angry and they have been told a story with you in it. One of them said to me today that someone should deal with the witch. He is a reader in the church. A man I have shared bread with."
18Now she put down her pen. "I am not a fool, Amoun. I have ears. I have known for a month that I am in danger."
19"Then why are you still here?"
20"Tell me what I am to do in Athens," she said. "Teach? Then I am teaching there and not here, and the men who told the story have learned that a story is enough to empty a hall. They will tell another about the next one. Hide? I am sixty-odd years old. I have perhaps ten years of teaching left in me, and I do not care to spend one of them in a cellar." She turned the brass rule over in her fingers. "And the governor comes to me because I am the one voice he hears that wants nothing from him. If I run, he hears only the ones who do."
21"They could kill you."
22"They could. I have looked at that. I looked at it very steadily, some nights ago, until it stopped being a shape in the corner and became a plain thing with edges." She smiled a little. "It is a strange freedom. What will a crowd do in the street next week? I do not know. I cannot reckon it, and I cannot rule it. No one can. Not the governor. Not the bishop either, I think, whatever he supposes."
23She laid her hand flat on the pages before her.
24"But whether I go to the hall tomorrow, and whether what I say there is true, and whether I say it well. That I can rule. That is the whole of my kingdom, Amoun. It is small. I have governed it for forty years and I do not intend to hand it over because I am shouted at."
25He had no answer. He was twenty-three, and he wanted to carry her bodily to the ship.
26"You are angry with me," she said.
27"Yes."
28"Good. Be angry and listen. If it comes to the worst, you will want to hate the men who do it. You will want to hate their church, which is your church. Do not. That would be to let them take two things from you when they came for one. You told me once that your faith is mercy. Hold them to it. Be the one in that porch who remembers."
29She pulled a wooden box toward her across the table. "And since you are here, and so sure I am about to die, you may as well be of use. In this are my father's Euclid, the clean copy, and our work on the tables of the stars, and my notes on the cone. There is one other copy of each in this city, and none anywhere else. I do not like that. Take these to your father's workshop. If there is a ship for Athens on the fourth day, there is no reason these should not be on it."
30He took the box. He did not understand then that she had answered him. It was heavy, and he carried it home through the dark streets with both arms around it.
31She taught the next day, and the day after. He was there. She handed him back a proof. "Almost," she said.
32On the third day he was at the harbour early, arguing with a ship's master over the price of carrying a box. So he was not in the street.
33She was driving home. A crowd was waiting near her door. The reader from the church was at the front of it. They stopped the horses. They pulled her down out of the carriage.
34What they did then will not be written here. They dragged her to the great church by the harbour, the one where Amoun prayed. They killed her there, with broken roof tiles, and afterward they burned what was left. She was an old woman who had taught them arithmetic.
35Amoun came back up from the docks toward noon, pleased with his bargain. He saw the smoke and the people running. A woman he knew caught his arm and told him.
36He did not remember the rest of that day. He was told later that he had been found in the workshop, sitting on the floor with his arms around a wooden box, and that he would not let go of it.
37In the days after, the city was very quiet. Many were sick at heart, and many of those were Christians. A writer of the church's own history, a devout man, set it down that this deed was utterly foreign to the spirit of those who follow Christ, and that it brought no small disgrace on the church of Alexandria. He was of the same faith as the men who did it, and he wrote it all the same. No one was ever punished.
38Amoun did hate. Let that not be hidden. For a season he could not go into any church. He walked the streets at night looking at faces, wondering which hands. He kept a tile-setter's hammer under his cloak, and once he followed the reader from the church for half a mile through the dark, close enough to hear him breathe.
39It was the box that stopped him. He had turned back, that night, with the hammer still under his cloak, and gone home and sat in front of it. He had not been able to open it since the day. Now he made himself lift the lid.
40On top, in her dry upright hand, was a slip of reed-paper. It was not a farewell. She did not write farewells. It said: Amoun. The third table has an error in the seventh line. Mine, not my father's. Mend it before it is copied.
41He read that, and something in him that had been clenched for a month let go. He put his head down on the lid and wept until he was empty.
42She had known that she might be killed. And on one of those last nights she had gone through her tables again, line by line, and found a wrong number, and been annoyed with herself, and written a note. The crowd in the street had not been hers to stop, and she had wasted no hour on it. The seventh line was hers, and she had seen to it.
43And he saw what the hammer was. It would be the crowd coming into her kingdom after all, and into his, and he would have opened the gate to them himself.
44He mended the seventh line. It took him four days to be sure of the right number, and when he had it he could hear her say, "Yes." He copied the tables fair. He copied the Euclid.
45Then he went back to the great church by the harbour, on the Lord's day, and stood in his old place. It was the hardest thing he ever did. The reader was there. Amoun did not speak to him. But when the words of mercy were read out, Amoun said them aloud, clearly, and he looked at the man while he said them, and the man looked at the floor.
46He stayed in that church all his life. He was the one in the porch who remembered. When a tale began to go around about some neighbour, a Jew or a follower of the old gods or a Christian of the wrong sort, he would say, "I have heard a tale like that before. I will tell you how it ended." Some people listened to him and some did not, and he went on saying it.
47The box went to Athens on a later ship. In Athens there was still a school, the last one, where the old learning was still taught, in a house that traced its line of teachers back to Plato. The clean Euclid of Theon was copied there, and copied again. For more than a thousand years, in every land where those thirteen rolls were read, it was that edition, the father's and the daughter's, that people held in their hands.
48Of her own writing almost nothing has come down. We know the names of her books and little more. No one wrote down a single sentence that we can be sure she said. Those who admire her have since put many fine words in her mouth, and none of them are hers.
49So you must judge her as Amoun did, by what was in the box. There was her father's work, made clean, and there were the stars set in order. And there was a note about an error in the seventh line, written by a woman who knew the crowd was gathering.