HYPATIA of ALEXANDRIA

Prometheus Books

Contents

Chapter One

In the fifth century BCE, Greece was a collection of city-states of which Athens was the one we know best. It was in Athens that Socrates the philosopher lived and taught up till the time of his execution in 399 BCE. It was here, too, that his pupil Plato founded his Academy, an institution of higher learning with mathematics (in particular arithmetic and geometry) at the core of its curriculum.

Here also Plato's pupil Aristotle studied. Plato died in 348 or 347 BCE and Aristotle lived from 384 to 322 BCE. He in his turn taught Alexander of Macedon (Alexander the Great) whose dates are 356 to 323 BCE.

It was Alexander who united the various feuding states into a single Greek nation, which became the center of a large empire extending far beyond Greece itself.

In particular, Alexander's armies conquered northern Egypt around 330 BCE and one of his generals, Ptolemy I Soter, founded the city of Alexandria in the west of the Nile delta. Alexander installed Ptolemy as the first of a long line of hereditary rulers of Egypt. From that time till its takeover by the Arabs in 642 CE, Alexandria remained a Greek city and a major center of Greek learning and culture (often rivaling or even surpassing Athens itself). From its inception, however, its population included Jews, and Alexander himself decreed that Jews and Greeks were to be treated equally.

Early in his reign, Ptolemy I founded an institution of advanced scholarship, the Museum, which maintained a standard of excellence for almost seven centuries. It has been estimated that at the height of its glory the Museum in its libraries held some half a million books. The Museum, or at least its mathematical and philosophical traditions, will be dealt with in the next chapter.

Ptolemy also introduced the cult of a new god, Serapis, whose temple was adjacent to the Museum and whose worship was essentially peculiar to Alexandria.

The translation of the Hebrew scriptures (the Septuagint) in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE made these writings available to the Hellenic population as well as to those Jews who knew no Hebrew. A Platonistic account of Jewish religion (according to which the Logos or Word, the Idea of Ideas, was God's first-begotten) was produced in Alexandria by Philo Judaeus in the early part of the first century CE. Both these developments prepared the ground for the later spread of Christianity. Christianity came early to Alexandria. Tradition names Saint Mark the Evangelist as the first missionary to preach the Gospel there; more solidly, an early Alexandrian convert, one Apollos, is mentioned in Acts 18:24, as an assistant to the apostle Paul.

A little before this, in 80 BCE, Egypt was formally annexed to the Roman Empire as the Greek star by then had waned. Cleopatra's suicide in 30 BCE brought the Ptolemaic line to an end and Alexandria came under the direct governance of Rome.

However, this did not in any way affect the essentially Hellenic nature of Alexandria. It remained a Greek city with Greek as its language and with an intellectual tradition that was uncompromisingly Greek.

The first departure from this state of affairs came with the spread of Christianity. In the first century CE, Christianity was an insignificant movement, and it was only in the second century that it became deserving of notice. By the fourth century CE, however, it had become a very powerful force indeed.

The emperor Constantine I (Constantine the Great) embraced Christianity and "recognized" it-making it in effect the established state religion, a status it achieved de jure under the later emperor Theodosius I (Theodosius the Great). He also founded a city on his accession to the throne in 324 CE. This he erected on the site of the former Byzantium and modestly named it Constantinople. The new city became the focus of his power, and formed, along with Athens and Alexandria, the third major center in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

Christianity remained the dominant religion of the empire thereafter except for brief lapses, notably a period during the reign of Julianus II (Julian the Apostate), 361-363 CE.

By this time the Roman Empire was in deep trouble. It was under external pressure from the Huns and the Visigoths and was in turmoil internally as well. In 364 CE it split into two parts: the Western Empire (ruled from Rome) and the Eastern Empire (ruled from Constantinople). Alexandria became a part of the Eastern Empire.

By this time, moreover, Christianity had developed an ugly face: the formerly persecuted were all too ready to become the persecutors. Jews felt the wrath of a by now openly anti-Semitic church militant, and "pagans," those who were neither Christian nor Jew, were also likely to be targets of violence.

As if this threefold division were not enough, points of doctrine divided the Christians and were all too often settled by force. Chapter 3, section A, gives more details of this, but these divisions between "orthodox Christians" and "heretics" further aggravated the factionalism that beset Alexandria in particular.

It was during the third and fourth centuries CE that the Museum fell into decline. The great libraries were destroyed in part during a succession of civil wars in the third century. The last collection probably went late in the next, in 391 CE, when the archbishop, Theophilus, obtained imperial sanction to raze the temple of Serapis and build a Christian church on its site (dedicated to John the Baptist, of whom he had custody of some alleged relics).

The last attested member of the Museum was a mathematician and astronomer, Theon of Alexandria, of whom we shall have much more to say, as he was Hypatia's father.

Early in the fifth century CE, in 412, Theophilus was succeeded in the archbishopric by his nephew Cyril (Saint Cyril of Alexandria). Cyril was much at loggerheads with the civil governor (or prefect), Orestes. Orestes was a Christian, but a much more tolerant one than was Cyril, who seems to have been personally a most intemperate man.

In, possibly, 414, Cyril unilaterally took it upon himself to expel the Jews from Alexandria, and this he did, much to Orestes' displeasure. The ensuing riots and the feud between the two men were the direct cause of Hypatia's death and will be examined in detail in chapter 7, but the turbulence of the times owed as much to the rift between the secular and the ecclesiastical authorities as to the sectarian animosities of the people.

With Hypatia's death, Alexandria lost its secular intellectual tradition almost entirely. What little mathematical activity remained in the empire tended to be conducted elsewhere.

The relevant emperor at the time (see table 1) was the Eastern emperor Theodosius II, who had acceded to the throne as a small boy. His regent, Anthemius, ruled till 414 CE and probably continued to exercise de facto power after that, as Theodosius was then still only in his midteens. Anthemius's grandson of the same name became the Western emperor in 467 CE and reigned until his execution in 472 on the orders of the Suebian general Ricimer. These events may have a bearing on the Hypatia story.

Other later developments also germane to the matter are various letters sent by both Orestes and Cyril to Theodosius after Hypatia's death. These will be discussed in detail, along with the material of the previous paragraph, in chapter 7. Among Theodosius's attempts to quell the turbulence was an edict of 423 CE forbidding persecution of the Jews and destruction of synagogues-issued not so much out of compassion for the Jews as to quell riots and disorder among "Hellenes, Jews, and heretics." all of which groups he despised!

The Arabs captured Alexandria in 642 CE and much of what remains of the mathematics of the late Hellenic world has in fact reached us via Arabic translation. The intellectual tradition that characterized Alexandrian life for some seven centuries developed out of this historical content.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from HYPATIA of ALEXANDRIAby MICHAEL A. B. DEAKIN Copyright © 2007 by Michael A. B. Deakin. Excerpted by permission.
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