SOURCE: "A Christian Martyr in Reverse," Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 6-8.

In the prose poem reprinted below, Molinaro recreates the life and death of Hypatia from the perspective of a feminist poet and novelist.

The torture killing of the noted philosopher Hypatia by a mob of Christians in Alexandria in 415 A.D. marks the end of a time when women were still appreciated for the brain under their hair.

The screams of a 45-year-old Greek philosopher being dismembered¹ by early-5th-century Christians, in their early-5th-century church of Caesareum, in Alexandria, center of early-5th-century civilization, reverberated between the moon gate & the sun gate of that civilized Egyptian city.

Before the philosopher's broken body was thrown into the civilized Alexandrian gutter, for public burning.

& smoke signals rose from the disorderly chunks of her charring flesh, warning future centuries of reformers & healers that they must hush their knowledge...