Unburning Alexandria (28 page)

Heron strode right by the Nubian into Augustine's room.

"Yes?" Augustine lifted his head from the scroll he had been reading.

"Your counsel was wise," Heron said, and sat in a chair without invitation. "I received word that the event took place five days ago."

"So your secrets are saved, consigned to the future flames."

"Not all of my secrets," Heron said. "Some may have been smuggled to the future by Sierra and her cohort earlier. But, yes, the hemorrhaging of the past has been stopped, at least for now."

"Interesting, is it not, that you and Sierra both were intent on saving," Augustine mused, "you your secrets, Sierra the knowledge that previously had been lost. You sought to save your scrolls from unwanted eyes by safeguarding their appointment with the flames, she sought to save that knowledge for humanity by rescuing the scrolls from those very same flames."

"Your future has been safeguarded, too," Heron felt it necessary to point out. "I gave you the tools to make your Church permanent. If others had that knowledge – if others knew how to construct devices that move men through time – your position and that of the Church in the future would be far weaker."

"Are you sure it was Sierra whom the monstrous Nitrians slaughtered – the woman who travelled through time? Faces seem to transform with the regularity of the seasons when you are in residence."

"Benjamin – son of Jonah – confirmed it," Heron said. "He got there too late to save her. But he took her precious locket, which she always carried. Her body had been torn to pieces. A woman in my employ shares Benjamin's bed – when the time is right, I will ask her to retrieve the locket, so I can have the proof in my hands. It was bathed in blood – there are means in the future to identify exactly whose blood it was."

Augustine's lips moved with mixed emotions. "A mystery of the universe I have yet to comprehend is why it often takes the death of flesh to feed the life of ideas."

[New York City, 1895 AD]

Sierra closed the door behind Max and felt in her pocket once again, to make sure she had enough money to book passage on the next liner to London.

She walked down the stairs and out into morning light, which felt rude upon her face.

She walked about half a block. Everything felt very heavy, even though she was carrying nothing. She could buy an inexpensive change of clothes after she had purchased her ticket.

Why did the world feel so heavy? Why was it so hard for her to move? She stopped to catch her breath. She felt a little better. A red cardinal flew by her. It was chirping, and the sound soothed her. She took a step or two to see it more clearly, in the direction from which she had just come, and she discovered that the heaviness was gone. Her head felt lighter.

She walked a little further, more quickly, back to the hotel.

Max was standing in front of the hotel. He ran to her, flung his arms around, kissed her all over her face.

"I don't want to lose you, either," Sierra said. "We'll work this out, figure how to get back to the 21st century. In the meantime, we can help Appleton place the scrolls."

Max held Sierra close. "I'm getting to love this century. I spotted a little place yesterday that serves breakfast, about three blocks away. Just like 'The Girls in their Summer Dresses'."

"That's in the next century, decades away," Sierra said, "about a guy ogling every girl who walks by." She gave him a playful shove.

And the two walked off, hand in hand, to face the millennia.

Appendix

The following real people appear in
Unburning Alexandria
(along with characters for whom there is no historical record). The details provided below are what we know of them, as of the time of this writing (April 2013).

Alcibiades, 450-404 BC
.  Reputed to be handsome, amorous, wealthy, brilliant, brave, unpredictable, egotistical, and Socrates' favorite student.  The two saved each other's lives as soldiers near the beginning of the Second Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.  Alcibiades later became an Athenian general, with mixed results.  He fell in and out of favor with various oligarchic and democratic governments in Athens.  While taking temporary refuge in Phrygia, on the east side of the Aegean, he was murdered by a band of Spartans (either loyal to Sparta, or hired by Alcibiades' political opponents in Athens).  According to I. F. Stone in
The Trial of Socrates
(1988) and his sources, Alcibiades was surprised while in bed with a woman, and fought "naked, outnumbered, but brave with sword in hand" till the end.

Antisthenes, 444?-365 BC
. Oldest disciple of Socrates, said to have walked daily from Piraeus to Athens to hear him speak. Identified in Plato's Phaedo as being present on the last day of Socrates's life. Antisthenes wrote a dialog about Alcibiades; just a few fragments survive.

Appleton, William Henry, 1814-1899
.  Became head of the publishing company, D. Appleton & Co, when his father Daniel retired in 1844. Published Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and leading nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers in America.  Offices in Manhattan.  Owned the Wave Hill house in Riverdale, overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades, 1866-1899.  Huxley was among his guests at the house.  Theodore Roosevelt's family rented Wave Hill (when he was a boy in the summers of 1870 and 1871), as did Mark Twain (1901-1903).

Aristotle, 384-322 BC.
Plato's student, Alexander the Great's teacher, one of the two titans (along with Plato) of Western philosophy. He emphasized the importance of observation and empirical evidence (in contrast to Plato's focus on ideas), and is therein one of the founders of scientific method. Influential essays attributed to Aristotle span dozens of seminal topics including politics, biology, logic, education, poetry, and ethics in as many as 140 works, some or all of which are thought be lecture notes compiled by his students. Only a third to a half of these survive. We know about the lost works because they are mentioned elsewhere.

Arsinoe IV, 68/56?- 41 BC.
Cleopatra's younger half-sister, political rival, controversially executed by Marc Antony on the steps of a sanctuary temple in Rome.

Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine), 354-430 AD.
Arguably the greatest Christian thinker and philosopher, responsible for much of the Church's fundamental theology, which he presented at a time – the decline of the Roman empire - crucial for the Church's survival and growth into the future. Combined ancient pagan philosophy with Christian teaching, in particular Plato's realm of ideal forms – the ultimate source of truth and beauty, never fully perceivable by humans - with the holy "City of God". He failed to prevent the execution of his friend Marcellinus (see below) and dedicated the first books of
The City of God
to him. The only Christian philosopher of perhaps comparable import would be St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1275 AD).

Callimachus of Cyrene, 310/305?-240 BC.
Compiled the
Pinakes
– "Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning Together With a List of Their Writings" – or card-catalog-like listing every author with works in the Library of Alexandria. Entries were alphabetized according to the genre and author's name, and contained biographical information about the author, the first few words of the text, its total number of lines, and where in the Library the text was located. May well be the first comprehensive card catalog of its kind. The 120 scrolls of the
Pinakes
have not survived in their entirety, but extensive pieces remain. (See Heather Phillips, "The Great Library of Alexandria?" 2010, for more.)

Heron (or Hero) of Alexandria, 150 BC??-250 AD??
  The years of his birth and death are debatable -- Heron pops up throughout a 400-year span of ancient history.  He was a prolific inventor of devices that embodied principles and techniques that were 2,000 years ahead of their mass application in the Industrial Age.  These included a toy that ran on steam power (the aeolipile) and an automated theater that utilized "phantom mirror" and persistence-of-vision effects that are the basis of our motion pictures.  Many of his treatises on other inventions, and mathematics, exist just in fragments, or are known only via reference to them by later Greek, Roman, and Arabic writers. His
Metrica
, considered his most important mathematic work, was discovered in Istanbul in 1896.

Hypatia, 355-370?-415 AD
. Daughter of Theon, who was an astronomer, mathematician, and one of the last members of the Museum in Alexandria.  Hypatia likely assisted her father in his new edition of Euclid's
Elements
and his commentaries on Ptolemy's
Almagest
, but she was considered a brilliant philosopher and mathematician in her own right, and led the Neoplatonist school in Alexandria.  Renowned not only for her intellect, but her beauty and eloquence, Hypatia attracted many students and admirers. Hypatia was pagan, however, and her charm and accomplishments infuriated certain Christian fanatics, who brutally murdered and mutilated her.  The death is thought to mark the end of Alexandria as an intellectual center of the ancient world; it was followed by an exodus of scholars.  Charles Kingley's 1853 novel
Hypatia
made her a heroine of the Victorian era, and she is today regarded as the first woman to have made a significant contribution in mathematics.  (Kingsley is today better known for his 1863 urban fantasy,
The Water-Babies
.)

Jowett, Benjamin, 1817-1893
.  Translator of
The Dialogues of Plato
, in four volumes, with extensive analyses and introductions, first edition, 1871 -- still the standard English translation -- as well as translations of Thucydides, and Aristotle's
Politics
. Declining health prevented him from completing a series of essays about the
Politics
.  He was for 28 years a tutor, and then for 23 years Master, at Balliol College, Oxford.

Marcellinus, ?-413 AD.
Secretary of State of the (Western) Roman Empire – Emperor Honorius's representative – and friend of Augustine. Marcellinus ruled the Donatist Christian sect "heretic," after granting them the right to public worship. Augustine opposed the harshness with which the Donatists were removed from their churches, but pleaded on behalf of Marcellinus when he and his brother Apringius were arrested by General Maricus, a Donatist sympathizer, put on trial, and put to death. Marcellinus later was sainted, and is considered a Christian martyr.

Plato, 427?-347 BC
.  Socrates's student, Aristotle's teacher, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher in history, the father of philosophy, or along with Aristotle one of the two great sources of Western thought. Among Plato's most influential ideas is that truth exists in some ideal realm, separate from humanity, and which humans can only imperfectly understand (theory of forms); and the best kind of government is an absolute dictatorship of the wisest (philosopher-king). Our entire knowledge of Socrates is based on what he says in Plato's dialogues, along with lesser works by Xenophon (also Socrates's student), and his appearance as a character in contemporary plays, such as Aristophanes'
The Clouds
. Debates continue as to what parts of what Socrates says in Plato's dialogues are expressions of the original ideas and words of Socrates or Plato.

Ptolemy, Claudius, 90-168 AD.
His
Almagest
and related astronomical studies provided an intricate and mathematically detailed, geocentric (Earth at the center of universe) mapping of the "epicycles" of the Sun, the Moon, and the five known planets at the time (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn – Earth was not considered a planet). Ptolemy's model held sway until the Copernican heliocentric (Sun at the center) model developed by Copernicus (1473-1543 AD) and supported by Galileo (1564-1642) and his telescopic observations. The Church strongly opposed this model, found Galileo "suspect of heresy" for promoting it and sentenced him to house arrest, and continued its opposition until the 20th century (Pope John Paul II declared in 1992 that the Church had been in error in its judgment of Galileo). The accuracy of Ptolemy's lunar work, notwithstanding its incorrect geocentric premise, has been noted, though flaws in his lunar model were corrected by Copernicus.

Regnault, Jean-Baptiste, 1754-1829.
French allegorical and historical painter, best known for his
L'Éducation d'Achille
(1782),
Déscente de Croix
(1789), and
Socrate arrachant Alcibiade des bras de la Volupté
(1791). The title of the last is frequently rendered in English as
Socrates dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sin
, or
Socrates dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of S.
, and currently hangs in the Louvre.

Socrates, 470?-399 BC
.  No texts written by Socrates have survived or are alluded to by ancient authors; all that we know of him are from the writings of his students, mainly Plato (see above), and a few contemporaries.  Socrates taught that the pursuit of knowledge was the highest virtue, and knowledge was best obtained through continuing questioning and dialog.  He was no fan of democracy -- in the
Phaedrus
(where Socrates also condemns the written word as conveying only the "pretense of wisdom"), Socrates asks why, if we would not trust a man ignorant of horses to give us advice about horses, should we have confidence in a government composed of everyday people with no philosophic training in understanding good and evil -- yet Socrates, condemned by the Athenian democracy on charges of corrupting the youth of the city with his ideas, accepted its death sentence. Indeed, waiting in prison for thirty days for the return of the priest of Apollo from Delos (no death sentences could be carried out in his absence), Socrates refused an offer of escape and refuge made by his old friend Crito.  Socrates explains in the Platonic dialog of that name that to evade the death sentence would be to put himself above the state, which as a critic of the state he had no desire to do. I. F. Stone in
The Trial of Socrates
(1988) argues that Socrates may also have wanted his death penalty carried out as a way of permanently shaming the democracy he hated.  In any case, that was certainly the result: the death of Socrates by prescribed hemlock in 399 BC redounds as one of the worst cases in history of a dissident destroyed by government, all the worse because that government was the world's first known democracy.