Poetry by Angelo Colavita: ON HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA
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ON HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA
“A formidable intellectual […] unlike her father,” writes Watts.
“A young lady of greatest beauty and merit,” writes Fielding.
“Heroine of romantic atrocity,” writes Van der Waerden.
“Helpless, pretentious, and erotic,” writes Kingsley.
“The virgin of Serapis, the last of the Hellenes,
ornament of learning, stainless star
of wise teaching,” writes Palladas.“She who honorably presides over the mysteries,” writes Synesius.
“Subtler than a serpent, skilled in all the tricks of logic,” writes Cyril.
“She beguiled many people through [her] satanic wiles,” writes John of Nikiû.
“The whole city doted on her and worshipped her,” writes Damascius.
“In bloom of beauty,” writes Gibbon,
“superstition perhaps would more gently expiate
the blood of a virgin than the banishment of a saint.”“In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth,” writes Hypatia.
“Mankind, in its headlong course, struck you and cursed you,” writes de Lisle.
“The library and the statues of our forebears,” writes Barrѐs.
“The words are slightly different, the sense is very much the same,” writes Plato.
“The world of divine intelligences and the natural beauty of the universe, Heaven,
ends with a description of the bishop’s anger,”
writes Dzielska.“Your gods are reduced to dust at the feet of the victorious Christ,” writes Cyril.
“The kingdom of God he is erecting may turn out to be the kingdom of Satan,”
warns Aben-Ezra.
“Those dogs, the Christians, murdered her,” writes Fielding.
“Dangerous, jealous figures who were also utterly unphilosophical,” writes Damascius.
“Bigots, wild beasts of the desert, and fanatic intriguers,” writes Hypatia.
“By their profound religiosity […] she was torn to pieces,” writes Hesychius.“A bestial murder,” writes Voltaire.
“The daughter of Theon was the first martyr to that misogyny
which later rose to a frenzy in witch hunts,” writes Zitelmann.
“Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity,” writes Socrates.
“To stain their barbarous hands with her blood,” writes Toland.“This is what you really love, my young man,
but you do not love beauty for its own sake,” writes Hypatia.“My life has lost its sweetness,” writes Synesius. Writes Hypatia of Alexandria,
“Life is an unfoldment.”
