Hypatia, and the strange history of the Neo-Platonic school. The last
glimmer of light in the ancient world was from the embers of their
philosophy. A few late epigrams preserve a record of their mystical
doctrines, and speak in half-unintelligible language of "the one hope"
that went among them, a veiled and crowned phantom, under the name of
Wisdom. But, apart from those lingering relics of a faith among men
half dreamers and half charlatans, patience and silence were the only
two counsels left for the dying ancient world; patience, in which we
imitate God himself; silence, in which all our words must soon
end.[20] The Roman empire perished, it has been said, for want of men;
Greek literature perished for want of anything to say; or rather,
because it found nothing in the end worth saying. Its end was like
that recorded of the noblest of the Roman emperors;[21] the last word
uttered with its dying breath was the counsel of equanimity. Men had
once been comforted for their own life and death in the thought of
deathless memorials; now they had lost hope, and declared that no
words and no gods could give immortality.[22] Resignation[23] was the
one lesson left to ancient literature, and, this lesson once fully
learned, it naturally and silently died. All know how the ages that
followed were too preoccupied to think of writings its epitaph. For
century after century Goth and Hun, Lombard and Frank, Bulgarian and
Avar, Norman and Saracen, Catalan and Turk rolled on in a ceaseless
storm of slaughter and rapine without; for century after century
within raged no less fiercely the unending fury of the new theology.
Filtered down through Byzantine epitomes, through Arabic translations,
through every sort of strange and tortuous channel, a vague and
distorted tradition of this great literature just survived long enough
to kindle the imagination of the fifteenth century. The chance of
history, fortunate perhaps for the whole world, swept the last Greek
scholars away from Constantinople to the living soil of Italy,