The murder of Hypatia at Alexandria

other · 415 · Alexandria

The witness this project holds is Socrates Scholasticus, a Christian writing about twenty-five years afterwards. He describes Hypatia as the daughter of the philosopher Theon, heir to the school of Plato and Plotinus, so far beyond the philosophers of her own time that men came from a distance to hear her; she appeared in public before the magistrates without embarrassment, and he says men admired her the more for it. She was killed over a quarrel she was not party to. The prefect Orestes and Cyril, bishop four years, were at odds, and it was put about among the Christian populace that it was she who kept Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. A party of them, whose ringleader Socrates names as a reader called Peter, waylaid her on the way home, dragged her out of her carriage and took her to the church called the Caesareum, where they stripped her and killed her with roof tiles; then they tore the body apart and burnt the pieces at a place called Cinaron. It was March, in Lent, in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate. Socrates neither accuses Cyril nor clears him. What he writes is that the deed brought the greatest opprobrium not only upon Cyril but upon the whole Alexandrian church, and that nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres and fights and transactions of that sort. How far the bishop was answerable for a mob whose passions he had helped raise has been argued from the sixteenth century to this one, and this record does not settle it. What is not in doubt is who died, how, and at whose hands: a reader of the Alexandrian church and the crowd he led.

To remove the woman the Christian populace believed was keeping the prefect from making peace with the bishop.

The best-known killing of the late antique city, and a stain Socrates says fell on the whole Alexandrian church.