Hypatia of Alexandria sits alongside Galileo and Giordano Bruno as something of a historical trinity in anti-theistic mythology. She is depicted as a martyr of science and reason, wickedly murdered by religious fanatics, a symbol of lost learning and of the beginning of the Dark Ages. But the distorted story that makes up her modern myth bears little resemblance to actual history and ignores the key contexts for both her life and her assassination.

Ever since her violent death in 415 AD Hypatia of Alexandria has been used as a symbol, though what she has symbolised has changed several times. For John Toland (1670-1722) she represented proof of his argument that women could be men’s intellectual equals. Voltaire depicted her as a champion of the literary arts, claiming in 1772 that she was killed because she dared to teach Homer and Plato. In the nineteenth century several novels about her romanticised her story still further, with Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) depicting her as a superior European rising above the decadence and decline of her oriental environment before being murdered by swarthy eastern degenerates.

But the depiction of her that is most pervasive currently is one of a rationalist astronomer and mathematician, foully murdered by Christian fanatics, with her tragic and violent death marking the end of the enlightened and tolerant Classical world and a descent into Medieval superstition and ignorance. This is based largely on superficial and erroneous versions of her story: perhaps most notably that given by Carl Sagan in his influential 1981 TV documentary series Cosmos and, more recently, the 2009 biopic Agora by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Rachel Wiesz as the ill-fated philosopher.

This is the version of her myth that has been seized upon with glee by anti-theists and, along with the myths around the Great Library of Alexandria and the ones about Christians destroying most ancient science and learning, forms a meta-narrative that is the core of the persistent “Conflict Thesis” view of history that goes unquestioned in many atheist circles.

This popular version of the Hypatia story is summarised by Sagan in Cosmos. After rehearsing a series of myths and distortions about the Great Library of Alexandria (see here for details) he goes on to tell a strange version of the tale of its destruction:

Let me tell you about the end. It’s a story about the last scientist to work in this place. A mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and head of the school of Neo-Platonic philosophy in Alexandria. That’s an extraordinary range of accomplishments for any individual, in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in this city in the year 370 AD.

This was a time when women had essentially no options. They were considered property. Nevertheless, Hypatia was able to move freely, unself-consciously through traditional male domains. By all accounts she was a great beauty. And although she had many suitors, she had no interest in marriage.

The Alexandria of Hypatia’s time, by then long under Roman rule, was a city in grave conflict. Slavery, the cancer of the ancient world, had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the focus, at the epicenter of mighty social forces. Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, despised her: in part because of her close friendship with a Roman governor, but also because what she symbolized: she was a symbol of learning and science which were largely identified by the early church with paganism.

In great personal danger Hypatia continued to teach and to publish, until in the year 415 AD, on her way to work, she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s followers. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and flayed her flesh from her bones with abalone shells. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.

The glory you see around me is nothing but a memory. It does not exist. The last remains of the library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death.

This account is riddled with nonsense, as we will see. But it was the inspiration for Amenábar’s film, which essentially tells the same story. Amenábar and his co-screenwriter Mateo Gil at least did a little more research than Sagan and so corrected a few of his errors. That aside, their story still has Hypatia somehow associated with the Great Library (or rather its sub-library in the Serapeum), though they show it being destroyed earlier in her life rather than, as Sagan claims, as a consequence of her death. But Agora goes much further in depicting Hypatia as a free-thinker who is probably an atheist. At one point, confronted with the accusation that she is without any religion (“someone who, admittedly, believes in absolutely nothing”) Hypatia replies, rather vaguely, “I believe in philosophy”. Later the movie has Cyril describe her as “a woman who has declared, in public, her ungodliness”.

Amenábar also amplifies the tragedy of her death by depicting her discovering heliocentrism and Keplerian elliptical orbits. Despite this being a total invention by the screenwriters, publicity for the movie included vox pops in European cities where people were asked who first came up with these concepts and had them being (understandably) surprised when “informed” that it was Hypatia. Since the movie’s release this “fact” has now begun to appear in popular articles and online discussions about Hypatia. This is how pseudo historical myths take hold.

Like much New Atheist bad history, the myths perpetuated and added to by Sagan and Amenábar can ultimately be traced back to one of Edward Gibbon’s more polemical anti-Christian passages:

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 a jealous eye, the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her academy.

A rumour was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the praefect 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.

(Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 47, 1776)

Gibbon then goes on to detail the illustrious later career of the wicked bishop Cyril and his progress to sainthood, noting tartly “[s]uperstition, perhaps, would more gently expiate the blood of a virgin than the banishment of a saint”. This passage contains most of the key elements that have formed the hagiography of Hypatia as a martyr of science and learning savagely murdered by ignorant Christian fanatics. Unsurprisingly, the Gibbonian narrative boosted by Sagan and Agora is a mainstay of anti-theist folklore: a story that gets repeated with little to no effort at checking how much of it is true. The key elements tend to include:

• Hypatia was a free-thinker, sceptic and probably an atheist who opposed religion
• Hypatia was a significant scientist, astronomer and mathematician
• She was the inventor of the astrolabe and the hydroscope
• She was the head of the “School of Neoplatonic Philosophy” in Alexandria
• She was associated with the Great Library of Alexandria or even its last Librarian
• She was young and very beautiful
• She was murdered out of a hatred for her learning
• Her death brought the intellectual tradition of Alexandria to an end and marks the end of Classical civilisation and the beginning of the Dark Ages.

A typical example of the results of this distorted mythic version of her story is a 2019 blog article on Godzooks: The Faith in Facts Blog by Rick Snedecker. Working from some quotes by Hypatia that he found on the internet, Snedecker warmed to the theme of Hypatia as a sceptic about religion. In the rather awkwardly-titled blog article “Religious doubt is far older than even antiquity’s doomed Hypatia”, he begins with this quote as evidence of her scepticism of religion:

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.”

Snedecker assures his readers that “Hypatia is important because many people erroneously think religious doubt, skepticism and atheism are a mostly modern phenomena” and cites Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History (2004) saying Hypatia was the “‘last secular philosopher of antiquity’ and a martyr, in part, of reason at the hands of religious zealotry”. He goes on to give a typically Gibbonian version of the death of Hypatia and to draw some moral lessons from it about modern American politics.

The main problem here is that none of Hypatia’s writings survive and no ancient source contains this alleged “quote” or anything like it. So where did this supposed “quote” come from? The answer is that it was invented in 1908 by the American writer, soap-salesman and eccentric Elbert Hubbard. In a series of educational books for children called Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Teachers, Hubbard chose Hypatia as one of his “great teachers” but was stymied by the awkward fact that we actually have none of Hypatia’s writings or teachings, making it rather hard to present her as “great”. He solved this problem by simply making some teachings up, including the wise words above.

In a classic case of confirmation bias, Snedecker took this suspiciously modern-sounding “quote” as evidence for what he wanted to be true and did not bother to actually track it to its source. He adjusted his article slightly when he was alerted to his mistake, saying that it was only “attributed” to Hypatia and adding the words “likely apocryphally”. But he did not bother to correct the sentiment or educate himself on whether Hypatia was actually any kind of doubter of religion at all.

Snedecker is not the only atheist blogger who has used this fake quote. Donald Prothero, a Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, wrote a glowing review of the movie Agora on Skepticblog in 2012. As well as being riddled with other historical howlers, he too took the invented Hubbard “quote” at face value and did not bother to check it. These particular “skeptics” are not very good at being sceptical, when it suits their agendas.

Of course, the real Hypatia was very different to the mythic version beloved by the current crop of anti-theistic activists.

Hypatia – Background, Education and Scholarship

Hypatia came from a rich family that formed part of Alexandria’s civic elite. This conservative ruling and intellectual class lived in the upper city and formed what Edward J. Watts calls the “Alexandrian garden and townhouse set” (Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, Oxford, 2017, p. 18) and understanding this background is essential to any real grasp of her life and, especially, her dramatic death. This is because, despite the modern obsession with highlighting the religious elements in her story, it is actually one of social and political classes clashing in the context of massive changes in late Roman society. As Watts puts it:

Historians writing about Hypatia have tended to focus on fourth- and fifth-century Alexandrian religious dynamics, but spatial and socioeconomic divisions mattered far more than religious differences to Hypatia’s contemporaries. Most fourth- and fifth-century Alexandrians and pagans did not understand religious differences in the same way that modern religious communities do. They did not see stark divisions between Christians and pagans and would not have naturally been hostile toward people with different beliefs.

(Wats, pp. 17-18)

So mapping modern conceptions of religion that would have been alien to Hypatia’s world onto our sources while ignoring the social and economic divisions that were integral to Alexandria in her period will inevitably lead to a misunderstanding of who she was and why she died.

For 700 years the Greek-speaking elite that ruled Alexandria had benefited from the city’s riches thanks to its status as one of the great trading ports of the ancient world. Founded by Alexander the Great, it had been one of a network of Hellenic cities in the eastern Mediterranean for centuries before being annexed by the Romans and becoming a key trading and export hub, linking the Roman Empire to both the Nile and the Red Sea and the wider world beyond.

Hypatia’s ruling class presided over one of the largest cities of the Roman world, with somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people crammed into its ten square miles. Its inhabitants were mostly Greek or Coptic-speaking, but with a large community of Jews in its Delta quarter and a constant influx of immigrants from rural areas and other parts of the eastern Empire. Most of these people lived in cramped and fairly squalid apartments and crowded housing in the quarters that made up the lower city. But Hypatia came from a more luxurious and rarefied world: one that rarely thought about the thousands of labourers and beggars who they passed if their litters and carriages took them through the streets where the bulk of the population lived.

We know she was the daughter of Theon (c. 335- c. 405), a philosopher and mathematician who edited several important mathematical works. But ancient scholars did not conform to modern ideas of specialisation in particular disciplines. Astronomy was a branch of mathematics and astrology was an extension of both and so Theon studied all three. He was also a poet and he wrote on divination and auspices, including a (lost) work entitled On Signs and the Examination of Birds and the Croaking of Ravens. Interestingly, none of the sceptics and atheists who hold him up as the source of Hypatia’s alleged rationalism and scepticism seem aware of this particular element of her father’s studies. He was later referred to as “the man from the Mouseion”, but the original Mouseion with its famous Great Library had ceased to exist in the previous century, so this could be a reference to a later, refounded institution, a name for his private school or it may simply be a euphemism for a particularly renowned scholar. It is clear that it was he who enabled his daughter to get an education of a kind few women of the time were able to obtain.

Elite education in the late Roman world followed a well-established curriculum. It began early, with a child learning to read and write from around the age of five. This is where most noble girls’ education ceased, though some could go on with their male counterparts to study grammar and poetry from the age of around twelve or even go on to study rhetoric, debating and public speaking at about fifteen. This was where most boys’ education ended, since it prepared them to practice law as well as giving them the grounding to enter the ranks of the large administrative class that kept the Late Roman Empire running. Other noble boys who were less academically gifted would have spent more time at the gymnasium, with a view to a military career.

A few, however, would have progressed to higher studies in logic, mathematics and philosophy; which included mathematics’ sub-branch, astronomy. Some could then have specialised in medicine. Even the very few girls who had progressed beyond grammar to study rhetoric would generally not advance to this higher level – most of them would have married in their mid-teens and have households and children to concern them. But as the daughter of an established philosophical scholar, Hypatia seems to have progressed naturally to study in her father’s salon with his other pupils. And as a member of an elite family who did not need to marry for wealth or connections, she could devote her late teens and early twenties to higher study. Hypatia famously never married, which seems to have been partly as a result of her ascetic Neoplatonic philosophical beliefs but was probably also simply because she did not need to.

Hypatia was clearly a brilliant student and seems to have moved from being her father’s pupil to becoming his colleague, teaching alongside him. She also collaborated with him in his astronomical and mathematical work. A heading in Theon’s thirteen-book commentary on Ptolemy’s Almagest (or the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis as it was known at the time) reads “Commentary by Theon of Alexandria on Book Three of Ptolemy’s [work], an edition revised by my daughter Hypatia, the philosopher”. Alan Cameron argues that all of the following ten books of the Almagest that Theon uses were edited by Hypatia, noting that the method of long division used in Books 3-13 differs from that used in Books 1-2 (see Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy, 37-80, Oxford, 2016, p. 191). Cameron also makes a strong case that she also edited the surviving text of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables – an immensely significant work for centuries to come given that it tabulated all the data needed to compute the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets, the rising and setting of the stars, and eclipses of the Sun and Moon.

The tenth century AD Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda credits her with three main scholarly works: a commentary on the Conic Sections of the third-century BC scholar Apollonius of Perga, one on the Handy Tables of Ptolemy, and a third on the Arithmetica of the second to third century AD mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria. Her commentaries have been lost, but we have portions of the works of Apollonius and Diophantus that she studied and so have some idea of her level of sophisticated learning. While we have no evidence of her writing any original work herself, this should not give the impression that her scholarship was second rate – many scholars in her period focused on editing and commenting on earlier works and these commentaries usually included original insights. That said, the significance of her contributions to mathematics and astronomy are often wildly overstated: she was a renowned scholar and clearly did sophisticated work, but she should not be presented as any kind of great innovator.

Among the more grandiose claims made for her in popular works is the assertion that she invented various scientific instruments. For example, this spectacularly stupid article on the World History website breathlessly assures its readers that “Hypatia invented the plane astrolabe, the graduated brass hydrometer, and the hydroscope”. This is complete nonsense. To begin with, astrolabes pre-date Hypatia’s time by at least 500 years. We have a surviving letter by one of Hypatia’s students, Synesius, that mentions her in connection with an astrolabe, but it does not claim she invented anything. Writing to Paeonius, a military official in Constantinople who may have previously been the military comes of Alexandria, Synesius presents him with an astrolabe and says “[This astrolabe] is a work of my own devising, including all that she, my most revered teacher [i.e. Hypatia], helped to contribute, and it was executed by the best hand to be found in our country in the art of the silversmith.” He is clearly crediting his training in mathematics and astronomy by Hypatia for his ability to create this complex instrument, but he does not claim she somehow invented astrolabes.

Similarly, one of Synesius’ letters to Hypatia asks her to send him a hydroscope. By this stage Synesius was no longer living in Alexandria, having taken up the position of bishop of Ptolemais in Lybia. It seems his new city did not have artisans capable of making such a technical instrument and so he asks his former teacher to send him one from the much larger city of Alexandria. But given he goes to some lengths to explain what a hydroscope is and how it works, it is fairly clear he is not writing to the instrument’s inventor. And a “hydrometer” is simply another name for a hydroscope.

Even more absurd is the depiction in the movie Agora of Hypatia as a radical innovator in astronomy who rejected geocentrism, embraced a heliocentric cosmology and even discovered the planets have elliptical orbits. This is total fantasy. We have some references to Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC) presenting some kind of early heliocentrism, though we have no idea how speculative or how astronomically-based his ideas were. We do know they were rejected centuries before Hypatia was born. As for elliptical orbits, the Greek devotion to the idea that a circle was a “noble” form was so strong that even in Kepler’s time great thinkers could not bring themselves to accept the lop-sided and inelegant image his model presented – Galileo rejected the Keplerian model out of hand. That the daughter of a man who devoted his life to the study of Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmos and who probably edited a substantial part of Ptolemy’s great opus on the subject herself would somehow be a heliocentrist is totally ludicrous. Unfortunately, thanks to Agora, this fantasy is now being added to the list of silly myths around Hypatia.

Hypatia was an excellent scholar and renowned for her learning, but she was not a great innovator and did not invent anything that we know of.

Hypatia and Neoplatonism

Popular versions of the story of Hypatia tend to emphasise her mathematics and astronomy, partly because we understand and can relate to these disciplines, but mainly because it sets up the climax of the “rationalist murdered by ignorant religious fanatics” story. That she was a philosopher of a school of Neoplatonism is either not mentioned or mentioned without much elaboration. If her philosophy is referred to at all, we are often told that she was “the head of the Neoplatonic School in Alexandria”, which summons up an image of a modern-style institution, with buildings and administrators and Hypatia as some kind of official dean or chancellor. It was nothing like that.

A “school” in this period was a very private affair: a fairly informal group of students who studied under a respected teacher. It was usually an invitation-only group and most such schools met in the teacher’s home, though meeting in public spaces was also reasonably common. Members of this kind of scholarly salon were close-knit, devoted to each other and to their master (or mistress, in Hypatia’s case) and maintained a strong bond long after they went their separate ways. We see evidence of this close, almost secretive, ongoing devotion in the letters of Synesius; both those to Hypatia herself and others to his fellow former students. And there were many such “schools” – about as many as there were philosophers prominent enough to attract disciples. There were several in Alexandria and several others of them were also Neoplatonist.

Hypatia most likely inherited students from her father and her school was probably a continuation of his. Under her tutelage, this exclusive group won wide renown and Socrates Scholasticus says “many [students] came from a distance to receive her instructions” (Ecclesiastical History, VII.15), indicating that her fame reached well beyond Alexandria. What many modern popular writers do not seem to grasp is that she did not study and teach Neoplatonic philosophy as well as mathematics and astronomy. Rather, she taught mathematics and astronomy because she was a Neoplatonic philosopher.

Neoplatonism developed out of Plato’s tradition of Greek philosophy in the third century AD, based largely on the teachings of Plotinus (c. 204-270 AD). It was to have a long history and undergo many branchings and changes over the centuries, including becoming highly influential on Christian thought to the extent that it formed something of a philosophical foundation for early Christianity. It is not hard to see why. Plotinus developed Plato’s theory of eternal forms into a complex metaphysical system whereby there were three eternal cosmic principles underlying all reality: “the One”, “the Intellect” and “the Soul”. In this system, the ultimate principle from which everything else proceeds is “the One”, also called “the Good” or “the Father”, which is utterly transcendent, beyond all being and non-being and “prior to all existents”.

Other principles emanate from “the One”, the first of which is “the Intellect” or more properly “Nous”, which is the highest sphere accessible to the human mind. It is both the perfect image of “the One” and also the archetype of all existing things. Emanating from “the Intellect” is the “World Soul”, which stands between the “the Intellect” and the material and phenomenological world. It also embraces and includes all individual souls, which by study and contemplation can, via the “World Soul”, be informed by “the Intellect” and so attain enlightenment with the infinite “One”. Those who do not do this lose themselves in the material world and the finite and so are never happy or fulfilled in the way the philosophically enlightened are.

This rather mystical system bears some resemblance to Indian philosophy and certainly lent itself to religious ideas. On one hand it was developed in the third to fourth century by Iamblicus (c. 245- c. 325 AD) into an intensely ritualised system whereby ceremonies, hymns, magical formulae and devotion to the gods helped mediate between the believer and the transcendent cosmic principles. At around the same time Christian thinkers found Neoplatonism’s three cosmic principles highly compatible with their theological ideas about the Trinity and the theme of the contrast between the spiritual and the material world. This is why we find several Christians among Hypatia’s students, including at least two future bishops.

Hypatia seems to have rejected the newer Iamblichan branch of Neoplatonism and stuck to the more established and conservative tradition of Plotinus. Unlike Iamblichus’ new school, her philosophy was not necessarily connected to any particular religious beliefs and exactly what her own beliefs were is unclear, though she does not seem to have been a Christian despite being a teacher of several scholars who were. But the idea that she was some kind of modern-style rationalist or even an atheist is fairly absurd. For her, the study of philosophy aimed at enlightenment via the contemplation of “the One” via “the Intellect” and the “World Soul”. Mathematics was part of this not for its own sake, but as a way to elevate the mind beyond the material and into the mystical abstract. Astronomy and astrology served the same function, as branches of mathematics.

So it should be clear that a modern conception of Hypatia as a mathematician or astronomer in any modern understanding of those terms is completely wrong. Exactly how removed her studies were from our current conceptions of an academic in those fields becomes clearer when it is noted that more (to us) esoteric fields were part of her teaching. As already mentioned, her father wrote a book on auspices – the practice of reading omens from watching the behaviour of birds. Her student Synesius wrote a short treatise on the interpretation of dreams called De insomniis, which he sent to Hypatia for her comment. He also drew on the Chaldean Oracles and on mystical Hermetic writings. All this means that, from what we can understand about her teachings and her school, she was nothing like the modern fantasies of a rationalist and atheist devoted to pure mathematics and astronomy for their own sake. Any of the modern anti-theists who imagine this would actually find Hypatia’s mystical teachings quite bizarre.

Street Politics in Ancient Alexandria

One thing ancient sources agreed on about Hypatia’s Alexandria was that its citizens were excitable, passionate about the issues of the day and prone to sorting them out in the streets, often with savage violence. Writing of the murder of the Christian patriarch Proterius in 457 AD, Evagrius Scholasticus observes:

The people [of Alexandria] in general are an inflammable material, and allow very trivial pretexts to foment the flame of commotion … it is said that everyone who is so disposed may, by employing any casual circumstance as a means of excitement, inspire the city with a frenzy of sedition and hurry the populace in whatever direction and against whomsoever he chooses.

(Ecclesiastical History, II.8)

Evagrius was invoking something of a cliche here, given that writers had been saying this about the Alexandrian mob for centuries. Others called them “wholly light-minded, unstable, most seditious”, or “lawless [and] incensed” or “an irritable race” in a city “half-crazed in the riots of her frantic populace”.

Like many cliches, this one had an element of truth to it. In 203 BC the people of the city rose up and killed Agathocles, the scheming and murderous regent of the young Ptolemy V Epiphanes, literally tearing him limb from limb. Alexandria had the distinction of being the site of one of the first pogroms against Jews, with a massacre of protesting Jews there in the city amphitheatre in 66 AD, followed by a larger massacre of the wider Jewish population by Roman troops. Riots between Jews and Greeks in the city had broken out earlier, in 39 AD, and then again in 40 AD, killing hundreds. The unpopular Arian Christian patriarch George of Cappadocia was kicked to death by an angry mob in 361 AD. As mentioned above, the later patriarch, Proterius, met a similar grisly fate in 457 AD.

Riots and violent street politics were well known in other ancient cities, but Alexandria appears to have been particularly divided along class lines. Christopher Haas’ excellent monograph, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (John Hopkins, 1997) details how “[u]rban society in late antique Alexandria appears to have been fundamentally two-tiered” (p. 51), with a sharp division between the small number of elite honestiores and the poor humiliores who made up the vast bulk of the population. Haas argues that there is little sign of any kind of substantial middle class as a social and political buffer between these two.

The upper class was based on old money – centuries old in many cases – and extensive property holdings around the city and across the Diocese of Egypt generally. They also held almost all of the city’s political power through their dominance of the civic magistracies. They sat on the boulē, or city council, shared other political offices among themselves and were part of the Empire-wide network of patrons, clients and Imperial administrators. They were Greek-speaking, mostly of Greek ethnicity, usually well educated, politically conservative and very rich. This was the social class of Hypatia and her father. They tended to live in the upper city closer to the harbour and by the late fourth century they were mostly Christian, though some continued to practice pagan rites.

Most of the population lived in the crowded lower city or the outer suburbs outside the city walls. They were more ethnically diverse, but were mainly Coptic-speaking labourers and artisans. They organised themselves into a myriad of collegia – associations for mutual support and protection. Many of these were trade or craft guilds, but others were religious societies, drinking clubs or sporting associations. The collegia had established organisational structures, with recognised official leaders and elders. There was also something of a recognised hierarchy among them, with certain collegia being more esteemed and politically powerful than others. And they had their political allegiances as well, which meant it helped members of the city’s ruling elite to cultivate their favour and mobilise them when it helped them.

Christianity established itself in Alexandria very early, traditionally tracing their patriarchate there to the evangelist, Mark. The early Christian community would have been a collegium among many others: providing financial aid to members, settling disputes, providing burial for paupers and so on, much like the other collegia. Christianity’s marginal status politically in the third century, with its periodic official persecutions, meant the sect had to look after itself even more than other collegial groups, with the Patriarch becoming a significant figure in a growing faith within the city. With the conversion of Constantine, the end of persecution and increasing Imperial favour shown to Christianity, these bishops and patriarchs gained even greater power and authority, but this began to cause problems.

From about 381 AD Alexandria was the administrative capital of the Diocese of Egypt, which stretched from Libya to the shores of the Red Sea. The Diocese was ruled by an imperially-appointed prefectus augustalis rather than an ordinary vicarius, as an acknowledgement of the historical importance of Egypt in the Roman Empire. The military commander in the Diocese was the comes limitis Aegypti, who held great power in his own right, sometimes rivalling that of the prefect. The prefects of Alexandria were part of the network of patronage and preferment that made up the late Roman Imperial administration, which meant they were either members of the Alexandrian city elite or people of a similar class from other cities in the Empire.

But with the change in the status of Christianity from marginalised cult to Imperially-favoured religion and, eventually, the state religion of the Empire, the question of where bishops like the Patriarch of Alexandria fitted into the social and political hierarchy became a pressing one. They were no longer just another leader of a prominent collegium, but commanded great power in the city, especially among the poorer class in the lower city and beyond the walls. Those patriarchs who failed to gain the support of the mob could have short careers, as George of Cappadocia found in 361 AD. But in 412 AD a new bishop became patriarch in the face of elite opposition, and quickly proceeded to harness that popular support to further his agendas and increase his authority in the city. And this is what sparked the political turmoil that claimed Hypatia’s life.

The previous patriarch had been Theophilus, who had held the See of St Mark for 28 years. Early in his reign Christians and pagans had clashed in a conflict that led to pagan militants occupying the great temple of Serapis, which was then demolished as part of the negotiated end of the siege of the temple that followed – an event that forms part of the myths around the Great Library of Alexandria. But on the whole Theophilus managed the political tumults of the city and was on good relations with its ruling elite. He also seems to have also been on good terms with Hypatia, who by the end of his reign was a prominent public figure in the city. Theophilus presided over the wedding of Hypatia’s former student Synesius and then later supported his elevation to the bishopric of Ptolemais.

Theophilus’ health went into a long decline and his protege and maternal nephew Cyril began to position himself as his uncle’s successor before the old patriarch’s death in late 412 AD. But an archdeacon Timotheus had the support of the richer citizens and – this being Alexandria – the dispute led to yet more rioting. Despite Timotheus having some very powerful backers, including the city’s military commander, the comes limitis Aegypti Abundantius, Cyril’s popular support from the mobs of the lower city meant he prevailed.

Cyril did not waste any time in making use of his popular support. It seems the sect of the Novatians – Christians who took a hard line on refusing the readmission of idolators and other sinners to the Church – had backed Timotheus, so Cyril turned on them. He shut up their churches, stripped them of vessels and ornaments and persecuted their leader, Theopemptus. Flushed by this early success, Cyril was soon to turn his attention to another rival force in the city.

The trouble began with what seems something fairly innocuous – dancing. Public dancing exhibitions were a popular entertainment in Alexandria and many other cities and they often drew large crowds. The Jewish community in Alexandria was especially fond of this entertainment and engaged in it in large numbers on their Sabbath, with the moralist historian Socrates Scholasticus observing that this meant “disorder [was] almost invariably produced”. The prefectus augustalis of the city, Orestes, decided these events needed to be more closely regulated and so had an edict to this effect read in the theatre. One of Cyril’s supporters, a certain Hierax, was rather too enthusiastic in his cheering and applause at this announcement, causing the Jews in the theatre to shout he was there simply to stir up animosity. Orestes was already no fan of Cyril and his militant followers, so he had Hierax seized and, according to Socrates, “publicly subjected him to the torture in the theatre”.

Far from settling things down, this action triggered a sequence of violence. An angry Cyril had a fiery meeting with the leaders of the Jews. This inflamed things further and led to an organised large scale attack on Christians by a mob of Jews. They set up an ambush in the streets:

Having agreed that each one of them should wear a ring on his finger made of the bark of a palm branch, for the sake of mutual recognition, they determined to make a nightly attack on the Christians. They therefore sent persons into the streets to raise an outcry that the church named after Alexander was on fire. Thus many Christians on hearing this ran out, some from one direction and some from another, in great anxiety to save their church. The Jews immediately fell upon and slew them; readily distinguishing each other by their rings.

(Socrates Scholasticus,VII.13)

Cyril quickly struck back. He turned on the city’s Jewish quarter “accompanied by an immense crowd of people”, sacked its synagogues and, according to Socrates, forcefully expelled the whole Jewish population from the city. This cannot be strictly true, since we know of many Jews in the city from subsequent references, but even allowing for exaggeration by a hostile source (Socrates was a Novatian and no fan of Cyril), the scale of this pogrom must have been huge and included wholesale looting of Jewish property.

The prefect Orestes was outraged at Cyril’s actions. Socrates tells us that even before this “Orestes had long regarded with jealousy the growing power of the bishops, because they encroached on the jurisdiction of the authorities appointed by the emperor”, so this blatant challenge to the authority of the prefect could not be ignored. Both Orestes and Cyril petitioned the emperor and a political stand-off ensued. Cyril tried to find a reconciliation with his fellow Christian, Orestes: “Cyril extended toward him the book of gospels, believing that respect for religion would induce him to lay aside his resentment … however, even this had no pacific effect on the prefect”. Something that was very important to Orestes’ class was at stake – the hierarchy of political authority in the city. And as a member of the ruling elite, Orestes was not in the mood for compromise with a radical upstart backed by a mob from the lower city. The result was soon to be more violence.

Assassination

As already noted, by this stage Hypatia was a prominent figure in the city. Recognised major philosophers had long been seen as important in civic life as a kind of neutral and moderating force; figures who by their learning and detachment from the world made impartial and wise advisers to rulers and administrators. At least, that was the theory. But in Hypatia’s case the sources agree that it worked in practice. Our most contemporary source, the Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus, was lavish in his praise for her prudence and the respect she commanded:

On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in 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.

(Ecclesiastical History, VII.13)

The pagan Damascius was from a rival school of Neoplatonism and so was rather less fulsome about her philosophical status. But, writing a century after Socrates, he gave a similar assessment of the respect she commanded in Alexandria’s affairs:

Because she was skilled and articulate in her speech and wise and politically virtuous in her actions, the city seemingly loved her and particularly prostrated itself before her, and the governors always greeted her first when they came into the city.

(Life of Isidorus, 43E)

In this capacity as a public philosopher and advisor to the prefect, Socrates tells us she had “frequent interviews with Orestes”. She also belonged to the same social and political class as the prefect and is likely to have been more aligned to him politically than to a radical like Cyril. So it is hardly surprising that she was seen as associated with the prefect in the clashes that followed.

With their petitions to the emperor in far off Constantinople still awaiting a response, Orestes and Cyril were in a stalemate, so Cyril decided to strengthen his position by calling in allies from outside the city. As patriarch of the whole diocese, he had the support of the monks in the ascetic communities in the Nitrian desert, south-west of the city. These were hard-bitten, ferociously devout Christians who lived a tough life of near constant penance and prayer – far more fanatical, tough, young and passionate than the kind of quiet, gentle and elderly contemplative that the word “monk” conjures up today. Socrates reports that “they were of a very fiery disposition” and that “about five hundred of them” left their desert cells and entered the city in noisy support of their patriarch.

Exactly what Cyril intended these new allies to achieve is not clear, but the result was yet more violence. The militant monks encountered Orestes in the streets and a demonstration turned into a riot. A monk called Ammonius threw a stone at the prefect’s head, wounding him. Seeing him fall with blood streaming from his wound, most of Orestes’ guards fled, but the people of the city surrounded the prefect, fought off the rioting monks, seized Ammonius and rescued Orestes. Angered at the violence against him, Orestes had Ammonius tortured so severely that the monk died. And, of course, this ratcheted up the tensions still further.

Cyril decided to back the monks’ actions, sent another petition to the emperor and then took to the pulpit to declare Ammonius nothing less than a martyr for the faith. But Socrates tells us this gambit backfired.:

[T]he more sober-minded, although Christians, did not accept Cyril’s prejudiced estimate of him; for they well knew that he had suffered the punishment due to his rashness, and that he had not lost his life under the torture because he would not deny Christ

(Ecclesiastical History, VII.14)

It should be noted here that virtually everyone involved in this spiralling political conflict was a Christian. Orestes had been baptised by the Patriarch of Constantinople and ruled a city with a majority Christian population. This means the crowd that rescued him from the rioting Nitrian monks were also Christians. And Cyril’s attempt to turn Ammonius into a martyr failed because it was rejected by most Christians – “the more sober-minded”. The dispute was not one with Christians on one side and non-Christians on the other; it was between the lower class radicals who supported the politically belligerent patriarch and more conservative citizens who largely preferred the status quo and so supported the prefect.

The failure of Cyril’s martyrdom gambit left his followers at a disadvantage in the conflict. Tensions had now risen to the point where openly attacking the prefect would come dangerously close to treason. So his more radical supporters, possibly quite by chance, found a new target for their frustration. Since Hypatia was an adviser to the prefect, rumours began to circulate that she was preventing any reconciliation with Cyril, and she became the focus of their ire:

Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid [Hypatia] returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Cæsareum, 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.

(Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

Socrates Scholasticus’ account is the closest in time to the events and clearly states that Hypatia “fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed”. Despite being no fan of Cyril, he does not attribute her assassination to his instigation, though he makes it clear that it happened because of his political conflict with the prefect.

The later pagan writer, Damascius, on the other hand does put the blame squarely on Cyril in his account:

[O]ne day, Cyril, bishop of the opposition sect, was passing by Hypatia’s house, and he saw a great crowd of people and horses in front of her door. Some were arriving, some departing, and others standing around. When he asked why there was a crowd there and what all the mess was about, he was told by her followers that it was the house of Hypatia the philosopher and she was about to greet them.

When Cyril learned this he was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder and in the worst form he could imagine. For when Hypatia went out of her house, in her accustomed manner, a throng of merciless and ferocious men who feared neither divine punishment nor human revenge, attacked and cut her down, thus committing an outrageous and disgraceful deed against their fatherland.

(Life of Isidorus, 43E)

It suited Damascius’ purposes to make the Christian bishop into the murderous villain of the story and polemicists from Gibbon onward have been happy to accept his word on this. But modern historians are less convinced. Socrates was a hostile source regarding Cyril and had good reason to note Cyril’s guilt on this in his much earlier account, but he does not. Edward Watts argues that mobs were used to intimidate and noisily demonstrate in ancient street politics, but deliberate murders were rare even in tumultuous Alexandria – they only tended to happen when things got out of hand and were rarely the deliberate object of the exercise (see Watts, pp. 115-116).

Whether he ordered the killing or not, Cyril certainly benefited from its aftermath. The city was outraged at the murder, the emperor condemned it and the violence that proceeded it and Orestes was either recalled or requested his recall to Constantinople. Cyril, on the other hand, remained in place and Damascius hints that he had powerful allies in the Imperial court – he mentions one named Aedisius – who convinced the emperor not to act further in retaliation against the patriarch. So as a result of Hypatia’s brutal lynching, whether it was planned or spontaneous, Cyril went from a losing position in the conflict with Orestes to effectively winning.

The Making of a Myth

Hypatia’s death began to be used to advance various narratives and agendas almost immediately. For Socrates, it was evidence of the ambition and greed for power of Cyril – the man who had persecuted Socrates’ Novatian sect. Damascius also made Cyril the villain, directly stating he orchestrated the murder. But Cyril went on to be something of a hero in both Orthodox and Coptic Christianity, so it is perhaps not surprising that about 200 years after the murder we find John, Bishop of Nikiû in the Nile Delta, depicting Hypatia as the pagan villainess who was rightly brought down by the righteous patriarch:

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 honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom

…. And thereafter a multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate …. and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments … and they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion … And they tore off her clothing and dragged 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 parallels here with Socrates’ near contemporary account are very clear and we know that John of Nikiû used Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History as his main source for this section of his Chronicle. But Nikiû has deliberately changed the story and added some embroidery of his own: now Hypatia is an evil pagan magician who leads Orestes astray and causes him to abandon his faith. None of this is reflected in any other later Christian sources – the Byzantine Suda, Theophanes and Nicephortus Callistus all essentially reflect Socrates’ account. So it seems these new elements were Nikiû’s invention to help mitigate the blame for a murder by an esteemed bishop. It should be kept in mind that Nikiû was a Coptic bishop who wrote in a time when paganism was largely a memory and female philosophers hard to even imagine.

Many popular modern accounts conflate elements in the story and so have Hypatia being killed by the Nitrian monks, which serves to highlight the lurid “wise rationalist killed by ignorant clergy” theme in the polemics. But Maria Dzielska points out that this is not found in what Socrates tell us and that the monks “terrified by the popular reaction to their aggression against the prefect Orestes, took flight” (Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, Harvard, 1995, p. 97). That the mob who killed her were supporters of Cyril is clear, but they do not seem to have been monks.

Similarly, the idea that her status as a scholar was the motivation for her death is largely without foundation. It was her scholarship that gave her the political prominence that led to her assassination, but this cannot be used as evidence that Christians hated learning. Again, the praise for her learning is consistent across all the sources, Christian or otherwise, and Socrates explicitly states that she was killed despite the renown her learning brought her, not because of it. After detailing the basis for her high status as a scholar he says “[y]et even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed” (my emphasis). Only the brief account of Hesychius says that her murder was “on account of jealousy and her superior wisdom and, most of all, her knowledge about astronomy” (preserved in Suda Y.166 1-11). But he also blames “the innate rashness and tendency towards sedition of the Alexandrians”, so the reference to her learning seems more to highlight her superiority to the typical Alexandrian mob.

Many modern accounts also dwell on the gruesome details of her death: with Hypatia being seized, stripped, dismembered, dragged through the streets and then burned. Socrates’ use of the word ὄστρακα for the tools by which she was killed led Gibbon to declare that “her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells”, since the word means “shells”. But it can also mean “potsherds” and was a term used for roof tiles, which is most likely what it means in the description of her murder. Roof tiles were available in abundance in an Alexandrian street and made ready missiles in a riot or for a mob stoning someone to death.

The image of a woman being “completely stripped” certainly excited the fevered imaginations of some nineteenth century writers, who could not help but suggest she had also been raped. Given that one later source makes mention of Hypatia having been a great beauty, this gave rise to depictions of a naked and youthful Hypatia at the mercy of her thuggish assailants, which tells us more about those nineteenth century painters and writers than it does about history.

In fact, Hypatia is likely to have been in her mid-sixties when she was killed and the story of her great beauty serves to set up a moral fable about her philosophical chastity and so is of dubious historicity.

It should also be noted that a ritualised dragging of the body through the streets, dismemberment and then burning of someone who had been lynched or executed is found in several other accounts of such events in Alexandria. The murder of George of Cappadocia and his two compatriots was followed by a similar process. So were the bodies of some Jews in the pogroms of 39 AD and the that of Proterius in 457. Christopher Haas argues that these parallels are not coincidences, calling it an “Alexandrian civic ritual of expiation” (Haas, p. 87; see his detailed analysis pp. 87-89). So these elements in the story are not, as some seem to think, evidence of a particular animus against learned women, but – yet again – just how they did things in the street politics of Alexandria.

Similarly, Hypatia’s status as a female scholar and philosopher is often heavily emphasised, with claims made that she was “the first female mathematician” or somehow unique in her status as a female scholar. As already noted, most women in the Greco-Roman world’s highly patriarchal society did not advance beyond a rudimentary education, but while Hypatia’s advanced learning was unusual, it was far from unique. Centuries before she was born we have references to female scholars like Aspasia, Diotima, Arete, Hipparchia and Pamphile. Closer to her time we have Pandrosion in Alexandria and Sosipatra in Pergamon. Nor was she the last such female scholar. Just after her time the Iamblican Neoplatonist Asclepigenia studied and taught in Athens and in Alexandria Aedisia did the same, untroubled by any Christian mobs.

This also indicates another part of the myth that is nonsense: the idea that Hypatia’s murder represented the end of learning in Alexandria and the beginning of “the Dark Ages” generally. This has been presented as the moral of the story of Hypatia from Gibbon through Sagan to Agora: Bertrand Russell concludes his highly Gibbonian account of her death with the solemn words “after this Alexandria was no longer troubled by philosophers” (A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, 1945, p. 387). But not only did Aedisia and her sons maintain a flourishing school in the generation after Hypatia, she also managed to completely avoid assassination despite being a pagan, a woman and a scholar. And Hierocles, Asclepius of Tralles, Olympiodorus the Younger, Ammonius Hermiae and Hermias all continued the tradition of learning in the city in the century that followed, as did John Philoponus and various Christian scholars. What actually seems to have brought about a decline in scholarship was the Muslim conquest in 641 AD, after which the city was never the centre of learning it had once been, with Cairo becoming the Muslim intellectual centre.

The story of Hypatia used by anti-theist polemicists is essentially a pseudo historical moral fable, told to reinforce an outdated and debunked view of intellectual history. Hypatia was not murdered because Christians hated her learning. She had no association with the Great Library of Alexandria or its successor in the Serapeum. Her death did not signal the end of ancient philosophy and the beginning of “the Dark Ages”. She was not unique, not a secularist or an atheist, not a modern style sceptic or rationalist and not a great scientific innovator. On the contrary, she was very much a woman of her age, something of a mystic by our standards and rather conservative in her outlook. She was caught up in one of the regular outbursts of political turmoil in a city renowned for its violent street politics and her death was part of a political dispute that was not over religion or learning. The real story of Hypatia is actually much more interesting than the anti-theist version and atheists need to study it to understand it properly if they genuinely claim to be rationalists. After all, rationalists accept the analysis of historians, not lurid but emotionally-appealing fairy tales.

Further Reading

Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy, pp. 37-80, (Oxford, 2016)

Thony Christie, “Hypatia – What do we Really Know?”, Renaissance Mathematicus, 2019

Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, (Harvard, 1995)

Peter Gainsford, “Cosmos #3 – Hypatia and the Library”, Kiwi Hellenist, 2018

Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (John Hopkins, 1997)

Spencer Alexander McDaniel, “Who was Hypatia Really?”, Tales of Times Forgotten, 2018

Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, (Oxford, 2017)

Bryan J. Whitfield, “The Beauty of Reasoning: A Reexamination of Hypatia of Alexandria”, The Mathematics Educator, Vol.6:1 (1995), pp. 14-21