Murder of Hypatia

Hypatia, the daughter of the mathematician Theon, taught Neoplatonist philosophy, mathematics and astronomy in Alexandria and was among the most respected figures in the city; all her known pupils were Christians, among them Synesius of Cyrene, later bishop of Ptolemais. She wrote commentaries on the Arithmetica of Diophantus and the Conics of Apollonius and worked with her father on Ptolemy’s Almagest.

In 412 Cyril, the nephew of Theophilus, became bishop of Alexandria and soon came into conflict with the prefect Orestes. In 414, according to the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, after clashes and a massacre of Christians by Jews, Cyril closed the synagogues, confiscated Jewish property and expelled Jews from the city (Socrates implies all were expelled, John of Nikiu only those involved in the massacre); Orestes complained to the emperor. In a riot the prefect was nearly killed, and the monk Ammonius, who had started it and struck him with a stone, was tortured to death on his orders. A rumour spread among the Christians that Hypatia, whom Orestes consulted, was preventing his reconciliation with the bishop. In March 415, during Lent, a mob led by the reader Peter seized her, dragged her into the church of the Caesareum, stripped her and killed her with potsherds (ostraka), then tore her body apart and burned the remains.

Socrates, a contemporary, condemned the murder and put it down to political jealousy; the Neoplatonist Damascius, about a century later, blamed Cyril, while the Egyptian bishop John of Nikiu in the 7th century accused Hypatia of sorcery. There is no direct evidence against Cyril, though many at the time believed that he had ordered the killing, and historians still debate his responsibility. In the autumn of 416 an imperial law took the parabalani, a body of clerics under the bishop’s authority, out of his control, restricted their activities and limited their number to 500. Hypatia’s death did not end Alexandrian scholarship: philosophers such as Hierocles and John Philoponus taught and wrote there for two more centuries. From the Enlightenment onwards — John Toland, Voltaire — writers made her a symbol: for Voltaire, of reason free of dogma; for Charles Kingsley, of “the last of the Hellenes”; in modern times she has become an icon of women’s rights.