Hypatia and the Uses of a Death

Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician and astronomer who taught Neoplatonic philosophy in the city from around 400 until her death in 415. She was murdered by a mob during a period of severe factional conflict involving the prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril.

The killing is documented in near-contemporary sources, including the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, who is not hostile to Christianity and describes it as a disgrace. The details are grim and are the only thing most people who know her name know about her.

That displacement is the subject of this entry, because it is a specific mechanism and it is not restricted to her.

What she actually did is partly recoverable. She edited and produced commentaries on Apollonius on conic sections, on Diophantus on arithmetic, and worked with her father Theon on the text of Ptolemy's Almagest. Textual criticism of mathematical works is not a minor activity in this period; establishing a reliable text is the precondition for anyone using it, and Theon's edition of Euclid became the standard for over a thousand years.

The letters of her student Synesius, later a bishop, survive and describe her instructing him in the construction of scientific instruments, including an astrolabe and a hydrometer. That is a working scientist teaching apparatus, and it is a rare direct source.

None of it survives under her own name as an independent work, and some of what she edited is preserved only inside her father's or her students' output. So the material record is thin, and the biographical record is dominated by the last hour of her life.

The uses that hour has been put to are worth naming. Eighteenth-century writers made her a martyr to religious fanaticism in service of an argument about the church. Later writers made her the last of the ancients, a symbol of a closing age. She has been a feminist icon, a rationalist icon and a film. In almost none of these is anyone reading her commentary on Diophantus.

A death that is useful to several arguments crowds out a life that is useful to none of them. The record of what she thought is small and hard, and the record of how she died is vivid and portable, and the vivid one wins every time.

This is not unique to women, but it applies to them with particular force because the surviving material is already thin. Where a man's work survives in bulk, a dramatic death is a footnote to the work. Where the work barely survives, the death becomes the whole entry.

The corrective is small and available. She edited Apollonius. That is the sentence that should come first.