Priscilla of Alexandria
Page 4
The “just and pious men” were emigrants from all points of the Mediterranean, the rabble of the port, whom Christendom enrolled for a little money. They were mingled with fanaticized honorable inhabitants, and monks from numerous convents that surrounded the city, who did not blush to have tatterdemalions and thieves for companions because, they said, what is important is not the quality of the instrument but the sanctity of the result.
The rendezvous had taken place at the Gate of the Sun. There, while waiting for one another, many had drunk copiously at the sleazy taverns that bordered the avenue sloping toward the city. Peter knew the approximate hour of the morning at which it was necessary to set forth in order to arrive at the right moment. When spirits were heated, the air was filled with the singing of canticles mingled with vociferations and obscenities, and they were beginning to stop passing chariots in order to make the conductors kiss the cross, Peter gave the signal to depart and the cortege started walking toward Hypatia’s house.
Hypatia’s celebrity was then very great. She taught mathematics and philosophy. In Rome, Athens and Byzantium there was no young man inclined toward matters of thought who had not come to hear her. She combined, the Greek philosopher Damascius said, the beauty of the visage with the luminous clarity of speech. She was the torch of neoplatonism, the hope of all those who saw with alarm in that stormy century the Christian shadow extending a little further every day over the ancient wisdom of philosophy.
Even more than her influence, Cyril could not forgive her for a personal insult that her disciples had inflicted on him. A few days before, his chariot had arrived outside Hypatia’s house at the moment when numerous young men and women who had come to hear her were companying her and acclaiming her. Having recognized him, they had shouted: “Down with the Bishop!” and he had been forced to retrace his steps.
“I shall also make her turn back,” Bishop Cyril had said, that evening.
Events occur less by virtue of the human will than a curious concurrence of circumstances that seems to have prepared them. When the procession that Peter was leading arrived at Hypatia’s house, perhaps nothing would have happened if Hypatia, at that precise moment, had not just closed her door and mounted her chariot, which was waiting to take her to the Library.3 She straightened up and gazed at that howling crowd that blocked the street.
Perhaps nothing would have happened if the driver had whipped his horse and set the chariot in motion. The Christians would probably have stood aside and contented themselves with insulting Hypatia. But the driver was a very young man. Either because he had read the gravity of the situation in the fury of the gazes or because he was gripped by an inexplicable panic terror, he dropped the reins, leapt down from the seat and fled.
Hypatia was standing in the motionless chariot. The Christians had surrounded her but, impressed by her calmness, they formed a circle around her. Even Peter recoiled. Nothing might have happened if a Greek idiot, whose name has not survived, had not been in the front rank of the crowd. He was laughing and shouting without comprehension, divided between joy and rage. He advanced and delivered a blow of his staff to Hypatia’s head with all his might. It appears that he hit her on the jaw, which explains why she did not pronounce a syllable until the moment of her death.
She tottered and fell on to the front of her chariot. Immediately, no longer retained by the magnetism of her courage, the Christians rushed forward. Peter seized her by her legs and dragged her on to the pavement of the street.
“Take her to church!” said a voice. “Let her ask God’s pardon for her sins!”
Peter and another man seized her and dragged her along the street. The Church of Caesarea was nearby. They arrived there. Hypathia was thrown brutally on to the stones of the threshold. Her head collided with a step with a dull sound. Her hair came undone. She recovered consciousness and got up, her jaw hanging down.
“Let her ask for pardon!” someone cried.
Peter, striking her in the small of the back, put her on her knees.
But then, suddenly, in a second, an obscene fury was unleashed. The Christians rushed upon Hypatia and tore off her clothes. Fifty hands groped her body. A monk with an ascetic face threw himself on the assailants and howled: “Beware of the demon!”
They might have treated him roughly, but, standing on the steps of the church, he said: “It’s necessary to stone her.” And he added, travestying the thought of Christ: “Let someone who has never sinned cast the first stone!”
Then someone pushed Priscilla forward, and put a stone in her hand. “This is Diodorus’ daughter. She’s a child. She’s never sinned.”
Priscilla, overwhelmed by horror, was a few paces away from Hypatia, naked and soiled. She distinguished the imprints of fingers on her shoulders and breasts. A little trickle of blood departed from the temple and ran all the way down to the lips. Behind her, through the door of the church, which stood ajar, the face of a priest appeared, animated by innocent curiosity. It seemed that a great silence fell around her and she had a great deal of trouble detaching her thoughts from the ridiculous shadow that the sun made of her brother’s widespread ears.
Had she ever sinned? Yes, if she had taken pleasure under the sycamores of the garden in the kiss of a childish mouth scented with honey and acacia. It was necessary for her to say so and recuse herself. She was about to do so. But someone pushed her.
“Well! Priscilla, in the name of Christ!”
She raised her arm, devoid of strength, with difficulty, and threw the stone, which hit Hypatia in the neck.
The martyr’s eyes opened wide and fixed themselves on Priscilla. They were large, bright, cold, intelligent eyes that expressed astonishment and the desire to comprehend that had always animated them. A single flash, and that light vanished. Stones rained down from all sides, and the spirit of the neoplatonist at least owed to the fury of the Christians that it escaped without an excess of suffering into the region of which she had weighed the shadows and measured the mystery while alive.
Priscilla fled. The Christians had a long debate around Hypatia’s body. A few wanted to carry away her body in order to burn it in the fields. Others, armed with knives, strove to butcher it, saying that it was appropriate, by way of an example, to parade the pieces triumphantly through the city. The former had difficulty winning the argument. Thy transported what remained of Hypatia, the trunk and the head, to a place called Cinaron, and delivered it to the flames.
The prefect only made a simulacrum of investigations in order to punish the guilty parties. Peter disappeared shortly thereafter in order to avoid reprisals. A cobbler near the Diocletian column flattered himself until he died for having conserved one of Hypatia’s desiccated hands, which he had cut off with his work-knife.
Because of her fortune, Priscilla was the most sought-after young woman in Alexandria. She refused all suitors, in spite of the exhortations of her father and those of Bishop Cyril, who dreamed of giving her in marriage to an adventurer named Antagoras, whose zeal he wanted to reward. She had not forgotten Quintus Moschus, her brother’s friend, and the unique kiss of pleasure that had touched her lips. But those who had remained faithful to the ancient gods of the Empire and the Christians were now too profoundly separated by religious hatred. She no longer had any opportunity to encounter him.
She only saw him again once.
She was coming back from Pharos on the heptastadion at dusk, followed by two negro slaves. In a violet cloak hastened by an emerald clasp, his hair parted at the front, the young Moschus was sitting on a stone bench facing the sea. He was sitting beside a young man of his own age, singularly beautiful and pale. His left arm was negligently placed on the other’s shoulder, and his entire face had the animation that intellectual conversation gives
She was tempted to go to him. But at the sight of her they turned away and they were talking in low voices. She heard Moschus say to this companion: “That’s Priscilla, who took part in the stoning of Hypatia.”
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p; An expression of disgust was in the eyes of the two young men.
Priscilla continued walking along the heptastadion, but from that moment on it was as if a door opening to a beautiful domain was forever closed for her.
At that moment of her life she had the dream that was to decide her destiny.
She was walking along a road on either side of which were cripples, lepers and people covered in lesions and ulcers. In the distance, a woman wearing a luminous robe was making signs to her. She tried to reach her, but as she advanced along the road the cripples threw away their crutches, the lepers lost their scabs and the bearers of ulcers were healed. She, on the contrary, sensed her muscles shriveling and all the wounds that had disappeared as she passed came, like birds, to settle on her.
She thought on awakening that the woman who had beckoned to her in her dream was the Virgin Mary and that it was necessary, in order to reach her, to assume, to the extent that she could, the sins of humankind.
Her life changed. She no longer thought of anything but prayer. She cut off her hair by way of penance. She wanted to go into a convent and wrote asking an abbess she knew to come and intervene with her father in order that he would permit her to withdraw from the world.
Old Diodorus loved his daughter too much to hear anything of the sort. He even asked Bishop Cyril to indicate to his daughter, with all his authority, that there were several possible paths to her salvation and that the one permitting her to accomplish family duties was as certain as that of retreat and the convent.
The path that Priscilla chose thereafter was new, and unexpected by everyone.
A sort of prophet named Sosymus came to Alexandria and was very fashionable for a while. His enemies claimed that he came from a Greek monastery, from which he had been expelled because of his unnatural mores, and that he belonged to one of the richest families in Athens. He spoke in the evening at crossroads, and people of the best society came to listen to him, as they might have listened to an actor. He was clad in rags. He never devoted any care to his beard or his hair. He expressed himself with a kind of savage fury. He preached the necessity and love of suffering. Prayer, good works and religiosity, were futile. The essential thing was to suffer, in the flesh and in the soul equally, to suffer every day and as much as possible.
One evening, Priscilla went to hear Sosymus, who was speaking in the quarter known as Rhacotis, where the sailors’ hovels were. He was standing on a trestle of planks set up against a brick wall. Around him, the houses of the poor and the noxious streets formed a kind of perspective of misery. A man holding a torch lifted it up, so that his face could be seen, and the gesture he made in parting his rags to show a wound in his chest. His conviction radiated from him like a palpable atmosphere, and many of those who were listening were penetrated by the desire for immediate suffering.
There were men who tore out their beard, others who cut themselves with their knives. One woman fell to the ground in convulsions, begging the people surrounding her to pierce her hands and feet with nails.
It was before the prophet Sosymus, in the tremulous torchlight, among the prostrated wretches avid to add further to their misery, that Priscilla found the directive idea of her life.
What could be the greatest cause of suffering for her? At the moment of her adolescence, Pricilla had not felt awakening within her the physical desire for amour. “She’s as cold as the tomb,” her brother Marcus said of her. The sexual appeal of men, which she sensed round her, inspired an invincible disgust in her. There could not be any image more frightful for her than representing herself in the process of submitting to the lust of a man. And that image was so cruel and so redoubtable that, by virtue of a sort of obsession, it returned to her eyes incessantly. She could not get rid of it.
She saw herself delivered to the most abject individuals, like the martyrs whose stories had cradled her infancy. She imagined he violation of her body with a great acuity of vision and the presentation of the most trivial details. She indulged herself above all in imagining it accomplished by the men who inspired in her the most vivid disgust or the greatest terror. She saw herself in the arms of her brother Marcus because the sin of their incestuous union appeared to her to surpass in its horror all the others. She indulged herself by imagining the monstrous body of Peter, and sensing his murderous hands squeezing her delicate neck or her perfumed armpits.
She woke up at night, bathed with sweat, not because she had dreamed during her sleep but because she was gnawed by the irresistible desire to dream while awake. She then imagined, forcefully, what her torture would be. She clenched her teeth in order not to sense noxious kisses on her mouth. She moaned and begged. And sometimes in the morning, there were the stigmata of embraces on her wrists and thighs.
For a long time she had thought that those images were inspired by the demon and she had begged God’s pardon for them. But after she had heard the prophet Sosymus she discovered that the Lord was showing her by means of those obsessions the path that she had to follow, and she was singularly comforted by that.
At that point in her life an event occurred that was to hasten her resolution further.
She was coming back one evening along the quay that led from the port of Eunostos, which was deserted at that hour. A beggar, who had been sitting amid the debris of ropes and boats and whom she had not perceived, ran toward her to ask for alms.
She was afraid. And, as he stood before her with a bizarre grunt, she called out to the two slaves who were two steps behind her. Believing that their mistress was being attacked, they struck the beggar with their staffs, and he collapsed.
When Priscilla leaned over him she saw that his jaw was broken and his skull split. He stammered, and died within a few minutes. She recognized the idiot who had been the first to strike Hypatia in the jaw with his staff as she was standing in her chariot.
She felt remorse at having caused the death of that wretch. She wept for him bitterly. The emptiness of her futile life appeared to her more forcefully. And it was shortly thereafter that she quit Alexandria.
No one knows how she did it, how she was able to escape the authority of her father and that of Bishop Cyril, and why the investigations made to find her were fruitless.
What is certain is that the daughter of Diodorus, who was then in the full splendor of her beauty at the age of eighteen, knocked one evening on the door of a certain Spartacus, a renowned brothel-keeper in the Cynegion quarter of Byzantium. He kept a brothel for soldiers and the lower classes under the fortifications, in a place once constructed for food shops, which had been disaffected and abandoned to prostitution.
Spartacus was a good Christian and a good citizen. He paid heavy taxes, for the best part of the Empire’s revenues then came from innumerable brothels. He was also a lover of tradition, and, in accordance with an old Roman custom, a copper plate swung over his door, on which was painted: Hic habitat felicitas.4
Certainly, when he saw the svelte body of Priscilla standing before his threshold at that crepuscular hour, when he looked at the clear oval of her face, her large bistred eyes and the heavy brown tresses overflowing the hood of her cloak, he thought he was in the presence of one of the angels he had admired in the Church of the Holy Purity, the cupola of which extended its shadow over the paved street as the sun set.
He bought slaves, sometimes very dearly, in the markets of the Golden Horn. But not all of them were equally apt for prostitution. There were some who fled without having redeemed their purchase price, others who were sick and others who died in brawls. He often thought that his métier was very hard. Now, Priscilla immediately gave him a thousand drachms. He was dazzled and in, exchange, immediately installed her in the most comfortable of his rooms. He also offered to dispense with the custom by which every prostitute gives herself, once, on arrival, to the keeper of the brothel, but she refused, and it was him who took her virginity.
Priscilla was inscribed in the register of women under the name of Fabrilla, because there had
been a Fabrilla some time before who was much in demand among spatharii and the gladiators of the circus. A placard bearing that name was placed over the door of her room. She turned it round herself when a man came in. In addition to her youth and beauty, the confusion with the original Fabrilla ensured that as soon as night fell until a very late hour, she got scarcely any rest.
Her room’s only furniture was a wooden stool, a little earthenware trough, a stone bed on which there was a straw mattress, and an extraordinarily soiled carpet. By day she wore the yellow robe of prostitutes and a square bonnet of the Assyrian form that was customary among women. In the evening she took her place in the common room where people drank. She never showed any preference. She threw herself on the bed and endured all caresses. Doubtless she ended up learning them. Nothing, from what is known about her seems to indicate, during this period of her life, the excess of suffering that she expected, which was to lead her to God.
Did she think that she would succeed by another route? Did she discover an unknown beauty in Spartacus’ narrow cell with its low ceiling, the obscene inscriptions of the wall and the vermin that inhabited her mattress? Did she hear, in the drunken voices of street-porters and sailors, in the insults of men who played dice for her body and disputed the possession of it, knife in hand, a music as sweet as that which ought to charm the ears of the elect? Or rather, by virtue of one of those mysterious transformations of which nature has the secret, did the alarm of obscenities and the lacerations of her body a hundred times violated become for her attractions, her dolor changing into pleasure?
She became coquettish, she took an interest in the life of the brothel, she comported herself there not like a martyr but like a woman. She formed a close friendship with a daughter of Egypt named Seso, young and quite pretty, who occupied the room next to hers, and whom many men acquired the habit of possessing at the same time as her because of the intimacy that linked them.