Hypatia of Alexandria

Hypatia of Alexandria (in Greek: Υπατία) (c. 370 - 415) was a popular Hellenized Egyptian female philosopher, mathematician, astronomer/astrologer, and teacher who lived in Alexandria, in Hellenistic Egypt, and who contributed greatly to that city's intellectual community. 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 have 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.

Life and career

Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was also her teacher and 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. Hypatia became head of the Platonist school at Alexandria in about 400 AD. There she lectured on mathematics and philosophy, and counted many prominent Christians among her pupils. No images of her exist, but nineteenth century writers and artists envisioned her as an Athene-like beauty.

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 I 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 as a virgin till her death. The Suda is one such source, which also tells the story of her rebuffing a suitor by throwing sanitary napkins at him Suda online, Upsilon 166, 6^* Accessed 22 June 2006. "She was so very beautiful and attractive that one of those who attended her lectures fell in love with her. He was not able to contain his desire, but he informed her of his condition. Ignorant reports say that Hypatia relieved him of his disease by music; but truth proclaims that music failed to have any effect. She brought some of her female rags and threw them before him, showing him the signs of her unclean origin, and said, “You love this, O youth, and there is nothing beautiful about it.” His soul was turned away by shame and surprise at the unpleasant sight, and he was brought to his right mind." . These later portrayals 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. Letter 154 of Synesius of Cyrene to Hypatia (online version). This suggests 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.

Death

Theories about the origins of 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 city prefect Orestes; to a conspiracy supported by the Emperor himself; to a lawless, civilian "peasant stock" mob (soldiers are never mentioned) made up of Christians and non-Christians alike, led by a man named "Peter." Another point of view holds that Hypatia was part of a rebellion and her murder inevitable.

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 415."

John, Bishop of Nikiû, a 7th century author, described her death as follows, obviously drawing on Socrates but coming to rather different conclusions and 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....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 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."John, Bishop of Nikiu: The Life of Hypatia. Chronicle 84.87-103 (online version).

Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire states (using words that are repeated almost verbatim in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology:

"Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father's studies; her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus; and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher; and Cyril beheld, with jealous eye, the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her academy. A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts; but the murder of Hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Cyril of Alexandria."

The Catholic Encyclopedia states:

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-Platonism, 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.Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Cyril of Alexandria"

Soldan and HeppeSoldan, W.G. und Heppe, H., Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, Essen 1990. p.82. argue that Hypatia may have been the first famous "witch" punished under Christian authority, as was noted by many church-critical authors who argued that Hypatia's death seems to match the punishment for witchcraft prescribed by the Emperor Constantius II, to be "torn off their bones with iron hooks."

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 theologian who was posthumously canonised by the church, has been accused of complicity in the murderSuda, Upsilon 166 6-8. Of note, this is a 10th century source., although conclusive evidence of this is lacking.

Some authors have used Hypatia's death as a symbol of the "repression of reasoned paganism by irrational religion". Included among these was the astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan, who provided a vivid account of her death and the burning of the Library of Alexandria in his popular science book A Personal Voyage. Earlier writers sharing that view include Voltaire and historian Edward Gibbon. 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. This point is alluded to by Smith, who states "She was accused of too much familiarity with Orestes, prefect of Alexandria,, and the charge spread among the clergy, who took up the notion that she interrupted the friendship of Orestes with their archbishop, 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.

Modern references

The novelist Charles Kingsley wrote the serialized novel Hypatia in 1853, loosely based on the historical Hypatia. The artist Charles William Mitchell, painted a stylized interpretation of Hypatia in 1885; his one and only famous work. It has also been claimed that the woman in Raphael's 1506/1510 work the School of Athens is Hypatia.

In 1986, a quarterly, peer-reviewed scholarly journal entitled Hypatia was launched; published by Indiana University Press. It covers the subject areas of Gender Studies; Sociology & Social Work; Literature & Literary Criticism, and has the stated intent of publishing articles "intended to encourage and communicate many different kinds of feminist philosophy".

References

External links

Resources on Hypatia: booklist, classroom activities

Extensive biography on Hypatia This website takes the position that Hypatia was an astrologer

James Grout: Hypatia, part of the Encyclopædia Romana

"Hipatia" – an organization 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"

Her history and contributions to science

English translations of some of the works referred to above

Hypatia World: website dedicated to the continuation of the work of Hypatia

A counter-point to some of the assertions appearing in Maria Dzielska's Hypatia of Alexandria