Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?
Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, teacher, editor, inventor, musician, and author. In March, 415 A.D. she was murdered by a mob of fanatics on the steps of a church called The Caesarium in Alexandria, Egypt. She has become a symbol of martryed Reason, feminism, and Classical paganism. The year of her birth is unknown. The Polish historian Maria Dzielska, arguing that the career path of a 4th century academic might parallel a modern one, suggests that Hypatia was born around 355, which would have made her 60 when she died. This chronology allows her to be significantly older than her more notable students, conforming to modern convention. One should bear in mind, though, that a Roman girl was a legal adult at the age of 12, and in an age when life was nasty, brutish and short, people did not have the luxury of prolonging childhood, adolescence and graduate school into their thirties.
I thought you’d never ask. The daughter of the famous mathematician philosopher Theon of Alexandria (under whom she also studied), Hypatia, remarkably for a woman of that era, rose to become head of the Platonist school at Alexandria. This, along with Hypatia’s insistence on wearing a short tunic (the garb of men) and the fact that, despite having many Christian students and admirers (Including Synesius of Cyrene, who was later to be ordained as the Bishop of Ptolemais: wherever the fuck that is.), she was an unashamed Pagan didn’t sit well with Alexandria’s Christian community. [Phun and disturbing Phact: Hypatia, despite being a woman of stunning beauty, was disgusted by the human body, which she considered “a pile of garbage. When on of her students told Hypatia that he was in love with her, she removed her bloody menstrual pad, waved it in the poor guy’s face and screamed, “That, young man, is what you have fallen in love with and there is nothing beautiful about it.”] Sadly, Hypat
