The Herstory of Hypatia

At Medium, "The Herstory of Hypatia" -- Herstory, get it? -- written by one Joshua Hehe, who bills himself as:

Theorist, Pantheist, Ontologist, Syncretist, Glocalist, Anthropologist, Populist, Cosmologist, Futurist, Ethicist, Alarmist, Epistemologist, Occultist, Artist,…

Clearly this impressive list of accomplishments qualifies him to write about Late Antiquity. Or something. My old buddy Mohsen is a cosmologist, and I am familiar with the range of mathematics and physics he had to master. (TOF himself took only Astrophysics and Galactic Structure and the usual range of Differential Manifolds, Tensor Calculus, etc. Although that was many eons ago and, use it or lose it, TOF would hesitate to bill himself as a Tensorist, or even a Manifoldist, since he specialized in General Topology instead.) Glocalist stumped him for a time, but he figures it is a combination of Globalist and Localist, which is sort of like what Hegel and Marx called an internal contradiction. Not only is Mr Hehe a Syncretist, but also a Pantheist. Plus, he is a Theorist and they don't come any more impressive than that.

TOF's Faithful Follower recalls that Hypatia has made appearances heretofore, but knew there would be a hereafter, as well. It's the gift that keeps on giving, being one of the foundational myths of the Modern Age. The story has been told so often it is easy to forget that these accounts are many times longer than the only surviving near-contemporary source, meaning that new facts have been created to flesh out these longer narratives.

Naturally, as is often the case with writers from that quarter, Mr Hehe cites no sources, and one suspects he leans heavily on Draper/White, on Sagan, and/or Gibbons. At least an account TOF once saw on something called rationalwiki cited sources, even if they were mostly irrelevant.

TOF will pause here and allow you to read Mr Hehe's account and make your own notes. Remember the TOFian battle cry: "How do you know that? What is your source!" Ready? Go!

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Hypatia Part VIII: The Sources

Continued from Part VII: The Aftermath

This is a summation of the various sources of information on Hypatia with some comments on their provenance.

Sources for Hypatia

The Sources covering Hypatia are listed in their chronological order, starting with Synesius' Letters, which preceded the assassination of Hypatia, followed by the Histories of Socrates Scholasticus and Philostorgius of Cappadocia, who were reasonably contemporary, with the proviso that Philostorgius exists only as a 10th century epitome (or digest).

1. Synesius. The Letters. Contemporary. The primary source for Hypatia’s teachings. Some interpretation is required because Neoplatonists kept their teachings largely occult. The letters do not cover the events in Alexandria leading up to her murder.


2. Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History. Contemporary. He covers major events preceding and including the murder and provides a context. He was a lawyer in Constantinople, well-informed about goings-on in the Church and Empire. His informants on the character of Hypatia were likely Ammonias and Helladius, who would have known her before they fled after the Serapeum riots. He is somewhat hostile to Cyril because of his treatment of the Novatians.


3. Philostorgius of Cappadocia. Ecclesiastical History [Contemporary]  Exists only in an epitome compiled by Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, 10th cent.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

4. Damascius. Life of Isidore. Two generations later (5th, early 6th century). This is a brief mention in passing and gives few details. Studied in Alexandria and became the last master of the Athenian Academy before it was closed. Deeply hostile to Christianity and only source to claim that Cyril directly engineered the murder. Disagrees with Socrates on the place of the murder and gives no other details. Original lost; reconstructed from fragments quoted by others. Source of the "menstrual rags" story.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

5. John Malalas. Chronographia. 6th century. Antioch. Two sentences. Info on her lifespan, fame, popularity. His book is “a curious farrago of fact and fancy.”


6. Hesychius of Miletus. Onomatologus. 6th century. Short bio. Original lost; survives as fragments quoted by others. Contains info on titles of her works. Reports she was married to Isidore, a fragment repeated in The Suda, but which is in error. Isidore lived in the wrong generation.


7. John of Nikiu. Chronicle. 7th century. Survives in Ethiopian translation of Arabic translation of Coptic original. Local author (Lower Egypt) born during Arab invasion. May have had access to now-lost records of Alexandrian church. Clearly biased, pro-Cyril. Follows John Malalas and a second, now lost work. Only source that calls Hypatia a pagan and a witch. Celebrates her murder but does not say that Cyril planned or knew.


8. The Suda. 10th century. Byzantine encyclopedia. Combines fragments of Heysichius and Damascius. The encyclopedia is regarded as unreliable overall.


9. Other accounts are fully derivative of the above.

On-Line Resources

Listed in story order and including context resources: Alexandria, Serapeum, etc.

1. List of Roman Emperors
2. List of the Popes of Alexandria
3. Tidbits of Neoplatonic philosophy Part III, with links to Parts I and II
4. The Historia Augusta (a “mockumentary” or satire, not always reliable) on the Egyptian character
5. Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman Antiquities: On the assassination of Bishop George the Arian
6. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, Book V, ch. 7 and 10: On the assassination of Bishop George the Arian and the murder of the virgins of Heliopolis.
7. Rufinus of Aquileia: Ecclesiastical History, On the Destruction of the Serapeum
8. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Book V, ch. 16: On the Destruction of the Serapeum
9. Synesius, Letters.
10. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Book VII, ch. 13-15: account of Hypatia and the events leading up to her murder.
11. John Malalas. Chronographia.
12. The Suda Lexicon (Contains a fragment on Hypatia from Heysichius of Miletus and a longer fragment from Damascius’ Life of Isidore.)
13. Photius. Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius, compiled by Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, cf. Book VIII, ch. 9
14. John of Nikiu, Chronicles 84.87-103, On the death of Hypatia
15. Catholic Encyclopedia (1914), Cyril of Alexandria.
16. Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Book 2 ch. V and VIII, on the murder of bishop Proterius.
     

Hypatia Part VII: The Aftermath

Continued from Part VI: Murder Most Foul

AND SO, WITH THE MURDER OF HYPATIA, all learning in Alexandria shut down under the aegis of the learning-hating Christian learning haters, and the Dark Age descended, preventing us from reaching Mars because Hypatia was on the verge of discovering the Copernican system. 

Ho ho! TOF jests. Although he never ceases to marvel at the wacky fables modern skeptics will swallow wholesale. Especially when it comes to the history of their bête noire.  

Hypatia Part VI: Murder Most Foul

Continued from Part V: The Great Cyrillic Flame War

AD 414/416.  RUMORS FLY IN THE NAKED CITY.  Why is Orestes so obstinate?  Why will he not make kissy-face with Cyril?  My wife's second cousin's brother says that Hypatia is the obstacle!  Her counsel keeps the prefect at odds with the patriarch, and therefore perpetuates unrest in the City. Somebody oughta do something about that dame.

Hypatia Part V: The Great Oresto-Cyrillic Flame War

Continued from Part IV: The Teachings of Hypatia

Arcadius: would you trust your
Empire to this man?

After Graduation

 AD 395.  AUGUSTUS THEODOSIUS DIES.  He has already appointed his two sons as Augusti to succeed him: Honorius in the West; Arcadius (left) in the East.  No one realizes it yet; but the Empire will never again be united. 

AD 395/6.  Synesius returns home from Alexandria.  The next year, he is part of the Pentapolitan embassy to Constantinople.  While in the capital, he is baptized.  (This does not mean conversion.  Late baptism was common in those days.)  But in AD 400 an earthquake strikes the capital and the embassy leaves.  Synesius will later write of this:

“…if you remember the circumstances which I left the town.  God shook the earth repeatedly during the day, and most men were on their faces in prayer: for the ground was shaking.  As I thought at the time that the open sea would be safer than the land, I rushed straight to the harbor without speaking to anyone except Photius of blessed memory, but I was content simply to shout to him from afar, and to make signs with my hand that I was going away.”  (Letter 61)

The Visigoths under Alaric go on a rampage through Greece.  Perhaps half of all ancient Greek art is lost.  R.A. Lafferty says, It must have been the worst half.  They were art critics of exquisite taste. (The Fall of Rome)

Hypatia Part IV: The Teachings of Hypatia

Continued from Part III: The Deconstruction of the Serapeum

AD 392-395.  SYNESIUS AND HIS FRIENDS study with Hypatia.  Synesius’ oldest surviving letter is dated to AD 394, two years after the riot and the consequent imperial edict. 

So what did Hypatia teach?  Shh.  It’s a secret.  No, seriously.  It is.  Synesius and the inner circle were privy to it, but not the vulgar masses, not even those who attended the public lectures.  It was hermetic knowledge, to be sealed away from dreary proles who could not possibly understand it.  "It is an old tradition, I think," Synesius writes, "and quite in the manner of Plato, to conceal the profound thoughts of philosophy behind the mask of some lighter treatment, that thereby whatsoever has been acquired with difficulty shall not be again lost to men, nor shall such matters be contaminated by lying exposed to the approach of the profane." (Synesius, On dreams, pref.)

Hypatia Part III: The Deconstruction of the Serapeum

Continued from Part II: When Hypatia Was a Little Girl

Theophilus at the Serapeum

AD 381.  AN ECUMENICAL COUNCIL in Constantinople decides "that the bishop of Constantinople should have the next prerogative of honor after the bishop of Rome, because that city was New Rome." Alexandria is not pleased to get bumped, but what can ya do?

AD 385.  When Hypatia is about thirty years old, Theophilus is elected Pope of Alexandria and begins agitating against the Novatians.  Sure, we know; but it all seemed terribly important at the time.

AD 391 After more than a decade of toleration, the Emperor issues an edict against cult practices, as a result of which many urban temples are abandoned.  Theophilus says, “Kool!”

"Not content with razing the idols' temples to the ground, Theophilus exposed the tricks of the priests to the victims of their wiles. For they had constructed statues of bronze and wood hollow within, and fastened the backs of them to the temple walls, leaving in these walls certain invisible openings. Then coming up from their secret chambers they got inside the statues, and through them gave any order they liked; and the hearers, tricked and cheated, obeyed.  These tricks the wise Theophilus exposed to the people." 
-- Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History Book V, ch. 22

A point to remember: in the pagan Empire, there was no separation of Temple and State. The temples were State property, and the priests were state employees. The Emperor has a sacerdotal role as the bridge-builder among the various cults. As the Emperors became more than nominally Christian, they saw this as a personal affront, and they were entirely within their rights to close temples and stop the salaries of priests, especially in cases of egregious fraud, such as the talking statues. Meanwhile, the populace, especially in the East was going Christian wholesale, and the temples were emptying of worshipers and sacrifices, so many of the temples were abandoned and derelict. One of the benefits, as Pliny wrote to Trajan a couple centuries earlier, and perhaps one of the motivators behind Trajan's persecution was to encourage people to return to the Old Time Religion:

I interrogated these as to whether they were Christians; those who confessed I interrogated a second and a third time, threatening them with punishment; those who persisted I ordered executed. ...

[T]he contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it. It is certainly quite clear that the temples, which had been almost deserted, have begun to be frequented, that the established religious rites, long neglected, are being resumed, and that from everywhere sacrificial animals are coming, for which until now very few purchasers could be found. Hence it is easy to imagine what a multitude of people can be reformed if an opportunity for repentance is afforded.

-- Pliny, Letters 10.96-97

Hypatia Part II: When Hypatia Was a Little Girl

Continued from Part I: The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria

When Hypatia Was a Little Girl

SOMETIME AROUND AD 355, a year after Augustine of Hippo was born, the well-known mathematician and astrologer, Theon of Alexandria, begat a daughter whom he named Hypatia.  She was to mature into a mathematician and astrologer in her own right, but also into a Neoplatonist philosopher of no small repute, one of a small group of female philosophers that graced that period of history in Alexandria. 

This was the milieu in which she came of age.

At this point even the youngest Christians persecuted by Diocletian would would have been in their fifties.  But their children, now grown to adulthood, might still harbor fear of their pagan neighbors based on the tales their parents had told them.  After all, Diocletian’s persecution had come out of the blue following a period of relative toleration.  

A USEFUL REMINDER: Pretty much everyone in the ancient world was a murderous psychopath, compassion not being a notable virtue. Accounts of executions, riots, and the like describe actions that would make Faithful Reader's head explode faster than the hairs on it would curl. And as fast as one group could be domesticated by those preaching love and compassion, fresh waves of psychopaths would come riding in from the deserts or the steppes, or sailing in from the Northlands.

ALEXANDRIA IS AN IMPORTANT SEAT OF THE CHRISTIANS. Its bishop, the Successor of St. Mark, has traditionally ranked Number Two behind the Pope of Rome. In fact, he too styles himself a "pope." Alexandria butts heads constantly with Number Three, Antioch, over theological matters: Antioch emphasizes the divinity of Christ, Alexandria his humanity.  (Eventually, an ecumenical council will rule: OK, dudes, he was both.  Now stop the bickering.)

Byzantium has been renamed Constantinople for twenty-five years, and her bishop being ipso facto the bishop of the Emperor of the East, has become a dude of considerable mojo.  But Alexandria opposes the elevation of Constantinople to a Patriarchate.  And whenever an Antiochene is appointed to the See of St. Andrew, the See of St. Mark becomes a mite peckish.  None of this bothers the See of St. Peter, out in the Wild West.  The problems there are of a more quotidian nature: few cities and far flung.  The heresies there are fewer and generally different from those that pester the East. And there are an awful lot of barbarians piling up against the Rhine and Danube frontiers.  Something about Huns out on the steppes...  

Hypatia Part I: The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria

A FEW YEARS BACK, on The Aulde Blogge, in the days before TOF was TOF, yr. obt. svt. wrote a series on Hypatia of Alexandria. He has bethought himself to reprint that series here on the TOF Spot as a Blast From the Past, for three reasons:

• Live Journal has become seriously moribund and seldom stirs even when poked with a stick.
• The Hypatia series would form a nice companion to the Galileo series, since both are often used as mythological stick-figures by Late Moderns.
• TOF can put up lots of posts for very little effort, since he has bogged down on the next Psyche episode.

With some efforts to correct typos and grammatical faux pas, a few additions and amendments, the series proceeds as follows:

• Part I: The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria (That's this one right here. Deep background)
• Part II: When Hypatia Was a Little Girl (Events in Alexandria and the world during Hypatia's formative years
• Part III: The Deconstruction of the Serapeum (An event during Hypatia's prime that has become a Modern myth in its own right.)
• Part IV: The Teachings of Hypatia (No, she wasn't an ur-scientist.)
• Part V: The Great Oresto-Cyrillic Flame War (The situation that eventually resulted in her murder.)
• Part VI: Murder Most Foul (The accounts of the murder itself.)
• Part VII: The Aftermath (No, it did not trigger the Dark Ages.)
• Part VIII: The Sources (How do we know about this?)

The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria - Redux

By sundry means was TOF made aware of this article on Hypatia of Alexandria posted on something called RationalWiki [sic]. As with all things internettingly wiki, the sourcing is rather scattergun with a marked preference for tertiary sources.  Back on The Auld Blogge there was a multi-part series on the life and context of Hypatia, beginning here.

[sic] rational ∩ wiki = Ø by the nature of wikish procedure.  The results of desultory serial committee overrulings is not prima facie "rational." At best, it may be group-think.  

But let us see what counts for reference among the rationals.

Agora, the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Catching up on tabs. 

A schlock movie

A scholarly source,
albeit secondary

Over at Armarium Magnum, an atheist blogger yclept Tim O'Neill, who often takes his fellow atheists to task for being, well, stupid and ignorant about history, returns to the movie Agora. 

Agora was a movie that purported to tell the life and death of Hypatia of Alexandria, and which hit all the expected tropes.  As Marie Dzielka pointed out in her seminal book (entitled, appropriately enough, Hypatia of Alexandria), the poor Neoplatonic philosopher has been roped in as a Symbol for whichever hobby horse the current age was riding.  To Gibbon's generation, she symbolized Classicism and the fine old Greco-Roman civilization.  To 19th centurians like Draper and White, she symbolized Science (vs. Religion).  More recently, she has symbolized Woman (hear her roar).  In each mythos, Hypatia was killed because she was a pagan, because she was a "scientist" [sic], or because she was a woman.  Better yet, because she was a scientific pagan woman! 

The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria

A linked series of posts on the LJ site beginning here: http://m-francis.livejournal.com/159500.html

detailing the life and times of Hypatia of Alexandria, including the looting of the Serapeum by the Arian Patriarch George, the murder of George by the pagans, the Deconstruction of the Serapeum by Inperial Troops, the teachings of Hypatia, the Massacre of the Christians by the Jews, the Expulsion of the Jews, the Attack on the Imperial Prefect, the Murder of Hypatia, the Aftermath, and the Sources.