In March of 415 AD, in the city of Alexandria, the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy was returning home from her teaching rooms in her carriage. She was a woman in her sixties, the daughter of the mathematician Theon, and the most famous teacher in the eastern Mediterranean. Her students came to Alexandria from as far as Antioch, Damascus, and Carthage. She had lectured on Plato and Aristotle for forty years. She had written commentaries on Diophantus, on Apollonius’s Conics, on Ptolemy’s astronomy. She had counted the city’s prefect, Orestes, among her closest friends and political allies.
A crowd intercepted her carriage on the street outside the church of the Caesareum. The crowd pulled her down from her seat, dragged her into the church, stripped her, and killed her by beating her to death with shards of pottery and roof tile. They then dismembered her body and burned the pieces outside the city walls at a place called Cinaron.
She was Hypatia. She is, by some margin, the most famous murder victim of late antiquity. The basic facts of her death have been agreed upon by the contemporary Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus, the later pagan historian Damascius, and every modern scholar from the eighteenth century to the present. The question that has never been settled is what she died for.
What she did with her life
Hypatia was born around 355 AD in Alexandria, the daughter of Theon — himself the last documented director of the Mouseion, the city’s faded research institute that was the residual descendant of the Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria. Theon taught her mathematics and astronomy himself. She succeeded him as the head of the school sometime in the 390s AD, possibly earlier.
The Neoplatonic school in Alexandria was, by the time Hypatia took it over, a private academy operating out of teaching rooms in the city center. It had no formal connection to the Mouseion (which barely existed anymore) and no formal connection to any state institution. It was funded by tuition and by gifts from wealthy alumni. The curriculum was the standard Neoplatonic program of the late Empire — mathematics, astronomy, music theory, and the philosophy of Plotinus and Porphyry — taught with the assumption that the universe had a rational structure and that the trained human mind could perceive it.
Her students were of mixed religious background. The most prominent who survives in the documentary record is the Christian bishop Synesius of Cyrene, whose correspondence with Hypatia preserves seven of her letters and several detailed references to her teaching. Synesius writes to her about astronomical instruments she has had built for him in Alexandria. He writes to her about his political career. He writes to her about the deaths of his children. The tone is consistently the tone of a former student addressing a teacher he never stopped revering. He calls her mother and philosopher. He addresses several letters simply to The Philosopher, without further identification, on the assumption that there is only one in Alexandria for whom he would not need to use a name.
She did not marry. She did not, by all accounts, take any romantic partner. Damascius, the pagan historian writing about her a century after her death, includes the famously gruesome anecdote of a love-struck student to whom Hypatia, asked to consider his suit, presented her own menstrual cloth as a demonstration that physical desire was beneath the philosophical life. Damascius is the only source for this story; it is probably apocryphal; it is the only piece of biographical detail most modern readers know about her.
The politics of Alexandria, 412–415
By the early fifth century, Alexandria was governed in an uneasy three-way arrangement between the imperial prefect Orestes (representing the Roman emperor), the patriarch Cyril (representing the Christian church), and the city’s traditional civic institutions (Greek, mostly pagan, increasingly squeezed by the other two). Orestes was Christian but politically aligned with the pagan and Jewish elites who had run the city for centuries. Cyril, who had succeeded his uncle Theophilus as patriarch in 412, was pursuing an aggressive program of consolidating church power and pushing back against both the prefect and the city’s non-Christian populations.
The conflict came to a head in 414. A Christian street monk named Hierax was tortured in the prefect’s court for inciting a riot. Cyril’s faction, in retaliation, expelled the entire Jewish community of Alexandria from the city — by force, in a single night. Orestes wrote furiously to the imperial court in Constantinople. A delegation of monks from the Egyptian desert came to Alexandria to support Cyril and, in the course of a street confrontation, threw a rock at Orestes, hitting him on the head. The monk who threw the rock, Ammonius, was arrested and tortured to death by the prefect’s guards. Cyril attempted to canonize Ammonius as a martyr. The imperial court refused.
This was the political situation in March 415 AD.
Hypatia, in this configuration, was firmly on Orestes’s side. She was the visible intellectual symbol of the prefect’s faction — pagan, learned, aristocratic, the philosophical embodiment of the alliance between the imperial bureaucracy and the city’s old Greek elite. Cyril’s faction, accordingly, had begun by late 414 to spread the rumor that Hypatia was the reason Orestes refused to reconcile with the patriarch. She was the witch, the obstacle, the demon advising the prefect. The rumor circulated, by all contemporary accounts, in the streets and in the churches.
The mob that killed her in March 415 was led, according to Socrates Scholasticus, by a man named Peter the Reader — a low-ranking church functionary attached to the patriarchate. Socrates is explicit about the political motive. He says, in a passage of cold precision unusual for a Christian historian writing about a pagan victim:
“Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort. And this affair brought no small disgrace, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church.”
The historian was writing perhaps twenty years after the murder, in Constantinople, with no political reason to defend Hypatia. His judgment is the closest thing to a contemporary verdict the murder has.
What followed
Cyril remained patriarch of Alexandria for another thirty years. He was never prosecuted for Hypatia’s death. He went on to write a series of substantial theological works, to lead the imperial church through the doctrinal disputes of the early 430s, and to be canonized after his death as a Doctor of the Church. He is venerated in the Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, and Anglican traditions. There is a feast day. The standard biographical entries on him, in church reference works through the early twentieth century, did not mention Hypatia.
Orestes left Alexandria within months of the murder and disappears from the historical record. We do not know where he went or what became of him.
The Neoplatonic school in Alexandria continued under successor heads — Hierocles, then Ammonius, then Olympiodorus — for another century and a half. It produced significant work. It taught Christian and pagan students together. It was finally closed by the emperor Justinian in 529 AD, along with the school in Athens, as part of his program of standardizing Christian doctrine across the empire. The closure marks, in most modern accounts, the end of the classical philosophical tradition.
Hypatia’s writings have not survived. She was prolific — Damascius lists her major works — and the manuscripts must have been in the school’s library, copies of which would have been kept by her students and by their students after them. None of these copies survived the conversions, the closures, and the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642. We know what she wrote about because we have lists of titles in later authors. We do not have a single line of text known to be hers.
What survives is one mathematical commentary, attributed to her father Theon, that is now believed by some modern scholars (on stylistic grounds) to be Hypatia’s work edited under her father’s name. We are not certain. The attribution debate has been going on for two hundred years.
The site of the Caesareum is now a public square in modern Alexandria with no commemorative marker. The location of Cinaron — where her body was burned — is not known. There is no surviving tomb. There is no surviving relic. The only physical trace she may have left is the disputed mathematical commentary.
And one letter, from her former student Synesius of Cyrene, dated to about 413 AD, asking her to please send him by the next courier the bronze astronomical instrument she had been making for him. The instrument is described in detail. It does not survive either.