Hypatia, Pagan Martyr

Alexandria, March 415 AD. The city has mixed feelings concerning the vicious lynching and subsequent death of one its highest (if not) highest representatives: Hypatia.

Her crime: being a Pagan in the growing turmoil of Christian persecutions, more specifically, a representative of the prestigious Neo-Platonist School founded by the philosopher Plotinus.

She was described by Socrates Scholasticus in the following way:
There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.

An influential member of the community (and a close friend of Orestes, Prefect of the city) Hypatia was renowned for her rhetorical skills, her philosophy and her beauty.
A peculiar anecdote describes her reply to a young man who was much in love with her, she showed him her menstrual rags and said "Is this what you love?" (Do you love what perishes?) (this anecdote was told by Damascius, the "last of the Neoplatonists").

We have lost most of her works although we do know that she edited the third book of her father's commentary on Ptolemy's Mathematical Treatise and charted celestial bodies (with astrolabes), hydroscopes and hydrometers (to measure the density of liquids).

Yet she lived in troubled times; times that could not spare the lives and thoughts of the intellectual pagan élite.
Intolerance thrived - in 380 Theodosius made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire which became enforced in Egypt around 392. Christians became persecutors (by far worse than the persecutors they had suffered in the early days), the property of Pagans was confiscated, temples were closed and destroyed and in Lower Egypt sacred texts were destroyed (whilst the Nag Hammadi texts were being hidden in Upper Egypt).
In Alexandria the intolerant Pope of Alexandria, Theophilus, (also a Saint of the Coptic Church) was responsible for the crisis that brought upon the street wars between Pagans and Christians and the destruction of the Serapaeum (the temple of Serapis, the Hellenistic-Egyptian God).

Responsible for Hypatia's vicious death (which will follow below) was the action of the bishop Cyril (nephew of Theophilus) openly detested a powerful pagan woman (thanks to the works of people like St. Augustine, the image of women was polluted) like Hypatia.
Her death was barbarous and the consequence of the distorted and intolerant minds of the Christian Mob:
Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.

Hypatia's legacy never truly died (she was admired by Voltaire, Vincenzo Monti, John Toland and also has a lunar crater to her name) but her death was but one of many, perpetrated by the hand of intolerance and religious folly.