The last rays of heathen cultivation in Italy were extinguished in the gloomy dungeon of Boethius, and the period so justly designated as the Dark Ages began both in eastern and western Europe. 8. LAST ECHOES OF THE OLD LITERATURE--From the time when Christianity placed itself in opposition to the old culture of heathen Greece and Rome, down to the period of the revival of classical literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the classical spirit was nearly extinct both in eastern and western Europe. In Italy, the triumph of barbarism was more sudden and complete. In the eastern empire there was a certain literary activity, and in the department of history, Byzantine literature was conspicuously prolific. The imperial family of the Comneni, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Palaeologi, who reigned from the thirteenth century to the end of the eastern empire, endeavored to revive the taste for literature and learning. But the echoes of the past became fainter and fainter, and when Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks, 1453 A.D., the wandering Greeks who found their way into Italy could only serve as language-masters to a race of scholars, who thus recovered the learning that had ceased to exist among the Greeks themselves. The last manifestations of the old classical learning by the Alexandrian school, which had done so much in the second and first centuries before our era, may he divided into three classes. In the first are placed the mathematical and geographical studies, which had been brought to such perfection by Euclid, his successors, and after them by Ptolemy. In the second class we have the substitution of prose romances for the bucolic and erotic poetry of the Alexandrian and Sicilian writers. In the third class the revival, by Nonnus and his followers, of a learned epos, of much the same kind as the poems of Callimachus. Among the representatives of the mathematical school of Alexandria was Theon, whose celebrity is obscured by that of his daughter Hypatia (fl. 415 A.D.), whose sex, youth, beauty, and cruel fate have made her a most interesting martyr of philosophy. She presided in the public school at Alexandria, where she taught mathematics and the philosophy of Ammonius and Plotinus. Her influence over the educated classes of that city excited the jealousy of the archbishop. She was given up to the violence of a superstitious and brutal mob, attacked as she was passing through the streets in her chariot, torn in pieces, and her mutilated body thrown to the flames.