p. 1 “In the spring of 45, however, the Roman imperial machine in the great city of Alexandria seized up. The trouble began with the election of Cyril as Bishop of Alexandria in 412. After the death of Cyril’s predecessor, the Christian community in the city split in two camps with one side supporting Cyril and the other supporting a rival named Timothy. It took three days of street fighting and of the intervention of Egypt’s top military official to prevail… By 415 the confrontations … brought the Bishop into conflict with the Roman governor Orestes…. Cyril summoned a mob of monks to Alexandria. He hoped they would intimidate the governor into an agreement. But violent protests have unpredictable consequences. Instead of persuading Orestes to talk, one of the monks hit him in the head with a stone. Orestes had the monk arrested, tortured and killed…. Cyril and his associates began to blame their problems on the regular audiences that Orestes had with the female philosopher named Hypatia. The daughter of a prominent Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia had been Alexandria’s leading thinker for nearly 35 years. Philosophers had no formal authority in the later Roman world, but some of them enjoyed immense influence. They had traditionally advised cities and officials about policy while standing apart from the transactions that bound the Roman elite to one another. Concerned only with truth and uninterested in reputation or personal gain, these public intellectuals involved themselves political life only to the degree that their actions made cities more justly governed. If deployed at the right time and in the right way, their counsel could diffuse tension by adding a calm and rational voice to heated confrontations. Her status is a philosopher gave her tremendous symbolic power in a city that was struggling to hold itself together. Her presence at his side made the governor appear to be the reasonable party in the dispute…. Christians loyal to Cyril… began to murmur that Hypatia had bewitched the governor and used her magic to keep him alienated from Cyril. ..In March 415 this frustration led a member of the Alexandrian church named Peter to gather a crowd of Cyrillian supporters that could confront Hypatia. We do not know what Peter and his associates initially planned to do when they found her. Mobs gathered all the time in the Roman world. They usually screamed and yelled. Sometimes they vandalised property. In rare cases they even killed. It was however exceptional for a member of the Roman elite to be physically assaulted by a mob. This mob was different in it either went out with an uncommonly violent sense of purpose or had uncommon luck in finding Hypatia teaching in a public classroom travelling in one of Alexandria’s streets…. Peter and his partisans grabbed her. they shredded her clothes and her body with pottery fragments, tore out her eyes, drag her corpse through the streets of Alexandria, and then burnt her remains.”
P 51 As the 380 s gave way to the 390s, Hypatia faced many of the same professional and personal challenges encountered by mid-career professionals in the modern world. By her 35th birthday, Hypatia had created a distinctive brand of philosophical teaching that combined the rigor of the leading Alexandrian mathematicians with the sophistication of Plotinian and Porphyrian Platonism. … [but] steady expansion of Iamlichian teaching into leading centres of scholarship like Alexandria and Athens mean Hypatia’s teaching began to look increasingly dated. .. The emergence of a militant anti pagan tendency among some Alexandrian Christians early years of the decade presented a different challenge. The non-confessional intellectual middle ground that Hypatia cultivated continued to draw elite Christian students like Synesius who valued traditional education. The wider world, however, was increasingly polarized in the 390s by a toxic combination of anti-pagan imperial legislation and aggressive actions against pagans by Alexandria’s Christian leadership destablised the city.”
p. 92 Female philosophers were not particularly rare in antiquity. as early as 1690, Gilles Menage collected the names and identifying details for over 65 female philosophers. it’s now includes figures ranging across time from Aspasia and Theano in the fifth century BCE through 6th century CE figures like Theodora, the woman to whom Demascius dedicated his Life of Isiodore. .. Hypatia had four significant female contemporaries who were trained as philosophers, philosophy or mathematics, played a public role like the one she assumed. three of these, Panrosian of Alexandria, Sosipatra of Pergamun, and the wife of Maximus of Ephesus, are older than Hypatia. The fourth woman, Aschlepignia of Athens, was the daughter of Hypatia’s younger rival, the Athenian philosopher Plutarch.
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