despair, 'how is this to bear on the worship of the gods?
'Why.... why,.... if you thought that people's minds were sufficiently prepared, you might rise in your turn, and make an oration—you can conceive one. Set forth how these spectacles, formerly the glory of the empire, had withered under Galilaean superstition.... How the only path toward the full enjoyment of eye and ear was a frank return to those deities, from whose worship they originally sprang, and connected with which they could alone be enjoyed in their perfection.... But I need not teach you how to do that which you have so often taught me: so now to consider our spectacle, which, next to the largess, is the most important part of our plans. I ought to have exhibited to them the monk who so nearly killed me yesterday. That would indeed have been a triumph of the laws over Christianity. He and the wild beasts might have given the people ten minutes' amusement. But wrath conquered prudence; and the fellow has been crucified these two hours. Suppose, then, we had a little exhibition of gladiators. They are forbidden by law, certainly.'
'Thank Heaven, they are!'
'But do you not see that is the very reason why we, to assert our own independence, should employ them?'
'No! they are gone. Let them never reappear to disgrace the earth.'
'My dear lady, you must not in your present character say that in public; lest Cyril should be impertinent enough to remind you that Christian emperors and bishops put them down.'
Hypatia bit her lip, and was silent.
'Well, I do not wish to urge anything unpleasant to you.... If we could but contrive a few martyrdoms—but I really fear we must wait a year or two longer, in the present state of public opinion, before we can attempt that.'
'Wait? wait for ever! Did not Julian—and he must be our model—forbid the persecution of the Galilaeans, considering them sufficiently punished by their own atheism and self-tormenting superstition?'
'Another small error of that great man.—He should have recollected that for three hundred years nothing, not even the gladiators themselves, had been found to put the mob in such good humour as to see a few Christians, especially young and handsome women, burned alive, or thrown to the lions.'
Hypatia bit her lip once more. 'I can hear no more of this, sir