Few primary documentary sources regarding Hypatia of Alexandria have survived, and no extant writings can be uncontestably attributed to her, yet two feminist journals (1) and two lunar landmarks are named after her(2). Writers such as Edward Gibbon(3), Voltaire(4) and Carl Sagan (5) have told the story--a beautiful, learned young woman living at a time when few men and even fewer women had achieved an advanced education was brutally murdered, cut down in the prime of her life by a fanatical mob. The local bishop, Cyril of Alexandria who may have instigated them--or at the very least turned a blind eye to their crimes--was later made a saint. Her death is seen as the end of classical learning and free inquiry and the beginning of a dogmatic and often brutal new world order.
Alexandria, where Hypatia was born and seems to have lived her entire life, was long considered a place of learning. Peter James and Nicholas Thorpe, in their book Ancient Inventions refer to the city as "the scientific center of the ancient Greek world."(6) Here,the Pharos lighthouse, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, was built in the third century BCE, as well as the Mouseion, the great library, where scholars attempted to collect all knowledge then available in the forms of copies of all scientific and philosophical writings (and sometimes the originals, much to the chagrin of their owners) in maps, star and navigation charts. The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures is also believed to have been accomplished in Alexandria.(7) The city was also home to Heron (late first century, CE), the "machine man," mechanikos, who invented devices such as self-trimming lamps, surveying instruments, and various automata and gimmicks for use in theaters and temples.(8) Here also stood theSerapeum, cult center of the worship of Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis.
The year of Hypatia's birth is often given as 370 CE, making her 45 at her death in 415. Maria Dzielska in Hypatia of Alexandria argues that she was more likely born around 355, making her 60 when she was killed. One reason for the earlier date is that one of Hypatia's students, Synesius of Cyrene, is believed to have been born in the late 360's or possibly 370, nearly the same time as the traditional date of Hypatia's birth. It is unlikely, Dzielska says, that he would have showed the degree of respect and admiration he does for her in his letters--according to another biographer, Michael A.B. Deakin, Synesius "almost palpably worshipped the ground on which she trod"(9)--if they had been so close in age.(10)
Her father was the philosopher and mathematician Theon of Alexandria (c 335--c.395), who also taught mathematics and astronomy at the Mouseion there. Of her mother and possible siblings or more distant relatives, the sources are silent. Among Theon's works were commentaries on Ptolemy's Almagest and the works of Euclid. Dzielska notes that he was interested in pagan religious literature and old Greek practices of divination.(11) She also notes a Suda (a 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia) entry that names him as the author of a treatise titled On Signs and the Examination of Birds and the Croaking of Ravens, and an essay on the star Sirius(12)--a star long used by the ancient Egyptians to predict the flooding of the Nile.
Hypatia's works are said to include commentaries on Diophantus' Arithmetica, Apollonius' Conics and Ptolemy's astronomical works. A dedication to her in her father's commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest is seen as either an indication that she helped her father write it, perhaps by drawing diagrams, or by actually writing it. No purely philosophical work is attributed to her. However, drawing conclusions from the letters of a Hypatia's pupil, Synesius of Cyrene, Dzielska states that her philosophic teachings were of Neo-Platonism. With the Neo-Platonic view of the division of the material and immaterial world, and the latter's inherent superiority, it is not necessarily hostile to Christianity as it is often practiced today, but in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, they were seen as rivals worldviews.(13) Dzielska also sees evidence of Hypatia's Neo-Platonism in an anecdote recounted in the the Suda entry about her. According to this story, she is supposed to have cured a young student of his infatuation with her by showing him cloths stained with her menstrual blood. "This is what you love, young man, and it isn't beautiful!" she is supposed to have told him. Or, in Dzielska's account: "This is what you really love, young man, but you do not love beauty for its own sake."(14)
Dzielska makes the argument that Hypatia and her students formed a tight circle. As was Hypatia herself, many of her students were from wealthy, well-connected families who later went on to assume important postions in society.(15) Two of her students became bishops, including Synesius of Cyrene, from whose letters Dzielska draws many of her conclusions. She also sees Hypatia as dedicated to philosophy, specifically Neo-Platonism, which with its emphasis on self-control and virtue tended to look down on the lower classes. The paganism of the temples was too "common" for her who sought the divine in knowledge. In her words, Hypatia "protected her Christian students. With her tolerance and consummate grasp of metaphysical questions, she assisted them in achieving spiritual and religious integrity."(16)
Not everyone was so tolerant or had a consummate grasp of metaphysical questions, however. Cryil, who was bishop of Alexandria at the time of Hypatia's death, was proceeded in that position by his kinsman, Theophlius. Emperor Theodosius I issued an edict in June, 391, which prohibited cult practices. Theophilus saw this as an opportunity to further his program of seizing pagan temples and converting them to Christian centers. Riots broke out. In 391 or 392, Theophilus moved against the Serapeum.. Its pagan defenders included Olympius, a Neo-Platonist philosopher; two teachers of Greek language and literature; and one, possibly two, poets, but no Hypatia. An edict from the emperor demanded the pagans leave the temple, proclaimed the Christians killed in the struggle martyrs, and handed the Serapeum over to the church. This is seen as further evidence of Hypatia's distance from the common people.(17)
Citing Socrates Scholasticus, as well as John, Bishop of Nikiu, Dzielska points to Hypatia's friendship with Orestes, augustal prefect in Alexandria from possibly 412-415, the year of Hypatia's death. Orestes was a Christian, but no friend of the then bishop Cyril, whom he saw as trying to seize civic powers for the ecclesiastical.(18) In a particularly nasty incident, a group of monks who were supporters of Cyril, came across Orestes, accusing him of paganism. One monk threw a stone and hit the prefect in the head. In turn, Orestes had him arrested, tortured and executed, something Cyril did not forgive.(19)
Scholasticus mentions that the people blamed Hypatia, the distant aristocrat, for the failure of Orestes and Cyril to reconcile. John of Nikiu goes even further and accuses her of witchcraft: "...and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honored her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom."
This is what Dzeilska sees as the trigger that set the mob upon her, that is, the accusation of witchcraft, and using it to sow discord among Christians. She states that the rumor was started by Cyril as an attempt to undermine the political power of his enemy. People saw her as distant, non-Christian. They may have remembered her father's studies of magic. It clicked.(20)
The ancient accounts differ as the exact circumstances of her murder. John of Nikiu states that the mob, incensed over the news that she had bewitched the prefect Orestes, found her in a "lofty chair" (teaching?) dragged her from it, through the streets to a church called the Caesarion, where she was stripped of her clothing then dragged through the streets to her death. Her body was buried. Scholasticus wrote that she was pulled from her chariot as she was on her way home, brought to the Caesarion, stripped and flayed with ostrakois, "oyster shells," (also used for brick roof tiles) before her corpse was burned.(21)
Probably neither her father Theon nor her student Synesius of Cyrene was alive to hear the news of her death. While Dzielska maintains that Hypatia's gruesome death did not put an end to classical Greek inquiry, or eliminate paganism, one cannot help but shudder in horror at this death, and regret the loss of her works. Ironically, Dzielska sees her legacy living on into the century after her death in the "'holy men' of Alexandrian Neoplatonism" who sought "to achieve religious experience as the essential ideal of philosophy."(22)
NOTES
1Hypatia: Feminist Studies published in Athens and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Studies published at Indiana University.
3 Gibbon, Edward; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
4 Voltaire; Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke ou le tambeau de fanatisme; Dictionnaire philosophique quoted in Hypatia of Alexandria by Maria Dzielska, translated by F. Lyra (1996):
"Hypatia's death was 'a bestial murder perpetrated by Cyril's tonsured hounds, with a fanatical gang at their heels.' She was murdered, Voltaire asserts, because she believed in the Hellenic gods, the laws of rational Nature, and the capacities of the human mind free of dogmas. Thus did religious fanaticism lead to the martyrdom of genius and to the enslavement of the spirit.
Voltaire returns to Hypatia in his Dictionnaire philosophique. There he asserts that she 'taught Homer and Plato in Alexandria during the reign of Theodosius II' and that the event leading to her death were instigated by Saint Cyril, who 'loosed the Christian rabble on her.'" pp 2-3
13 from Deakin, Michael A.B; The Primary Sources for the Life and Work of Hypatia of Alexandria:
"In any case he [Synesius of Cyrene] was, in his Christianity, very much a neoplatonist at a time when this was seen as a rival philosophy. (However, it should be said that nowadays neoplatonist viewpoints have so permeated Christianity that it would be unrecognisable without them. In particular, today's formulations of the doctrine of the Trinity preserve elements of neoplatonism and could not be uttered without them! Although modern versions of trinitarian dogma follow Augustine rather than Synesius, the latter remains a key figure in this story.) "
