Hypatia of Alexandria
It is easy, and tempting, to see the adoption of Christianity as a marker for the emergence of women onto the pages of medieval history. But there is a flip side to the coin. The violent death of the mathematician, philosopher and teacher Hypatia (c.350–415) at the hands of a Christian mob ensured her lasting celebrity in fiction, drama, painting and film.
She has often been held up as a ‘pagan’ martyr and many historians believe that behind her grotesque end, inverted, lies the legend of St Catherine.∂The Alexandria that Egeria visited in the 380s was a Graeco-Egyptian city of intellect and learning, political intrigue and religious conflict. It was a melting pot of Jewish and Greek, African, Byzantine and Roman peoples, rife with sectarian tension, philosophical debate and gnostic contemplation. The greatest library in the ancient world flourished here and scholars were still drawn to this city to learn from the inheritors of Hellenistic scientific traditions. Euclid had written his Elements here in the third century BCE.
During the fourth century, Alexandria’s pre-eminent mathematician was Theon, from whom several editions of, and commentaries on, Euclid and Ptolemy survive in part or whole. He recorded observations of solar and lunar eclipses and seems to have taught, perhaps as its principal, at the Alexandrian school of philosophy known as the Museion. That his daughter, Hypatia, was a gifted mathematician in her own right is evident, both from Theon’s acknowledgement of her as his co-editor and in the work of her pupils.
The writings of her most celebrated protege, Synesius – which include the surviving text of a letter to his tutor, begging her for help with the building of a hydrometer – reveal a woman of substantial character and intellect, with the technical capability to construct such instruments as astrolabes.
Possessed of a wry and earthy sense of humour, she famously fended off a persistent young suitor, perhaps one of her pupils, by showing him a soiled sanitary towel, asking if he found much beauty therein. Hypatia is said to have remained celibate all her life. She was a gifted lecturer, able to bring the complexities of conic geometry and higher-level equations into the realms of comprehension for her students. That she lived into her sixties suggests that she must have tutored hundreds of Alexandrians.Hypatia is often described as a Neoplatonist; that is to say, her philosophy was rationalist in the classical Greek tradition. Much has been made of her paganism, but the term is unhelpful. She was certainly not an avowed or baptised Christian – even though her protege Synesius became bishop of Ptolemais during her lifetime. Conflicts between ultra-orthodox Christians and other sects led, it is true, to outbreaks of mob violence like the grisly episode that led to Hypatia’s murder; but it is, I think, more helpful to suggest that contrasting ideas of spirituality and philosophy were in vigorous competition in the great city on the Nile delta. Tensions might easily become inflamed.
The events that led to Hypatia’s death are related by a contemporary, the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, whose Ecclesiastical History was compiled in Constantinople around 439:
About this same time it happened that the Jewish inhabitants were driven out of Alexandria by Cyril the bishop… The Alexandrian public is more delighted with tumult than any other people: and if at any time it should find a pretext, breaks forth into the most intolerable excesses; for it never ceases from its turbulence without bloodshed…2
In this case, a dispute erupted over large crowds gathered to watch dancing on the Jewish Sabbath, a practice tolerated by Orestes, the city’s liberal governor, but deplored by its Christian bishop, Cyril. After an eruption of extreme violence on the streets, the entire Jewish community was expelled and tensions between governor and bishop became strained to breaking point.
Cue the intervention of 500 monks from the monastic community of Nitria in the desert southwest of Alexandria (Egeria had visited them thirty years previously), who came into the city to confront Orestes:…and meeting the prefect in his chariot, they called him a pagan idolater, and applied to him many other abusive epithets… and a certain one of them named Ammonius threw a stone at Orestes which struck him on the head and covered him with the blood that flowed from the wound… The monk was secured and brought before the injured prefect, who had him tortured to death… The animosity between Cyril and Orestes did not by any means subside at this point, but was kindled afresh…3
Socrates now introduces his improbable – pagan – heroine:
There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more. Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called C?sareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.4
Hypatia’s odd status as a pagan martyr, with Bishop Cyril playing the part of Pontius Pilate, has been enshrined in the works of writers as diverse as Edward Gibbon and Charles Kingsley. She is remembered by generations of admiring mathematicians, inheritors of the free intellectual spirit of scientific enquiry. Even so, without her own words or physical remains, her life as a creative woman remains intangible, out of reach.