The Slow Ages

The Lamp and the Library: Hypatia of Alexandria, and the City That Kept the World's Learning. Hypatia's life and intellectual world, the Library and its cultural role, late-antique Alexandria the murder, myths vs evidence, and a soothing closing reflection.

 There is a particular hour on the Salisbury Plain when the light goes down to a soft amber and the wind does not so much blow as rest across the ground. It moves slow. It moves low. It folds around the long, low grass and lifts, here and there, a whisper of silver over the heads of the stalks, and then lets it go. If you were lying on that plain now, and it is evening, and the day has given its whole warmth to the turf beneath you, you could feel the field breathing out the last of the sun.

The year was four hundred and seventy-six. In it, the last ruler who held the western half of the Roman Empire was set aside from his office, in a quiet and largely ceremonial act. The man who was set aside was a young man called Romulus Augustulus. The man who set him aside was a Germanic chief called Odoacer. In the weeks that followed, the insignia of western imperial rule were sent east, to the court at Constantinople, and with that, the line of western emperors was finished.

The story I want to tell you this evening is a long one, and it moves slowly, the way a river moves. It is about how a small community by a river became, over many generations, a power that reached across the sea. There are kings in it, and senators, and generals. There are wars, told quietly. And there are quiet changes at the end — the kind of changes that happen so gradually that no one in the room can quite say when they happened.