“They shredded her clothes and her body with pottery fragments, tore out her eyes, dragged her corpse through the streets of Alexandria, and then burned her remains.” This was the terrifying fate of a philosopher named Hypatia of Alexandria. She didn’t even really do anything wrong – she was a victim of a power struggle between Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and the governor Orestes.
“As the conflict with Orestes heated up, Cyril and his associates began to blame their problems on the regular audiences that Orestes had with a female philosopher named Hypatia. The daughter of a prominent Alexandrian mathematician, Hypatia had been Alexandria’s leading thinker…Philosophers had no formal authority in the later Roman world, but some of them enjoyed immense influence…Her status as a philosopher, then, gave Hypatia’s audiences with Orestes tremendous symbolic power in a city that was struggling to hold itself together. Her presence at Orestes’s side made the governor appear to be the reasonable party in the dispute. In the language of antiquity, Cyril seemed to be a provocateur whose childish pique now threatened the very stability of the city.”
Hypatia received some undue blame from Cyril’s camp: “Christians loyal to Cyril saw something much more nefarious in Hypatia’s audiences with Orestes. They began to murmur that Hypatia had bewitched the governor and used her magic to keep him alienated from Cyril. In their minds, the system had stopped working because Hypatia had blocked the voices of Cyril and his supporters from participating in the conversations that mattered in Alexandria. She needed to hear the anger of these people directly…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.” But, most likely “Peter and his band of supporters probably set out to frighten Hypatia into withdrawing from her public role advising Orestes.”
Hypatia was, unfortunately for her, encountered in public by the furious gathering. “While the mob may not have expected to see Hypatia, it is clear that she was utterly unprepared for their fury. She was in a public space with few attendants to protect her, and she was without the security of the solid outer walls that secured the homes of Alexandria’s wealthy from the noise, smell, and anger of the masses. She was exposed, and Peter and his partisans grabbed her.”
“The situation quickly got out of control. Hypatia was dragged through the street and taken to the Caesareum church along Alexandria’s waterfront. The mob stripped her and tore her body apart using broken roof tiles, an easily available and surprisingly lethal weapon for urban combat. One source tells us that they even cut out her eyes. Hypatia’s mangled remains were then taken to a place called the Cinaron, where they were burned.”
The story of Hypatia is a rather disturbing episode in Roman history, her tragic death being so cruel and unwarranted.
Source:
Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher by Edward J. Watts
shadowsofconstantinople.com 