Hypatia
For other uses of Hypatia, see Hypatia (disambiguation).
Hypatia of Alexandria (in Greek: Υπατία) (c. 380 - 415) was a philosopher, mathematician, and teacher who lived in Alexandria, then a Greek city. Several works are attributed to her by later sources, including commentaries on Diophantus's Arithmetica, on Apollonius's Conics and on Ptolemy's works, but none has survived. Letters written to her by her pupil Synesius give an idea of her intellectual milieu. She was of the Platonic school, although her adherence to the writings of Plotinus, the 3rd century follower of Plato and principal of the neo-Platonic school, is merely assumed. Hypatia's contributions to science are reputed (on scant evidence) to include the invention of the astrolabe and the hydrometer.
She was the daughter of Theon, the last fellow of the Museum of Alexandria, which was adjacent to or included in the main Library of Alexandria. Hypatia did not teach in the Museum, but received her pupils in her own private home. No images of her exist, but nineteenth century writers and artists envisioned her as an Athene-like beauty.
Hypatia was murdered in March 415 in the Alexandrian church of the Caesareum (a former pagan temple) by a mob led by a Christian magistrate named Peter. The motive seems to have been rooted in religious and political controversies.
In 391, Theophilus, the patriarch of Alexandria, had destroyed some pagan temples in the city , which may have included the Museum and certainly included the Serapeum (a temple for the worship of Serapis and "daughter library" to the Great Library). In the same year Emperor Theodosius had published an edict prohibiting various aspects of pagan worship, whereupon (although this was part of a wider phenomenon) Christians throughout the Roman Empire embarked upon a thorough campaign to destroy or christianize pagan places of worship.
Hypatia lived during a conflict between pagans, on the one side, and Christians on the other, who were demanding the final destruction of paganism as an imperial institution; it appears that certain Christians and sympathisers of either side found it difficult to come to terms with the conflict. Hypatia, herself a pagan, was respected by many Christians, and was even exalted by a few later Christian authors as a symbol of virtue, often being portrayed by them (and by romantic novelists) as a virgin till her death. These later portrayals (interesting as they are) are not entirely reliable, since they often contradict each other.
Her contemporary, the Christian historiographer Socrates Scholasticus in his Ecclesiastical History portrays her as a follows:
- "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 presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more."
Some insight into the intellectual conflict of early 5th century Alexandria is given by the letters written by Synesius of Cyrene, Bishop of Ptolomais, to Hypatia, whom he loved and respected as a teacher. In one of them, he complains about people who begin to undertake philosophy after failing at some other career: "Their philosophy consists in a very simple formula, that of calling God to witness, as Plato did, whenever they deny anything or whenever they assert anything. A shadow would surpass these men in uttering anything to the point; but their pretensions are extraordinary." In this letter, he also tells Hypatia that "the same men" had accused him of storing "unrevised copies" of books in his library. [1] This indicates that books were rewritten to suit the prevailing Christian dogma, which may also relate to the difficulty of finding accurate contemporary information about Hypatia's life and death.
Hypatia's death
Theories about the mob violence that ended Hypatia's life range from a local, spontaneous Christian uprising tolerated by the Christian Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria over a conflict between Cyril and the more tolerant prefect Orestes; to a conspiracy supported by the Emperor himself; to a lawless, civilian "peasant stock" mob (soldiers are never mentioned) made up of superstitious Christians and non-Christians alike led by the charismatic zealot "Peter." Another point of view holds that Hypatia was part of a rebellion and her murder unfortunate, but inevitable (In the ancient world, it was common for historians to copy from each other without further inquiry, thus making a resolution difficult).
Socrates Scholasticus described her death thus in his Ecclesiastical History:
- "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 Caesareum, 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. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort. This happened in the month of March during Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril's episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius, and the sixth of Theodosius [AD 415]."
John, Bishop of Nikiû, a 7th century author, described her death as follows, obviously drawing on Socrates but coming to rather different conclusions [2]:
- "And [after an alleged Jewish massacre was punished by the Christians and the Jews expelled from the city] a multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate – now this Peter was a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ – and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her seated on a (lofty) chair; and having made her descend they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her [till they brought her] through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire. And all the people surrounded the patriarch Cyril and named him 'the new Theophilus'; for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city."
The Catholic Encyclopedia states:[1]
- In one of these riots, in 422, the prefect Callistus was killed, and in another was committed the murder of a female philosopher Hypatia, a highly-respected teacher of neo-Platoism, of advanced age and (it is said) many virtues. She was a friend of Orestes, and many believed that she prevented a reconciliation between the prefect and patriarch. A mob led by a lector, named Peter, dragged her to a church and tore her flesh with potsherds till she died. This brought great disgrace, says Socrates, on the Church of Alexandria and on its bishop; but a lector at Alexandria was not a cleric (Scr., V, xxii), and Socrates does not suggest that Cyril himself was to blame. Damascius, indeed, accuses him, but he is a late authority and a hater of Christians.
John of Nikiû also portrays Hypatia as a witch:
- "And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, 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."
The punishment of witchcraft had been determined decades earlier by Emperor Constantius, as noted in Soldan's and Heppe's Geschichte der Hexenprozesse [3, p.82]:
- "Things changed with Constantius, who thoroughly tried to get rid of magic and therefore of paganism. In one of the laws he passed for that reason he complains that there were many magicians who caused storms with the help of demons and who harmed others' lives. The magicians caught in Rome were supposed to be thrown to wild animals, the ones picked up in provinces were to be tortured and, if they persistently denied, the flesh should be torn off their bones with iron hooks."
Although iron hooks were not used, Hypatia's death seems to match the prescribed punishment for witchcraft; the Greek term for the implements used in the killing, ostrakois, is translated as "tiles", but literally means "oystershells". Hypatia may have been the first famous "witch" punished under Christian authority, as was noted by many church-critical authors; however, while some of the Christian invective used to justify or excuse her murder betrays a vulgar reliance on fear of black magic, the essence of Christian objections to her influence will have lain in the turbulent confluence of Christian and Platonic assertions about the nature of God and the afterlife, which achieved its most famous expression fifteen years later in Augustine's The City of God. The Patriarch, Cyril, a sophisticated theologian who was posthumously canonised by the church, has been accused of complicity in the murder, but there is no evidence to support this; however, he does appear to have failed to condemn the act.
Some authors have used Hypatia's death as a symbol of the repression of, in their terms, a reasoned paganism by an irrational religion. Included among these was the astronomer Carl Sagan, who provided a vivid account of her death and the burning of the Library of Alexandria in his popular science book Cosmos. Earlier writers sharing that view include Voltaire and historian Edward Gibbon. The Christian English writer, Charles Kingsley, portrayed the philosopher in his historical romance, Hypatia (1860), in which she converts to Christianity at the approach of her death. A serious study by the Polish historian Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (1995), explains Hypatia's death as the result of a struggle between two Christian factions, the moderate Orestes—supported by Hypatia—and the more rigid Cyril.
All the above works use ancient writers as their primary sources. Dzielska, alone, makes use of surviving personal letters written by students of the philosopher.
Year of birth
Traditionally a late date of birth has been ascribed to Hypatia, perhaps influenced by after-the-fact romanticized images of her which depict her dying as a young and beautiful woman. Many authors presumed she died in her forties, and thus had been born around 370. However, Dzielska has most recently argued that she was more likely born around 350 and thus would have been in her sixties when she was killed.
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[1] Letter 154 of Synesius of Cyrene to Hypatia (online version).
[2] John, Bishop of Nikiu: The Life of Hypatia. Chronicle 84.87-103 (online version).
[3] Soldan, W.G. und Heppe, H., Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, Essen 1990. (English translation by Erik Möller.)
External links
- Resources on Hypatia: booklist, classroom activities
- Extensive biography on Hypatia. This website takes the position that Hypatia was an astrologer, for which no evidence exists.
- "Hipatia" – an organisation promoting "the adoption of public policies combined with human and social behaviour that favour the free availability and sustainability of, and social access to, technology and knowledge".
- Hypatia World: website dedicated to the continuation of the work of Hypatia
- A point-by-point rebuttal of some of the more questionable assertions appearing in Maria Dzielska's Hypatia of Alexandria. Note: Prudish scholars are advised not to download the .PDF version of this lengthy document.