Hypatia of Alexandria: Her Context and Legacy 3161549694, 9783161549694

Table of contents :
Dedication
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Timeliness of Hypatia • Dawn LaValle Norman and Alex Petkas
Hypatia and Synesius
1. Hypatia and the Desert: A Late Antique Defense of Classicism • Alex Petkas
2. Desire and Despair: Synesius, Hypatia, and No Consolation of Philosophy • Helmut Seng
3. Synesius’ Letters to Hypatia: On the “End” of a Philosopher-Friendship and its Timelessness • Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer
Hypatia in Context
4. Bloody Iuvenalia: Hypatia, Pulcheria Augusta, and the Beginnings of Cyril of Alexandria’s Episcopate • Walter F. Beers
5. The Shattered Icon: An Alternative Reading of Hypatia’s Killing (Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 – 7, John of Nikiu, Chron. 84.100 – 103, and Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.23) • Mareile Haase
6. The Private Devotions of Intellectual Hellenes • David Frankfurter
7. ‘A Mere Geometer’? Hypatia in the Context of Alexandrian Neoplatonism • Sebastian Gertz
Hypatia in her Ancient and Modern Reception
8. Hypatia’s Sisters? Gender and the Triumph of Knowledge in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca • Joshua Fincher
9. The Ideal (Bleeding?) Female: Hypatia of Alexandria and Distorting Patriarchal Narratives • Victoria Leonard
10. Hypatia and her Eighteenth-Century Reception • Edward Watts
11. Starring Hypatia: Amenábar’s Agora and the Tropology of Reception • Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle
Appendix A: Translation of Primary Sources on Hypatia • Alex Petkas and Dawn LaValle Norman
Appendix B: Hypatia’s Death According to Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15: A Textual Commentary • Mareile Haase
Bibliography of Primary Sources
Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Contributors
Index
Ancient Authors and Works
Subjects
Blank Page

Citation preview

Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity Herausgegeber / Editors Christoph Markschies (Berlin) · Martin Wallraff (München) Christian Wildberg (Pittsburgh) Beirat /Advisory Board Peter Brown (Princeton) · Susanna Elm (Berkeley) Johannes Hahn (Münster) · Emanuela Prinzivalli (Rom) Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt)

119

Hypatia of Alexandria Her Context and Legacy Edited by

Dawn LaValle Norman and Alex Petkas

Mohr Siebeck

Dawn LaValle Norman, born 1983; 2015 PhD in Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University; Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry in Melbourne. orcid.org / 0000‑0002‑3354‑1298 Alex Petkas, born 1984; 2019 PhD in Classics and Hellenic Studies at Princeton Uni‑ versity; Assistant Professor of Classics at California State University, Fresno. orcid.org / 0000‑0001‑6891‑8908

ISBN 978‑3‑16‑154969‑4 / eISBN 978‑3‑16‑158954‑6 DOI  10.1628 / 978‑3‑16‑158954‑6 ISSN 1436‑3003 / eISSN 2568‑7433 (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio­ graphie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020  Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany.  www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that per‑ mitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies partic‑ ularly to reproductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset and printed on non-aging paper by Laupp & Göbel in Gomaringen and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren. Printed in Germany.

For Robert Germany (1974 – 2017) πάτερ καὶ ἀδελφὲ καὶ διδάσκαλε καὶ διὰ πάντων τούτων εὐεργετικὲ καὶ ἅπαν ὅ τι τίμιον καὶ πρᾶγμα καὶ ὄνομα. (Paraphrase of Synesius, Epistle 16)

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Timeliness of Hypatia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dawn LaValle Norman and Alex Petkas

1

Hypatia and Synesius 1. Hypatia and the Desert: A Late Antique Defense of Classicism . . . . . Alex Petkas

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2. Desire and Despair: Synesius, Hypatia, and No Consolation of Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Helmut Seng

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3. Synesius’ Letters to Hypatia: On the “End” of a PhilosopherFriendship and its Timelessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer

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Hypatia in Context 4. Bloody Iuvenalia: Hypatia, Pulcheria Augusta, and the Beginnings of Cyril of Alexandria’s Episcopate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walter F. Beers 5. The Shattered Icon: An Alternative Reading of Hypatia’s Killing (Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 – 7, John of Nikiu, Chron. 84.100 – 103, and Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.23) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mareile Haase

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6. The Private Devotions of Intellectual Hellenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 David Frankfurter 7. ‘A Mere Geometer’? Hypatia in the Context of Alexandrian Neoplatonism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Sebastian Gertz

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Table of Contents

Hypatia in her Ancient and Modern Reception   8. Hypatia’s Sisters? Gender and the Triumph of Knowledge in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Joshua Fincher   9. The Ideal (Bleeding?) Female: Hypatia of Alexandria and Distorting Patriarchal Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Victoria Leonard 10. Hypatia and her Eighteenth-Century Reception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Edward Watts 11. Starring Hypatia: Amenábar’s Agora and the Tropology of Reception Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle

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Appendix A: Translation of Primary Sources on Hypatia . . . . . . . . . . 239 Alex Petkas and Dawn LaValle Norman



Appendix B: Hypatia’s Death According to Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15: A Textual Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Mareile Haase



Bibliography of Primary Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Bibliography of Secondary Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Index Ancient Authors and Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

List of Abbreviations Authors Ach. Tat. Achilles Tatius Amm. Marc. Ammianus Marcellinus Historicus Ammon. Ammonius Apul. Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis Aug. Augustus Augustinus Augustinus Hipponensis Clem. Al. Clemens Alexandrinus Theologus Dam. Damascius Philosophus Demetr. Demetrius Phalereus Rhetor E. Euripides Tragicus Eun. Eunapius Eus. Eusebius Caesariensis Scriptor Ecclesiasticus Hes. Hesiodus Epicus Hierocl. Hierocles Platonicus Philosophus Hom. Homer Joh. Chrys. John Chrysostom Lact. L. Caelius Lactantius Firmianus Lib. Libanius Sophista Livy Titus Livius Marin. Marinus Biographus Non. Nonnus of Panopolis Olymp. Olympiodorus Philosophus Orig. Origen Phlp. John Philoponus Phot. Photius Pl. Plato Philosophus Plutarchus Biographus et Philosophus Plu. Porph. Porphyry Procl. Proclus Philosophus Procop. Gaz. Procopius of Gaza Aurelius Prudentius Clemens Prudentius Simp. Simplicius Philosophus Socrates Scholasticus Socr. Sozom. Salminius Hermias Sozomenus Syn. Synesius of Cyrene Them. Themistius

X

List of Abbreviations

Works Augustus Res Gestae Divi Augusti R. G. Apuleius Apologia apol. De deo Socratis Cassidorus / Epiphanius Hist. eccl. tripart. Socrates Ecclesiastical History (Latin Translation) Clemens Alexandrinus Theologus Protrepticus Protr. Stromateis Strom. Cyril of Alexandria Against Julian Adv. Iul. Damascius The Philosophical History PH Demetrius Phalereus Rhetor Demetrius on Style Eloc. Epigrams Anthologia Palatina AP Eunapius Vitae Sophistarum VS Euripides Bacchae Ba. Eusebius Commentary on Isaiah Comm. in Is. Demonstratio Evangelica Dem. ev. Ecclesiastical Theology De eccl. Theol. Ecclesiastical History H. E. Praeparatio evangelica Praep. ev. Hesiodus Epicus Fragmenta Fr. Opera et Dies Op. Scutum Herculis Sc. Theogonia Th. Hierocles Platonicus Philosophus in Carmen Aureum in CA Homer Illiad Il. Odyssey Od. Hymni Homerici hymnus ad Venerem (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite) hVen. Iamblichus De Anima de Anima Commentarius Commentary on the Timaeus   in Timaeum Jerome De Viris Illustribus Vir. ill.

List of Abbreviations

John of Ephesus E. H. Ecclesiastical History John of Nikiu Chronicle The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu Lactantius Div. Ins. Institutiones Divinae [Divine Institutes] Ps.-Aristeas Letter of Aristeas Libanius Or. Orationes Livy AUC Ab Urbe Condita Nonnus of Panopolis D. Dionysiaca P. Paraphrase of John Olympiodorus in Alc. in Platonis Alcibiadem commentarii in Grg. in Platonis Gorgiam commentaria Proll. Prolegomena Origen schol. in Lc. scholia in Luc. Philoponus de aeternitate On the Eternity of the World, against Proclus Philostratus Vit. Apoll. Life of Apollonius Photius Bibl. Bibliotheca Plotinus Enn. The Enneads Plato R. Respublica Symp. Symposium Plutarch Pyrrh. The Life of Pyrrhus Apoph. lac. Apophthegmata Laconica Is. Os. Isis and Osiris Porphyry Abst. de Abstinentia Aneb. Letter to Anebo de Regressu Animae On the Return of the Soul Plot. Vita Plotini Marc. Ep. ad Marcellam Proclus Philosophus in Ti. in Platonis Timaeum commentarii in Cra. in Platonis Cratylum commentaria Procopius of Gaza In. Is. Commentary on Isaiah

XI

XII

List of Abbreviations

Prudentius Ad. Sym. Contra Symmachum Rufinus of Aquileia Hist. eccl. l. Ecclesiastical History (Latin Edition) Salminius Hermias Sozomenus HE Ecclesiastical Histories Simplicius Philosophus in Aristotelis Categorias commentarius in Cat. Socrates Scholasticus Hist. eccl. Ecclesiastical History Suda Suidae Lexicon (Adler, ed.) Synesius of Cyrene Aeg. de providentia astrolab. sermo de dono astrolabii de Dono. De dono astrolabii Ep. Epistles insomn. de insomniis Themistius Or. Orationes Theodoret Hist. E. Ecclesiastical History Theodosian Code Cod. Theod. Codex Theodosianus Vergil Aen. Aeneid

Journals ACO Acta Antiqua   hungaricae AJA Anabases Apeiron ARG BICS Byz. Z BzA ByzSt Church. Hist. CJ Class. Mediaev. CPh

Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Acta antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae

American Journal of Archaeology Anabases: traditions et réception de l’Antiquité Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science Archiv für Religionsgeschichte Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Byzantinische Zeitschrift Beiträge zur Altertumskunde Byzantine Studies / Études byzantines. Church History The Classical Journal Classica et Mediaevalia Classical Philology: A Journal Devoted to Research in Classical Anti­ quity Crit. Stud. Media Communication and Critical / Cultural Studies   Commun. CPG Clavis Patrum Graecorum

List of Abbreviations

CR DACL EMWJ Fem. Stud. Gnomon GRBS Gregorianum Gymnasium HSCP Hermes Historia Hypatia Isis Klio JEA JECS JEH JHS JJS JMEMS JLA JRS JRA JTS LSJ LIMC MH Millennium Mnemosyne OLD OSAPh PCP Philologus Phronesis PG PGL PLRE Philologus Phoenix P. Oxy.

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Classical Review Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie Early Modern Women: an Interdisciplinary Journal Feminist Studies Gnomon: Kritische Zeitschrift für die gesamte klassische Altertums­ wissenschaft Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies Gregorianum: periodicum trimestre a Pontificia Universitate Grego­ riana editum Gymnasium: Zeitschrift für Kultur der Antike und humanistische B ­ ildung Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Hermes: Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy Isis: An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences Klio: Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Journal of Early Christian Studies Journal of Egyptian Studies Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Journal of Late Antiquity Journal of Roman Studies Journal of Roman Archaeology Journal of Theological Studies Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., rev. H. Stuart Jones (1925 – 40); Suppl. by E. A. Barber and others (1968) Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae Museum Helveticum Millennium: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahr­ tausends n. Chr. Mnemosyne: bibliotheca classica Batava. Glare, P. G. W. 1982. Oxford Latin Dictionary, Oxford. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Pacific Coast Philology Philologus: Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy Patrologica Graeca Lampe, G. W. H. 1961. A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire Philologus: Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption. Phoenix: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada revue de la Société canadienne des études classiques Oxyrhynchus

XIV Promethius PW RAC RÉAug REG RFIC RGRW TAPhA TCH TRE WJb VChr Vic Lit Cult ZPE

List of Abbreviations

Prometheus: rivista quadrimestrale di studi classici “Pauly-Wissowa”, i. e. August Friedrich von Paulys Real-encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft Rivista di archeologia Cristiana Revue des études augustiniennes et patristiques Revue des études grecques Rivista di filologia e di istruzione classica Religions in the Greco-Roman World Transactions of the American Philological Association The Transformation of the Classical Heritage Theologische Realencyclopädie Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft Vigilae Christianae Victorian Literature and Culture Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

Introduction The Timeliness of Hypatia Dawn LaValle Norman and Alex Petkas Hypatia is something of an academic household name. The story is so familiar, the sources for her life so apparently scarce, that one may wonder if there is much left to be said. Even as this volume was being finalized, a new biography of Hypatia appeared (written by one of our contributors).1 But scholarship and culture continue to develop, and we are confident that each of the essays gathered here have some new perspective to share about Hypatia and her legacy. To take one example, in early 2017 Hypatia’s name was all over the internet, especially in those streets and alleyways of the web frequented by members of the academy. The reason was a controversy over an article published by Hypatia, a feminist journal which takes its name and inspiration from the topic of this volume, the fifth-century CE Platonist Hypatia of Alexandria.2 The author of the article examined from a philosophical perspective the parallels between transgenderism and transracialism. This provoked a backlash in which many academics demanded that Hypatia rescind the article, an action which the editors ultimately did not take. This controversy stirred discussion on issues relevant to all academics, about the publication, reception, and censorship of peer reviewed scholarship that risks or provokes public backlash. Turning to the historical Hypatia in terms of this debate can help us to approach aspects of her career with fresh eyes: how might she have reacted? Hypatia herself edited and published several school texts of notable mathematicians and astronomers, but she also seems to have published the controversialist intellectual work of her contemporaries, such as those of her student Synesius (see the first essay in this volume). And most vividly, Hypatia was also a female intellectual who faced public ire, albeit of a different sort. Hypatia is unfortunately most famous for her untimely end, which has often been seen as marking the end of a great age – of learning and free thought, tol1   Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 2   Rebecca Tuvel, “In Defense of Transracialism,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32.2 (2017): 263 – 278.

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erant multiculturalism, or even classical antiquity itself. In 415 a gang of Christians caught her off-guard in the streets of Alexandria and brutally lynched her. The essays collected herein were first presented at a conference at Princeton University titled Hypatia: Behind the Symbol, which took place in December 2015, and was partly inspired by the 1600‑year anniversary of her death. As the title of that conference suggests, the notion that her death was such a symbolic and epoch-making event is itself a viewpoint examined critically, rather than explicitly adopted, by contributors in this volume. The causes and consequences of this gruesome tragedy are indeed examined in detail in many of the essays in this volume, but we hope that, on the whole, this book has succeeded in getting past the age-old pattern of seeing Hypatia’s death as the most noteworthy moment in her life. We felt Hypatia to be a timely subject in 2015, and we believe this to be even more the case upon publication. Public and political interest in women’s leadership in the arts and sciences has only increased and shows no signs of waning. In times of change, people often turn to history for ethical examples. Hypatia’s life can provide one, for instance, to women interested in lessons for success in a male-dominated political and intellectual climate. Her publishing and teaching achievements matched or exceeded those of many of her noteworthy male contemporaries. But she also grounded her personal effectiveness in skills and activities which are often gendered as female, such as interpersonal charm, relationship cultivation, and (probably) conforming to gender-specific models of virtue enforced by her culture, such as her much-discussed chastity. But one aspect of her life that deserves particular attention here, because it may be less obvious, is Hypatia’s interest as a male role-model. This is not only because men can (of course) learn much from emulating admirable women, but also because Hypatia is a striking example of how many ancient men, too, were at least partially aware of this fact. In the absence, for the most part, of formal certifying bodies, intellectual formation in the ancient world was much more explicitly interpersonal, based on teacher-disciple relationships, and frequently theorized in terms of mimesis (e. g. in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus). Hypatia taught, mentored, and thus left her own ethical imprint on a predominantly male student body – the clearest example is her student Synesius of Cyrene. Indeed, Hypatia and Synesius constitute perhaps the best documented historical example of female-male mentorship surviving from antiquity. Synesius is granted significant space in this volume, but he is not the only evidence one can find herein of men modeling themselves after this woman – see, for instance, Joshua Fincher’s treatment of Nonnus’ female intellectual figures in Chapter 8 or Edward Watts’ discussion of Rev. John Toland in early eighteenth-century England in Chapter 10. We hope readers, regardless of their identity, will find this volume useful in clarifying their own reflections about the continuing timeliness of Hypatia.

Introduction

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Creating Unity from Fragments Our knowledge of Hypatia herself rests upon a rather thin body of evidence, almost all of which we have collected and translated afresh at the end of this volume (Appendix A). These are followed by an in-depth commentary on some of the difficult parts of one of our most important sources, Socrates Scholasticus’ Historia Ecclesiastica (Appendix B). As mentioned above, a frequent frustration for interested scholars is both the lack of sources and the outsize role her death plays in many of those we do possess. The only trace of actual textual products we might have from Hypatia are from technical works of mathematics (see the selection of Hesychius from the Suda in Appendix A). Most promisingly for our purposes, her father Theon says in his introduction to his commentary on Book III of Ptolemy’s Almagest that the text was “edited by my daughter the philosopher Hypatia” (παραναγνωσθείσης τῇ φιλοσόφῳ θυγατρί μου Ὑπατίᾳ).3 While the surviving version of Theon’s mathematical works must owe something to Hypatia’s editing hand, it is impossible to disentangle with any confidence her ipsissima verba from the treatises. In addition to her (probably) text-critical work on the Almagest, she also produced her own (lost) commentaries on Diophantus’ Mathematica, the Astronomical Canon of Ptolemy and the Conics of Apollonius. It has been suggested that the first six books of Diophantus’ work owe their survival in part to her commentary, which ended after book six.4 While she would surely be glad to be known by her scholarly and mathematical works, we can gain a more vivid picture of Hypatia by studying her impact on her students, and above all Synesius. Synesius’ letters to Hypatia suggest at times that we are glimpsing the relationship between teacher and mentor in action. Like the mathematical traces, they offer a route toward Hypatia before her death. Because of their status as our earliest and most intimate evidence for Hypatia’s life as a teacher and mentor, we begin the volume with three essays that look specifically at the Synesius-Hypatia epistles. First, Alex Petkas argues that the correspondence between Synesius and Hypatia reveals her investment in contemporary debates about the content of paideia, especially an intra-Christian discussion about the role of Classical texts and values. Following on from this social-historical reading come two literary examinations of the Synesius-Hypatia correspondence, which problematize their status as historical sources. Helmut Seng looks as the role Hypatia plays in the correspondence less as an actual historical individual, and more as a symbol of philosophy. The cor3   Cited in Alan Cameron, “Isidore of Miletus and Hypatia of Alexandria: On the Editing of Mathematical Texts,” GRBS 31 (1990): 106. 4   Thomas Heath, Diophantus of Alexandria: A Study in the History of Greek Algebra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 5 – 6, 18. Michael A. B. Deakin, “Hypatia and her Mathematics,” The American Mathematical Monthly 101.3 (1994): 234 – 243 discusses what we know of her other lost commentaries.

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respondence breaks down in-step with the breakdown in Synesius’ own hope in finding consolation from philosophy itself. Synesius thus uses Hypatia for his own self-formation and in addressing his rising despair after the deaths of his sons. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer goes one step further, stepping back to look at the epistolary corpus as a whole and its arrangement by Synesius as an intentional story that develops through the placement of individual letters. As such, it is not a reliable window onto any reality beyond that of the author Synesius’ literary intentions. Thus, both Seng and Harich-Schwarzbauer argue that even the evidence which brings us nearest in time and place to Hypatia must be read as through a distorting mirror, or even perhaps more as fiction than fact. After Synesius, our evidence lies almost exclusively in late ancient historians. Walter Beers takes up the challenge of reading Hypatia’s role in our longest testimony, the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates Scholasticus. He argues that the story Socrates tells is not really about Hypatia at all, but about Cyril of Alexandria, the man behind her death. And if there is any woman of primary interest to the story, it is the Empress Pulcheria rather than the philosopher Hypatia. Mareile Haase likewise looks to the use of Hypatia by historians, especially (like Beers) to Socrates’ Hist. eccl. Drawing on the concept of “substitutive image act,” she investigates the motifs that literary accounts of Hypatia’s murder share with depictions of the destruction of the Alexandrian cult statue of Serapis. Haase concludes that Socrates uses iconoclasm as a metaphor to create a graphic mental image capable of counteracting the authorities’ silence about Hypatia’s violent death. The final two essays in this section examine different aspects of Hypatia’s identity: her religion and her philosophy. David Frankfurter’s essay delves into what we can know about the religious life of late-ancient followers of traditional religion, among whom we must number Hypatia, by all accounts. He concludes that in the fourth and fifth centuries there was a privatization of traditional religion, where sacrifices at home took the place of proscribed sacrifices in temples. Such domestication changed what it meant to “do” paganism and allowed a certain merging of traditional religious practices with Christianity. Sebastian Gertz’s contribution gathers what we can guess about Hypatia’s life as a Neoplatonic philosopher at this time, especially as it relates to her evident focus on mathematics. Gertz suggests that Hypatia’s work as a philosopher should be seen in the context of the earlier Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry, rather than the next phase in the long and creative development of Neoplatonism. Most likely she would have seen her mathematical projects as necessary preliminary work in a course of Platonic clarification and ascent. The line between ancient and modern receptions is labile. Already, the letters of Synesius could be fruitfully looked at as a reception of the Hypatia-story in a particular time and place. This is even truer for the historians who wrote in the following centuries, examined primarily in the essays of Part II. Yet Hypatia continued to be important long after late antiquity. Her voice echoes

Introduction

5

through the ages, albeit only through the words of others, ancient and modern. We begin Part III by looking at two early receptions of Hypatia. The first is a suggestive argument by Joshua Fincher that echoes of Hypatia can be heard in the fifth-century epic poetry of Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. The academic women in this poem share important details that could evoke links in the minds of its readers to the most famous recent female philosopher from the same region. Victoria Leonard’s essay continues the interest in ancient reception, while also pushing us forward into more recent moments of reception. Leonard looks at the memorable scene, recorded only in Damascius’ Philosophical History, of Hypatia’s display of her menstrual blood to ward off an unwanted suitor. By looking at Damascius’ narration of this scene, Leonard argues that the patterns of misogyny which it begins are continued in the use and abuse of Hypatia into the modern era. Edward Watts’ essay also pauses over the gendered modern reception of Hypatia’s story, especially in her rich eighteenth-century reception in England and France. There he discovers a tussle over Hypatia’s legacy. Was she of interest as a pawn in a political game more centrally about Cyril (as we have seen argued in Beers’ essay in this volume), or as a model of an educated intellectual woman? While male writers of the eighteenth century tended to focus on the former, female writers from the same period were more interested in the later, which leads Watts to suggest that the main reason that Hypatia’s death overshadowed her life for so long is that almost all of our textual descriptions of Hypatia are written by men. The final contribution, by Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle, turns to the cinematic rendition of Hypatia’s life in Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora, and finds there a subtle tug-of-war over how readers (and viewers) take Hypatia’s story and remake it to suit their own desires, much like the fictitious slave Davus’ flash-back during the scene of Hypatia’s death, which constructs a new narrative at odds with Hypatia’s self-conception throughout the film. All of these readers, both ancient and modern, provide us with different angles from which to view our elusive subject, proving her perennial interest and seeming inexhaustability. We hope that this volume contributes to the continuing conversation over Hypatia’s life and legacy in yet another phase of her rich reception. In the process of producing this volume, we have contracted many debts of gratitude. First of all, for Christian Wildberg, who inspired us with the idea for the conference and volume in the first place. Also, to Alan Cameron, who was able to attend the conference and provided valuable feedback on many papers, but who unfortunately did not live to see the outcome of the conference in book-form. Then, to all of the financial sponsors at Princeton University who underwrote the conference from which this volume descends: the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, the Classics Department, the Council of the Humanities, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Center for the Study of Religion, and Classical Philosophy. The

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range of sponsors points to how many fields the study of Hypatia necessarily touches. Likewise too, we would like to thank all of the participants and attendees at the original conference who helped create the rich conversation that produced this volume. In the production of the volume we owe especial thanks to Carolyn Alsen, who tirelessly and carefully helped with editing and formatting. Finally, we dedicate this book to the memory of our common mentor, Robert Germany, who was truly a “father, brother, teacher and benefactor” to both of us, and whose conversation we miss daily.

Hypatia and the Desert: A Late Antique Defense of Classicism Alex Petkas Introduction Hypatia, as far as we can tell, spent much of her career in the public eye. This is partly because she taught philosophy, a subject generally associated with the leading citizens in late antique society. But it is also because she did not limit her intellectual practice to teaching: She maintained an active patronage network, was a confidante to city councillors, and advised at least one imperial governor in Alexandria. Indeed, it was not so much her purely academic pursuits that led to her death, as the fact that she commanded real political influence, and used it.1 How did Hypatia’s calling as a public philosopher influence her teachings? Many studies have carefully assessed the doctrinal content of her philosophical and mathematical curriculum.2 This is an important task, and a challenging one, since we must extract clues from the very limited number of direct sources on Hypatia, as well as comparative evidence of other philosophers, including her student Synesius. In this essay, however, I will take up a far less examined aspect of Hypatia’s teaching, and propose that her role in the history of classicism has been underestimated. I will argue primarily from the writings of her student Synesius of Cyrene. By “classicism” I mean a discourse based around emulation of a set of canonical ancient texts and compositions, which aimed, in its highest registers, to reproduce the Attic Greek literary language.3 This classicism was underpinned, 1

  Edward Watts’ account of her death, in Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 121 – 134, makes this particularly clear. 2   Including Gertz’s in this volume. See also Watts, Hypatia, 37 – 50; Michael A. B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007), 77 – 106; Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 27 – 65. 3   The cultural politics of this system are somewhat better studied in the earlier empire: Simon Swain, Hellenism and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17 – 42. See the introduction to James Porter, ed., Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) in which Porter discusses the difficulty of defining what is classical. Despite the absence of a clear Latin or Greek terminological equivalent, we can find a notion of the classical and classicism at work in antiquity, “existing not as a unified phe-

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in the late antique East, by traditional patterns of Greek education, a diverse set of practices which fell under the heading of rhetoric.4 The Greek word paideia is frequently used in modern scholarly discussions to denote the shared literate culture of east Roman elites, for whom mastery of a classical canon and a code of decorum thought to be found therein was necessary for many types of public persuasion.5 Although Synesius does use the word in a very classicizing sense, paideia was also a generic term for “education” or the “culture” inherited from one’s upbringing. By the fourth century AD, a time of great debate about the sources of prestige and authority, the word paideia had been used by many Christian authors over the centuries to refer to alternative forms of education, such as even monastic and proto-monastic life.6 It is likely that Hypatia shared Synesius’ interest in classical paideia, given her public-facing career. She would have frequent need of rhetoric in her advisory activity to the governor Orestes and the civic council, as well as in mantaining her patronage network, which included many former students.7 In Hypatia’s day, participation at a high level of civic life of Alexandria also meant engaging with Christianity. Scholars have frequently observed that Hypatia’s school was distinctive for the number of students she had from prominent Christian families.8 But her involvement in the public culture of Christianity runs deeper than we have hitherto appreciated. In what follows, I will carefully read a few select passages of works Synesius sent to Hypatia, and argue that it makes the most sense to see both their opponents and primary audience as Christians. Hypatia thus emerges as a conscientious participant in civic debate nomenon . . .”, but “as a set of attempts to retrieve, reproduce, and so too to produce a hegemonic cultural signature” based on a canon that we could today recognize as classical (Porter, Classical Pasts, 29). Every artist’s classicism will be an idiosyncratic negotiation between personal taste and the canon they sense or select. 4   Donald Russell, Greek Declamation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) is a standard introduction. See also Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 5   Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1992) is fundamental. A recent volume by Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen, eds., Literature and Society in the Fourth Century AD: Performing Paideia, Constructing the Present, Presenting the Self (Leiden: Brill, 2015) aims to bridge the artificial scholarly gap between earlier imperial and late antique rhetorical culture. 6  Cf. PGL s. v. παιδεία. The more Christian senses were, however, generally secondary extensions of the more traditional semantics of the term. I advocate using “classicism” or “classical paideia” instead not so much in order to criticize existing work on late antique paideia, as to bring it into tighter theoretical dialogue with studies of classicist literary culture in earlier and later periods. 7   The public or political aspects of her career were noted by Socrates and Damascius, and are also borne out by many letters of Synesius, e. g. 81. See also Watts, Hypatia, on her philosophical school as a civically minded project (see especially p. 79 – 92). 8   Synesius is the most famous, and concrete information about others is derived from his letter collection. Watts, Hypatia, 63 – 78; Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, 27 – 46.

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about the status of classical literary culture in a Christian dominated Alexandria. In order to provide more detailed picture of the kinds of political issues this debate related to, I present a brief account of the Origenist controversy, a contemporary disturbance which brought Alexandria and the nearby desert ascetic communities into conflict.

Hypatia the Publicist Towards the end of 404 AD, Synesius sent Hypatia a letter (154 in modern editions) from his native Libya, with three treatises attached.9 At the end of the long letter, he makes it clear that he wants her to share one of the treatises, entitled Dio, among Alexandrian learned circles. Dio is a complex polemical work, and Synesius spends most of the prefatory letter explaining who its targets are, in order to make sure it is interpreted correctly. Epistles of this kind were expected to be shared.10 Letter 154 thus merits our careful attention, for in it Synesius outlines what could be described as Hypatia’s rhetorical mandate with respect to the debate that the Dio provokes. Why was Dio worth Hypatia’s (and our) consideration? It can be described, in short, as a literary-philosophical manifesto. The treatise takes its name from Synesius’ favorite early imperial Greek author, Dio of Prusa, nicknamed “Chrysostom.” Synesius presents Dio’s bios or career in a positive light, as a paradigm according to which he has modeled his own life. The treatise moves on to defend the importance of classical paideia to anything worthy of the title of the philosophical life. This included both the (neo‑)Platonism common in Hypatia’s day, which was particularly interested in theology and salvation, and also other forms of life claiming to be “philosophy,” such as Christian asceticism.11 Classical paideia, Syn 9   For another approach to this letter and its significance, see also Harich-Schwarzbauer’s essay in this volume. 10  Syn. Ep. 101 and 105 are well-known examples making this common expectation explicit. Cf. Pauline Allen, “Christian Correspondences: The secrets of Letter-writers and letter-bearers” in The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes, eds. Han Baltussen and Peter Davis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 209 – 232; Scott Bradbury, Selected Letters of Libanius (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 19 – 20; Michael Trapp, Greek and Latin Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17. 11   On Synesius as a theological and religious figure, Samuel Vollenweider, Neuplatonische und christliche Theologie bei Synesios von Kyrene (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985) and also Donald Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, On Prophecy, Dreams, and Human Imagination: Synesius, De Insomniis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014). Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, Philosopher-Bishop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) is useful on Neoplatonic doctrine in Synesius, though for his religiosity see Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 19 – 39. For monasticism as “philosophy,” Anne-Marie Malingrey “Philosophia:” Étude d’un group de mots dans la littérature grecque des Présocratiques au IVe siècle après J.‑C. (Paris: Librarie C. Klincksieck, 1961).

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esius insists, is essential not just as a preparatory exercise but as a lifelong aid to keeping up a contemplative discipline. In articulating his vision, Synesius draws deeply on Plato – not just for the doctrines of the Republic and Phaedo but also some of the loci and literary discussions of the Phaedrus and Theaetetus.12 He also displays profound classical paideia while arguing for it. Letter 154 characterizes the Dio, using terms drawn from sophistic cuture, as “no less a display of wide learning than a praise of it” (πολυμαθείας οὐχ ἧττον ἐπίδειξις ἢ ἐγκώμιον). The the text is filled with references to the classical tradition he is defending, including Homer, Thucydides, and Aristophanes. Synesius also engages with the second sophistic authors Philostratus and Aristides as peers (§ 1 – 3). The language is high Attic, and ornate even by classical standards. In the treatise he also devotes substantial space to a lampoon of professional teachers, as well as a criticism of “barbarian” ascetics, who are clearly some sort of Christian monks. Being a manifesto of an already well-established literary author, Dio takes up many points Synesius had broached in earlier writings, including arguments and topoi he probably learned at Hypatia’s school. In one of his first letters (137), to his fellow student Herculian, he includes a cryptic reference to the mythic shapeshifting god Proteus.13 The obscurity and specificity of his comment suggest, in context, that it was a teaching familiar to his addressee from Hypatia’s school, which he expected Herculian to recognize immediately. He returns to the theme more fully in the Dio (5.7 – 6.3). There Synesius makes clear clear that for him, Proteus was a positive paradigm for a philosopher who knows profound mysteries but can also adjust his self-presentation to disarm and charm the Everyman, who might not be ready to hear hard doctrines. This Proteus allegory thus serves an argument that the philosopher should take rhetoric seriously. It may also be a window on to how Hypatia conceived of her own public career: she had to control the audience and reputation of her teachings, which posed much more risk to her, as a pagan woman, than to her male Christian students.14 Synesius elaborates the Proteus principle with another allegory especially suggestive of Hypatia’s situation: if Ixion had not been given a cloud-decoy, he never would have given up chasing Hera (5.7). 12   Many references can be found in Kurt Treu, Synesios von Kyrene: ein Kommentar zu seinem “Dion.” (Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1958) e. g. on § 12 of the text, as well as in the notes to the CUF (Budé) edition of Lamoureux and Aujoulat. Michiel Op de Coul, “Aspects of Paideia in Synesius’ Dion,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, eds. H. Seng, and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 110 – 124 is a good starting point for study of the Dio. The text runs between 45 and 60 pages in modern editions. 13   “I forgot the wise art of Proteus, which was none other than to spend time with people, not as a divinity but as a fellow citizen” (τῆς σοφῆς τοῦ Πρωτέως ἐπελαθόμην τέχνης (οὐ γὰρ ἄλλη τις ἦν ἢ συνεῖναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις οὐ θείως, ἀλλὰ πολιτικῶς). Perhaps not coincidentally, it was on the shores of Egypt that Menelaus met Proteus, on his way home from Troy (Odyssey 4.435 – 570). 14   The allegory draws both on a passage in Plato’s Euthydemus (288b7 – c2) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Demosthenes § 8. Cf also Philostratus Life of Apollonius 1.4; Lib. Or. 18.176.

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The Dio is more broadly a sustained reflection on how classical literature (including Old Comedy) is important for all “serious” people, speculative philosophers no exception, precisely because it is pleasurable (Dio § 5 – 8.). It thus may give us some hint about how enjoyable it was to study at Hypatia’s school. Success of the sort she achieved in her world must have required, besides determination and political intelligence, a great deal of charm and wit – in ancient terms, rhetorical skill.15 Synesius discusses the other two treatises, On Dreams and On the Gift, much more briefly in the letter, but it is most probable that he wanted her to publish them as well. Is there any significance to the fact that he published all three, together, to Hypatia, in late 404? The question cannot be treated satisfactorily here, but I will highlight a few connections between them in the conclusion; it is likely that they also contributed to the same project. Various proposals have been made about the opponents of the Dio, though its audience has not been treated as often. The two have not always been distinguished. In the remainder of this section I will argue, against most modern interpretations, that both opponents and audience were predominantly Christians, or, at the very least, participants in a cultural debate dominated by Christianity on either side. For the sake of clarity, I will confine to the footnotes some of the more specialized details of the argument. “This year I have finished two books, the one after being inspired by God, the other by the calumny of men.” So Synesius begins his letter; the first book he refers to is On Dreams, the second is the Dio (he mentions On the Gift at the end of the letter). He immediately launches into an explanation of the calumny (λοιδορία) which brought it about. The obliqueness of his description of the calumniators is one of the reasons why it has been so challenging to determine their identity. The obscurity is probably intentional, as Synesius is talking about contemporary figures. He nonetheless expects Hypatia, and the people she shares the letter with, to recognize them. His opponents are divided into two groups:16 Some of those in white robes and some of those in grey robes (τῶν ἐν λευκοῖς ἔνιοι τρίβωσι καὶ τῶν ἐν φαιοῖς) claimed that I was committing a crime against philosophy, by developing expertise in beauty of diction and rhythm, and by considering it worthwhile to make a point about Homer and about rhetorical figures in speeches – alleging that a lover of wisdom ought to be a hater of the word, and only occupy himself with the superhuman realm (τὰ δαιμόνια πράγματα). As if they themselves have already become contemplators of the Noetic (θεωροὶ τοῦ νοητοῦ), while such a thing is impossible for me, since I devote some free time out of my life to purify my tongue and to sweeten 15   On rhetoric in the teaching of contemporary philosophers, see Malcolm Heath, “Platonists and the teaching of rhetoric in late antiquity,” in Late Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth, eds. Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Stephen Clark (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 143 – 159. 16   All translations are my own, based on the text and line numbers of the Garzya-Roques Budé edition (2003).

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my thought! What led them to condemn me as being suited only for play was that my Hunting with Dogs (τὰς Κυνηγετικὰς), after escaping my household in some unknown manner, has become a serious object of interest for a group of youths who are interested in Hellenism and charm; that, and some pieces of poetry carefully crafted and displaying “something of an archaic touch,” as we often say of statues. (Ep  154.2 – 18)

The “grey robes” have been variously identified as desert dwelling Christian monks, city dwelling Christian monks, pagan Cynic street preacher-philosophers, or a mix of Christian and pagan Cynics. The “white robes” have almost exclusively been identified as pagans, whether philosophers or rhetoricians.17 From the passage just quoted, a few facts emerge. First, it is not just reading classical literature which these critics frown upon, but producing classicizing literary works, since they were apparently provoked by an earlier act of publication by Synesius. The (lost) Hunting with Dogs was probably a prose treatise, and bore some resemblance to Dio’s Euboicus (Oration 7).18 It did not slip from its author’s house accidentally as Synesius coyly suggests, for he almost certainly refers to publishing it in Letter 74.19 The poetic works are likely the Hymns or at least a selection of some of them.20 Secondly, both groups of detractors make some kind of claim to “philosophy,” and their criticism of Synesius amounts more concretely to questioning his philosophical seriousness. Continuing on, Synesius begins to address the grey robes specifically: But some of them, with ignorance guiding their boldness, are readiest of all to discuss God (if you run into anyone, you will immediately hear something about their unsyllogistic syllogisms) and they drain out their words upon people even unsolicited. This seems to serve their private interests: for these people are the source of those popular teachers (δημοδιδάσκαλοι) in the cities, who are the “Horn of Amalthea” which they [i. e. the grey robes] think fit to use. I think you recognize (ἐπιγιγνώσκεις) this slack tribe which slanders a noble theme (γενναίαν ὑπόθεσιν). These people expect me to want to be their student,21 and claim that they will in a very short time render me a most daring fellow in matters of God, able to hold forth day and night continually. (Ep  154.19 – 30) 17   Op de Coul, “Aspects of Paideia in Synesius’ Dion,” argues that nothing in their description bears specifically on religion, and there may therefore be Christians in their number as well. I agree with his critique of earlier scholars’ over-reading of the ἑτέρα ἀγωγὴ at Dio 11, but in my view religion has much to do with it. Vollenweider, Neuplatonische und christliche (p. 19 ff), followed by many, sees both groups as pagans. Aldo Brancacci (Rhetorike Philosophousa: Dione Crisostomo nella cultura antica e bizantina (Rome: Bibliopolis, 1985), 149 – 151, however, sees the “white robes” as the monks of the Dio (and the grey robes as Iamblichan pagan philosophers). 18   Helmut Seng, “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene,” Hermes 134 (2006): 110. The Euboean Oration, one of Dio’s most beloved, is discussed in Synesius’ Dio at § 2. 19   Synesius mentions the text in Letter 101 to Pylaemenes and sends an “attikourgos logos” to the same in Letter 74. 20   Idalgo Baldi, Gli Inni di Sinesio di Cirene: vicende testuali di un corpus tardoantico (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 25 – 35. 21   μαθητιάω: a rare desiderative form memorably used by Aristophanes at Nu. 183 of the way students want to sit at the feet of a quack (Socrates).

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Following many scholars, I take these “grey robes” to be Christian ascetics – Synesius was himself a Christian, and they are somehow trying to recruit him.22 But the grey robes seem to be a civic phenomenon, and are therefore not to be identified strictly with monastics living in the desert outside the city: for one thing, it is unlikely that anyone on a trip to Nitria, Scetis, or Kellia would be surprised or bothered by unsolicited theologoumena. Synesius’ exasperation suggests the casual encounters of city life.23 He does use the word “cities” in the plural so there may be such people in Cyrenaica as well; but the passage indicates he is referring to the Alexandrian context which Hypatia is most familiar with – perhaps she recognizes them because they have slandered her own “noble themes” or those of other students of hers. Furthermore, the grey robes seem obsessed with theology beyond all other subjects. The δημοδιδάσκαλοι, “popular teachers” that seem to be a separate group who follow their lead, may be providing them financial support, if this is what the cryptic Horn of Amalthea reference means.24 The presence of patrons who support the grey robes would fit a well-documented late antique pattern of Christian ascetics with lay admirers.25 City-dwelling ascetics are attested for Alexandria by contemporaries John Cassian and Jerome, who view them as degenerate forms of the true monasticism found in the desert.26 If the grey robes are these sort of people, they were apparently unpopular among some “serious” Christians, and Synesius may be treading on rather safe ground when he dismissively criticizes them and their supporters. Then there are the men dressed in white robes: But the other ones, who have better taste, are sophists much more godforsaken than the former. And they would like to be congratulated for the same accomplishments (ἐπὶ τοῖς αὐτοῖς εὐδοκιμεῖν), but aren’t lucky enough to do even that. And you know of some people who have been despoiled in the tax office (οἶσθά τινας ἐν λογιστηρίοις ἀποδύντας), 22   Synesius a Christian: Cameron and Long, Barbarians and Politics, 19 – 28; 62 – 70. Grey robes signifying Christian monks: Eun. VS 476. 23   Aglae Pizzone, “Christliche und heidnische Träume: versteckte Polemik in Synesius, De Insomniis,” in Synesios von Kyrene: Politik, Literatur, Philosophie, eds. Helmut Seng and Lars Martin Hoffmann (Brepols: Turnhout, 2012), 255, sees them as desert monks, and the demodidaskaloi as a subset of them who visit the city. 24   Argued by, Ewa Wipszycka, “Le monachisme égyptien et les villes,” Travaux et Memoirs (1994): 1 – 44. Repr. in Etudes sur le christianisme dans l’Egypte de l’antiquité tardive, 1996), 144. Synesius may also somehow have in mind Philostratus’ description of Dio Chrysostom’s virtuosic eloquence, indicating especially his skill at of inventio (Phil. V. S. 486 – 487: Ἀμαλθείας γὰρ κέρας ἦν). The δημοδιδάσκαλοι may in fact be the “white robes” of the following section. 25   Melania the Elder, for example, visited Pambo and lavished him with a chest filled with three hundred pounds of silver, which he then ordered to be distributed to support the poorer monasteries in Libya: the ones in fertile Egypt, he claimed, were already doing well enough (Palladius. Hist. Laus. 10). 26  Cassian Coll. 18.4 – 7; Jerome ad Eustochium 22.34, Labourt. Referred to in the sources variously as Sarabaitae and Remnuoth; Wipszycka, “Le monachisme égyptien et les villes,” 286.

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or at any rate convinced by some single misfortune to turn to philosophy at the noontime of their life, from previously only using the gods’ names to swear in affirmations and denials like Plato; their shadow would sooner say something pertinent than they would. Nevertheless their pretension is forceful (δεινὴ ἡ προσποίησις). For wow (βαβαί), how high their eyebrow is stretched! And their hand props up their beard, and in other respects they go around more serious-faced (σεμνοπροσωποῦσιν) than the busts of Xenocrates. These people presume to legislate to us something that rather benefits themselves, i. e. that nobody seem to know anything good in public (μηδένα μηδὲν ἀγαθὸν εἰδότα φανερὸν εἶναι): for they think that it will impugn their own credibility if someone who is a philosopher knows how to speak. And they suppose that they can hide behind this pretension and seem like they are brimming with wisdom inside. (154.31 – 47)

Xenocrates succeeded Plato’s heir Speusippus in order to become the third headof the Academy. He was famous for his joyless demeanor.27 The word Synesius uses to compare them to Xenocrates’ busts, σεμνοπροσωπεῖν, “put on a stern face,” appears first in Aristophanes, in his description of Socrates in the Clouds (Nu. 363), a play Synesius praises in the Dio (3.5). Through this comparison, Synesius criticizes the “white robes” for assuming the bodily habitus of a serious philosopher without any of the intellectual substance. That he calls their affectation “δεινή” has an ironic force in the context of people who reject rhetoric: deinos is a standard adjective for describing an eloquent person (as in the common expression δεινὸς λέγειν).28 The fact that these people wish to be recognized on the same grounds as the “grey robes” is telling. For this would suggest that they share a common interest with them in what might be described as pop theology. This, I believe, is a strong indication that they are Christians, rather than pagan philosophers as the most common view holds.29 But he suggests they are like the grey robes not just because they say similar things, but also because they are interested in influencing public opinion – εὐδοκιμεῖν and φανερὸν εἶναι emphasize that there is an audience to the competition between them and Synesius. Synesius’ description of some people suffering what appears to be a loss of wealth in the tax office suggests people of the lower end of the curial class who were on the one hand personally liable for shortfalls in imperial tax reve27   Xenocrates as σεμνός and σκυθρωπὸς ἀεί: D. L.  4.7. Plato was reported to have told him, “Xenocrates, sacrifice to the Graces!” He was also famed (and parodied) for his chastity (D. L. 4.7). Cf. Phil. V. S. 528 on the relation of Marcus of Ephesus’ solemn countenance and sophistic profession. 28   LSJ s. v. δεινός III. Phil. V. S. 499 comments on the term’s ambiguity. 29   E. g. Pizzone, “Christliche und heidnische Träume.” But this popularizing version of philosophy / theology, since it dispenses with the prerequisite of rigorous philosophical training and which Synesius marks explicitly as sub-elite, does not seem to fit the usual Neoplatonists very well. That the white robes used to use the gods’ names in swearing affirmations and denials like Plato (μὰ τὸν Δία!), on my reading then, suggests that Synesius is portraying people who were not particularly religious before some sort of mid-life conversion. They have become not just earnest Christians but amateur religion hobbyists.

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nues and yet not well connected enough to obtain a pardon or exemption, nor wealthy enough to absorb a fine and maintain their social status.30 Bankrupt curials could flee to monasteries in order to escape financial burdens or seek alternative forms of respectability, and Synesius accuses the white robes’ turn to “philosophy” as something similar (and expects Hypatia to recognize the pattern).31 That he calls them “sophists” and that the Dio contains memorable tableaux of unfortunate grammarians, rhetoric teachers, and other types of literate professionals, has led many interpreters to see the white robes of 154 as teachers.32 However, later on in the letter, Synesius caricatures their “silence” (i. e. lack of eloquence) and alleges that they are jealous of his skill with words. He also later goes on to identify the white robes as the main opponents of the Dio, and in the work he blames them for their rejection of good paideia.33 This does, I think, allow for people who have been to the grammaticus, who perhaps have not had a full rhetorical training but are certainly literate; but it definitely seems to exclude professional rhetoricians. Synesius’ description of them as “sophists,” rather than indicating their profession, makes more sense as a caricaturing reproach for their baseless intellectual pretensions.34 Moreover, he charges them with having no genuine philosophical or theological training (which are seen as integral to each other) – this is another strong indication against their being pagan philosophers. So far, we have been dealing with what this letter says about the opponents of the Dio, but we must take care to distinguish these from the intended audience that Synesius hoped Hypatia would help him reach. One detail emerges about 30  The logisterion here most likely refers to the local collection depots of the tax system, well attested in Egyptian papyri (RE XIII s. v. λογιστήριον). Alternatively and less likely it may be a classicism, for in democratic Athens this was the place where the λογισταί met, who were the people responsible for conducting financial audits of public officers (LSJ s. v. λογιστής, λογιστήριον); in this case its meaning would be less clear, though possibly referring to minor officials who were fired after failing an audit. Under Valentinian and Valens (364) the collection of taxes was transferred from local curials to the office staff of the governors (CTh 12.6.7), though this arrangement seems not to have lasted past 390; Noel Lenski, Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the fourth century A. D. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 297 – 298. 31  Cf. οἶσθα; τινας has a generalizing connotation. Cod. Theod. 12.1.63 for (fears and rumors of, at least) Egyptian curials fleeing to monasteries to avoid liturgies. Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 180, for similar suspicions in Asia Minor (in Nilus of Ancyra). 32   E. g. Cameron and Long, Barbarians and Politics, 63. 33   See in agreement also Seng, “Die Kontroverse,”; Treu, Synesios von Kyrene, however, idenitifies the addressees of much of Dio § 4 – 11 as the grey robes. But compare what Synesius says further on in Ep. 154: “The treatise was composed against these people, and it opposes the voice of the one group (the grey) and the silence of the other (the white).” (ἐπὶ τούτοις συνετέθη τὸ σύγγραμμα, καὶ ἀπήντησε τῶν μὲν τῇ φωνῇ, τῶν δὲ τῇ σιγῇ.) (154.51 – 53) 34  Cf Letter 104.35 for someone characterized as a sophist, but as a pejorative epithet for a braggart rather than a professional designation.

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the likely audience from a section further on in the letter. He has just compared his Dio, with its polygenericity, unity of purpose, and deceptively relaxed style, to Plato’s Phaedrus. Drawing on another famous Platonic passage from the Symposium, he goes on to say: But whoever does not lack training (ὅστις δὲ οὐκ ἀγύμναστος) in ferreting out also some divine personage hidden under a cheaper form, just like in Athens the craftsmen used to do, enclosing Aphrodite and the Graces and other such beautiful works of the gods within statues of Silenuses and Satyrs, it will not escape this man that the text reveals many of the inviolable doctrines (τῶν ἀβεβήλων ἀποκαλύψαν δογμάτων), hiding under the pretense of being extraneously added to other things, and by being scattered in the discourse quite capriciously (εἰκῇ) and – so it would seem – artlessly.35 (154.75 – 83)

Synesius’ critics cloak intellectual shallowness with a serious garment, but his Dio does the opposite. Whether or not such a single vision unifies the seemingly disparate parts of the Dio has been debated.36 But it is clear that Synesius hoped his readers, contemporary and otherwise, would exercise themselves in just that search for the unifying (and divine) truth beneath. The audience which he hypothesizes here therefore is a learned one and one that probably enjoys reading things which challenge and affirm their ability to decipher messages hidden in the interstices.37 Readers trained in Neoplatonic schools such as Hypatia’s would have been well versed in Homeric, Orphic, Chaldean and even Platonic allegories, and a similar thing could be said about Christians who might have learned biblical exegesis at the feet of a figure such as the Alexandrian teacher Didymus the Blind (d. 398).38 Had Hypatia once tried to express to Synesius the underlying meaning of the Phaedrus? He speaks matter-of-factly about such latent doctrines, as if they were included in the lessons at her school. What might he or Hypatia have made of the famous palinode speech (Phaedrus 35   So Alcibiades describes Socrates in the Symposium (215b). Here however, the body of the Satyr or Silenus is relevant less for its ugliness than for its hybridity, and the comparison is no longer between bodies and likenesses of bodies, but between likenesses of bodies and texts. The analogous Graces and Aphrodite inside the Dio correspond, perhaps, to the riches of Synesius’ own mind. 36   Op de Coul, “Aspects of Paideia in Synesius’ Dion,” most recently pro; Antonio Garzya against (“Il Dione di Sinesio nel quadro del dibattito culturale del iv secolo d. C.” RFIC (1972): 32 – 45). 37   Compare William Johnson’s account of the role of reading in taste display and communal identity construction in the high empire in Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 9 – 16; 42 – 56; 200 – 202. 38   Didymus followed a heavily allegorical method of biblical exegesis. He was made head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria by Athanasius; Norma Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria (New York: Routledge, 2007), 24. For Homeric allegorical interpretation, Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Sebastian Gertz, Death and Immortality in Late Neoplatonism (Brill: Leiden, 2011), 174 – 188, provides examples of how exegeting Platonic myth was a serious interest of later Neoplatonists. See also Fincher’s essay in this volume for allegory in Nonnus.

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243 – 257)? What of the friendship depicted therein between the pupil and the philosopher-mystagogue? The classical culture of late antique Greeks generally acknowledged that high philosophy should require or reward some sort of textual askesis. In this climate, the author of such multi-layered works as Dio and the highly allegorical De Providentia might expect an avid and sympathetic readership. Most forms of higher education would have reinforced such hermeneutical skills, along with the metaphysical and political presuppositions that informed them, and we should not underestimate their usefulness in late antique public life.39 The majority of Alexandria’s elite classes would have been aware (at least) of such modes of reading and writing. Such then is the general class to which the Dio was addressed. Towards the end of the letter, Synesius wraps up his discussion of the Dio thus: About all these things, we will wait for you to judge (σε κρίνουσαν περιμενοῦμεν). And if you decree that it should be made public, it will be laid before rhetors together with philosophers. It will delight some, and it will benefit others, at least, that is, if it does not end up withdrawn by you, who are able to judge (δυναμένης κρίνειν). But if it does not in your view seem worthy of the audience of the Hellenes, and if you, as I suppose, like Aristotle, place the truth above a friend, a thick and deep darkness will cover it and humans will never know that it was composed. (154.91 – 99)

By leaving the text’s publication up to Hypatia, and specifically by using the verb κρίνειν (“judge, criticize”), Synesius casts Hypatia in the role of literary critic (κριτικός, usually masculine), a role she is not commonly associated with in scholarship, but which fits well her public persona. This role suggests a range of things in Greek intellectual tradition: not just the ability to judge style and content, but also to have one’s opinion taken seriously by peers – in other words, a prominent position, even a position of leadership, in an intellectual network. The “critic” represented a venerable tradition in Alexandria in particular, where publicly funded cultural institutions such as the Mouseion, established under the early Ptolemies, still existed – Hypatia’s father Theon had been a member.40 Famous Alexandrian critics of the Hellenistic period such as Aristarchus and 39   The imperial panegyrics of Themistius, for instance, are filled with important messages intended for both emperor and his elite audiences that often assume subtle attention from the listener. For irony and intertexts in Synesius’ De Regno, see Alex Petkas “The King in Words: Performance and Fiction in Synesius’ De regno,” AJP 139.1 (2018): 123 – 151. 40   Suda, Θ 205. The nature of the late antique Mouseion is uncertain, though it implied financial support, and was an honor dispensed by imperial officials. See Edward Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 13 – 15, 62. Its Ptolemaic status was common knowledge in Greek intellectual culture: Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) 96 – 7.

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Callimachus had enjoyed a tight relationship with the state.41 Synesius explicitly invokes the latter in Epistle 154 by referring to his critics as “Telchines,” a mythical race of technician-dwarfs with which Callimachus caricatured his own anonymous detractors in the opening of his Aetia.42 Synesius politely phrases his request that she publish the treatise, if she approves, in the form of a future more vivid conditional.43 If the request wasn’t clear enough to her, the letter carrier could make Synesius’ instructions much more explicit.44 This passage refers to the treatise’s destinees as “Hellenes.”45 In the author’s writings, this term lacks the religious meaning of “pagan” which we find in other Christian authors. It designates, in a broad sense, Greek-speaking individuals, and (usually) in a more narrow sense, people educated in classical Greek paideia.46 He also speaks of it reaching the attention of “rhetors and philosophers” – two groups which represent the dichotomy he is trying to overcome in the Dio.47 But there is no reason to suppose that he expected his treatise’s reach to stop there. He is singling out these people as the most coherent, representative, and judicious group among his audience, the influential opinion-setters who will hopefully be the first stop for the Dio after it is approved by Hypatia.

The Encroaching Desert: Contemporary Debates in the Christian Community Let us turn now to the cultural debates within Alexandrian Christianity that I propose Letter 154 and its attached treatises address. I will do this by examining certain aspects of the ecclesiastical controversy surrounding Origenism, 41  Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 123 – 4; 210 – 11. There is no evidence that Hypatia was a member of the Mouseion (a loud silence among our sources), and it is unlikely, given that she was a woman (Watts, Hypatia, 64 – 5). Imperial Mouseion members also included sophists; Phil. V. S. 524 (the sophist Dionysius of Miletus); 532 (Polemo). 42   Apparently, they had found orthographical errors in some of his writings: οὐδὲ γὰρ τῶν τοιούτων οἱ Τελχῖνες ἀπέσχοντο (Epistle 154.64 – 65); cf. Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1. (μοι Τελχῖνες ἐπιτρύζουσιν ἀοιδῇ / νήιδες οἳ Μούσης οὐκ ἐγένοντο φίλοι). 43   He does not directly specify a single agent (i. e. Hypatia) as the publisher here, probably because once he secures her approval he will circulate it through other channels as well, such as his brother Euoptius (cf. Ep. 105). For a similar use of the future cf. Synesius, De regno 9.5 “φέρε δή σοι γράψω λόγῳ τὸν βασιλέα, ὥσπερ ἄγαλμα στήσας· σὺ δέ μοι τὸ ἄγαλμα τοῦτο κινούμενον ἐπιδείξεις” 44   On the epistle carrier, Allen “Christian Correspondences”; Adam Schor, Theodoret’s People: Social Networks and Religious Conflict in Late Roman Syria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 37. 45   Cf. also further on in the letter δόγματα τῶν οὔπω φιλοσοφηθέντων Ἕλλησι (154.103 – 4). 46   Cameron and Long, Barbarians and Politics, 62 – 69. The usage is also common in Philostratus (e. g. V. S. § 571). 47   This might include lawyers, elsewhere referred to with the term ῥήτωρ in Synesius’ writings (cf. Ep 101, 103 to the ῥήτωρ Pylaemenes).

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a high profile series of events involving the Egyptian church, that transpired over the decade before the publication of the Dio.48 The Origenist controversy’s importance for understanding Hypatia and her political world has not been fully appreciated, and this treatment will not be exhaustive. I will focus on some key issues at stake in the controversy, as well as how it illuminates the relationship of church politics and public opinion, desert and city.49 One of the main protagonists of Origenist controversy was Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, who later ordained Synesius metropolitan of Ptolemais, the see responsible for all of the Libyan Pentapolis. Theophilus’ involvement in the controversy begins with a dispute in Jerusalem in 396 between John, the holy city’s bishop, on one side, and on the other Jerome, (resident in Bethlehem) and Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. The bishop of Jerusalem had objected to Epiphanius ordaining Jerome’s brother as a deacon uncanonically – i. e. outside of his own episcopal territory. The controversy quickly turned theological, with the other two accusing John of excessive fondness for the doctrines of the two-centuries dead Origen. Origen had been controversial more or less since his own lifetime and Epiphanius had already directed some of his considerable heresy-hunting prowess towards rooting out the Alexandrian exegete’s perceived errors. Bishop John called in, as a mediator, Theophilus, who sent his trusty envoy Isidore to Jerusalem. Isidore failed miserably, but Theophilus was nonetheless soon able to quench Jerome’s wrath with a letter and reconcile him reluctantly to his bishop.50 Isidore however soon fell out of favor with his superior for other reasons involving a somewhat obscure scandal in 399, and Theophilus indicted him in order to be tried in an ecclesiastical court. But he fled to the nearby monastic community of Nitria before the trial could take place, and a monk named Ammonius came thence to Alexandria with a delegation, in order to try to change Theophilus’ mind about Isidore. Theophilus speaks about this occasion in a synodal letter.51 According to his version of the story, Ammonius and his 48   This controversy, its lead-ups and spin-offs, comprises a complex set of of issues and I will only select certain immediately relevant aspects. I am reliant on the work of Elizabeth Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria in interpreting the sources and reconstructing the events. For the basic ancient narrative of the Egyptian events, see Socr. Hist. eccl. VI.7; Sozom. HE VIII.11 – 13. 49   An important beginning has been made, in drawing connections between the Origenist controversy and Synesius, by Pizzone, “Christliche und heidnische Träume.” I differ with points of her treatment, however, and her main focus is on De Insomniis. I am also encouraged and influenced at points by an unpublished lecture by Peter Brown on the subject, and I am very grateful to him for sharing this piece with me. 50  Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria, 23 for an overview of these events with additional primary sources. 51   For Theophilus’ version of these events, see the Second Synodal Letter (= Jerome Ep 92, CSEL 55, 147 – 55, trans. in Russell Theophilus of Alexandria, 93 – 99 esp. 95 – 97). Other versions

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assistants produced witnesses who publicly countered Theophilus’ allegations in a densely populated district of the city, and then, as Theophilus explains, “They bawled out whatever they believed to be prejudicial to us, inciting the pagan populace against us with the kind of things that unbelievers will readily give ear to.” Among which, they reminded the “unbelieving rabble” of the destruction of the Serapeum and “other idols,” adding the claim that the Nitrian monasteries had never infringed on the rights of temples. Ammonius and company did this, Theophilus observes, in order to win the support of the (allegedly pagan) masses, in order to stir up public hostility against Theophilus himself and to forcibly prevent Isidore from ever standing trial. If we trust the bishop’s account at least as far as the basics, this event illustrates the civic character of some ecclesiastical disputes – especially if prominent Christians were willing to enlist the support of pagans in influencing their outcome (this was apparently a plausible accusation, at least). Ammonius happened to be the most respected of a family of four very influential monks called the “Tall Brothers,” one of whom, Dioscorus, was a bishop of Hermopolis, the see responsible for Nitria, and the other two younger brothers held ecclesiastical posts in Alexandria.52 In response to Theophilus’ dispute with Ammonius and Isidore, the younger brothers had resigned their posts in Alexandria and gone to join the elder in the desert. Theophilus took this opportunity, according to Socrates, to stir up tensions between two groups of monks who were respectively labelled by their opponents as “Origenists” and “Anthropomorphites.” The so-called Anthropomorphites are described by some of our sources as holding that God has a body, although what seems to have been more at stake was affirming the validity of visions and images used or encountered in both ecstatic experiences and the apocryphal literature which claims to recount them.53 The “Origenists,” of whom the Tall Brothers were in fact leading figures at this time, stressed both the incorporeality of God and the necessity to purge the mind of all images, as being distracting deceptions in prayer – a sort of “mental iconoclasm,” to borrow Clark’s phrase.54 Theophilus convoked a synod on site in Nitria which condemned certain of the writings of Origen. The Origenists refused to comply and hand over their books, and so the bishop soon returned with military support from the preof the story: Palladius, Dialogue on the life of John Chrysostom 6; Socr. Hist. eccl. VI.7.9, Sozom. HE VIII. 8.12. 52   Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria, 27. 53  Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 43 – 50; Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria, 23. 54   The insistence on imageless prayer prevalent among the Origenists might have given Synesius something to complain about: his hymns, cast as acts of prayer, are filled with vivid imagery, though not so much that he imagines God (the Father) to have a body. See especially Hymn 8 on the resurrection of Christ and his ascent through the spheres, greeted as he goes by the various heavenly bodies. We have already seen in Ep. 154 how certain poetic compositions, probably the Hymns, allegedly ignited the controversy around his writings.

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fect in order to arrest the Tall Brothers, who had meanwhile fled with many of their supporters. Their cells were burned. The Origenist delegation escaped to Constantinople to pursue an appeal with the Emperor Arcadius and the Patriarch John Chrysostom. The latter’s hospitality for the monks earned him the ire of Theophilus, who eventually effected his deposition in 403.55 This was, then, a controversy which spanned three continents and rocked three of the most important episcopal sees of the Eastern Empire. The tumult began with a contention about the authority of the bishop of Alexandria over ascetic groups, and quickly raised the issue not just of which theological or exegetical position was correct but also what sort of people are qualified to pronounce on these matters and fit to have their views guide popular opinion. Clark’s work on the Origenist controversy has moreover shown the importance of lay people – many of them women – in shaping the debate, receiving and circulating polemical writings, and supporting the figures involved. Evidence is plentiful in the cases of Jerome and Rufinus.56 Lay patrons and enthusiasts were important threads in the economic and social fabric of ascetic communities in Alexandria and its orbit: in places like Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis, there was close interaction between monks, lay people, ecclesiastics and secular society. Pilgrims went to visit the desert, monks came to town on various errands, and they would return to their respective bases with new ideas, desires, and texts.57 Origenism also continued to be an issue of concern for the Alexandrian church even after its initial paroxysm: Theophilus, in his paschal letter of 404, explicitly attacks the Origenists, as he had in the letters of 401 and 402.58 On the most plausible reconstruction, Synesius’ Letter 154 was sent to Alexandria, with its accompanying treatises, towards the end of 404.59 By this time he had been married – he addresses the Dio to his son (e. g. § 4.1). The wedding most 55   Synesius alludes to John Chrysostom’s deposition in a letter he later wrote as bishop to Theophilus (Ep. 67). While on embassy in Constantinople from 397 – 400, he probably saw John preach. 56   Pammachius (a senator at Rome), Macarius, Paula and Melania were among Jerome’s associates; Clark, The Origenist Controvery, 11 – 42, esp 19 – 21; also see Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 366 – 362. Melania had also been a close associate of Evagrius (Palladius Hist. Laus. 38.8 – 9). Rufinus of Aquileia was an influential monk, to whom we owe the Latin translation of Origen’s On First Principles (the majority of the treatise is only available today through this translation). 57   Examples abound in Palladius and the Historia Monachorum. For instance, Palladius’ account of Apollonius, a desert entrepreneur who ran a profitable business conveying goods to and from Nitria: Hist. Laus. 13. 58   Translation in Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria, 152 – 3 (starting at § 11) of Jerome’s Latin translation (Jerome Ep 100, CSEL 55 213 – 33). Also see the earlier festal letters in the same volume. The letter of 403 does not survive. 59   On dating 154 and the Dio: see Noël Aujoulat’s introduction in the Budé edition, pp. 96 –  101.

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likely took place in Alexandria, and the bride was a woman from an Alexandrian family. This marriage had somehow involved the blessing of Theophilus – Synesius says as much in Letter 105. Thus it is clear that Synesius and the bishop of Alexandria were acquainted with each other by the time the Dio was written.60 There are some striking parallel passages in the rhetoric of Theophilus’ paschal letter of 402 and Synesius’ Dio and letter 154.61 The paschal letters (also known as festal letters) would have circulated widely, and participated to some extent in the classicizing Greek public culture Synesius was defending in the Dio.62 Among the charges which the Alexandrian pope continually alleged of Origen was that he and his followers completely denied the goodness of sexuality and procreation – in contradiction to God’s pre-lapsarian commandment to the first humans to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). This was probably more than anything a reductio ad absurdum from the more widely attested speculation of Origen that pre-existing souls had entered bodies as punishment for some prior declination from their happy incorporeal contemplative state.63 But the idea of a complete rejection of marriage, even if it was polemical exaggeration, found confirmation in the attitude of the monks towards sexuality. Indeed, the ideas at stake in the clash between Theophilus and the monks centered around the limits of ascetic practice and, correspondingly, the goodness of the body and the bodily existence of humans.64 That Rufinus and Jerome later traded insults over education – Rufinus challenging his opponent for constantly citing classical literature, Jerome riposting that the latter had obviously not had a proper education – also suggests that cultural and class biases were easily dragged into the fray.65 60   Tassilo Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001), 450 –  467, suggests it was an expression of loyalty to Theophilus, who wanted support in the midst of the Origenist controversy. 61   Pointed out by Pizzone “Christliche und heidnische Träume.” The “garrulitas” of which Theophilus accuses the monks in his paschal letter of is particularly striking (suriviving in Jerome’s Latin translation = Jerome ep. 98.193; cf Pizzone “Christliche und heidnische Träume,” 249). 62   Theophilus’ letters were praised by Jerome and Synesius for their stylistic qualities. Jerome flatteringly compares them, in their joining of rhetoric and philosophy, to a combination of Demosthenes and Plato (Jerome, Ep. 99.1 – 2). Synesius is more restrained in Epistle 9 (written as bishop, thus several years after the Dio’s publication). Krastu Banev, Theophilus of Alexandria and the First Origenist Controversy: Rhetoric and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 72 – 80, discusses both. 63   Attested e. g. at Theophilus, First Synodal Letter, PG 86 969C – 971B (Tr. in Russell, Theophilus of Alexandria, 91 – 93). Procreation and conception thus would presuppose the sin of the pre-existing souls of future infants. Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 113 – 114 on Theophilus’ (and Epiphanius’) charges against Origenism as anti-procreation. 64   I am particularly indebted to Peter Brown (unpublished essay) on this point. 65   On this see Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 15. the positions in the Origenist and related Anthropomorphite controversy, however, cannot be neatly mapped on to a binary of the educated vs. the simple (ibid. 46).

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These latter aspects of the debate engulfing Alexandria and its monastic environs become more clear when we take into account the role which Evagrius of Pontus and his writings played in setting the tone of monastic praxis. Evagrius is not mentioned by Theophilus in connection with Origenism, nor do Socrates, Sozomen, or Palladius connect him with these events. But more recently scholars have recognized his decisive role in shaping the debate. Born to a well-off Christian family, Evagrius had been given a thorough classical education. After working in the Constantinopolitan church as a deacon he was embroiled in a scandal and fled the city, arriving in Egypt in 383. He became closely associated with the Tall Brothers, especially Ammonius; he had corresponded with John of Jerusalem and Rufinus.66 Evagrius died in 399, perhaps before the controversy had taken on its stable form as a doctrinal dispute. In On Dreams (De Insomniis) (4.5), one of the other treatises included with Letter 154, Synesius takes on an unnamed opponent who believes spiritual ascent is important but distrusts the power of the faculty of imagination (phantasia). Pizzone has argued that Synesius is most likely referring to Evagrius.67 Whether Synesius means Evagrius himself or someone who has adopted Evagrian doctrine, the connection is very plausible. For according to the monk’s teachings, the imaginative faculty is the devil’s workshop, and mental images, both waking and sleeping, are the beginning of most temptations. Synesius describes On Dreams in Letter 154 as a novel examination of the imaginative nature, the phantasia. In fact the usual title, Περὶ Ἐνυπνίων, derived from Byzantine manuscripts of the treatise, is not used explicitly by Synesius anywhere, and suggests a more limited scope of material than this wide ranging text actually covers. On Dreams is one of the most ambitious ancient attempts to bring into dialogue the diverging semantic fields of phantasia, which is an important concept in both ancient psychology (as “the faculty of imagination”) and rhetoric (as “a mental image,” or “sense impression,” i. e. raw material for literary composition).68 Another well-known doctrine of Evagrius that Synesius criticizes, this time in the Dio, is the goal of reaching a state of apatheia, or freedom from the passions. This concept is traceable in some form to Plato and is of key importance in Stoicism, but by the time Evagrius made it a cornerstone of his ascetic philos66   Robert Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus (New York: Oxford 2003), xvii – xxi for the life of Evagrius, with further references; also Palladius Lau. Hist. 38. 67   It may be better to say that the anonymous person is more of an enthusiast for Evagrian teachings than the already deceased Evagrius himself; yet it was admittedly not uncommon in antiquity to polemicize against even long-dead opponents (e. g. Origen Contra Celsum). 68   On phantasia in ancient rhetorical theory, Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 107 – 129; in late ancient philosophy: Anne Sheppard, The Poetics of Phantasia: Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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ophy, it had already had a long history in Christian spiritual discourse.69 In the following passage of the Dio, while criticizing his opponents, Synesius seems to be targeting this very doctrine. He begins with mocking incredulity: For they [who think they are immune to distraction] certainly will not despise nature and say that they cling to contemplation without wearing out, making themselves out to be passionless (ἀπαθεῖς) gods clothed in scraps of flesh! Well, if they do say that, let them know that instead of gods, or wise men, or divine men, they have become spongeheaded braggarts in the extreme. They would be better off properly assigning what things belong in each category. For passionlessness (ἀπάθεια) pertains to the nature of a god, while humans, by trading vice for virtue, become moderated in passion (μετριοπαθεῖς); and it is escaping immoderateness that should be the challenge of the wise man. (Dio 6.6)

Elsewhere in his writings, Synesius is in fact happy to acknowledge apatheia as a legitimate aim of philosophical life (e. g. Epistle 140). Porphryry holds it to be the goal of the theoretical virtues.70 The fact that Synesius picks it out on this occasion as a particularly problematic doctrine strongly suggests he is reacting to something his opponents had insisted on.71 In his view, the Evagrian ideal of apatheia represented a dangerous attempt to exceed everyday human nature and become like a god. Becoming like the divine is also a very common theme in late antique spirituality: Synesius’ objection, it becomes clear in the treatise, is more that these people try to obtain the legitimate goal of philosophy in an illegitimate and disorderly fashion; that is, without “philosophy” itself. For in the view of the Dio, no philosophy which rejects classical paideia deserves the name; even though Evagrius and many of the desert ascetics were highly educated, they advocated a path which clearly did not require this.

Christian Controversy in a Diverse Society But who exactly is Synesius trying to challenge with these arguments? Interpreters of the Dio are faced with reconciling the many admiring comments Synesius makes about some Christian monks, and the critiques he nonetheless makes of their method therein. The following description suggests, on many points (e. g. κατενόησα, ἦσαν), that Synesius may have personally paid a visit to the desert:

69   Kevin Corrigan, Evagrius and Gregory: Mind, Soul and Body in the 4th century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 54 – 57 on the background of Evagrius’ use of apatheia. This may have been a signature doctrine that he made himself known for. Palladius reports that he said of Ammonius: “οὐδέποτε ἀπαθέστερον ἑώρακα” (Palladius, Hist. Laus. 12.5). 70   Sentences 32, which Synesius draws on in Ep 140. See also Porph. Sent. 6. 71   Jerome later (after 410) attacked Evagrius’ advocacy of apatheia – Dial. adv. Pelag. 1 (PL 23 517 – 519), though on different grounds. Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 16.

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And I have already observed (κατενόησα) barbarians too . . . who have made contemplation their mission and for this reason live apart from civic life and do not share in the company of men, eagerly trying to cut themselves loose from their nature. And they had (ἦσαν αὐτοῖς) solemn songs and sacred symbols and certain ordered processions towards the divine.72 All this amputates the desire to return to the material. And they live separate from each other (χωρὶς ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων), in order not to see or hear anything pleasing (χαρίεν), “Nor do they eat food nor drink the flashing wine.” [Il. 5.341] (Dio 7.1)

These men are “barbaroi” which we may possibly take as applying to Egyptian monks. I believe he means it more generally to apply to people lacking a thorough Greek education, regardless of their mother tongue, and living a certain lifestyle in the desert. Synesius points out that the goal of their self-isolation is sensory deprivation: they are trying not to see or hear anything pleasing. The first is not surprising: the sight of food, beautiful people of either sex, comfortable living circumstances, elegant art and churches, are common in the ascetic writings as of the sort of things which tempt monks back to civilization. But to ἀκοῦσαί τι χαρίεν, hear something pleasing, also suggests the act of enjoying literary arts, which is the key issue for Synesius. These monks do not resemble the stranger-haranguing, city-haunting, “grey robes” of Letter 154. They are not pseudo-monks or charlatans, and this is essential to his argument. The monks portrayed in the Dio are genuine ascetics, even somewhat idealized versions of them, such as are found in the pages of the Life of Antony, the Historia Monachorum, and Palladius’ Lausiac History. They are following a path widely acknowledged, including by Synesius himself, and most importantly, by his opponents and his audience, as generally deserving of praise and admiration. He describes them vividly (i. e. with enargeia) in order to confirm his claim to autopsy and anticipate one of his opponents’ possible objections (“but have you actually been to see the holy men?”). These ascetics, though they may seem like the gods to which the Iliadic tag refers, are still humans and they know it. As nobly as they struggle against nature, they grow weary at times of the blessed life of pure theoria, and then their mortal nature drags them back down. The author has been told, moreover, that it is a rare monk who actually makes it to the heights of contemplation, and this generally only occurs with people who are born with some sort of divine nature. “For,” he says, borrowing a line from the Phaedo: Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are Bacchants. (Pl. Phd. 69c) Nor even do these [special individuals among them] continually cling to their bacchic ecstasy (βακχείας).73 Rather, at one time they lie in God, and at another in the world and in their bodies, and 72

 These τακταί τινες πρόσοδοι I take to be regular liturgical services.   Compare a passage from Theophilus’ letter to Epiphanius: (= Jerome 90.144) the Origenists are “raving with bacchantic fury on behalf of the new heresy.” Clark The Origenist Controversy, 118 defends the accuracy of Jerome’s translations. 73

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they know that they are but humans . . . What else do their baskets mean, and their setting their hands to wicker weaving, if not that then they are men, that is, that they have at that point turned back (ἐπιστροφὴν) to the things below? For they certainly don’t contemplate at the same time that they devise their subtle baskets.74 (οὐ γὰρ δὴ θεωροῦσί τε ἅμα καὶ σοφίζονται περἰ τὰ πλέγματα).75 (Dio 7.3 – 4)

Synesius is not here criticizing them for mostly failing to reach uninterrupted theoria. His point is to show that their path is hard, and even these “barbarians” have strategies for dealing with the rest of their humanity. The good Hellenic solution, he argues, is literature, a much more flexible and charming way which serves the needs of softer natures: “And yet the barbaric constitution is mightier than the Hellenic at holding to its purpose. For whatever path it sets out on, it is vigorous and unyielding. The Hellenic is urbane and mixed more tamely – such that it may more quickly be dissolved!” (Dio 7.6). In praising the “barbarian” constitution as strong and superior in its intensity to the Hellenic constitution – a sentiment which echoes some sayings of the desert fathers76 Synesius’ aim is precisely to challenge the paradigmatic value and wider applicability of their ascetic path. For his opponents in the Dio are not “barbarians,” nor monks as such. They are “Hellenes” in the sense that they can be meaningfully held against a traditional Greek standard of excellence, but are instead inclined to see Christian monasticism as some sort of model for their own lives. Their interest in such alternative ways of “doing philosophy” has led them to believe that they can dispense with a classical education. They are not illiterate, but they are not particularly interested in Dio Chrysostom or Aristophanes, and may find Christian philosophers who have mastered such authors intimidating or even threatening to their worldview. They might have been to the grammaticus and picked up enough of letters to deal with business and tax documents, and perhaps read the pithy sayings of Evagrius and other desert fathers. But they do not think a holy man or a wise man need have anything to do with artistic literary production. These are the men in white robes. And the fact that such comparatively ordinary people feel like they have access to things like apatheia and pure theoria – the highest honors of philosophy – has given certain among them an intellectual boldness (in theological matters especially) which has greatly irritated Synesius. He expects Hypatia – and perhaps Theophilus as well – to sympathize with his frustration. 74   There is a humorous play on σοφίζονται here (to (handi‑)craft / to devise), and the inclusion of such “low” details lightens the mood and gently deflates the austere image of sainthood he is contending with. 75   Antony the Great was in fact said to have been caught up into a visionary ecstasy in the middle of his basket weaving once (Vita Antonii 82; cf. 53). 76  Cf Apopthegmata Patrum, (alphabetical collection), s. v. Arsenios, 5 & 6; though these offer the reverse valuation – i. e. the barbarian’s wisdom in virtue, obtained by his own labors, is more valuable than the παίδευσις of the Hellene and Roman.

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It would be difficult for such people to get too much out of his Dio. The uncommonly elaborate language he uses makes obvious the rather high level of cultivation he expects of his readers. The treatise, as we have noted, is aimed at the educated elite of the city, a religiously diverse group interested in keeping the peace in one of the ancient world’s largest and most complex imperial capitals. They are a group that Theophilus, imperial agents like Orestes, and Synesius and Hypatia, all wanted the support of. The majority of the city’s Christian elite would not have wanted to see proper monks denigrated – nor, for that matter, precious public cultural monuments like the Serapeum.77 Synesius took pains to render the distinction between religions as invisible as possible. This explains many features of the text, including his willingness to speak of Abba Amoun, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Abba Antony (in that order) as a group of holy men in the same class (§ 10.5). His philosophical classicism is witness to a deeper pragmatism of pluralistic consensus, addressed to a group that still contained prominent pagan families, even if they were in the minority. We should credit Hypatia as an architect of that consensus.

Conclusion To summarize: the Dio is not directed against Evagrius specifically, nor against the Origenists or Origenism. Synesius is attacking certain ideas or perhaps rather ideological tendencies which had been associated with “Origenists,” though he is not attacking them qua Origenist ideas. Rather, Synesius can allow us to see the Origenist controversy as part of debates brought on by cultural shifts relating to intellectual and spiritual authority in late antique Alexandria.78 What would be the fate of classical literature – and the institutions that promoted it – if it came to be seen as, ultimately, only vestigial to the dominant culture’s conceptions of virtue? This was the real threat that the white robes were posing, and these the unacceptable implications they were drawing from indisputably holy desert fathers. If we have been correct in assigning the opponents and audience of the Dio, Hypatia was at the center of a debate waged largely among Christians. But all public figures involved in societal leadership would be deeply affected by these issues. Synesius and his teacher were increasingly competing with monks for the influence and attention of the upper classes in Alexandrian society, who 77   Compare Julian’s description in his Letter 19 (Wright) of Pegasius, a Christian priest who kept the pagan holy objects of Troy safe in secret and shared them with the emperor upon his visit. 78   Blossom Stefaniw, for example, discusses the Evagrius’ doctrine, rhetoric, and the social network which spread them, as factors which would threaten the authority of the episcopal institution (“Evagrius and Authority,” in Evagrius and His Legacy. eds. Joel Kalvesmaki and Robin Darling Young [Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2016], 113 – 115).

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had long been accustomed to seek out philosophers as spiritual and ethical guides. On this front, paradoxically, the interests of Hypatia lined up, by virtue of a common threat, with those of Theophilus. Synesius is trying to deflate the grey robes as well, which clearly implies they are held in honor among some people. He does not see them as murderous or violent; but sanctimonious city ascetics could lend some coherence and legitimacy to what might otherwise in some people’s eyes look like an angry mob. Might these be the sort of people who could help an Ammonius turn a crowd against a Theophilus? Or a Cyril against an Orestes, or worse? Did Letter 154 and its dossier have anything to do with Hypatia’s death, then? John of Nikiu (84.87) suggests that astrolabes, “magic” and “instruments of music” were reasons that Hypatia was suspected of Satanic wiles. On the Gift, as Synesius tells us in Letter 154, was composed several years earlier, when Synesius was at court. In it, he presents his addressee Paeonius with a beautiful astronomical device, and describes how it works. It is not designed for collecting anything we would consider scientific data; rather, the form of the device is supposed to produce a phantasia in the mind of its viewer, leading them to a noble contemplation (5.5). He makes clear that it was made with help from his teacher (4.2). De Insomniis, though it certainly does not advocate magic, nonetheless contains discussions of vaguely occult phenomena, such as cosmic sympathy (§ 2), which could be interpreted or portrayed invidiously by hostile readers as involving magic. Synesius frames the Dio as a defense of the Muses, and uses the metaphor of a musical instrument prominently toward the end of the treatise. Whether or not these texts help explain Hypatia’s death (she would live about another ten years more), they may perhaps make more intelligible her exceptional life.

Desire and Despair: Synesius, Hypatia, and No Consolation of Philosophy Helmut Seng Introduction For the intellectual and spiritual biography of Synesius, Hypatia is a main point, if not the main point of reference.1 This is clear from a number of letters Synesius wrote to various addressees,2 including the philosopher herself. But the letters of Synesius are hardly to be read as straightforward biographical information. They serve social and pragmatic functions, and they are showpieces of literary skill (aspects that might coincide). The images Synesius gives of himself3 vary according to the specific intention or coloring of each letter, and so do the images of Hypatia and his relationship with her.4 This paper aims at exploring this relationship and its protagonists as presented in the letters of Synesius, occasionally taking into account his other works as well. Although references to Hypatia are not very numerous, her importance for Synesius is so fundamental that the image he gives of her comes close to making her not only his philosophical teacher, but almost a symbol of philosophy itself. References to Hypatia range chronologically from the first to among the last letters,5 as far as it is possible to reconstruct accurate dating. The ground-breaking study of Otto Seeck in 18946 has not been generally superseded, although 1   The texts by Synesius concerning Hypatia are presented and thoroughly commented on in Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia: Beiträge zur Klassischen Philologie 16 (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2011), 21 – 167. The letters are also commented on in Antonio Garzya and Denis Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, I – II (Paris: Les belles lettres, 2000). Cf. S. Toulouse, “Synésios de Cyrène,” Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (2016): 664 – 666 in his recent survey which evaluates abundant bibliography. 2  Including De dono to Paeonius (see below p. 39). 3   A letter being, proverbially, an image of the soul: cf. Demetr. Eloc. 227 and Klaus Thraede, Grundzüge griechisch-römischer Brieftopik, Zetemata 48 (München: C. H. Beck, 1970), 157 – 161 (an image, undoubtedly, shaped by the epistolist himself). 4   Although their general character might be summarily described as aiming at “eine enge persönliche Beziehung zur Lehrerin weiterzuführen bzw. wieder aufzunehmen, meist in Form von Klage und Bitte um seelischen Beistand.” Katharina Luchner, “‘Gott’ und Selbstrepräsentation in den Briefen des Synesios von Kyrene,” Millenium 2 (2005): 48. 5   For a probable allusion in the Dio see below p. 40 – 41. 6   Otto Seeck, “Studien zu Synesios,” Philologus 52 (1894): 458 – 483.

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important corrections have been convincingly proposed.7 Nevertheless, the last attempt at a general synthesis by Denis Roques in 1989 is highly problematic.8 Let it suffice for the purpose of this paper to distinguish five roughly chronological moments by keywords: (1) Herculian (2) Constantinople (3) The Dio (4) Networking (5)  No Consolation The paper is articulated according to these headings, concluding with a short summary.

Herculian The letters to Herculian, numbers 137 – 146, form a substantial sub-corpus within the letters of Synesius. Although some of them aim at practical purposes such as recommendations (Ep. 144) or asking help in getting hold of a runaway slave (Ep. 145), philosophy is a constant topic, present in all of them, if to different degrees.9 Ep. 137, usually held to be the first in order of chronology10 and particularly programmatic in character, contains a reference to Hypatia (Ep. 137, 8 – 9 G.‑R.): We have seen with our eyes, we have heard with our ears the lady who legitimately presides over the mysteries of philosophy.11  7   Cf. especially Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long (with a contribution by Lee Sherry), Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius, TCH 19 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 91 – 102 and Monika Schuol, “Synesios von Kyrene, Die Ägyptischen Erzählungen: Der historische Kontext,” in Synesios von Kyrene, Ägyptische Erzählungen oder Über die Vorsehung. Herausgegeben von Martin Hose, eingeleitet, übersetzt und mit interpretierenden Essays versehen von Martin Hose, Wolfgang Bernard, Frank Feder und Monica Schuol, Sapere 21 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 144 – 147 (with further reference).  8   Denis Roques, Études sur la Correspondance de Synésios de Cyrène, Collection Latomus 205 (Bruxelles: Latomus, 1989). Cf. the reviews, Neil B. McLynn, “The Career of Synesius,” CR 41 (1991): 346 – 348 and Jacqueline Long, Classical Philology 86 (1991): 357 – 364.  9   Thorough analysis in Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike. Kaiser Julian und Synesios von Kyrene, Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 23 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008), 197 – 213. Recent bibliography includes Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene. Philosopher-Bishop, TCH 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 25 – 28; Roques, Études, 87 – 103; Tassilo Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene. Politik und Philosophie, Hof und Provinz als Handlungsräume eines Aristokraten bis zu seiner Wahl zum Me­ tropoliten von Ptolemaïs, BzA 146 (München / Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2001), 497 – 563 and Aglae Pizzone, Sinesio e la ‘sacra ancora’ di Omero. Intertestualità e modelli tra retorica e filosofia, Il Filarete 231 (Milano: LED Edizioni Universitarie, 2006), 23 – 53. See also below, note 13. 10   Cf. Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, 194; details of chronology are controversial (cf. 190 – 197, with bibliography), but not essential for the analysis of content.

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Αὐτόπται γάρ τοι καὶ αὐτήκοοι γεγόναμεν τῆς γνησίας καθηγεμόνος τῶν φιλοσοφίας ὀργίων.

Although the philosopher’s name is not mentioned, the female article and adjective are unambiguous. The specific formulation states not only Hypatia’s leading position as καθηγεμών, professor, and the authenticity of her philosophy by the qualification of γνησία, genuine,12 but also makes her the intermediary between her students and the ὄργια, the mysteries of philosophy.13 Taken literally, Herculian and Synesius have become eye- and ear-witnesses not of the mysteries themselves, but of their leader; or, to interpret this phrase a bit, if they have become witnesses, it was under the guidance of Hypatia. Philosophy, thus, is a highly personalized matter, based on personal relationships, Hypatia being not only the center of communion and (group‑) identity, but also a kind of living symbol of quasi-divine status. If this is the status conferred on Hypatia, the close relationship as eye- and ear-witnesses grants a special distinction to Synesius and Herculian. Actually, the double expression αὐτόπται καὶ αὐτήκοοι is used by Christian authors referring to immediate experience of Christ in the context of epiphany and divine revelation.14 The figures described as witnesses are more often than not the apostles, presented as guarantors of authentic tradition. Noteworthy is the formulation in a pseudo-Chrysostoman homily on the transfiguration of Christ, marked by the vocabulary of the mysteries (PG 61, 721): . . . those [the disciples Peter, James, and John,] taking part with their master in the ineffable mysteries, becoming eye- and ear-witnesses of things not to be said or seen. . . . οἱ τῶν ἀνεκλαλήτων μυστηρίων τῷ διδασκάλῳ κοινωνοῦντες, καὶ τῶν ἀρρήτων καὶ ἀθεάτων πραγμάτων αὐτόπται καὶ αὐτήκοοι γενόμενοι. 11   All translations from the letters, with Garzya-Roques (G.‑R.) numbers, and De dono (occasionally slightly modified) are from Augustine Fitzgerald, trans. The letters of Synesius of Cyrene (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1926). 12   Tanaseanu-Döbler wonders if there is any polemic against rival schools here (Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, 198). Cf. also Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 144 – 145. 13   For the vocabulary of the mysteries, cf. Helmut Seng, Untersuchungen zum Vokabular und zur Metrik in den Hymnen des Synesios, Patrologia 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 105 – 118; fundamental to the subject in general is Christoph Riedweg, Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von Alexandrien, Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Ge­ schichte 26 (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 1987). The metaphorical use of mystery expressions is so widespread in philosophical texts that it seems implausible to conclude actual celebrations of mysteries by Synesius (as does Costanzo Bizzochi, “Gl’inni filosofici di Sinesio interpretati come mistiche celebrazioni,” Gregorianum 32 (1951): 347 – 387 for the hymns, but frequently referring to the letters to Herculian). 14  Orig. schol. in Lc. PG 17, 312 C; Eus. H. E. 3, 32, 4 (τοῦ κυρίου); 7, 25, 12 (τοῦ κυρίου); Dem ev. 7, 1, 23 (ἐνθέων λόγων); De eccl. theol. I praef. 2 (τοῦ λόγου); Comm. in Is. 2, 41 (τοῦ σωτῆρος); Supplementa quaestionum ad Marinum PG 22, 992 C; Procop. Gaz., In Is. PG 87, 2512 C; Joh. Chrys. In transfigurationem PG 61, 721 (cited here below). Cf. also Syn. Aeg. I 6 p. 75, 15 T. (consecration of the new king), arguably alluding to theurgical ritual. Them. Or. 5, mentioned by Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 144 is a legal context.

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The interpretation of philosophy as mysteries restricted to initiates has as its counterpart the disciplina arcani.15 On the one hand, philosophical lore has to be kept away from the crowd; this topic is brought up several times in the letters to Herculian,16 and in Ep. 143 Synesius rebukes his friend at some length for not keeping secret philosophical thoughts communicated to him.17 On the other hand, shared participation in philosophical conversation is an intimate privilege. Both aspects express a highly elitist understanding of philosophy.18 The very personal aspect of philosophy is frequently emphasized in the letters to Herculian; philosophy and friendship are inextricably intertwined. And both are more divine than human, as suggested by the phrase τῶν φιλοσοφίας ὀργίων and explicitly stated by Synesius (Ep.  137, 20 – 23 G.‑R.): Whenever my thoughts go back to our association in the study of philosophy, and to that philosophy at which we have both laboriously toiled, then under the influence of reasoning I attribute our meeting to god the ruler. Ὅταν δὲ πρὸς τὴν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ κοινωνίαν ἀπίδω καὶ φιλοσοφίαν ἐκείνην περὶ ἧς πολλὰ συγκεκύφαμεν, ἐνταῦθα ἤδη τοῦ λογισμοῦ γινόμενος, θεῷ βραβευτῇ τὴν ἐντυχίαν ἡμῶν ἀνατίθημι.

The desire of being together with the friend is the desire to philosophize together,19 or maybe more precisely: to experience philosophy together, like initiates of religious mysteries. To quote Synesius himself (Dio 8 p.  254, 10 – 13 T.):20 On the contrary – to compare small and greater – it is like Aristotle’s view that men being initiated have not a lesson to learn, but an experience to undergo and a condition into which they must be brought, while they are becoming fit (for revelation). ἀλλ’, ὡς μικρῷ μεῖζον εἰκάσαι, καθάπερ Ἀριστοτέλης ἀξιοῖ τοὺς τελουμένους οὐ μαθεῖν τι δεῖν, ἀλλὰ παθεῖν καὶ διατεθῆναι, δηλονότι γενομένους ἐπιτηδείους.

15   Cf. Othmar Perler, “Arkandisziplin,” RAC I (1950): 667 – 676, and Douglass Powell, “Arkandisziplin,” TRE IV (1979): 1 – 8. 16   But cf. also Antonio Garzya, Il mandarino e il quotidiano. Saggi sulla letteratura tardo antica e bizantina, Saggi Bibliopolis 14 (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1983), 130: “L’antica teoria es-cludeva dalla lettera privata il filosofare vero e proprio” (with further reference 130 – 131). 17   Ep.  143, 1 – 2 G.‑R. 18   Cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 35 – 36, especially her heading “Philosophie und Esoterik,” which acknowledges the tight connection between philosophy and secrecy. 19   Ep.  137, 37 – 38 G.‑R.: Καὶ δοίη μετ’ ἀλλήλων φιλοσοφεῖν· εἰ δὲ μὴ τοῦτο, πάντως φιλοσοφεῖν. 20    = Aristotle, De philosophia fr. 15 Ross. All translations from the Dio are from Augustine Fitzgerald, trans. The essays and hymns of Synesius of Cyrene II (London: Oxford University Press, 1930). Cf. also Heinrich Dörrie, Leid und Erfahrung. Die Wort- und Sinnverbindung παθεῖν – μαθεῖν im griechischen Denken, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, Abhand­ lungen der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1956), 32 – 36 = 334 – 338.

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Writing and receiving letters is at least some kind of surrogate for the shared experience of philosophy.21 The power of epistolary communication is praised in Ep.  138, 5 – 9.12 – 17.22 – 29 G.‑R.:22 . . . particularly because of the letter’s power to be a solace for unhappy loves, affording as it does in bodily absence the illusion of actual presence, for this missive seems itself to converse, thus fulfilling the soul’s desire . . . For my part I enjoy this sacred gift of God, and to whomsoever I needs must talk, if I cannot speak to him, at all events I can write, and this I often long to do. I then rejoice in those I love, and am present with them to the best of my power. Now as to you, if it may be said without bitterness, you seem to me to have changed your character along with your abode . . . But if through philosophy you have united what up to this moment has been separated, and if the beautiful is lovable, and is one thing and the same, as you have heard the poet say; in that case we shall no longer attribute your silence to disdain, but will share your philosopher’s joy, and will exhort you to keep clear of meanness, so that by union with what is strongest in your own nature, you may unite with what is strongest in ours. May you be such a man as this, O best of men, and thrice longed-for of brothers! . . . μάλιστα δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ δύνασθαι τὴν ἐπιστολὴν ἐρώτων οὐκ εὐτυχούντων εἶναι παραμυθίαν, παρεχομένην ἐν ἀπουσίᾳ σωμάτων φαντασίαν τῆς παρουσίας καὶ τῷ δοκεῖν προσδιαλέγεσθαι ψυχῆς ἐκπιμπλᾶσαν τὸ ἐφιέμενον . . . Ἐγὼ μὲν οὖν ἀπολαύω τῆς ἱερᾶς τῆσδε τοῦ θεοῦ χάριτος καὶ πρὸς ὃν ἔδει λαλεῖν, εἰ μὴ δύναμαι λαλεῖν, ἀλλ’, ἐπειδὴ γράφειν δύναμαι, θαμὰ τοῦτο ποιῶ καὶ κατὰ τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον σύνειμι καὶ ἀπολαύω τῶν ἐμῶν παιδικῶν. Αὐτὸς δέ, εἰ μὴ πικρὸν εἰπεῖν, συνδιέστησας τῷ τόπῳ τὴν γνώμην . . . εἰ δὲ ἥνωσας διὰ φιλοσοφίας τὰ δεῦρο διεστῶτα καὶ φίλον μὲν τὸ καλόν, καλὸν δὲ τὸ αὐτό, τοῦτο δὲ ἓν ὂν τοῦ θεοῦ λέγοντος ἤκουσας, οὐκέτι κρίνομεν ὑπεροψίαν τὴν πρὸς ἡμᾶς σιωπήν, ἀλλὰ συνηδόμεθα φιλοσοφοῦντι καὶ παραιτουμένῳ μὲν τὸ μικροπρεπεύεσθαι, συνόντι δὲ τῷ παρὰ σοὶ κρείττονι τοῖς ἐν ἡμῖν κρείττοσιν. Εἴης τοιοῦτος, ἀνδρῶν ἄριστε καὶ ἐμοὶ τριπόθητε ὄντως ἀδελφέ.

The formulations used by Synesius are highly emotional, expressing a degree of desire one would expect in a love-letter, rather than a letter of friendship among philosophers:23 ἔρωτες being quite open, ἀπολαύω almost explicit, παιδικά overtly homoerotic – metaphorical as all these expressions are, and conven21  As a sermo absentium; cf. Ps.-Lib.; [Ps.-Procl.]; Epistolary styles  2 p. 27, 8 – 11 Foerster-Richtsteig = 14, 1 – 3 Weichert = 66, 7 – 9 Malherbe; 58 p. 37, 9 – 11 Foerster-Richtsteig = 23, 10 – 12 Weichert  = 74, 32 – 33  Malherbe; Thraede, Grundzüge griechisch-römischer Brieftopik, 162 – 183; Pizzone, Sinesio e la ‘sacra ancora’, 27. 22   Synesius’ text is cited as a paradigm of the topos φαντασία τῆς παρουσίας by Robert Glenn Ussher, “Letter Writing,” in Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean III, eds. M. Grant and R. Kitzinger (New York: Scribners Charles Sons, 1988), 1574. Cf. also Ps.-Demetr., Epistolary Types 1 p. 3, 6 – 7 Weichert = 32, 10 – 11 Malherbe; Heikki Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie des griechischen Briefes bis 400 n. Chr., Annales Academiae scientiarum Fennicae B 102, 2 (Helsinki: Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, 1956), 38 – 42; Thraede, Grundzüge griechisch-römischer Brieftopik, 146 – 161 (on Ep. 138). 23   Cf. Garzya, Il mandarino, 125 for φιλοφρόνησις as “Leitmotiv della prassi epistolare tardoantica”; cf. also Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie, 35 – 37 and Thraede, Grundzüge griechisch-römischer Brieftopik, 125 – 146.

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tional as rhetorical hyperbole was in late antique epistolography.24 Nonetheless, these words express a state of mind (or heart) not dissimilar to fresh infatuation, and even anxious fear of losing the friend’s affections. Platonic love is referred to in Ep.  140, 1 – 14 G.‑R.:25 Τῶν ἐρώτων οἱ μὲν χαμαὶ ἐρχομένας καὶ ἀνθρωπικὰς τὰς ἀρχὰς ἔχοντες ἀπεχθεῖς τέ εἰσι καὶ ἐξίτηλοι, τῇ παρουσίᾳ μόνῃ καὶ μόλις μετρούμενοι· οἷς δὲ ὁ ἐφεστὼς βραβεύει θεός, κατὰ τὴν θεσπεσίαν Πλάτωνος φωνὴν συντήξας τῇ τέχνῃ καὶ ἕνα ἄμφω ποιήσας τοὺς ἀντερῶντας, οὗτοι καὶ χρόνου καὶ τόπου φύσιν ἐλέγχουσιν. Οὐδὲν γὰρ ἐμποδὼν ψυχαῖς ἐφιεμέναις ἀλλήλων ἀρρήτοις συνόδοις ὁμόσε χωρεῖν καὶ συμπλέκεσθαι. Ἐκεῖθέν ποθεν ἠρτῆσθαι δεῖ τὸ ἡμέτερον εἰ μὴ τὰ φιλοσοφίας τροφεῖα μέλλοιμεν αἰσχύνειν, αἴσθησιν ἀγαπῶντες καί, ὅταν αὕτη μὴ ὑπὸ σωμάτων θυροκοπῆται, ψυχῆς παρουσίαν οὐ προσιέμενοι. Τί οὖν ποτνιᾷ καὶ ταῖς ἐπιστολαῖς τῶν δακρύων ἐγχεῖς; Of loves there are some which have earthly and human origins. These are detestable and ephemeral, measured by the presence of the object alone, and even then with difficulty. But there are others over which a Divinity presides, and, according to the divine utterance of Plato, he fuses those who love one another by his art, so that from being two they become one. They triumph both over time and place. Nothing can prevent souls who seek each other from drawing near to each other by secret paths and becoming locked together. Now our friendship ought to be of this character, if we are not going to shame our training in philosophy. Do not let us be such men as simply rejoice in the senses, and never allow the soul to enter unless the body knocks at the door. Why do you lament and drench your letters with your tears?

Here, Synesius distances himself not so much from intense emotional involvement but from an overemphasis on physical presence – a topic developed more sympathetically in Ep. 139. But Herculian’s tears (or just complaints) actually seem to be the result of not receiving letters from Synesius who states several lines further on that two of his letters have been lost (Ep.  140, 28 – 30 G.‑R.).26 24

  Cf. Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie, 169 – 172 and Antonio Garzya, “Osservazioni sull’Epistola 140 di Sinesio,” in Platonism in late antiquity, eds. S. Gersh and C. Kannengiesser (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), 234 – 235 for expressions of friendship, as well as Pizzone, Sinesio e la ‘sacra ancora’, 29 note 20. 25   Cf. Pl., Symp. 191d as well as Garzya, “Osservazioni,” 232 – 233. Martin Hose, “Der Bi­schof und die Philosophin. Über die Inszenierung eines Paares in den Briefen des Synesios an Hypatia,” in Bi-Textualität. Inszenierungen des Paares. Buch für Ina Schabert, eds. A. Heitmann, S. Nieberle, B. Schaff, S. Schülting, Geschlechterdifferenz & Literatur 12 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2001): 323 – 333 compares Hypatia’s role in Synesius to Diotima’s in Plato, a reading well in accordance with this kind of loving philosophy. The relation between Synesius and Hypatia herself, in contrast, is represented as absolutely asexual. See below p. 48 – 49 and cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 162 – 163. 26   For practice and problems of epistolary commerce in antiquity cf. the short remarks in Ussher, “Letter Writing,” 1576 as well as Wolfgang Riepl, Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Römer (repr. Hildesheim / New York: G. Olms, 1972), 123 – 322 and Sigrid Mratschek, Der Briefwechsel des Paulinus von Nola. Kommunikation und soziale Kontakte zwischen christlichen Intellektuellen, Hypomnemata 134 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 274 – 301 (centering on the West and ecclesiastical correspondents); for parallels cf. Koskenniemi, Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie, 64 – 67.

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The oscillation in the attitude of Synesius might best be summarized by quoting the beginning of Ep. 146 which refers to common clichés of gender (1 – 6 G.‑R.): Ἐπιθυμήσας ἀρρενῶσαι τὴν ἱεράν σου ψυχὴν τῷ δι’ ἐπιστολῶν ἐπιπλῆξαι τῷ σφοδρῷ τῆς εἰς τὴν συντυχίαν ἡμῶν ἐνστάσεως, πολλῷ πρότερον ὑπὸ τοῦ κατακλυσμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐπιστολαῖς ἰύγγων αὐτὸς ἐθηλύνθην, καί εἰμι νῦν τοιοῦτος ὁποίῳ σοι τυγχάνοντι πρότερον ἐνεκάλουν. The desire which I felt to make strong like a man your hallowed soul made me write to you in blame of your excessive desire to converse with me. But long ago there was such a flood of enchantments in your letters that I, in turn, felt weak like a woman. And you see me today such a man as I at one time reproached you for being.

It would be gratuitous to present the complete evidence of this tema con variazioni. Instead, the correspondence with Herculian can now provide a transition to the next subheading, Constantinople. In Ep. 143, Synesius mentions some verses which are apparently the same as those contained in the treatise De dono, which served as a dedication address to be presented with the gift of a precious planisphaerium to an influential advocate and intermediary in the capital.27 It is not impossible that the date mentioned in the letter (as well as in Ep. 144), as the date until which Synesius would wait for Herculian to join him at his present whereabouts, the twentieth of the month of mesori (August 13th), was the day he was going to sail to Constantinople.28 Needless to say that this guess is quite speculative.

Constantinople Hypatia is almost absent from the writings of Synesius relating to his embassy to Constantinople.29 Where she is mentioned, though, it pertains to an issue crucial for the provincial ambassador Synesius: the construction of authority 27

  See below, section 2.   The year seems to be 397, if Synesius presented the aurum coronarium for the fifteenth anniversary of Arcadius being proclaimed Augustus (January 19th, 383); cf. Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 93. Roques, Études, 99 dates it to 399, following Ingeborg Hermelin, Zu den Briefen des Bischofs Synesios (Upp­sala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1934), 24 – 25. 29   For Synesius in Constantinople, cf. Christian Lacombrade, Synésios de Cyrène. Hellène et chrétien (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1951), 84 – 130; Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, 41 – 59; Roques, Études, 235 – 246; Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 71 – 102; J. H. Wolfgang G. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops. Army, Church, and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 253 – 272; Wolfgang Hagl, Arcadius Apis imperator. Synesios von Kyrene und sein Beitrag zum Herrscherideal der Spätantike, Frankfurter althistorische Beiträge 1 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1997), 63 – 200; Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 243 – 287. Cf. also Helmut Seng, “Auf dem Weg nach Konstantinopel: Die gescheiterte zweite Reise des Synesios in die Hauptstadt,” in 28

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deriving from his status as a philosopher. This is even the case in Ep. 136, written in Athens, arguably a stopover on the way to the capital.30 Athens, as a site of philosophy, is unfavourably compared with Alexandria (Ep.  136, 16 – 19 G.‑R.):31 To-day Egypt has received and cherishes the fruitful wisdom of Hypatia. Athens was aforetime the dwelling-place of the wise: to-day the bee-keepers alone bring it honour. Νῦν μὲν οὖν ἐν τοῖς καθ’ ἡμᾶς χρόνοις Αἴγυπτος τρέφει τὰς Ὑπατίας δεξαμένη γονάς· αἱ δὲ Ἀθῆναι – πάλαι μὲν ἦν ἡ πόλις ἑστία σοφῶν, τὸ δὲ νῦν ἔχον σεμνύνουσιν αὐτὰς οἱ μελιττουργοί.

Obviously, this remark applies to Synesius himself and his status as a philosopher, too, which is enhanced by the spiritual genealogy that makes him a member of a philosophical elite and an offspring of Hypatia.32 Once more, she functions as a symbol of philosophical identity, crucial for the self-image of Synesius, which is also the image offered to any reader of this letter. Hypatia is also mentioned, although somewhat casually and not by name, in the ekphrasis of the planisphaerium designed by Synesius,33 since he would have studied not only philosophy, but also astronomy with her.34 The planisphaerium is described as (De dono 4 p. 138, 9 – 10 T.) “a work of my own devising, includKoronís. Homenaje a Carlos Ronchi March en sus ochenta años, eds. Pablo Cavallero, Rodolfo Buzón, Diana Frenkel, and Amalia Nocito (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2003), 305 – 314. All these interpretations contrast, though in different degrees, in many respects; this cannot be discussed here. 30   This cannot be proven, cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 132 –  133; but cf. Roques, Études, 162 and Garzya and Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, I, 162 (note 3), refuting the arguments given for dating the letter to 410 by Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 409 – 411 who are followed by Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 121 – 122 with note 204. 31   Synesius seems to be somewhat topical here, cf. Alfred Breitenbach, Das “wahrhaft goldene Athen”. Die Auseinandersetzung griechischer Kirchenväter mit der Metropole heidnisch-antiker Kultur, Theophaneia 37 (Berlin / Wien: Philo, 2003), 19 – 20.258 – 259 (and passim for images of Athens in late antiquity). Cf. also the comments in Garzya and Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, II, 395 – 398. 32   Cf. also, with a different focus, Ep. 16, 2 G.‑R.: Μῆτερ καὶ ἀδελφὴ καὶ διδἀσκαλε (see infra). 33   Bibliography includes Otto Neugebauer, “The Early History of the Astrolabe,” Isis  40 (1949): 248 – 251; Lacombrade, Synésios de Cyrène, 123 – 126; Giuseppina Stramondo, trans. Sinesio, A Peonio sul dono, Miscellanea di studi di letteratura cristiana antica 14 (Catania: Centro di studi sull’antico Cristianesimo, Università di Catania, 1964); Josef Vogt and Matthias Schramm, “Synesios vor dem Planisphaerium,” in Das Altertum und jedes neue Gute für Wolfgang Schadewaldt zum 15. März 1970, ed. Konrad Gaiser (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970); Otto Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy II (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975), 872 – 877; Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, translated by F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72 – 73; Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 84 – 91; Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 275 – 282; Jacques Lamoureux and Noël Aujoulat, eds. Synésios de Cyrène, Opuscules III (Paris: Les belles lettres, 2008), 163 – 184, 232 – 236 and Helmut Seng, “Das Geschenk des Synesios” (in preparation). 34  Cf. the formulation in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 166: “Hypatia als Repräsentantin der Einheit von praktischem und theoretischem Wissen”.

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ing all that she, my most revered teacher, helped to contribute (διανοίας μὲν ἔργον ἐμῆς, ὅσα μοι συνευπόρησεν ἡ σεβασμιωτάτη διδάσκαλος).” Arguably, this could be perceived as a claim to authority (by professing once more a spiritual-scientific-philosophic genealogy),35 but disguised as an avowal of modesty.36 The emphasis on philosophy throughout the text,37 which is a cover letter rather than a treatise,38 and the assertion of the interrelation between philosophy and astronomy, are characteristics that seem to reflect the philosophical and scientific profile of Hypatia and her circle.39 However, the political writings composed or delivered at Constantinople mention neither Hypatia nor Synesius’ role as her disciple; but they do insist on the author’s status as a philosopher. The first-person-speaker of the Oration on Kingship is styled as a politically engaged philosopher, giving advice for good governance;40 The Egyptian Tales, professedly treating mythical events, but actually giving a highly partial account of contemporary struggle for power,41 include a presentation of a philosopher engaged not only in politics, but also in 35   Cf. Hose, “Der Bischof,” 325 – 330 (comparing Synesius to Pliny the Younger addressing high ranking persons as a means of social enhancement). 36   A device employed at the beginning of De regno in a rather obtrusive manner. 37   Provoking the hostile, but even more perplexing comments of Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy II, 872 – 877. 38   This implies, according to the rules of epistolography (cf. Demetr. On Style 228, 231, 234), that it must not go into technical detail. The corresponding σύγγραμμα Synesius mentions in De dono 5 p. 140, 2 T., is described in a manner that makes unlikely not only the identification with De dono itself (proposed by Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 148), but also the alternative that it was originally attached to De dono. It has not been transmitted (as to its possible content, cf. Vogt and Schramm, “Synesios vor dem Planisphaerium,” 306 – 307). 39   Remarkably, Synesius figures in the scholia to the Great Commentary on Ptolemy’s Handy Tables by Hypatia’s father Theon, cf. Joseph Mogenet and Anne Tihon, eds. Le “Grand commentaire” de Théon d’Alexandrie aux Tables faciles de Ptolémée I (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apo­ stolica vaticana, 1985), 75 – 77; Denis Roques, “La famille d’Hypatie,” REG 108 (1995): 147 – 148; and Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 27 – 28. 40   Cf. Christian Lacombrade, trad. Synésios de Cyrène, Le Discours sur la Royauté de Synésios de Cyrène à l’empereur Arcadios (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1951); Antonio Garzya, trans. Sinesio di Cirene, Sul regno (Napoli: Libreria Scientifica, 1973); Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 103 – 142; Carlotta Amande and Paola Graffigna, eds. Sinesio di Cirene, Sulla regalità, con una nota di L. Canfora, La città antica 27 (Pa­ lermo: Sellerio, 1999); Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 282 – 288; Lamoureux and Aujoulat, eds. Synésios de Cyrène, Opuscules II. 41   Cf. Salvatore Nicolosi, trans., Il “De Providentia” di Sinesio di Cirene, Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto Universitario di Magistero di Catania 15 (Padova: Milani, 1959), 21 – 40; Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 142 – 398; Hagl, Arcadius Apis Imperator, 46 – 62 and passim, Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 304 – 358, Lamoureux and Aujoulat, eds. Synésios de Cyrène, Opuscules III, 1 – 161.213 – 232; Lars Martin Hoffmann, “Die Lebenswelt des Synesios von Kyrene – ein historischer Überblick,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, eds. Helmut Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzan­ tios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 56 – 59; and Schuol, “Synesios von Kyrene, Die Ägyptischen Erzählungen. Der historische Kontext,” (2012), 133 – 143 (all with further reference). Details cannot be discussed here.

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poetry, usually interpreted as a kind of self-portrayal adapted to the narrative (1, 18, p. 105, 10 – 12; 105, 18 – 106, 4 T.):42 There was a certain man, dignified, but nurtured by philosophy in a rather rustic manner and unacquainted with the ways of the city . . . he wrote both poems and speeches and sang to the lyre in the Dorian mode, which he considered the only one able to allow for depth of character and diction. He did not expose his work to the public, but if there was an audience that could appreciate manly discourse and would not tolerate titillation and would take to heart what they heard, he would entrust his work to them.43 Ἐγένετο δέ τις εἷς ἐμβριθὴς μέν, ἀλλ’ ὑπὸ φιλοσοφίας ἀγροικότερον ἐκτεθραμμένος καὶ εἰς τὸ ἀστικὸν ἦθος ἀνομίλητος . . . καὶ ἐποίει καὶ ἔγραφε, καὶ πρὸς λύραν ᾖδε τὸν τρόπον τὸν Δώριον, ὃν μόνον ᾤετο χωρεῖν βάρος ἤθους καὶ λέξεως· οὐ μὴν ἐξέφερεν εἰς τὸ πλῆθος, ἀλλ’ εἴ τις ἦν ἀκοὴ λόγων ἀρρένων ξυνιεῖσα καὶ γαργαλίζεσθαι μὲν οὐκ ἀνεχομένη, ξυντετρημένη δὲ ἐπὶ τὴν καρδίαν, ταύτῃ τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ λόγους ἐπίστευεν.

That Hypatia herself was involved in political affairs is well known;44 but arguably, the kind of littérature engagée which characterizes the Constantinopolitan period of Synesius, even though it is imbued with philosophical elements and philosophical self-perception, could seem alien to the Hypatian mode of philosophizing. At least, it is remarkable that Synesius does not mention those writings in his letter to Hypatia accompanying the essay on Dio or the life according to his model (Ep. 154, which will be treated in the next section), whereas he does enclose his book on dreams, roughly contemporary to the Dio, and the ekphrasis of the planisphaerium, apparently not yet known to Hypatia. Of course, this argument is e silentio; but it is silence itself that requires an explanation. 42   Cf. Nicolosi, trans., Il “De Providentia” di Sinesio di Cirene, 76 – 78; Lamoureux and Aujoulat, eds. Synésios de Cyrène, Opuscules III, 135 note 131; Martin Hose, “Anmerkungen,” in Synesios von Kyrene, Ägyptische Erzählungen oder Über die Vorsehung, ed. Martin Hose, Sapere 21 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 120 [note 82]. Would it be absurd to relate the ἀκοὴ . . . ξυνιεῖσα to an audience congenial to Συνέσιος? 43   Translation from Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 374 – 375. 44   Cf. Socr. Hist. eccl. 7, 15, 2 – 4 and Dam. Vita Isidori (PH) fr. 102, 11 – 18 Zintzen = 43 E 1 – 8 Athanassiadi (= Suda IV 644, 30 – 645, 4 Adler) with the comments in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 198 – 204.275 and Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 559 with note 216 as well as Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, 87 – 90.145; Gemma Beretta, Ipazia d’Alessandria, Gli Studi: Filosofia e scienze umane 70 (Roma: Ed. Riuniti, 1993), 154 – 157 (her contention, 157, that “era di fatto Ipazia ad essere a capo della città” is not quite borne out by the evidence); Richard Klein, “Die Ermordung der Philosophin Hypatia. Zum Kampf um die politische Macht in Alexandria,” in Atti dell’Accademia Romanistica Constantiniana XI 1993 (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996), 74 – 83; Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity. Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore / London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 307 – 313, 467 – 469, and Alan Cameron, “The Life, Work and Death of Hypatia,” in Le voyage des légendes. Hommages à Pierre Chuvin, eds. Delphine Lauritzen and Michel Tardieu (Paris: CRNS, 2013), 79 – 82 = 200 – 203, 325 – 326. Amplified and revised version in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185 – 203, 326 – 331.

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The Dio The Dio is a programmatic essay45 written on an apologetic occasion, associated with still another work by Synesius, entitled Κυνηγετικαί / Cynegetics, which can provisionally be translated as “on hunting” or “a hunter’s tales”, and which had been criticized as a piece of mere entertainment, devoid of any value in philosophical terms.46 In the Dio’s introductory letter to Hypatia (Ep. 154) Synesius is at pains to rebut his adversaries by a somewhat incoherent argumentation. Rather ingenuous is the assertion Synesius makes that the book has slipped out of his house without his knowledge.47 Oblique, but more effective might be the affirmation that a work like the Dio does possess some philosophical value, notwithstanding its literary charm48 – an affirmation applicable to the Κυνηγετικαί / Cynegetics as well, even if it is not mentioned in this context. Unfortunately, it is impossible to clarify this much further since the work has not been transmitted. But it seems possible that there is some kind of analogy to Dio of Prusa’s essay known by the double title of Euboeus / Euboikos and Kynegos (“The man from Euboea” or “the hunter”). This work is extant and contains, imbedded in a pleasant narrative, ethical aspects of popular philosophy. Whatever the exact nature of his Cynegetics, Synesius does not dwell on it at length.49 Apparently, Hypatia does not know the work, since then an explanation would be superfluous – but neither does Synesius send her a copy to corroborate his apology. In fact, his most effective move is the turn to a general debate offering him an opportunity to respond to and caricature his detractors (two groups wearing 45   Cf. Kurt Treu, Synesios von Kyrene. Ein Kommentar zu seinem “Dion”, TU  71 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958). Recent bibliography on the Dio includes Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, 125 – 137, Maria Di Pasquale Barbanti, Filosofia e Cultura in Sinesio di Cirene, Symbolon 13 (Firenze: La Nuova Italia editrice, 1994), 149 – 194; Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Schweigen und doch nicht schweigen. Beobachtungen zur literarischen Technik des Synesios von Kyrene,” in The language of silence I, eds. Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 2001), 113 – 126; Helmut Seng, “Synesios, Δίων und Φαλάκρας ἐγκώμιον,” in κῆπος. Homenaje a ­Eduardo J. Prieto (Buenos Aires: Paradiso, 2000), 591 – 603 and “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene,” Hermes 134 (2006): 102 – 116; Jacques Lamoureux and Noël Aujoulat, eds. Synésios de Cyrène, Opuscules I (Paris: Les belles lettres, 2004), 91 – 185, 324 – 336; and Michiel Op de Coul, “Aspects of Paideia in Synesius’ Dion,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, eds. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 110 – 124. Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 67 – 113 reads the Dio according to his thesis that Synesius tried for a career as a court philosopher in Constantinople before, frustrated, abandoning politics (but for provincial affairs) and “converting” to philosophy, an interpretation rejected in the reviews by Helmut Seng (Gymnasium 110 (2003) 290 – 293), Alexander Demandt, BZ 97 (2004), 250 – 252, and Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Gnomon 78 (2006), 401 – 408. 46   Seng, “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene,” 107 – 108. 47   Ep.  154, 11 – 15 G.‑R. 48   Ep.  154, 75 – 83 G.‑R. 49   Recent bibliography on the Κυνηγετικαί / Cynegetics includes Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 299 – 304 and Seng, “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene.”

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grey and white robes respectively).50 This results in a role-reversal that moves Synesius from defendant to accuser.51 It would be too long to go into all the details,52 but it is striking that the programmatic statements in the Dio itself are noticeably less polemic and apologetic than the corresponding utterances in the letter to Hypatia. It seems that Synesius is trying to convince Hypatia of his position in a more declarative manner than his book would be able to do by itself. Apparently, his double role as a philosopher and as a littérateur needs special justification to Hypatia. He produces, as collateral evidence for his exoneration, the fresh philosophical work on dreams, and the ekphrastic letter on the planisphaerium which dates back several years;53 obviously, the political writings, as discussed in section 2, would not be very helpful in this contest. Synesius is striving for approbation from Hypatia, a most existential approbation indeed since his whole life as a philosopher is at stake. There is no evidence if he ever obtained it.54 But at least two ways of claiming Hypatia’s approval in an indirect manner can be noted. Synesius has published the Dio, an action he declares to be dependent on Hypatia’s consent in Ep.  154, 91 – 99 G.‑R.55 And he alludes to the philosopher’s name in the very last sentence of his essay (Dio 18 p.  278, 17 – 20):56 And as many forms of literary style as exist, and however diverse, in everyone of my imitations of these my own personal note must needs be added. It is thus that the highest string, itself awaiting rhythm, re-echoes it to the melody that is being played. παντοδαπῶν τε ὄντων τῶν λεκτικῶν χαρακτήρων καὶ πλεῖστον διαφερόντων, ἐν ἑκάστῃ τῶν μιμήσεων προσηχεῖν ἀνάγκη καὶ τοὐμὸν ἴδιον, ὡσπερ ἡ ὑπάτη χορδὴ τὸν ῥυθμὸν αὐτὴ μένουσα παραβομβεῖ κινουμένῳ τῷ μέλει. 50   Recent bibliography on the problem includes Seng, “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene,” 103 – 104; Op de Coul, “Aspects of Paideia in Synesius’ Dion,” 116 – 117 and Aglae Pizzone, “Christliche und heidnische Träume: Versteckte Polemik in Synesios, De insomniis,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, eds. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), especially 249 – 257; cf. also Petkas in this volume. 51   Ep.  154, 53 – 56 G.‑R. 52   Cf. Seng, “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene,” 104 – 105. 53   The astronomical explanation being dependant on Hypatia herself, it is its literary transformation that becomes a point of interest in the present discussion, and possibly even more the polemics against false philosophers present in De dono which will be more fully developed in the Dio. 54   Cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 163 – 165, headed: “Der Dissenz zwischen der Philosophin und ihrem Schüler.” 55   Even if the contestation that the Κυνηγετικαί / Cynegetics have become known without the author’s assent is to be read as a kind of preventive justification for publishing the Dio in case of Hypatia’s disapproval as Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 163 – 165 puts forward, first-hand effect will be suggesting Hypatia’s approbation. 56   Cf. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Erinnerungen an Hypatia von Alexandria. Zur fragmentierten Philosophinnenbiographie des Synesios von Kyrene,” in Gender Studies in den Altertumswissenschaften. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen, eds. Barbara Feichtinger and Georg Wöhrle, Iphis 1 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002), 105.

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Hypatē, the Greek word for the “highest” note (sc. chordē), clearly echoes his teacher’s name. This seems to subtly imply that Hypatia and her influence in some way are also “re-echoed” in the Dio itself (as perhaps in many of Synesius’ literary works) – an insinuation that amounts to another pretension of spiritual genealogy.

Networking There are six further letters by Synesius directed to Hypatia, and she is indirectly addressed in two more. Ep. 5 is addressed to Euoptius, the brother of Synesius. At the end, he asks him to greet several people, among whom is Hypatia. It is not clear if this implies a request to forward the letter itself which is a literary showpiece apparently designated for circulation, possibly among selected readers, as it contains a rather frivolous account of an ill-fated journey including shipwreck and an encounter with Libyan women whose remarkable bodies are described with some detail, the whole episode evoking a mock Odyssey.57 It is hard to tell if Hypatia, or any of the other people greeted, would be adequate readers. But it is worthwhile to quote a passage from the end of this letter (Ep. 5, 303 – 308 G.‑R.): Farewell; give my kindest messages to your son Dioscorus and to his mother and grandmother, both of whom I love and look upon as though they were my own sisters. Salute for me the most holy and revered philosopher, and give my homage also to the company of the blessed who delight in her oracular utterance . . . Ἔρρωσο καὶ τὸν υἱὸν Διόσκορον κέλευε μετὰ τῆς μητρὸς καὶ τῆς τήθης, ἃς ἐγὼ καὶ φιλῶ καὶ ἐν ἀδελφαῖς ἄγω. Ἄσπασαι τὴν σεβασμιωτάτην καὶ θεοφιλεστάτην φιλόσοφον, καὶ τὸν εὐδαίμονα χορὸν τὸν ἀπολαύοντα τῆς θεσπεσίας αὐδῆς . . .

The words used for Hypatia are reverential as always.58 Ep. 133 is addressed to Olympius, an answer to a letter Synesius has received from him and on which he comments (Ep.  133, 4 – 8 G.‑R.): 57   Bibliography includes Xaver Simeon, Untersuchungen zu den Briefen des Bischofs Syn­esios von Kyrene, Rhetorische Studien 18 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1933), 62 – 78; J. Vogt, “Syn­esios auf Seefahrt,” in Kyriakon. Festschrift Johannes Quasten I, eds. Patrick Granfield and Josef A. Jungmann (Münster: Aschendorff, 1970); Denis Roques, “La lettre  4 de Synésios de Cyrène,” REG 90 (1977): 263 – 295; Jacqueline Long, “Dating an Ill-Fated Journey: Synesius, Ep. 5,” TAPhA 122 (1992): 351 – 380; Pietro Janni, trans., Sinesio, La mia fortunosa navigazione da Alessandria a Cirene, Biblioteca di geographia antiqua 1 (Firenze: Olschki, 2003) and Pizzone, Sinesio e la ‘sacra ancora’, 97 – 117. 58   As Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 126 – 127 remarks, σεβασμιωτάτην conveys on Hypaia “gottähnliche Aura”; cf. also ἡ σεβασμιωτάτη διδάσκαλος in De dono 4 p. 138, 9 – 10 T. and δέσποινα σεβασμία in codd. C L (followed by Hercher) of Ep. 10, 2 G.‑R. (reading δέσποινα μακαρία, quoted below p. 48).

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But I conjecture it was a very old one, for it was worm-eaten and the words for the most part were illegible. I wish very much that you would not content yourself with merely sending me one letter a year . . . Τεκμαίρομαι δὲ αὐτὴν εἶναι παμπάλαιον, τῷ τε θριπηδέστατον γεγονέναι καὶ τῷ συγκεχύσθαι τὰ πλείονα τῶν γραμμάτων. Ἐγὼ δὲ ἠξίουν μὴ καθάπερ δασμόν τινα ἐτήσιον τὴν ἐπιστολὴν πέμπεσθαι . . .

Epistolary commerce is always precarious in antiquity,59 but this letter also gives an account of the dangerous situation Synesius finds himself in and which might influence the exchange of letters for the worse. For his answer to Olympius, he specifies Hypatia, the common teacher (ἡ διδάσκαλος ἡ κοινή) as an intermediary.60 It is highly plausible that Ep. 124, directed to her and describing much the same circumstances, was sent to Hypatia together with the letter to Olympius (Ep.  124, 1 – 6.10 – 14 G.‑R.):61 Even though there shall be utter forgetfulness of the dead in Hades, “even there shall I remember thee,” my dear Hypatia. I am encompassed by the sufferings of my city, and disgusted with her, for I daily see the enemy forces, and men slaughtered like victims on an altar . . . Yet even under these conditions I love the country. How else should I feel? For I am a Libyan, born here, and it is here that I see the honoured tombs of my ancestors. On your account alone I think I should be capable of overlooking my city, and changing my abode, if ever I had the chance of doing so. Εἰ δὲ θανόντων περ καταλήθοντ’ εἰν Ἀίδαο, (Iliad 22, 388) αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ κἀκεῖ τῆς φίλης Ὑπατίας μεμνήσομαι. Ἔγωγέ τοι τοῖς πάθεσι τῆς πατρίδος περιεχόμενος καὶ δυσχεραίνων αὐτὴν ἐφ’ οἷς ὁρῶ καθ’ ἡμέραν ὅπλα πολέμια καὶ ἀποσφαττομένους ἀνθρώπους ὥσπερ ἱερεῖα . . . ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐπὶ τούτοις φιλοχωρῶν. Τί γὰρ καὶ πάθω, Λίβυς ὢν καὶ ἐνταῦθα γενόμενος καὶ τῶν πάππων τοὺς τάφους οὐκ ἀτίμους ὁρῶν; Διὰ σέ μοι δοκῶ μόνην ὑπερόψεσθαι τῆς πατρίδος κἂν λάβωμαι σχολῆς μεταναστεύσειν.

Personal contact, then, with his philosophical friends would be the only reason for Synesius to leave his beloved Libya. The last phrase of Ep. 124 could be read as nothing else but a metaphor for philosophizing in a moment free of immediate concern,62 a voyage of the soul to the holy mysteries presided over by Hypatia as their living symbol.63 However, Synesius seems to actually have found the opportunity to go to Alexandria in spite of the warlike devastation of 59

  Cf. the two letters to Herculian that have been lost, mentioned in Ep. 140, 28 – 30 G.‑R. (see above p. 34). 60   Ep.  133, 22 – 25 G.‑R. 61   A possibility considered neither by Seeck nor by Roques, Études – although he dates both letters to May 405 (166.220 – 221) – or Garzya and Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, I – II. 62  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 94 emphasizes that political engagement puts at stake the ideal of ἀπάθεια here; this is well in accordance with Dio 6 p. 250, 10 – 12 T. where ἀπάθεια is restricted to god, μετριοπάθεια being adequate to man. 63  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 94 notes the hymnical effect of the indirect adress to Hypatia; see also p. 47.

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the country; or possibly he left Cyrene even because of the dangerous situation for himself and his family, including the infant Hesychius, his firstborn son.64 Less dramatic is Ep. 46, a letter of recommendation for a certain Alexander directed to Hypatia; the text is no longer than one sentence: I seemed destined to play the part of an echo. Whatever sounds I catch, these I repeat. I now pass on to you the praises of marvellous Alexander. Ἠχοῦς ἔοικα πρᾶγμα ποιεῖν. Ἅσπερ εἴληφα φωνὰς ἀντιδίδωμι, τὸν θαυμαστὸν Ἀλέξανδρον ἐπαινῶ παρὰ σοί.

Apparently, this is not a complete letter; but it is not clear if it is the beginning of one the rest of which has been lost in tradition,65 or rather an excerpt. At any rate, Ep. 46 as well as Ep. 133 to Olympius show that Hypatia is not just an idealized point of reference (she is of course this, too), but also a contact person in social and practical matters.

No Consolation Although elements of networking and practical matters are not totally absent in the letters to be discussed in this section, the emphasis lies on emotional expressivity, in other words, on the suffering Synesius. Somewhat curious is Ep. 15, the beginning of which is as follows (Ep.  15, 1 – 2 G.‑R.): I am in such evil fortune that I need a hydroscope. See that one is cast in brass for me and put together. Οὕτω πάνυ πέπραγα πονήρως ὥστε ὑδροσκοπίου μοι δεῖ. Ἐπίταξον αὐτὸ χαλκευθῆναί τε καὶ συνενωθῆναι.

The letter does not contain any personal address; the reverential tone Synesius regularly uses for Hypatia is totally absent. Arguably, the letter is not complete. The instrument in question is summarily described and its function explained; it is not mentioned in any Greek text prior to Synesius66 which has led to spec64

  Cf. Helmut Seng, “Die Söhne des Synesios,” Studia Patristica 34 (2001): 230 – 231.   As indicated by Antonio Garzya, ed. Synesii Cyrenensis Epistolae (Roma: Typis Officinae Polygraphicae, 1979), 86; Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Polyphones Schweigen. Hypatia von Alexandria und die rhētorikē philosophousa,” in Weibliche Rede – Rhetorik der Weiblichkeit. Studien zum Verhältnis von Rhetorik und Geschlechterdifferenz, eds. Doerte Bischoff and Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Rombach Wissenschaften. Reihe Litterae 93 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2003), 69 – 74, though, thinks it is complete, interpreting its brevity as a token of intimacy. 66   Neither is the rare word ὑδροσκόπιον used for the instrument Synesius describes, called aréomètre by Dimitris K. Raïos, Archimède, Ménélaos d’Alexandrie et le “Carmen de ponderibus et mensuris” : contributions à l’histoire des sciences (Ioannina: D. K. Raïos, 1989) and hydrometer by Michael A. B. Deakin and Charles R. Hunter, “Synesius’ ‘Hydroscope’,” Apeiron 27 (1994), 40, in any other text (this might be a reason why Synesius gives a sketchy description; possibly he is not sure of terminology). It serves for measuring the relative weight of liquids; in contrast, the ὑδρο65

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ulations that he himself or Hypatia could have invented it. This is far from sure;67 actually it is similar to one ascribed to Theon’s senior colleague Pappus by al-Khâzinî in the twelfth century.68 But Synesius is clearly engaging in a particularly specialized conversation on physics with Hypatia, the high rank scientist, which demonstrates his own expertise as well.69 Synesius neither gives any specification of the evil fortune he is suffering nor of the interrelation between it and the need of a hydroscope.70 Although a connection with the letter following here has been suggested, this is far from clear, and is even implausible given the contrast of tone, quite businesslike here (even including the formulation “I am in such evil fortune”), but highly pathetic where Synesius speaks of the grief for his deceased sons. Ep. 10, 16 and 81 are thematically linked by the deaths of the sons of Synesius, a topic present in several letters to other recipients as well.71 Chronology cannot be established easily, if at all. At least Synesius informs us that the first son he lost died at the time when he himself took office as metropolitan bishop of Ptolemais.72 Arguably, this is one of the sad events Synesius relates that he suffered during the past year in his letter to a certain Proclus. The present winter, he continues, has bereft him of his last son (Ep. 70): σκόπιον mentioned in Hephaestio Thebanus, Apotelesmatica p. 234, 20; 269, 9 Pingree = CCAG VIII 2 p. 113, 15 – 18 Ruelle (cf. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, 142 note 67) and in Galenus, De animi cuiuslibet peccatorum dignotione et curatione p. 68, 17 Kühn and Institutio logica 12, 4 p. 27, 16 Kalbfleisch is a kind of water-clock, possibly identical with Heron’s ὕδριον ὡροσκοπεῖον (Fragmenta de horoscopiis tit.; fr. 1 prooem. 10; fr. 1, 3; fr. 2, 22) and the ὑδρομέτριον described by Ptolemy, Syntaxis p. 416, 21 Heiberg (quoted in Pappus’ commentary on books 5 and 6 of the Almagest, p. 87, 5 Rome) and Procl., Hypotyposis 4, 71 p. 120, 14 Manitius. 67   Cf. Raïos, Archimède, Ménélaos d’Alexandrie, 129 – 131 with further discussion. 68   Cf. Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 91 and al-Khâzinî, Book of the Balance of Wisdom, chapter  7 p.  40 – 52 Khanikoff. 69   Cf. Luchner, “‘Gott’ und Selbstrepräsentation in den Briefen des Synesios von Kyrene,” 48 – 49: Synesius as “Mitglied eines vor allem auch auf mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Kenntnisse abzielenden (neu‑)platonischen Kreises.” 70   Possibly, it could serve medical purposes (cf. Michael A. B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr [Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007], 105): analytic according to Deakin and Hunter, “Synesius’ ‘Hydroscope’,” dietetic as suggested by Raïos, Archimède, Ménélaos d’Alexandrie, 129, or pharmaceutical, cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 71, refering to Cameron and Long (with a contribution by Sherry), Barbarians and politics at the Court of Arcadius, 54 note 195. The speculation by Dzielska, Hypatia, 78 that Synesius’ instrument was designed for hydromancy is incompatible with the description of the procedure by Hincmar of Reims quoted from CCAG VIII 2 p. 141, 17 – 19 Heeg in Dzielska, Hypatia, 142 note 68; cf. also Matteo Agnosini, “Giamblico e la divinazione κατὰ τὸ φανταστικόν. Verso l’integrazione di un genere divinatorio: il caso dell’idromanzia” in Formen und Nebenformen des Platonismus in der Spätantike, eds. Helmut Seng, Luciana Gabriela Soares Santoprete, and Chiara Ombretta Tommasi, Bibliotheca Chaldaica 6 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016) on hydromancy in a neoplatonic context. 71   Cf. the short survey in Seng, “Die Söhne des Synesios.” 72   Cf. ibid., 231 – 233 with further reference.

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During the year which has just passed no letter has come to me from your sacred hand, and I look upon this as one of a number of calamities which have happened to me at this juncture. For I have suffered many griefs in many ways this last year, and now this winter has snatched away from me that child who was all the joy that remained to me. No doubt it was my fate to be happy when in your company, but when away to have experience of evil fortune. At all events might there come from your fatherly heart some letter that shall alleviate my grief, the most precious cargo that comes from Thrace. Πέρυσιν οὐχ ἥκει μοι γράμματα παρὰ τῆς ἱερᾶς σου χειρός· ἠρίθμησα καὶ τοῦτο μετὰ τῶν συντυχόντων μοι κατ’ ἐκεῖνο καιροῦ δυσχερῶν. Πολλὰ γὰρ ἐπὶ πολλοῖς ἐγὼ πέρυσιν ἠνιάθην· ἀλλὰ καὶ ὁ τῆτες χειμῶν ὅ τι μοι λοιπὸν ἦν τῶν εἰς ψυχαγωγίαν ἀφείλετο τὸ παιδίον. Εἵμαρτο γὰρ ἄρα συνόντι μὲν ὑμῖν εὐτυχεῖν, ἀπόντι δὲ χαλεποῦ πειρᾶσθαι τοῦ δαίμονος. Γενέσθω δή τις παραμυθία τὸ δέξασθαι τῆς πατρικῆς σου κεφαλῆς γράμματα, τὸ τιμαλφέστατον ἀπὸ Θρᾴκης ἀγώγιμον.

The letter which informs Asclepiodotus, otherwise unknown, about the loss of the last son, opens with high pathos (Ep.  126, 1 – 10 G.‑R.): Alas! but why alas? We have suffered what is mortal indeed. The third of my sons, the only one who remained to me, has gone. I still, however, hold the view that good and evil cannot be predicated of that which is not in our power. Or rather, this lesson which I learned long ago has now become a belief of a soul schooled in experience; the blow therefore was of course more violent than my own suffering from it. The evil spirit whose business it is to hurt me arranged beforehand also that you, always so dear to me, should not be present. O best, thrice dear and most loyal of friends, may you come yet! Οἴμοι. Τί δ’ οἴμοι; Θνητά τοι πεπόνθαμεν. Ὁ τρίτος γε καὶ λοιπὸς οἴχεται τῶν υἱέων. Ἀλλὰ τό γε δόγμα τὸ περὶ τοῦ μηδὲν εἶναι τῶν οὐκ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν ἀγαθὸν ἢ κακὸν ἔτι παρ’ ἐμοὶ σώζεται, μᾶλλον δὲ πάλαι μὲν ἦν μάθημα, νυνὶ δὲ γέγονε δόγμα ψυχῆς ἐγγεγυμνασμένης ταῖς περιστάσεσιν. Ἔδει δὲ ἄρα χαλεπωτέραν μοι γενέσθαι τοῦ πάθους τὴν προσβολὴν καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ὁ δαίμων, ᾧ μέλει βλάπτειν τἀμά, προῳκονομήσατο μηδὲ σὲ τὴν φίλην μοι παρεῖναι κεφαλήν. Ἀλλ’ ἔλθοις ποτέ, θαυμάσιε καὶ τριπόθητε καὶ φίλων ἀδολώτατε.

“We have suffered what is mortal indeed.” Quoting Euripides,73 Synesius is recurring to a classical topos of consolation,74 self-consolation in his case,75 immediately to be followed by another one, the restriction of the terms of good 73

  Bellerophon, fr. 300 Nauck2 = TrGF.   Cf. Ps.-Demetr. Epistolary types 5 p.  5, 6 – 9 Weichert = 34, 13 – 16  Malherbe; Kassel 54 – 55; Johann 63 – 84. The consolatory implication is expressed more explicitly in Euripides, Ino fr. 418 Nauck2 = TrGF: γίγνωσκε τἀνθρώπεια μηδ’ ὑπερμέτρως / ἄλγει· κακοῖς γὰρ οὐ σὺ πρόσκεισαι μόνη; cf. Rudolf Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechischen und römischen Konsolationsliteratur, Zetemata 18 (München: C. H. Beck, 1958), 93. Cf. also Menander Rhetor on the παραμυθητικὸς λόγος p. 413, 23 – 414, 6 Spengel and Joachim Soffel, Die Regeln Menanders für die Leichenrede in ihrer Tradition dargestellt, herausgegeben, übersetzt umd kommentiert, BzA 57 (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1974), 210 – 212. 75   Cf. Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, 285 with note 806, who refers to Plu. De tranquillitate animi 475c, where the same verse of Euripides is quoted. 74

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and bad to the moral sphere.76 The process of consolation, that is, learning this lesson by experience, is formulated as an instance of the πάθει μάθος scheme.77 But the appeal to Asclepiodotus that he come to see Synesius seems to aim at a more personal method of consolation. Ep. 16 can be read as a somewhat indirect notification of the death of the last son to Hypatia and would thus be roughly simultaneous, but it is also possible that she has been informed earlier. The text reads as follows: I am dictating this letter to you from my bed, but may you receive it in good health, mother, sister, teacher, and withal benefactress, and whatsoever is honoured in name and deed. For me bodily weakness has followed in the wake of mental suffering. The remembrance of my departed children is consuming my forces, little by little. Only so long should Synesius have lived as he was still without experience of the evils of life. It is as if a torrent long pent up had burst upon me in full volume, and as if the sweetness of life had vanished. May I either cease to live, or cease to think of the tomb of my sons. But may you preserve your health and give my salutations to your happy comrades in turn, beginning with father Theotecnus and brother Athanasius and so to all! And if any one has been added to these, so long as he is dear to you, I must owe him gratitude because he is dear to you, and to that man give my greetings as to my own dearest friend. If any of my affairs interests you, you do well, and if any of them does not so interest you, neither does it me. Κλινοπετὴς ὑπηγόρευσα τὴν ἐπιστολὴν ἣν ὑγιαίνουσα κομίσαιο, μῆτερ καὶ ἀδελφὴ καὶ διδάσκαλε καὶ διὰ πάντων τούτων εὐεργετικὴ καὶ ἅπαν ὅ τι τίμιον καὶ πρᾶγμα καὶ ὄνομα. Ἐμοὶ δὲ τὰ τῆς σωματικῆς ἀσθενείας ψυχικῆς αἰτίας ἐξῆπται· κατὰ μικρόν με δαπανᾷ τῶν παιδίων τῶν ἀπελθόντων ἡ μνήμη. Μέχρις ἐκείνου ζῆν ἄξιον ἦν Συνέσιον μέχρις ἦν ἄπειρος τῶν τοῦ βίου κακῶν. Εἶτα ὥσπερ ῥεῦμα ἐπισχεθὲν ἀθρόον ἐρρύη, καὶ μετέβαλεν ἡ γλυκύτης τοῦ βίου. Παυσαίμην ἢ ζῶν ἢ μεμνημένος τῶν υἱέων τοῦ τάφου. Σὺ δὲ αὐτή τε ὑγιαίνοις καὶ ἄσπασαι τοὺς μακαρίους ἑταίρους ἀπὸ τοῦ πατρὸς Θεοτέκνου καὶ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀδελφοῦ Ἀθανασίου ἀρξαμένη, πάντας ἑξῆς· καὶ εἴ τις αὐτοῖς προσγέγονεν ὡς εἶναί σοι καταθύμιος, ἐμὲ δὲ δεῖ χάριν ὀφείλειν αὐτῷ διότι σοι καταθύμιός ἐστι, κἀκεῖνον ὡς φίλων φίλτατον ἄσπασαι παρ’ ἐμοῦ. Τῶν ἐμῶν εἴ τί σοι μέλει, καλῶς ποιεῖς· καὶ εἰ μὴ μέλει, οὐδὲν ἐμοὶ τούτου μέλει.

The formulation of the wish to die apparently implies that not only two sons are dead, but also the last one Synesius has described in his letter to Proclus as “that child who was all the joy that remained to me”. The torrent long pent up, now bursting upon Synesius in full volume, covers the deaths of all his sons, but might also include the additional calamities and the many griefs mentioned to Proclus.78 Be that as it may, the deaths of his sons is the epitome of the sufferings 76   Cf. Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechischen und römischen Konsolationsliteratur, 83 and Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, 285. 77   Cf. Dörrie, Leid und Erfahrung. 78   Physical illness, as to be concluded from κλινοπετής, the very first word of the letter, is a topos in the expression of grief, cf. Kassel, Untersuchungen zur griechischen und römischen Konsolationsliteratur, 53.

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of Synesius, and his wish to die the epitome of his despair. Hypatia for her part is, once more, a living symbol of philosophy, or even the consolation that philosophy might give. The hymn-like invocation not only confirms her almost divine status,79 even if the name of sister is a non-hierarchic intrusion appealing to a more horizontal mode of affection,80 but also acts as an equivalent, as it seems, to a cry for help, for consolation to the suffering soul of Synesius.81 All the more important, then, is the effort to establish community by greeting the members of Hypatia’s circle, those blessed men, enjoying friendship and philosophy, even if not personally familiar;82 all the more important is the appeal to Hypatia to take interest in his affliction, even if expressed with restraint, and with some ambiguity too: if Hypatia will not care, neither will Synesius. But will he not care about her insensitivity, or will he no longer care about the deaths of his sons if Hypatia does not and, by doing so, possibly demonstrates a philosophical attitude that teaches him not to despair?83 If Ep. 16 concentrates on the deaths of the sons, in Ep. 81 the topic serves but as an introduction to the practical content of the letter which consists in asking Hypatia for intercession with the authorities and private individuals of influence on behalf of a certain Nicaeus, mentioned in Ep. 80 too, and Philolaus, otherwise unknown, in a property dispute.84 These two topics are carefully connected by moral and practical considerations, especially the unshakeable standard of good and evil that was evidenced in Ep. 126.85 An additional motive is the complaint of his loss of influence with the mighty, apparently alluding to the conflict 79

50.

  Cf. also Luchner, “‘Gott’ und Selbstrepräsentation in den Briefen des Synesios von Kyrene,”

80   Hose, “Der Bischof,” 329 points to Iliad 6, 429 – 430 (Andromacha addressing Hector) as a model for Synesius. Cf. also the comments in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 76 – 77. 81  Luchner, “‘Gott’ und Selbstrepräsentation in den Briefen des Synesios von Kyrene,” 50 points out the “Bemühen um das Erzeugen intensiver Emotionalität”. 82   The enumeration includes “father” Theotecnus and “brother” Athanasius, both mentioned also in Ep. 5. The guess by Beretta, Ipazia d’Alessandria, 34 – 35 and Roques, “La famille d’Hypatie” – repeated in Garzya and Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, I, 107 [note 93] with further bibliography; cf. also Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 79 – 80 – that they are father and brother of Hypatia is rather speculative; the fact that in Ep. 5, 308 – 309 G.‑R. they are called “father” and “my friend” (τὸν ἑταῖρον ἡμῶν) suggests a metaphorical cognation as more likely. This does not necessarily imply a formal hierarchy as suggested by Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene, 30 – 31 note 66. 83   Cf. the contrasting interpretations by Josef Vogt, “Das unverletzliche Gut. Synesios an Hypatia,” in ΤΙΜΗΤΙΚΟΝ ΑΦΙΕΡΩΜΑ / Festschrift für Konstantinos J. Merentitis (Athens: En Athēnais, 1972), 436 = 89 – 90: “Daraus ist nicht etwa eine Anwandlung von Trotz zu entnehmen, vielmehr das völlige Aufgehen des Jüngers in den Herzensregungen der Meisterin” and Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, 284: “eines leisen Anflugs von Bitterkeit und Resignation.” 84   Cf. Garzya and Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, II, 206 – 208.338 – 339. 85   Cf. Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, 285.

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with the governor Andronicus (and justifying the role of Synesius who dared to excommunicate him).86 Thus the consolatory topic as well as the appeal to former approbation by Hypatia leads to practical purpose. Most expressive is the last text to be examined, Ep. 10: I salute you, and I beg of you to salute your most happy comrades for me, august Mistress. I have long been reproaching you that I am not deemed worthy of a letter, but now I know that I am despised by you all for no wrongdoing on my part, but because I am unfortunate in many things, in as many as a man can be. If I could only have had letters from you and learnt how you were all faring – I am sure you are happy and enjoying good fortune – I should have been relieved, in that case, of half my own trouble, in rejoicing at your happiness. But now your silence has been added to the sum of my sorrows. I have lost my children, my friends, and the goodwill of every one. The greatest loss of all, however, is the absence of your divine spirit. I had hoped that this would always remain to me, to conquer both the caprices of fortune and the evil turns of fate. Αὐτήν τέ σε καὶ διὰ σοῦ τοὺς μακαριωτάτους ἑταίρους ἀσπάζομαι, δέσποινα μακαρία. Πάλαι μὲν ἂν ἐγκαλέσας ἐφ’ οἷς οὐκ ἀξιοῦμαι γραμμάτων, νῦν δὲ οἶδα παρεωραμένος ὑφ’ ἁπάντων ὑμῶν ἐφ’ οἷς ἀδικῶ μὲν οὐδὲν, ἀτυχῶ δὲ πολλὰ καὶ ὅσα ἄνθρωπος ἀτυχῆσαι δύναται. Ἀλλ’ εἴπερ εἶχον ἐντυγχάνειν ὑμετέραις ἐπιστολαῖς καὶ μανθάνειν ἐν οἷς διατρίβετε (πάντως δὲ ἐν ἀμείνοσίν ἐστε καὶ καλλίονος πειρᾶσθε τοῦ δαίμονος), ἐξ ἡμισείας ἂν ἔπραττον πονήρως ἐν ὑμῖν εὐτυχῶν. Νῦν δὲ ἕν τι καὶ τοῦτο τῶν χαλεπῶν ἐστὶν ἅ με κατείληφεν· ἀπεστέρημαι μετὰ τῶν παιδίων καὶ τῶν φίλων καὶ τῆς παρὰ πάντων εὐνοίας καὶ, τὸ μέγιστον, τῆς θειοτάτης σου ψυχῆς, ἣν ἐγὼ μόνην ἐμαυτῷ ἐμμένειν ἤλπισα κρείττω καὶ δαιμονίας ἐπηρείας καὶ τῶν ἐξ εἱμαρμένης ῥευμάτων.

In contrast to Ep. 81, the loss of influence is not emphasized, although it might be hinted at by the mention of the friends and goodwill of every one Synesius declares he has lost. However, the main focus lies on the friends belonging to Hypatia’s circle, and still more on the philosopher herself. Friendship and philosophy are intimately intertwined as ever; blessed are they who enjoy both through each other. For Synesius, however, the absence of the mistress of philosophy is almost equivalent to the absence of philosophy itself. His longing for communion in friendship and philosophy, so necessary in his absolute distress, is painfully frustrated. His desire (the intensity of which has been compared to that of an elegiac lover, whereas the relation between Synesius and Hypatia is

86  Cf. Ep. 41, 42, and 72 with the comments in Garzya and Roques, trans. Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance, I, 128 – 147.324 – 326, Josef Vogt, “Synesios gegen Andronikos: der philosophische Bischof in der Krisis,” in Adel und Kirche. Gerd Tellenbach zum 65. Geburtstag dargebracht von Freunden und Schülern, eds. Joseph Fleckenstein and Karl Schmid (Freiburg: Herder, 1968): 15 – 25, Antonio Garzya, “Sinesio e Andronico,” in Hestiasis. Studi di tarda antichità offerti a Salvatore Calderone, I (Messina: Sicania, 1986), 93 – 103, Roques, Études, 137 – 159, and Karen Piepenbrink, “Selbstverständnis und Selbstdarstellung des Synesios von Kyrene als Bischof,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, eds. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 84 – 91 (all with further references).

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represented as pure from any sexual implications) is left to despair, and the consolation of philosophy is impossible.87 Admittedly, this is a rather straightforward reading. Despair is not total as long as Synesius continues writing to Hypatia, and the letter is an appeal to her to finally send a letter to him. Both parties will obviously be well aware of the precariousness of epistolary commerce; not receiving letters for a long time is a rather common misfortune as a number of examples have shown, and in addition a highly emotional complaint is not only a typical reaction, but also a device of rhetoric.88 But even so the contrast between being blessed in the company of Hypatia and being distraught without even receiving a letter from her constitutes the very structure that informs the letter.

Conclusion Being a philosopher is a central aspect of the self-image Synesius offers in his writings. This is true in programmatic contexts, when defining his role in Constantinople or justifying his double occupation as a littérateur and a philosopher at the same time in the Dio. But it is also true in more personal contexts as most clearly to be seen in the letters to Herculian where philosophy and friendship appear as inseparably united and longed for. Hypatia is referred to as all but a living symbol of philosophy. More than once, this amounts to legitimizing the philosophical existence of Synesius by a kind of spiritual genealogy. But when, grieving for his sons, he cannot find the comfort he is craving for, it is the absence of Hypatia, as manifested in the failing of communication, that amounts to a symbol: epitomizing desire, despair and no consolation of philosophy.89

87  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 162 sees an analogy (though sublimated) to the exclusus amator of Roman love elegy. 88  Here it corresponds to the topical πόθος-theme, cf. Thraede, Grundzüge griechisch-­ römischer Brieftopik, 165 – 173. Comparable in intensity, but different in tone is Ep. 8 in which Synesius rebukes his brother Euoptius for not writing, cf. Franz Tinnefeld, “Synesios von Kyrene: Philo­sophie der Freude und Leidensbewältigung. Zur Problematik einer spätantiken Persönlichkeit,” in Studien zur Literatur der Spätantike, eds. Christian Gnilka and Willy Schetter (Bonn: R. Habelt, 1975), 169. 89   Martin Hose, “Synesios und seine Briefe. Versuch einer Analyse eines literarischen Ent­ wurfs,” WJb 27 (2003), 136 points out the importance of a historia calamitatum for a “sympathetische Identifikation,” as outlined by Hans Robert Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 271 which he sees as fundamental for the profuse reception of the letters of Synesius. In a similar way, F. Tinnefeld, “Synesios von Kyrene,” 179, conceives Synesius as a tragic personality, referring to the definition by Johannes Hoffmeister, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Hamburg: Mittler & Sohn, 1955), 616, and concludes: “Synesios ist ganz und gar Mensch; dies ist der Grund, warum wir ihn lieben.”

Synesius’ Letters to Hypatia: On the “End” of a Philosopher-Friendship and its Timelessness (Based on the Hermeneutics of Fritz Mauthner and Umberto Eco)1 Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer Synesius’ Letters to Hypatia – A Literary Corpus Synesius and Hypatia make for a strange couple.2 Synesius addressed seven letters to the philosopher known for her role as a leading Hellenist and teacher of philosophy. In this article I will argue that the letters to Hypatia, in which the “epistolary I”3 takes on the role of a student, serve an important function for the reader, shaping the entire epistolary corpus of 156 letters4 and heightening the suspense right up to the end of the collection. These seven letters are therefore an important guarantee that all the letters will be received as a singular work. That they were indeed received as a corpus is evidenced by the manuscript tradition and suggested by the enormous attention which the letters received among the Byzantines. My thesis treats this correspondence as a literary corpus so conceived by the author,5 thereby ascribing a function to it that goes beyond merely depict1

  Translation by Austin Diaz.   For “coupling” see Martin Hose, “Der Bischof und die Philosophin, Über die Inszenierung eines Paares in den Briefen des Synesios an Hypatia,” in Bi-Textualität. Inszenierungen eines Paares. Ein Buch für Ina Schabert, ed. A. Heitmann, S. Nieberle, B. Schaff and S. Schülting (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001), 323 – 333. 3   I distinguish between the historical author and the epistolary “I”; cf. Matthias Ludolph, Epistolographie und Selbstdarstellung. Untersuchungen zu den ‘Paradebriefen’ Plinius des Jüngeren (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1997), 3 – 40. 4   The total number of 156 is indisputable. The letters 157 – 159, included in the edition by R. Hercher, Epistolographi Graeci, ed. Rudolph Hercher (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1873) are apocryphal. W. Fritz already disproved them in Wilhelm Fritz, “Unechte Synesiosbriefe,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 14 (1905): 75 – 86. For the order of the letters, see Antonio Garzya, ed. Synesii Cyrenensis Epistolae (Roma: Typis Officinae Polygraphicae, 1979), XLI – XLVI. Subsequent quotations come from this edition. 5   For the Synesianum as literary corpus, see Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Zum Werkcharakter der Briefe des Synesios,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, ed. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 96 – 109. The corpus research on Synesius is in its infancy. That Corpus-conceptions existed at this time and were subtly presented is confirmed by the “Alexandrian” Claudius Claudianus. Cf. Bruno Bureau, “Commencements et fins différés dans la poésie de Claudien,” in Commencer et finir. Débuts et fins dans les littératures grecque, latine et néolatine. Actes du colloque organisé les 29 et 30 septembre 2

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ing the communication between late antique aristocrats. Such an assumption is not without grounding: a corpus is to be considered in the light of criteria intrinsic to the work as well as observations regarding the transmission of that work. As soon as we contemplate Synesius’ entire corpus, with all the completely distinct masks which he dons, then it becomes obvious that we are dealing with an author who has created an ingenious and complex literary work in which earnestness and playfulness subtly interact. The biographism that has laid the foundation for the prosopography and reconstruction of the historical Synesius can therefore no longer be unquestionably perpetuated; it demands revision. This article investigates the “couple” of Synesius and Hypatia, which we only meet in Synesius. Church historians who tell of Hypatia provide not a single scrap of evidence for a relationship between the bishop and the philosopher and, in fact, never even mention Synesius. Are we to assume a damnatio memoriae by contemporary Christian authors? Only around 150 years after Hypatia’s death does Evagrius Scholasticus mention Synesius in his Church History.6 He, however, fails to mention Hypatia. When approaching the letters, we must first cast doubt on two views used to legitimize the correspondence as historical documentation: first, the assumption that Synesius collected copies of his letters which were then edited by his brother;7 second, the argument that we can use the addressees to construct a communications network of Cyrenian aristocrats and then work backwards to construct an historical personage.8 With regard to the correspondence, it is worth keeping in mind that letters, just like any literary work, could be addressed to high ranked personages, or even just dedicated to them, without establishing actual contact. Such an act could, for example, make a work more noticeable to its readership, ennobling it. Beyond all this, functionalizing Synesius’ letters as documents of actual correspondence runs into an almost insurmountable obstacle: for many letters, it is simply impossible to establish even a relative chronology, to say nothing of actually dating them.9 2006 par l’Université Jean-Moulin-Lyon 3 et ENS-LSH, ed. B. Bureau and Chr. Nicolas, vol. 1 (Paris: Édition CERGR, 2008), 187 – 206. 6   A. Hübner, trans., Evagrius Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica (Turnhout: Brepols 2007), 1.15. For Evagrius Scholasticus, see most recently Foteini Kolovou, “Ein Bischof kat’oikonomian in spätbyzantinischen Urteilen: Synesios von Kyrene und Nikephoros Gregoras’ Protheoria zu De insomniis,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, ed. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 288 – 403. Kolovou does not consider that Evagrius could have used Synesius himself as a source (Ep. 105). 7   Tassilo Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene. Politik und Philosophie, Hof und Provinz als Handlungsräume eines Aristokraten bis zu seiner Wahl zum Metropoliten von Ptolemaïs (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 146; München: Saur, 2001), 32 – 33. 8  Schmitt, Die Bekehrung des Synesios von Kyrene (passim). 9   Most recently see Katharina Luchner, “Einführung,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Polis – Freundschaft – Jenseitsstrafen, ed. K. Luchner, B. Bleckmann, R. Feldmeier, H. Görgemanns, A. M. Ritter and I. Taneseanu-Döbler (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 21. Luchner rejects the possibility of the letters as an intentional corpus, as she seems to on page 21.

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In Greek and Latin literature, the beginning and the end of a work mark the preferred place for the literary ego to take the stage.10 The most recent research on Synesius’ letters has resoundingly confirmed that the introductory correspondence (Ep. 1 – 5) opens the floor for poetical declarations – even if individual scholars’ interpretations of the work’s beginning lead to different conclusions.11 No similar appraisal of the correspondence’s conclusion exists. Up to now, Synesius’ death was held accountable for the abrupt end of communication.12 At this point I would like to begin my argument by differentiating between Synesius’ death and the “death” of the epistolary “I”. In the second section I will move on to the presentation of Hypatia by two eccentric interpreters, each of whom reflect upon the “end of a philosophical friendship” in novelistic form: first, the radical philosopher of language Fritz Mauthner (1849 – 1932), who reflects debate surrounding the scholarly discipline of history in his time: Hypatia’s death does not silence Synesius, although his friendship with the philosopher remains largely unrequited. The second “hermeneuticist” is the literary theorist and author Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016), who narrates the revelation of Hypatia’s true nature in his novel Baudolino. Eco’s Hypatia never has anything to do with a character named Synesius. She is, however, “conquered” by the mischievous narrator, Baudolino, and bears a child. In Mauthner’s text, the philosopher’s death does not coincide with Synesius’ end. Whereas Eco, who blinds out the existence of Synesius totally, seems to hint at Synesius’ letters implicitly. He alludes to a method to detect a double nature of the letters to Hypatia, mirrored in the double nature of Hypatia.

From the Beginning to the End of the Work Letter 1 serves as an introductory letter with a metapoetic function, and it has been rightly noted that each letter from 1 to 4 addresses a different addressee.13 The themes of these letters are arranged following the principle of variatio, 10

  See Bureau, “Commencements et fins différés dans la poésie de Claudien,” note 4.   Martin Hose, “Synesius und seine Briefe. Versuch einer Analyse eines literarischen Ent­ wurfs,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft 27 (2003): 132, note 37; see Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Zum Werkcharakter der Briefe des Synesios,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, ed. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 102; Helmut Seng, “An den Haaren herbeigezogen. Sophistische Argumentation im Encomium Calvitii,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Politik – Literatur – Philosophie, ed. H. Seng and L. M. Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 142 note 87. 12   Since no letter seems to be written after 413, commonly 413 is supposed to be the date of Synesius’ death. See Denis Roques, Synésios de Cyrène. Tome II. Correspondance. Lettres I – LXIII, Texte établi par Antonio Garzya, Traduit et commenté par Denis Roques (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2000), IX – X. 13   See Hose, “Synesios und seine Briefe”. 11

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a principle which extends beyond letter 4. In Ep. 5, which broadens into a story, we again find clear signals pointing to a metapoetic reading.14 The “I” of the letter reports that, following a shipwreck, he found himself in a land of wondrous women – for the literarily versed among us, this is an unmistakable signal that we are dealing with a narrator who is inclined to spin fables.15 A sea voyage, which enjoys success as well as failure, belongs to that reliable repertoire of tricks authors employ to speak about their own work and provide the reader with guidance. Many of the letters in this corpus point to a preconceived literary work, allowing for metapoetic interpretation.16 We have no similar observations regarding the end of the correspondence.17 The assumption that a sick and weak Synesius died during the correspondence simply became the assumption in scholarship and this biographical interpretation has continued, unabated. Meanwhile, the conclusions of different works from classical literature have been well researched, but a similar analysis of late antique texts continues to be a desideratum. With the aid of compelling parallels between the corpus Synesianum and the work of his Alexandrian-born contemporary Claudian, the poet, whose work likewise met an abrupt end because of death, we can make important inferences.18 Yet, a major difference remains that the historical Claudian is present outside of his own work.19 Recent research emphasizes the necessity for us, instead of labeling an ending open or closed, to consider how the conclusion of a work may rather play on the dialectic of openness and closedness. A heavily marked closing can leave an ending open and vice versa. Letters per se are already said to be a “weak” genre. That they, in the terminology of Fowler, do not create the expectation of a “masculine” end is therefore hardly surprising.20 The end of Synesius’ epistolary 14

  See Seng, “An den Haaren herbeigezogen,” 125; Aglae Pizzone, Sinesio e la sacra ancora di Omero. Intertestualità e modelli tra retorica e filosofica, Il Filarete 231 (Milano: Edizione Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, 2006), 79 – 117. 15   For this see Seng, “An den Haaren herbeigezogen,” 125 with note 3 (“Züge eines Rollenspiels”) and 138 (“Lust des Autors am Fabulieren”); cf. the unreliable narrator of a sea voyage par excellence Odysseus (Hom. Od. 5.291 – 457). 16   Thus, for example, when we look at Ep. 46 Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia 16 (Bern: Lang, 2011), 82. 17   The first ideas regarding these aspects can be found in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 23 – 28 and “Zum Werkcharakter der Briefe des Synesios,” 106 – 107. 18   This open end is explained with the death of the author or a decisive political event, namely the execution of Stilicho. 19  Augustine De civitate Dei 5.26 calls him a “Christi nomine alienus”; Orosius 7.35.21 a “pervivacissimus paganus.” 20   A masculine ending is an explicit, marked end, while a feminine, weak end is one that simply fades away. Don P. Fowler, “Second Thoughts on Closure,” in Reading the End of Greek and Latin Literatur, ed. D. H. Roberts, F. M. Dunn and D. P. Fowler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10, addresses the juncture of masculine “closure” and “male power”.

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correspondence, then, is, according to this conception, marked as a “feminine” and weak end, yet can we still describe it as closed? This is the question we must answer. As we shall see, the character of Hypatia plays a decisive role in this regard.

Hypatia in Synesius’ Work Synesius left behind a diverse corpus. The individual writings belong to different literary genres. Next to the letters, two harangues, the Catastases and the “autobiographical” Dion: Or, On Living by his Example, we have Egyptian Tales,21 the spoudaiogeloion In Praise of Baldness, the panegyric To Paeonius, the political tract On Kingship, the philosophical tract On Dreams as well as the climax of nine Hymns – in other words, in Synesius we have a literarily varied, almost protean author, whose propensity for allegory is well known.22 His letters fit effortlessly into this body of work. They convey autobiographical snapshots of a sometimes strong and self-assured, sometimes weak and doubting “I” that ­confidently wields the epistolary genre and subtly exploits the playful options available in this literary form. Before turning to Ep. 154, the central focus of my argument, I would like to make a few general remarks on the relationship between Hypatia and Synesius. In his letters, Synesius proclaims himself Hypatia’s disciple. In his other works, we only find an explicit reference to her in Ad Paeonium (310c – 311b) which seems to belong to the genre of epistolography as well.23 If Hypatia truly represented the height of philosophy for Synesius, we have to ask why she goes unmentioned in the rest of his works. The genre itself offers an answer in that the “private” has an established place in letters. The role a philosopher takes in respect to his wife or to women in general has its place in a letter. Among the Neoplatonists, Porphyry provides us with an instructive example. The letter to his wife Marcella is, on the first, material level, a highly personal, even intimate recognition of his social responsibility. Ad Marcellam addresses Porphyry’s philanthropic endeavors. It pledges support to an older woman, a widow with several children, thereby giving deference to a dead friend.

21   For the problems of defining the genre of this work, which are actually conceived as speeches, cf. Martin Hose, ed., Synesios von Kyrene. Ägyptische Erzählungen oder Über die Vorsehung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 12 – 14. 22   See Wolfgang Bernard, “Zur allegorischen Methode des Synesios in seinen Ägyptischen Erzählungen,” in Synesios von Kyrene. Ägyptische Erzählungen oder Über Die Vorsehung, ed. M. Hose (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 157 – 159. 23   I am grateful to Helmut Seng for this observation.

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Μένειν δὲ ἐνταυθοῖ βιαζόμενος τήν τε τοῦ αὖτις ἐντυχεῖν ἐλπίδα προϊσχόμενος εἰκότως σοι παραινέσαιμ’ ἂν ἀντεχομένῃ τῶν δοθέντων ἐν τοῖς δέκα μησὶν οἷς μοι συνῴκησας μὴ πόθῳ καὶ ἐπιθυμίᾳ τοῦ πλείονος καὶ τὸ ὂν ἤδη ἐκβαλεῖν.24 I will arrange for you to stay here therefore; and in rightfully holding the hope of seeing me again before your eyes, I would like to advise you to hold fast to what you had in those ten months in which we were together, so that you do not lose through longing and desire for more that which you already have.

Porphyry makes clear in this programmatic epistle that corporeal relations with his wife are out of the questions (she is too old and already sick), before the letter launches into a philosophical discourse on the relationship between body and soul through which Marcella is offered a consolation. Synesius appears to have Porphyry in mind as a counter paradigm for his own relationship with Hypatia. He drafts the image of a woman superior to him whose intellectual leadership he prizes. Hypatia could offer consolation, but she shows no reaction to the “student’s” pain (in response to e. g. Ep. 10, where her indifference is a theme), she brings no philosophical paraenesis of solace to bear.25

The End of a Philosophical Friendship: ‘Reading’ the Letters to Hypatia In Ep. 136, which Synesius writes to his brother Euoptius, the author makes Hypatia a symbol of the Alexandrian Platonists’ superiority over the practitioners of the Athenian school. By insinuating a friendship, Synesius also suggests his own philosophical superiority over the Academy at Athens, emphasizing the formal and aesthetic aspects of that superiority.26 Yet at the same time, throughout the epistolary corpus, the epistolary “I” tells of the falling out of their friendship, for which Hypatia is said to be responsible. Ep. 154, the final letter to Hypatia, speaks an all-together different language. The ambivalence of the epistolary “I” towards Hypatia is now unavoidable. This letter does not speak of waning contact or of physical and psychic weakness, rather the epistolary “I” requests a critical reading of a writing whose title is withheld.27 Only at the end does he mention that some divinity dictated to him yet another writing. In doing so, Synesius does not so much question Hypatia’s authority as a reviewer, as set it aside completely. A divinely inspired work needs no help from the philosopher and her dialectical and discursive method. The epistolary “I” plays this announcement like a trump card, making the writing untouchable and shielding it from criticism. 24

 Porph. Marc. 4, 20 – 24, des Places.   On the suffering Synesius, see Seng’s contribution in this volume. 26   See the detailed commentary in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 132 – 146. 27   For this Helmut Seng, “Die Kontroverse um Dion von Prusa und Synesios von Kyrene,” Hermes 134 (2006): 104, 111. 25

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. . . ἀλλ’ ἐξείργασται μὲν ἐπὶ μιᾶς ἅπαν νυκτός, μᾶλλον δὲ λειψάνου νυκτός, ἣ καὶ τὴν ὄψιν ἤνεγκε τὴν περὶ τοῦ δεῖν αὐτὸ συγγεγράφθαι. ἔστι δὲ οὗ τῶν λόγων δίς που καὶ τρίς, ὥσπερ τις ἕτερος ὤν, ἐμαυτοῦ γέγονα μετὰ τῶν παρόντων ἀκροατής. καὶ νῦν ὁσάκις ἂν ἐπίω τὸ σύνγραμμα, θαυμαστή τιs περὶ ἐμὲ διάθεσις γίνεται, καί τις ὀμφή με θεία περιχεῖται κατὰ τὴν ποίησιν. εἰ δὲ μὴ μόνον τὸ πάθος ἐμοῦ καὶ περὶ ἕτερον δ’ ἂν ταῦτα γένοιτο, σύ καὶ τοῦτο μηνύσεις. σύ γὰρ δὴ μετ’ ἐμὲ πρώτη τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐντεύξῃ.28 . . . but this work is the result of a single night, or rather the remains of a night, which also brought the dream-message that it needed to be written down. There are perhaps two or three points in the text where I have become, among those present, an audience member to myself, as though I was another person. So often now, when I turn to the text, I experience a wonderful state and a divine voice flows about me, thinking of its drafting. When I am not alone in feeling this sentiment, when it happens to someone else, you will share it with me. For next to me you are the first one among the Hellenes who will meet this work.

This move simultaneously dismisses the highest instance of Hellenism, Hypatia, from the epistolary corpus. Synesius’ literary signature, the riddle, a technique, which invites the reader to decode complex narrative structures,29 takes in Ep. 154 a new and final turn. A signpost is provided. It sets the reader on a trail which merely alludes to the two works, laying out a path for the intended reader. This reader is integrated into the game, asked to solve the riddle and read critically – as Hypatia was asked to – the individual writings of his corpus. A historical perspective might counter that the writing which Hypatia is to review is already known to the (historical) addressee and therefore need not be explicitly mentioned. Yet, if we assume a literary correspondence, which is my main thesis, then the question remains open. It is exactly this point in the correspondence that invites the reader to identify the two works. In other words, the epistolary “I” solicits a relecture of Synesius’ oeuvre. By explicitly stating that one work (Ad Paeonium, On the Gift) was to be enclosed with the review copy, the epistolary “I” rules out Ad Paeonium and manages an initial anchoring for finding the unnamed work. Letter 154 thus contains clues, though they are not definitive ones: it and the work it refers to are thereby marked as works preceded by another work and thus positioned in a series – we are invited to ask, what is the significance of their order? In Ep. 154 the epistolary “I” supposes an alliance between philosophy and textualisation, going on to discuss the rules of production and subsequent reception of a literary work. Via the fiction of an autobiographical work, the epistolary “I” provides the reader with a map for approaching Synesius’ own work. The self-referential function in Ep. 154 affixes Synesius’ seal on the letters. This closural sphragis suggests that the epistolary “I” identifies in Hypatia, his paragon of Hellenic education, the ideal “clue” to lead into his work. 28

  Ep.  154; Garzya, 276.17 – 277.1.   For this Bernard, “Zur allegorischen Methode des Synesios,” 160.

29

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Synesius’ letters to Hypatia distinguish themselves through a particularly dense intertextuality. Their composer has a literarily educated readership in mind, recalling prose and poetic texts from Homer to Plotinus. The dismissal of Hypatia in Ep. 154 turns out to be a mise en abyme and so delivers a strong signal to the literarily versed reader meant to follow the correspondence to its (very) end, letter 156.30 Letter 154 deals with literary criticism and the basics of hermeneutics.31 Suddenly the inconstant spiritual constitution of the epistolary “I” we have come to expect from the numerous letters addressed to Hypatia (Ep. 10, 15, 16, 81, 124) disappears. In a direct reversal of this relationship, the new strong “ego” of the author, who has composed a new work exposed to the philosopher’s criticism, speaks. Above all this “I” describes his role in this most recent work as a medium, as it was dictated to him by a divinity. The epistolary “I” imagines itself as a spectator, full of wonder, watching the birth of this (successful) work. None of the previous letters to Hypatia had acknowledged that Hypatia should have made literary exegesis an object of her teaching. Metaliterary reflections on the interpretation of a text are therefore introduced unexpectedly. That a text must possess a thematic unity and coherence (Ep. 154, 274, 18 – 275, 20) constitutes the core of this thesis which Hypatia must judge. If she does not positively review the work – it remains open which text it is – then he will not publish it (Ep. 154, 276, 1 – 9). This acknowledgment of the strength of Hypatia’s judgment involves the reader, inviting him to wonder which work is meant and if it might be one now known, published after having been approved by the teacher. At the literary level, the ending of the epistolary correspondence and the friendship between Synesius and Hypatia converge.32 The way in which 30   To demand immortality as an author has been a theme since classical literature. Next to the letters addressed to Hypatia, the transmission and research history show that Ep. 105 is particularly suited to ensure the perpetuity of the letters. For the transmission of Corpus Synesianum see Denis Roques, “Lecteurs de Synésios, de Byzance à nos jours (VIe – XXIe s.),” in Synesios von Kyren, ed. Seng and Hoffmann, Byzantios 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 276 – 387. 31   See the detailed commentary in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 96 – 125. 32   Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and later summarizing her main arguments: Maria Dzielska “Once again on Hypatia’s Death,” in Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism, eds. M. Dzielska and K. Twardowska, Byzantina et Slavica Cracoviensia 7 (Cracow: Jagiellonian Universtiy Press 2013), 65 – 73 argues from the point of view of history. Dzielska does not consider that the letters are literarily challenging texts that demand to be considered as more than just historical reports. The research of Schmitt, Die Bekehrung von Synesios von Kyrene and Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion zur Philosophie in der Spätantike, Potsdamer altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 23 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008) take a similar tack. See also Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Work,” in Wandering Poets and other Essays on Late Antique Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185 – 203; 326 – 331 in his recent revision of his former work on Hypatia and Synesius. For the analysis of the social processes at the turn of the fifth century which in no way lose relevance, if we take into account literary strategies in Synesius, see Petkas in this volume.

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Synesius addresses his “teacher” corresponds to the rules of classical epistolography and closely follows the tradition of literary stylization of philosophy teachers in Late Antiquity.33 The letters do not provide evidence of an actual friendship with Hypatia, something that, in light of Synesius’ literary profile, is doubtful. The fact that Ep. 154, which marks a definite caesura in the friendship, comes at the end of the correspondence is crucial for my argument. Had this letter come at the beginning and offered an initial key to reading all the letters, the suspense built around Hypatia would have dissipated and failed to prepare the intended reader via the right sequence of steps for the literary anagogy. This way, however, the reader is always encouraged to read further and, even past the disruption in Ep. 154, not to abandon his attentive reading attitude. Desiring to discover what happens in the wake of this break, which provides the proficient reader with a hint key – the reader continues to the end through two short letters. Both letters, Ep. 155 and Ep. 156, are addressed to a Scholasticus. The epistolary “I” exhorts a person (the titles name him Dometianus) to come to the aid of a widow with a child. These letters can now be read as a closing and final framing that complements Ep. 1 and therefore supports my argument. In letter 1, the epistolary ego worries about one of his “children,” i. e. one of his works, which is not granted the status it deserves. Letters 155 and 156 are again aimed at an educated person who is equally familiar with the Platonic way of speaking about writing from the Phaedrus. In the entirety of the Synesianum only this addressee receives a qualifying epithet that so explicitly refers to his education: this ascription of scholasticus could mean that he is a jurist or simply an academic without any specification. The epistolary “I” appeals to the humanity (φιλανθρωπίᾳ) of the man, who should help a widow and her now orphaned child (σὺν ὀρφανῷ παιδίῳ; Ep. 155.3: βοηθείας), praising the man’s καλοκαγαθίαν (Ep. 155.11). The widowed woman is a relative of the epistolary “I”, who has earned help thanks to her “beautiful soul” and “excellent being.” As a relative she has earned protection and salvation. The letter closes by mentioning this relative’s orderly mother. The drastic nature of this appeal to the scholasticus lies in the simultaneous request of protection for the epistolary “I”. As the Phaedrus intertext makes clear, (with its comparison of textual and biological parentage) the “mother” is the written literary work, and her “child” is an orphan. Ep. 156, the closing letter, takes up the theme of help again: Τὰ δίκαια χρῄζει συμμάχων καὶ γένοιτ’ ἂν οἱ βοηθοῦντες αὐτοῖς εὐδαίμονες, τοῖς ὀρθῶς ἔχουσι συμπονοῦντες. Εἱλόμην δή σε τούτων πρόβολον, γνώμῃ τε ἀμύνοντα καὶ τέχνῃ. Τὸ μὲν οὖν ἐμὸν ἅπασιν εὖ ποιεῖν οἷς ἂν δύνωμαι. Δίδου δὲ αὐτὸς ἀφορμάς· αἰσθήσῃ γὰρ φιλίας ἣν οὔτε αὐτὸς μέμψῃ, γελάσει τε ἴσως οὐδείς. (Ep.  156, Garzya 278,9 – 14) 33

 Tanaseanu-Döbler, Konversion ignores the Author-persona staged by Synesius. She trivializes the epistolographic traditions, which the correspondence not only strictly observes but also, and even more so, reflects.

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Just causes need allies, and may those who aid such causes be happy, as they labor together with those who have a just cause. I have taken you as their shield, you who support them with knowledge and skill. My task is now to do good to all whom I can benefit. Do undertake such efforts yourself. You will form a friendship, which no one can criticize and for which no one can ridicule you.

The epistolary “I” offers his friendship to the scholasticus, a friendship no one could ridicule. If we read the letters 155 and 156 as closing epistles constituting a thematic union, as both the common addressee appears to insinuate and, especially, the βοήθεια-motif34 suggests, then we can further interpret them as a support for the reader, who recognizes the letters as a corpus and decodes them as a literary construction. A true friendship, one that does not open up the epistolary “I” to ridicule, is possible with the scholasticus (γελάσει τε ἴσως οὐδείς).35 The silence of the author that comes with the conclusion of Ep. 156 leaves a defenseless child behind. The scholasticus is asked to care for this child and its mother. Which child? The child as literary product and his controversial legitimacy are already a theme of the introductory epistle (Ep. 1). For a woman with a child (σὺν ὀρφανῷ παιδίῳ)36 left behind (after the father’s “death”), the epistolary “I” asks for accommodation. A fictional eulogy for the epistolary ego? Authorial signals could be read in this direction. An initial allusion appears at the beginning of Ep. 124. Only in this epistle is Hypatia directly addressed by name: using a Homeric quote, the epistolary “I” admits that he will think of her even in Hades.37 Who lies behind this scholasticus? If the title bears up,38 we can understand him to be a jurist, in a narrow sense, or, in a broader sense, just an educated person.39 In the context of a literary production of this letter correspondence, a scholasticus – beyond a social and judicial discourse – converges with the intended literarily versatile reader of the overall letter corpus. In Ep. 154, the epistolary “I” maintained that his most recent work, just composed, forms a unified whole and possesses a hidden level of meaning. The intended reader is expected to be able to recall the proper hypotext to understand this higher level. The letters addressed to the scholasticus very much demand from the reader the ability to recognize this lofty context. The density of specific Platonic usages in the letters 155 and 156 catches the eye; especially the key word βοηθείας provides a decisive sign.40 In metaphorical language that references the central part 34

  Taken up again in Syn. Ep. 155; Garzya 278.5 (ἐπαμύνῃς).  Syn. Ep. 156; Garzya 278.14. 36  Syn. Ep. 155; Garzya 278.2. 37  Syn. Ep. 124; Garzya 212.11 – 12. See the detailed commentary in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 93 – 94. 38   For the broad agreement regarding this appellation in the leading codices (except Va) see Garzya, ed. Synesius of Cyrene, Epistolae, 277 – 278. 39   For “scholasticus” see Axel Claus, Ὁ Σχολαστικός (Köln: Gerd Wasmund, 1965). 40  Syn. Ep. 155; Garzya 277.8. 35

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of Plato’s Phaedrus (275d – 276a), “help” means propping someone up with the “helping hand of a father,” in other words reading a work incapable of protecting itself.41 With the conclusion, which extends from Ep. 154 to Ep. 156 Synesius, the “father” for his orphaned child, the letters, offers this help to those who are ready to receive them as a corpus. The mother (with one orphan child) is the written text (with the letter collection), who needs support to be understood in the right way (Cf. Ep. 1.22 (γραφὰς)).

The End of the Philosophical Friendship in the Literary Reception Hypatia is and remains an object of desire, an item of research and literature. This desire plays a key role in the literary reception of Hypatia. In this vein, I would like to present two authors who have provided literary depictions of the masculine desire with which Hypatia is confronted and who also seem to have read Synesius’ letters as a corpus: the philosopher of language and writer Fritz Mauthner (1849 – 1932), and the novelist and literary critic Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016). The choice of these two authors can be taken as coincidental. Yet this choice is due to the observation that the reception of Hypatia has remained uninterrupted for epochs, that she has become more than a symbolic figure of religious conflict, standing for more than progressive currents and gender-inflected interpretations. The Synesius letters, in contrast to the other sources of Hypatia’s life, offer themselves up to be read with a specific hermeneutical interest. Mauthner and Eco converge and join me in viewing the letter corpus as a unified whole.

Hypatia’s Falling Silent in Fritz Mauthner’s Novel “Hypatia” (Berlin 1892) Mauthner, who championed a radical critique of language (namely that knowledge is not possible using language), published his novel Hypatia in 1892, after it had appeared serially the year before.42 This Novel from Classical Times is based 41   Thomas Alexander Szlezák, Platon lesen, Legenda  1 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993), 40 – 44. 42   See Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Die Aporie. Identitätssuche in Fritz Mauthners Roman Hypatia”, in Zerfall und Rekonstruktion. Identitäten und ihre Repräsentation in der Österreichischen Moderne, ed. H. Kernmayer, Studien zur Moderne 5 (Wien: Passagen Verlag 1999), 69 – 88. Roberto de Pol, “Gli occhi di Ipazia: Kulturkampf e anacronismi nella Hypatia di Fritz Mauthner”, in Figure di Ipazia, eds. G. Sertoli and L. Badini Confalonieri (Arricia: Studi e testi di Palazzo Serra 3, 2014), 81 – 102, however, focusing on the “Kulturkampf ” is less interested in the reception of ancient sources on Hypatia than in literary discourses of Mauthner’s contemporaries.

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to a great extent on Synesius’ letters. The desire of the single student in Synesius’ letters is distributed to four friends: the Jewish Alexander Josephson, the German and Nazaren Wolff, the Antioch-born official Troilus and the Libyan patrician Synesius, a colorless but friendly Neoplatonist. All four students feel drawn to the philosopher. Yet Hypatia does not reciprocate anyone’s love, and step by step, she pulls away from the desire of her friends. Knowing that she cannot convey her understanding using words sets her above her friends and makes her lonely. With her skepticism of words, she comes closer to the divine, where none of her friends can follow. Mauthner turns Hypatia into a symbolic successor and godchild of the emperor Julian who, soon after his visit to Alexandria and the Library of Serapeum, falls in battle against the Persians. A bird, a marabou, becomes Hypatia’s constant companion after the destruction of the Serapeum and a symbol for her specific direction as philosopher. The marabou dies with her. The death of Hypatia is provided in detail. Synesius is not present for her murder. Right at the moment of this cruel act, Synesius is a supplicant to the bishop who orders him never to mention the name Hypatia in the church again. Synesius becomes a bishop only after the philosopher’s death. Only then he composes his hymns to prove “that the Neoplatonic philosophy, in particular the system of his unforgettable teacher and soulmate Hypatia, in no way contradicts Christian dogma.”43 In Mauthner, the friendship between Synesius and Hypatia does not end. His Synesius lives on after the death of the philosopher. He fulfills his connection to her by poetically manifesting her linguistic skepticism in his hymns. In Synesius’ hymns the poetic “I” aspires to the union with the divine, which is to be equated with the ineffable, highest “Sein”. In a similar move, Mauthner asserts that the truth is beyond language.

43   Fritz Mauthner, Hypatia: Roman aus dem Altertum, Ausgewählte Schriften 3 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919), 321. F. Mauthner, Ausgewählte Schriften, 328 details in the second edition (1919) the reaction his novel received. The historian and Nobel Prize winner for literature, Theodor Mommsen, who gave the author advice, criticized the novel’s aesthetic deficiency. As someone critical of any sort of historical novel, Mommsen was disturbed by the “double coloring of the painting,” which “damaged the whole even while individual aspects delighted and amused.” In research on Mommsen, Mauthner has, as earlier, no place. One exception comes with J. Malitz in Juergen Malitz, “‘Auch ein Wort über unser Judenthum.’ Theodor Mommsen und der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit,” in Theodor Mommsen. Gelehrter, Politiker und Literat, ed. Josef Wiesehöfer (Stuttgart: Steiner 2005), 155, marking the occasion of Mommsen’s intervention on behalf of the Jews against Heinrich von Treitschke. Mauthner’s novel “Der neue Ahasver. Ein Roman aus Jung-Berlin” (its first appearance in Berliner Tagblatt in 1881 as a serial novel) was mentioned as it took place in an atmosphere of antisemitism. In his foreword, Mauthner addresses Mommsen and the problem of conversion.

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The ‘Revelation’ of Hypatia – Her Satyric Nature in Umberto Eco’s Novel Baudolino (Milan 2000) With Umberto Eco, a great fabulist encounters Hypatia.44 In his novel Baudolino, which he published in 2000,45 the hero, a trickster and fabulist himself, meets this now young and ethereal woman.46 Eco moves Hypatia to the Middle Ages, placing her in the context of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. His hero is the foster son of emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, who dies under mysterious circumstances like emperor Julian. Eco’s Hypatia lives in a fantastical world populated by sciapods and other imaginary creatures we know well from works such as Lucian’s True Stories and the Alexander Romance. While preparing for a battle against the Huns, Baudolino meets the fairy-like Hypatia, who is not just beautiful but the embodiment of beauty itself. She introduces herself as a descendant of the ancient Hypatia and claims to live with many other Hypatias. Similar to the Amazons of myth, select Hypatias are given to Satyrs to ensure feminine descendants. Masculine offspring are left with the Satyrs. Like the marabou in Mauthner, a unicorn, the symbol of goodness, virginity, and untouchability, accompanies Eco’s Hypatia. Hypatia, ignorant until now of corporeal desire, meets with Baudolino several times and finally gives into his entreaties.47 Intercourse, however, has a surprise in store for Baudolino: Hypatia has the hindquarters of a goat. In the end though, the fabulist Baudolino’s true love is stronger than his shock at Hypatia’s hybrid form. After some time, Hypatia conceives a child. Baudolino sets off for battle against the Huns, now wanting to ensure the future of his wife and unborn child. Hypatia and Baudolino never see each other again; she only remains present in his dreams. With Baudolino, Eco creates the figure of a (postmodern) narrator. As such he meets the narrative figure of Hypatia, who has become manifold since classical times. Her being, its purity and embodiment of beauty, remains. For the narrator who wants to discover her and to tell of her anew, she hides something disturbing: two natures. Her feminine, transcendental nature is combined with a physical, satyr-like shape. Baudolino is able to overcome this disturbance and “free” Hypatia from her transcendental being. Put in another way: Eco reveals her hidden nature. On the first level – for a common reader – the series of letters in the corpus of Synesius’ letters present themselves by the symbol Hypatia

44   The translation of the entire Synesianum into Italian in Opere de Sinesio de Cirene: Epistole, Operette, Inni (Torino: Unione Tipografico – Editrice Torinese, 1989) reawakened interest in the character of Hypatia. 45   See Umberto Eco, Baudolino (Milan: Bompiani, 2000); for Hypatia 469 – 56 (§ 32 – 36). 46   Ibid. “Baudolino contro gli unni bianchi” (452 – 461); “Baudolino e gli uccelli roq” (462 – 573). 47   Hypatia is also curious to experience how desire plays out among people.

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as unambiguous. For the informed reader who handles the Platonic method of hermeneutics, the letters to Hypatia turn out to incorporate a hidden level. This cursory survey of Hypatia’s reception has aimed to show that two authors, completely different regarding their background and interest in Hypatia, still converge in a “student-like” desire for Hypatia as an interpreter and fabulist. In Fritz Mauthner, the death of the philosopher provided the impetus for Synesius to turn to literature with calm and joy. In Umberto Eco, Hypatia has become manifold and remains, as before, untouched. Baudolino, the protagonist and narrator, can “conquer” her. She exposes her goat-like shape and reveals herself as the embodiment of hybridity, combining complete beauty and ugliness. Does Umberto Eco, by “denuding” Hypatia in this consummation of desire, point toward a reading of Synesius’ letters to Hypatia which exposes their true nature as satirical?

Conclusion Synesius’ correspondence reveals itself to be a polyphonic and complex construction as soon as we begin to view it as a literary work. The hypothesis that we are dealing with a literary corpus in which Hypatia is the key for the interpretation of the epistolary corpus itself proves to be a productive perspective to which the entire Synesianum submits, revealing a literarily challenging and protean author. Hypatia “emerges” as the instance through which the higher sense of the correspondence is indicated, its true nature that consists of depicting more than everyday situations. Hypatia never answers to the epistolary “I”, yet she does answer to the reader. She is the figure that helps the appropriate recipient to read her and the letters simultaneously and sensibly as literature. The Platonic method of addressing and then leading the intended (literarily and philosophically instructed) reader comes into play here. This method converges with the demand of the epistolary “I” in Ep. 154, that a text must disclose a higher sense and build a unified whole. The Platonic way of correct reading that helps the sensible reader and leads him to the end is intertextually stamped at the end of the work with Ep. 155 and Ep. 156. With Ep. 154, a mise en abyme, Hypatia is released from the corpus, her function as a “helper toward the written Logos” fulfilled. The letters are then in no way a confident indication of actual correspondence between Synesius and the philosopher. In a very selective review of the literary reception of Hypatia, we traced her literary form briefly as expressed in two modern novels. The literary reception confirms the fertility of the narrative regarding the late antique philosopher who “must” become part of a pair. At the end of the 19th‑century and on the threshold of the 21st the Hypatia-Synesius relationship is either demystified (Mauthner) or completely eliminated (Eco). Mauthner allows the distance between the two to grow further in that she

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is not reachable through language. Eco’s design of a hybrid philosopher “eliminates” Hypatia in the world of fantasy, or at least a world with satyrical contours that find contact with Synesius’ letters as they also contain a “physical” Hypatia as well as one of a more satyr-like nature which reveals itself to the reader in a surprising fashion – turning into a satirical transformation of the “noble” Neoplatonist.

Bloody Iuvenalia: Hypatia, Pulcheria Augusta, and the Beginnings of Cyril of Alexandria’s Episcopate Walter F. Beers Introduction In the spring of 415, the city of Alexandria was rocked by a series of upheavals destined for a peculiarly lively afterlife among historians of Christianity and late antiquity.1 Tensions between the city’s more fractious elements led to a massacre of Christians by Alexandrian Jews, a retaliatory expulsion of Jews, and a series of anti-pagan riots which culminated in the infamous murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia at the hands of a Christian mob.2 In point of fact, Socrates Scholasticus, our only detailed and contemporary source for the events leading to Hypatia’s murder, tells us very little about the philosopher or about Alexandria’s elite intellectual circles. Rather, Socrates presents Hypatia as the pathetic but chance victim of a political contest between the city’s new bishop, Cyril, and its prefect Orestes – a contest that spun disastrously out of control. It is the testimonies of Synesius of Cyrene and Damascius that give us our picture of Hypatia as an influential teacher and accomplished scholar.3 To what extent her prominent position in the eastern empire’s Neoplatonist community was paralleled by an equal status in wider Alexandrian society is a question best referred to Synesius – he is our most detailed source on the 1   For their many helpful comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Jack Tannous, Peter Brown, Dawn LaValle Norman, Alex Petkas, David Gyllenhaal, Merle Eisenberg, and the members of the Princeton LAMB Workshop. 2   PLRE 2:575 – 6, “Hypatia 1.” These events will be discussed in detail below; scholarly (and unscholarly) treatments abound, but notable recent readings include Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works,” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 187 – 203; Edward Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable or Unacceptable Violence?” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, eds. Harold A. Drake et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 333 – 42; Edward Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 187 – 203; Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 295 – 316; Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83 – 100; Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long (with a contribution by Lee Sherry), Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 59 – 62. 3   Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 40 – 62.

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philosopher’s academic and social connections, and our only source untouched by memories of her sensational murder. My intention here, however, is not to examine Hypatia, either as a Neoplatonist or as a celebrated citizen of Alexandria. Instead, I would like to offer a reading of Socrates’ account of the unrest that swept through Alexandria’s streets in the spring of 415 with a view not towards Hypatia’s tragic role, but rather towards the early career of Cyril of Alexandria (sed. 412 – 444).4 Cyril – unquestionably the most influential Greek theologian of his generation, and arguably one of its most successful political operators – first emerges on the historical stage as a player in the tragedy of Hypatia, and thus this incident provides us with our first insights into the character of this important historical actor. In this paper I will attempt to pull at the threads of Socrates’ often oblique account, in order to draw out these insights. Furthermore, I will argue that the story of these events and Cyril’s role in them offers us some tantalizing hints of the bishop’s first, albeit indirect contact with a second woman – one who was to prove a vital ally in his future political career. This woman was the young Aelia Pulcheria (399 – 453), augusta and sister of the child emperor Theodosius II.5 In Socrates’ account we can see Cyril make a play for power in his own city, even as he keeps one eye on the capital, where Pulcheria – fresh from her own first forays into politics – now stood as the dominant figure in the imperial court. In Alexandria, Cyril met with mixed success, but in Constantinople and with Pulcheria, his reputation was made. With this in mind, it will be productive to begin by looking ahead at the subsequent careers of Cyril and Pulcheria and examining the evidence for their later collaboration.

The Constantinople-Alexandria Rivalry Within the space of two decades, Cyril and Pulcheria reshaped eastern Christianity. The councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) damaged irrevocably the fragile and hard-won homoousian consensus under which the dominant Christian body had entered the fifth century.6 The wedges driven into the Chris4   On Cyril generally, see John A. McGuckin, St. Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts, rev. ed. (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), and Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5   On Pulcheria, see Kenneth G. Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982). 6   On these two councils and the Christological debates of the first half of the 5th c., see the lucid summary in Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 1:1 – 51 and the bibliography cited therein.

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tian oecumene by these two councils would engender not marginal and ephemeral schismatic communities like the Novatians, the Donatists, and the Arian Gothic church, but the near loss of whole regions – Mesopotamia, Armenia, Syria, Egypt – to rival “Nestorian” and anti-Chalcedonian hierarchies.7 These seismic shifts in the Christian landscape, often difficult to trace on the ground but ultimately epochal in their consequences, can be traced back to these two exceptional personalities. Behind these events, however, lay a less lofty contest – that between the sees of Alexandria and Constantinople. This rivalry was not grounded in doctrinal disputes, even though such disputes were often grist for its mill. Rather, it had its roots in the opposition between Alexandria’s traditional primacy among the sees of the east and the growing power of the see of New Rome and its home synod, which functioned as a court of appeals in disputes of canon law and benefited from its proximity to the imperial court.8 These roots stretched back into the years of the Trinitarian controversies, and had by Cyril and Pulcheria’s time already erupted in one spectacular showdown, between Cyril’s uncle and predecessor Theophilus (sed.  384 / 5 – 412) and John Chrysostom (sed.  398 – 404). Perhaps inspired by his uncle’s victory, at Ephesus in 431 Cyril took advantage of the new Constantinopolitan patriarch Nestorius’ (sed. 428 – 431) political naïveté and Christological eccentricity and, in a masterful display of theological genius, anti-heretical zeal, and ruthless political opportunism, had Nestorius deposed and exiled and his own Christological formulations ratified by conciliar consensus. In this contest of wills Nestorius had contented himself with support from the indecisive Theodosius II, whereas Cyril found a ready ally in Pulcheria. Twenty years later, this great episcopal rivalry was finally resolved at Chalcedon. The assembled bishops, under pressure from Pulcheria and her new husband Marcian (r. 450 – 457), enshrined Cyrilline Christology in the council’s new definition of faith. Ironically, however, they also put an end to Alexandrian attempts to retard the influence of Constantinople. The council’s twenty-eighth canon declared that “the city which is honoured with the imperial government and the senate and enjoys equal privileges with imperial Senior Rome should be exalted like her in ecclesiastical affairs as well, being second after her.”9 By 451, 7   On the legacy of Chalcedon, see Price and Gaddis, Chalcedon, 1:51 – 56, as well as William H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) and Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 7 – 41. 8   Norman H. Baynes, “Alexandria and Constantinople: A Study in Ecclesiastical Diplomacy,” JEA 12 (1926): 145 – 56. 9   Price and Gaddis, Chalcedon, 3:75 – 76; cf. the text of the 3rd canon of Constantinople I at 3:86 – 87; commentary at 3:67 – 72.

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Cyril had been dead for some years. His successor, Dioscorus (sed. 444 – 451), attended the gathering at Chalcedon in disgrace; three years before, at a second council at Ephesus (449), he had seized the opportunity presented by fears of a Nestorian resurgence and succeeded in deposing his Constantinopolitan counterpart (Flavian, sed. 446 – 449). His victory, however, had been fleeting. In 450, Theodosius II died unexpectedly, and his older sister took up the reins of government alongside Marcian.10 The first priority of the new regime was to prevent further rifts from developing in the episcopacy and to secure the legacy of Cyril’s triumph at Ephesus. At the new council at Chalcedon, Dioscorus’ emphatically anti-Nestorian stance was no longer in favor, and he too was deposed and exiled. Cyril’s significance, however, was assured; from Chalcedon forward, contention between Alexandria and Constantinople would be over differing interpretations of the great patriarch’s theological legacy. The imperial household’s dramatic reversal of policy in the wake of Theodosius II’s death should probably be ascribed to Pulcheria’s desire to reestablish the status quo that had persisted during the dominance of her old ally Cyril.11 Marcian, prior to his elevation to the purple, had spent his entire career in the military.12 Thus, although it may be imagined that military policy under Marcian – more hawkish than that of his predecessor – was of the former soldier’s own making, it is likely that his policy towards ecclesiastical controversy was directed by Pulcheria, by then an old hand in such matters. About the substance of Cyril and Pulcheria’s relationship, however, we know very little. Pulcheria was the recipient of one of Cyril’s Christological treatises, composed in 430 before the first Council of Ephesus.13 It seems that they corresponded on other occasions, both via letters and through Cyril’s representatives in the capital, but such correspondence has left only the slightest of traces.14 What impressions remain of the behind-the-scenes dealing that facilitated Cyril’s victory over Nestorius suggest that Pulcheria worked in support of Cyril at court. Still, it remains unclear how instrumental Pulcheria’s role was in Cyril’s eventual triumph, much less to what 10   Henry Chadwick, “The Exile and Death of Flavian of Constantinople: A Prologue to the Council of Chalcedon,” JTS, n. s. 6 (1955): 17 – 34; Richard W. Burgess, “The Accession of Marcian in the Light of Chalcedonian Apologetic and Monophysite Polemic,” ByzZ 86 / 7 (1994): 47 – 68. 11  Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 209 – 12. 12   PLRE 2:714 – 5, “Marcianus 8.” 13  The Oratio ad Pulcheriam et Eudociam augustas de fide (CPG 5220); the text was probably originally addressed only to Pulcheria and not to Theodosius II’s recently baptized wife Eudocia (Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 159 – 61). 14   Note, for instance, the brief reference to communication with Pulcheria in the letter of Epiphanius archidiaconus (CPG 5396, 5450; ACO 1.4:222 – 5). On this letter and its place in Cyril’s correspondence, see Walter F. Beers, “‘Furnish Whatever Is Lacking to Their Avarice’: The Payment Programme of Cyril of Alexandria,” in From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities, eds. Nicholas S. M. Matheou, Theofili Kampianaki, and Lorenzo M. Bondioli (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 67 – 83.

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degree her support of Cyril’s cause was the result of a close relationship with the bishop rather than merely the coincidence of shared enemies.15 Nevertheless, in the controversy over Nestorius and the first Council of Ephesus, Pulcheria had thrown in her lot with Cyril; thereafter their political fates, and the legacy of Cyrilline Christology and its adherents, were inextricably linked. In the Chalcedonian tradition Pulcheria is venerated as a saint, but among anti-Chalcedonians she is at best an ex-nun, and at worst a whore.16

Socrates and His Sympathies Cyril, however, was making enemies long before the 420s. Just as Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History is the only contemporary account to treat Hypatia’s murder in any detail, it is also our only source for Cyril’s election and the beginning of his episcopacy. Before we turn to those beginnings, we ought to briefly examine Socrates’ relationship with the Novatians – a relationship which seems to have motivated the History’s hostility towards Cyril. The Novatians were a schismatic community that traced its origins back to the rigorist movements generated by the Decian persecution – the same context in which the more well-known Donatist church had its origins. Unlike the African Donatists, the Novatians maintained a conciliatory-enough profile that Novatian communities persisted in major imperial cities into the first half of fifth century, and in some places, even into the early seventh.17 Most scholars have been content to assume that Socrates’ clear sympathy for the empire’s Novatians indicates that he himself was a member of the Constantinopolitan Novatian church.18 This is certainly the lectio facilior, although at least one scholar of Socrates and his work still prefers to identify him as a fellow traveler only.19 15   For a more cautious estimate of Pulcheria’s influence, see Jill Harries, “Men without Women: Theodosius’ Consistory and the Business of Government,” in Theodosius II: Rethinking the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity, ed. Christopher Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67 – 89. 16  Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 226 – 7; Burgess, “The Accession of Marcian,” 50 – 54. 17   On the Novatians, see Vera-Elisabeth Hirschmann, Die Kirche der Reinen: Kirchen- und sozialhistorische Studie zu den Novatianern im 3. bis 5. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015); also Timothy E. Gregory, “Novatianism: A Rigorist Sect in the Christian Roman Empire,” Byzantine Studies / Études byzantines 2.1 (1975): 1 – 18. 18   The literature on Socrates and the early 5th c. church historians is considerable; the two most recent monographs are Peter Van Nuffelen, Un héritage de paix et de piété: Étude sur les histoires ecclésiastiques de Socrate et de Sozomène (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); and Martin Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates: Untersuchungen zu Geschichtsdarstellung, Methode und Person (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997). A cogent survey of the larger literature can be found in Hartmut Leppin, “The Church Historians (I): Socrates, Sozomenus, and Theodoretus,” in Greek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to Sixth Century A. D., ed. Gabriele Marasco (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 219 – 54. 19   Leppin, “The Church Historians,” 221 – 2.

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Perhaps these groupist distinctions would have been irrelevant to Socrates himself, for whom the clearest attraction of the Novatians was their reputation for outstanding piety.20 In the Ecclesiastical History, virtuous Novatian bishops are contrasted with mainstream bishops of poor character – and particularly with arrogant and power-hungry personalities such as Cyril. In the seventh book of the History, four bishops come under fire for their anti-Novatian policies: Cyril (7.7), Innocent I of Rome (7.9), Celestine I of Rome (7.11), and Nestorius of Constantinople (7.29). In three cases out of the four, these bishops are described as confiscating Novatian churches and property. Nestorius, who, Socrates tells us, caused upheaval not only in Constantinople but in his suffragan dioceses in Asia Minor with his vigorous pursuit of heretics, was only prevented from bringing the same policies to bear on the Novatians of the capital by imperial intervention.21 As Socrates tells it, these bishops’ actions against the Novatians in their respective cities were arrogations of secular power inimical to the proper and virtuous exercise of the episcopal office. In the case of both Cyril and Celestine this point is made explicitly. As soon as Cyril was elected, “the episcopacy of Alexandria began to dominate secular affairs beyond what was appropriate to its priestly station.”22 It was Cyril’s assault on the Novatians that marked this change for the worse: “Immediately, therefore, Cyril closed the churches of the Novatians in Alexandria, confiscated all their sacred heirlooms, and deprived their bishop Theopompus of everything he had.”23 Socrates returns to this theme with Celestine I, who, he says: . . . confiscated the churches of the Novatians in Rome and forced their bishop, Rusticula, to hold services secretly in private homes. Until this occurrence, the Novatians had positively flourished in Rome, possessing full churches and gathering together a large congregation. But envy of these things affected them also, since the bishop of the Romans, just like that of the Alexandrians, had long since advanced to a dominion beyond his priesthood.24 20

  On this analytical approach, see Frankfurter’s contribution to the present volume.  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.29.8 – 9, 11 – 12; cf. also 7.31, on Nestorius and the Macedonians. 22  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.7.4: Καὶ γὰρ ἐξ ἐκείνου ἡ ἐπισκοπὴ Ἀλεξανδρείας πέρα τῆς ἱερατικῆς τάξεως καταδυναστεύειν τῶν πραγμάτων ἔλαβε τὴν ἀρχήν. All translations from Socrates are my own, made in consultation with Günther C. Hansen, ed., Histoire ecclésiastique: Socrate de Constantinople, trans. Pierre Périchon and Pierre Maraval, 7 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 2004 – 2007) and with Andrew C. Zenos, trans., Socrates: Church History from A. D. 305 – 439 (NPNF2 2:1 – 178). The full critical text can be found in Günther C. Hansen and Manja Širinjan, eds., Kirchengeschichte: Sokrates (Berlin: Akademie, 1995). 23  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.7.5: Εὐθέως οὖν Κύριλλος τὰς ἐν Ἀλεξανδρείᾳ Ναυατιανῶν ἐκκλησίας ἀποκλείσας πάντα μὲν αὐτῶν τὰ ἱερὰ κειμήλια ἔλαβεν, τὸν δὲ ἐπίσκοπον αὐτῶν Θεόπομπον πάντων ὧν εἶχεν ἀφείλετο. 24  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.11.2 – 4: Καὶ οὗτος Κελεστῖνος τὰς ἐν Ῥώμῃ Ναυατιανῶν ἐκκλησίας ἀφείλετο καὶ τὸν ἐπίσκοπον αὐτῶν Ῥουστικούλαν κατ’ οἰκίας ἐν παραβύστῳ συνάγειν ἠνάγκασεν. Ἄχρι γὰρ τούτου Ναυατιανοὶ μεγάλως ἐπὶ τῆς Ῥώμης ἤνθησαν, ἐκκλησίας πλείστας ἔχοντες καὶ λαὸν πολὺν συναθροίζοντες. Ἀλλ’ ὁ φθόνος καὶ τούτων ἥψατο, τῆς Ῥωμαίων ἐπισκοπῆς ὁμοίως τῇ Ἀλεξανδρέων πέρα τῆς ἱερωσύνης ἐπὶ δυναστείαν ἤδη πάλαι προελθούσης. 21

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This judgment, applied to both Cyril and Celestine, fits into a larger theme in Socrates’ work; namely, the dangers posed to church and society by politically fractious bishops. Socrates’ position on this topic may well have had its roots in his memory of the tumultuous episcopacy of Theophilus, whose campaign against John Chrysostom had threatened the peace of the church in ways distressingly reminiscent of the era of the Trinitarian controversies.25 According to Socrates’ theory of history, disorder in the empire and church were always linked – one inevitably followed the other.26 Thus bishops who endangered the church through their hubris were complicit in the destabilization of the empire itself.27 It is through this lens that Socrates presents his account of Cyril’s rise to power and the death of Hypatia.

Socrates on Cyril and Hypatia According to Socrates, Cyril’s episcopacy began with a controversial election: Not long afterwards, Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, succumbing to kidney stones, passed away – in the ninth consulship of Honorius and the fifth of Theodosius, on the fifteenth of October [412]. Thereupon, the episcopacy was contested, and some sought to enthrone Timothy, an archdeacon; and others Cyril, who was Theophilus’ nephew. And since because of this, faction was stirred up among the populace, the commander of the regiment, Abundantius, intervened in favor of Cyril.28

Socrates takes care to alert his readers to the fact that Cyril’s episcopate, from its very beginning, was attended by popular unrest. We will see him, further on, paint a picture of Alexandria as a city almost constantly disturbed by such upheavals (7.13.2). On this occasion, however, the situation was serious enough to warrant military intervention. Intervention of this kind is conspic25  Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria, 23 – 33. On Socrates’ sympathies see also Van Nuffelen, Un héritage de paix et de piété, 19 – 20, 42 – 46 (although for a valuable corrective to Van Nuffelen’s “cercle de Troïlos,” see Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 82 – 84). 26   On this theme, see Leppin, “The Church Historians,” 236 – 7; note also the earlier literature cited in n. 67. 27   It is worth noting that, in Socrates’ account of the Council of Ephesus, Cyril escapes any explicit criticism (7.34); Socrates’ approach to the Theotokos controversy, however, strikes me as scrupulously measured – even Nestorius receives a surprisingly charitable assessment (7.32). Here the historian seems most concerned with doing his part to maintain the still-fragile resolution of the conflict. 28  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.7.1 – 3: Μετ’ οὐ πολὺ δὲ καὶ Θεόφιλος ὁ τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας ἐπίσκοπος λιθουρικῷ πάθει περιπεσὼν ἐτελεύτησεν ἐν ὑπατείᾳ Ὁνωρίου τὸ ἔνατον καὶ Θεοδοσίου τὸ πέμπτον τῇ πεντεκαιδεκάτῃ τοῦ Ὀκτωβρίου μηνός. Ἐπιμάχου δὲ γενομένης καὶ ἐνταῦθα τῆς ἐπισκοπῆς οἱ μὲν ἐζήτουν ἐνθρονισθῆναι Τιμόθεον ἀρχιδιάκονον, οἱ δὲ Κύριλλον, ὃς ἦν ἀδελφιδοῦς Θεοφίλου. Στάσεως δὲ διὰ τοῦτο μεταξὺ τοῦ λαοῦ κινηθείσης, συνελαμβάνετο τῷ μέρει Κυρίλλου ὁ τοῦ στρατιωτικοῦ τάγματος ἡγεμὼν Ἀβουνδάντιος. Abundantius was presumably the comes Aegypti (PLRE 2:3, “Abundantius 1”).

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uously absent during subsequent events in Alexandria, so we should not take Socrates’ statement here lightly. Rather, as Susan Wessel has argued, the inclusion of Abundantius in the story of the disputed election is intended to impugn Cyril’s legitimacy by suggestion that his election was achieved only by force.29 Whether or not this was really the case, we may imagine – here following Christopher Haas – that the dispute between Cyril and Timothy represented a choice between the successor groomed by Theophilus and an older, more experienced cleric. Perhaps, in view of the upheavals that had characterized the dead patriarch’s tenure, archdeacon Timothy represented the more conservative option.30 Cyril’s first order of business after his election, Socrates tells us, was to reverse his uncle’s policy of tolerance towards the Novatians (7.7.4 – 5). Cyril’s primary motivation for taking action against Bishop Theopompus and his congregation was probably a distrust of schismatics and the disunity they represented. There were, however, additional practical considerations. The legacy of Theophilus’ contest with the Tall Brothers, and the internal conflict it had generated between “Anthropomorphite” and “Origenist” parties in Egypt’s monastic communities, meant that the divisive old patriarch’s nephew could by no means count on the unified support of Egypt’s monks.31 A decisive move against a schismatic minority church would have served to establish Cyril as an uncompromising defender of orthodoxy  – both a generally desirable trait in monastic circles and a signal that dissent would not be tolerated. At the same time, Cyril’s move against Theompompus eliminated another episcopal rival whose rigorist position lent him an air of piety by default.32 After Socrates describes Cyril’s election and his subsequent anti-Novatian activities, the Ecclesiastical History turns to other topics. When Socrates returns to Alexandria at 7.13, it is to describe the unrest among the city’s Jews that would lead to Hypatia’s death. He begins the story with the topos of the city’s predilection for violence, noting grimly that “Alexandrians, more than any other people, take pleasure in faction. If ever they find a pretext, they finish up with more unendurable evils; for their impulse [for violence] does not fade without blood.”33 This 29  Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria, 15 – 16, 21 – 22 (contra Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 297 – 8). It should be noted here that the Greek and Syriac MSS read that Abundantius supported Timothy rather than Cyril, but this makes the passage illogical; Hansen’s emendation is derived from the Armenian trans. (see Susan Wessel, “Socrates’ Narrative of Cyril of Alexandria’s Episcopal Election,” JTS n. s. 52 (2001), 98 – 104; cf. however Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia,” 333 n. 3, 337 n. 22. 30  Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 216 – 20. 31  Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria, 23 – 30. For more on this (first) Origenist controversy, see Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 32  Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria, 30 – 33. 33  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.13.2: Ὁ Ἀλεξανδρέων δῆμος πλέον τῶν ἄλλων δήμων χαίρει ταῖς στάσεσιν. Εἰ δέ ποτε καὶ προφάσεως ἐπιλάβηται, εἰς ἀφόρητα καταστρέφει κακά· δίχα γὰρ αἵματος οὐ παύεται τῆς ὁρμῆς.

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programmatic statement provides an explanation for the frivolous violence that begins the story. “It happened then that the crowd rioted here amongst themselves, not for any cogent reason, but because of an evil that is common to all cities – that is, partisanship over dancers.”34 Not for the first time, either. He explains that performances on the Sabbath (since it was the Jewish day of rest) drew larger Jewish crowds and were therefore more likely to end in violence. Here confessional distrust combined with the theater’s factional rivalries to produce a heady mixture.35 Accusing the Jews of preferring pantomime over Torah, as Socrates does, seems to have been a commonplace of late-antique anti-Judaism.36 Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that performances frequented – and publicly known to be frequented – by the city’s Jews would have attracted fan hooliganism on both sides of the religious divide. On this occasion, however, routine hooliganism was the spark that fired a contest between the city’s two most powerful individuals, its bishop and the augustal prefect – the administrator of the civil diocese of Egypt and Alexandria’s senior resident imperial official. Whatever its cause, the unrest accompanying the Saturday pantomimes prompted a response from the prefect, Orestes. It was at the public reading, held in the theater, of a prefectural edict – intended, presumably, to curb unrest at such performances – that the next incident occurred. At first glance, Orestes’ decision to arrest and torture Hierax, “a grammar-school teacher and an ardent disciple of Bishop Cyril, and very zealous in rousing up [the crowd] with applause during his sermons,” seems inexplicable.37 It is hard to imagine that the accusatory acclamations shouted by the Jews were sufficient to prompt the prefect into such a public display of judicial violence. The explanation lies, I think, within Socrates’ description; he means that in addition to being a teacher, Hierax was a claquer – that is, a member of a squad of professional leaders of applause and acclamations. Teams of claquers such as Hierax were active in theatres across the empire, where their services were employed by dancers in an attempt to manipulate the 34  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.13.3: Ἔτυχε δὲ τότε στασιάζειν αὐτόθι τὸ πλῆθος πρὸς ἑαυτὸ οὐ δι’ ἀναγκαίαν τινὰ πρόφασιν, ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸ ἐπιπολάζον ἁπάσαις ταῖς πόλεσι κακόν, φημὶ δὴ τὸ σπουδάζειν περὶ τοὺς ὀρχηστάς. This was a common cause of civil unrest in the Roman world; see Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 223 – 8. 35  Socr. Hist. eccl.  7.13.4 – 5: Ἐπειδὴ γὰρ ἐν ἡμέρᾳ σαββάτου ὀρχούμενος πλείονας ὄχλους συνήθροιζεν τῷ Ἰουδαίους ἀργοῦντας ἐν αὐτῇ μὴ τῇ ἀκροάσει τοῦ νόμου, ἀλλὰ τοῖς θεάτροις σχολάζειν, ἐπίμαχος τοῖς τοῦ δήμου μέρεσιν ἡ ἡμέρα κατέστη. Καὶ τούτου τρόπον τινὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ ὑπάρχου τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας ἐν τάξει καταστάντος οὐδὲν ἧττον ἔμειναν οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι τοῖς τοῦ ἑτέρου μέρους ἀντιπαθοῦντες, καὶ ἀεὶ μὲν πολέμιοι πανταχοῦ τοῖς Χριστιανοῖς καθεστῶτες, ἔτι δὲ πλέον διὰ τοὺς ὀρχηστὰς ἐκπεπολέμωντο καθ’ αὐτῶν. 36   Van Nuffelen, Un héritage de paix et de piété, 394 – 5. 37  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.13.7: Ἦν δὲ ἐν αὐτοῖς τις ἀνὴρ ὀνόματι Ἱέραξ, ὃς γραμμάτων μὲν τῶν παιδικῶν διδάσκαλος ἦν, διάπυρος δὲ ἀκροατὴς τοῦ ἐπισκόπου Κυρίλλου καθεστὼς καὶ περὶ τὸ κρότους ἐν ταῖς διδασκαλίαις αὐτοῦ ἐγείρειν ἦν σπουδαιότατος.

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flow of approval and disapproval in their audiences. They would blend into the crowd, and, attuned both to the emotions of the audience and the signals of their leader, attempt to generate or stifle applause and chanting. If done well, of course, such manipulation would go entirely unnoticed.38 The work of claquers, however, was not limited to theatrical performances. By the fourth century, if not before, they had diversified their services to include manipulation of the acclamations that accompanied each public appearance of prominent officials such as Orestes. Since transcripts of these acclamations (seen as valuable expressions of public opinion) were required by law to be forwarded to the imperial court, claquers occupied a position of considerable de facto power. The ability to manipulate the content of acclamations meant the ability to influence officials, since they could not afford to risk critical acclamations making their way to the ears of the emperor himself.39 With Hierax’s real role in the theater clear, Orestes’ actions become explicable. Once the Jews in the crowd had alerted him to the presence of a claquer in the audience whom they associated with Cyril, Orestes determined to make an example of him. “Orestes,” as Socrates puts it, “had earlier begun to hate the tyranny of the bishops of Alexandria, because they usurped much of the power of those appointed to service by the emperor.”40 The arrest of Hierax served as a warning to Cyril and, perhaps, to claquers Orestes believed were behind the unrest at the pantomimes – interference and rabble-rousing would not be tolerated. Cyril, Socrates tells us, responded to the incident by threatening the Jewish leaders with a reprisal, rather than by going to Orestes directly (7.13.10). Perhaps he blamed them for outing Hierax to Orestes; perhaps he felt that they, and no one else, were responsible for the pantomime riots that had started the trouble. In any case, it is difficult to see how these events led to the Jewish massacre of Christians that Socrates then describes. Raising a false alarm about a fire at the Church of Alexander, a party of Jews lured unwitting Christians out into the city’s nighttime streets and set upon them – distinguishing Christian from Jew, Socrates says, by means of rings worn especially for the occasion.41 If we are to 38

 Cameron, Circus Factions, 234 – 7.  Cameron, Circus Factions, 237 – 44; John H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 208 – 19; Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 213 – 18; Charlotte Roueché, Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1993), 129 – 40. 40  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.13.9: Ὀρέστης δὲ καὶ πρότερον μὲν ἐμίσει τὴν δυναστείαν τῶν ἐπισκόπων , ὅτι παρῃροῦντο πολὺ τῆς ἐξουσίας τῶν ἐκ βασιλέως ἄρχειν τεταγμένων. 41  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.13.12 – 14: Σύνθημα δόντες ἑαυτοῖς δακτυλίου φόρεμα ἐκ φοίνικος γεγονὸς φλοιοῦ θαλλοῦ νυκτομαχίαν κατὰ τῶν Χριστιανῶν ἐπενόησαν. Καὶ ἐν μιᾷ τῶν νυκτῶν κηρύσσειν κατὰ τὰ κλίματα τῆς πόλεώς τινας παρεσκεύασαν βοῶντας, ὡς ἡ ἐπώνυμος Ἀλεξάνδρου ἐκκλησία πᾶσα πυρὶ καίοιτο. Τοῦτο ἀκούσαντες Χριστιανοὶ ἄλλος ἀλλαχόθεν συνέτρεχον ὡς τὴν ἐκκλησίαν περισώσοντες. Οἱ δὲ Ἰουδαῖοι εὐθὺς ἐπετίθεντο καὶ ἀπέσφαττον [small la39

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read more into this story than an ignorance on Socrates’ part of its causes, we might guess that its histrionic character hints at rumor-spun justifications for a pogrom rather than sober reporting – but we are reduced here to speculation. At the same time, we do not know whether Cyril was really able to orchestrate a wholesale expulsion of Jews from the city, as Socrates claims (7.13.15 – 16). Socrates’ reference to the ex-Jewish doctor Adamantius (7.13.17), as well as other sources, suggest that a spate of relatively prominent conversions followed.42 This would seem to indicate that threats of expulsion and confiscation, at the very least, were the order of the day.43 Whatever the extent of Cyril’s anti-Jewish efforts, however, they were enough to prompt parallel petitions from Orestes and Cyril to Constantinople, and to effect an open rift between patriarch and prefect. Despite efforts on Cyril’s part to engineer a reconciliation – or perhaps more accurately, Orestes’ public submission – this rift was to lead both men into still more dangerous waters.44 Despite the limitations of Socrates’ account, it is clear that chance events, and Orestes’ arrest and torture of Hierax, had led to a test of strength between Cyril and the prefect. It is worth noting that our historian, although he paints a critical picture of Cyril, does not identify the bishop as the instigator of anything except the dispossession of the Alexandrian Jews – and that only in response to the massacre at the Church of Alexander. We may wonder whether Orestes ascribed more agency to Cyril, but at least in the History Cyril merely takes the opportunity offered by circumstance to encroach on the prefect’s control of the city. In any case, Orestes’ demonstration of sympathy for the Jews and rejection of Cyril’s overtures were enough to cast doubt on the prefect’s Christian credentials, and to stir up another riot – this time, on the part of a group of Cyril’s monastic supporters from Nitria (7.14.1 – 8). Whether or not Cyril was responsible for the activities of these monks, the patriarch now found himself out of his depth. The incident devolved into chaos, and Cyril’s attempt to turn the torture and death of the monk Ammonius into a martyrdom was insufficient to counteract the severity with which the public viewed an attempt on the prefect’s life (7.14.8 – 11). Doubtless the memory of the massacre at Thessalonica in 390, trig-

cuna] ἀλλήλων μὲν ἀπεχόμενοι δεικνύντες τοὺς δακτυλίους, τοὺς δὲ προσπίπτοντας τῶν Χριστιανῶν ἀναιροῦντες. 42  Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 422 – 3, n.  87. 43   Haas notes (Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 126 – 7) that the community had recovered sufficiently by the middle of the century to petition to be allowed to rebuild a synagogue. 44  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.13.20 – 21: Ἐπεὶ δὲ τοὺς περὶ φιλίας λόγους Ὀρέστης οὐ προσεδέχετο, τὴν βίβλον τῶν εὐαγγελίων ὁ Κύριλλος προΐσχετο, διὰ ταύτης γοῦν καταιδέσειν τὸν Ὀρέστην ἡγούμενος. Ὡς δὲ οὐδὲ τούτῳ τῷ τρόπῳ ὁ Ὀρέστης ἐμαλάσσετο. It is not clear to me whether Socrates means this metaphorically or literally; if literally, we can assume that Cyril’s offering of a gospel / lectionary to Orestes took place in some public, liturgical context stage-managed by Cyril at which Orestes would have been a guest only.

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gered by the accidental death of Butheric, magister militum per Illyricum, was not far from the minds of some of the city’s older inhabitants.45 Socrates’ account here shifts to introduce Hypatia. She is presented not as the deliberate target of Cyril – yet again, a mob acts on its own volition, only inspired by the bishop’s feud with Orestes – but as another casualty of Cyril’s overweening “tyranny” and the disorder it engenders in the city. For this reason, Socrates’ story culminates in a pathetic portrait of the innocent victim and her tragic death. Her achievements in philosophy and paideia and her fame as a teacher were matched, he tells us, by her virtue and self-possession; her parrhesia with Alexandria’s male elite is justified by the fact that “all, on account of her exceeding prudence and temperance, stood in awe of and were amazed by her.”46 The mob’s hostility, in fact, was stirred up by Hypatia’s close association with Orestes: “The fact that she met very often with Orestes roused a slander about her among the people of the church, namely that it was she who would not allow Orestes to be on friendly terms with the bishop.”47 The meaning is clear. Orestes’ support for the Alexandrian Jews had been enough to impugn his religious credentials in some Christian eyes, and his association with Hypatia now earned him the suspicion of paganism. This was the meaning of the insults shouted by the Nitrian mob, and of his emphatic protest that he had been baptized by none other than Atticus of Constantinople (7.14.3 – 5). Here John of Nikiu, although far removed from the events which he describes and almost entirely dependent upon Socrates, offers a take on Orestes and Hypatia’s relationship that may well mirror that of the angry Christian mob: And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom . . . And he not only did this, but he drew many believers to her, and he himself received the unbelievers at his house.48

Thus, as innocent and uninvolved as she may have been, Hypatia became the scapegoat for the ongoing conflict between bishop and prefect and all the violence it had engendered. The mob dragged her to the Caesareum, Cyril’s own cathedral church, where they stripped her naked and stoned her to death with 45

  PLRE 1:166, “Buthericus.” On this event, and the dramatic consequences of other assaults on imperial officials, see Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 315 – 23, esp. 317 and nn. 86 and 87. 46  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.15.3: πάντες γὰρ δι’ ὑπερβάλλουσαν σωφροσύνην πλέον αὐτὴν ᾐδοῦντο καὶ κατεπλήττοντο. 47  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.15.4: Ἐπεὶ γὰρ συνετύγχανεν συχνότερον τῷ Ὀρέστῃ, διαβολὴν τοῦτ’ ἐκίνησε κατ’ αὐτῆς παρὰ τῷ τῆς ἐκκλησίας λαῷ, ὡς ἄρα εἴη αὕτη ἡ μὴ συγχωροῦσα τὸν Ὀρέστην εἰς φιλίαν τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ συμβῆναι. 48   John of Nikiu Chronicle 84.88; Robert H. Charles, trans., The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu (London: Williams and Norgate, 1916), 100 – 101; on John’s account, see Watts, “Murder of Hypatia,” 338 – 41.

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tiles. Her mutilated body was dragged off elsewhere to be burned. It was, as Christopher Haas has noted, another enactment of a “carefully structured ritual of civic purgation” that appears elsewhere in our sources – execution, a grisly parade of the corpse through the city, and cremation.49 It is no wonder that this crime produced shocked and horrified reactions as far away as Constantinople. The Caesareum, built in the first century BCE by Cleopatra VII, then for centuries the center of Alexandria’s imperial cult before its conversion into the city’s patriarchal church, was a grand and ancient structure just north of the agora that no doubt dominated the center of the city. It was flanked by two seventy-foot obelisks, “Cleopatra’s Needles,” which now stand, one each, in London and New York.50 It is difficult to imagine a more public stage for such a grisly crime, and it would have meant the desecration of the city’s chief place of Christian worship. We are left wondering whether it would even have required rededication after the incident.51

The Parabalani Constitutions – an Imperial Intervention? Socrates tells us that after the arrest of Hierax and again after Ammonius’ death, both the augustal prefect and the bishop sent messages to the imperial court giving their own version of events. The very sending of these messages suggests that both men were aware that goings-on in Alexandria were liable to attract imperial attention and censure, and the messages were certainly intended to excuse and justify their involvement. We can safely assume that similar reports were dispatched after Hypatia’s death. Rumors about their contents must have made the rounds of the intellectual circles in which Socrates moved.52 While riots may have been common, and the Jews of Alexandria may have had few powerful advocates, the death of Theon’s daughter made a marked impression on the eastern empire’s elite. Under these circumstances, we might expect some kind of public response from the imperial consistory. But was any such response forthcoming?

49

 Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 85 – 90, 313 – 14.   Judith McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 B. C. to A. D. 700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 177. 51   The Latin church preserves a canon law tradition requiring the rededication of a church after the violent spilling of blood inside the building: John T. Gulczynski, The Desecration and Violation of Churches: An Historical Synopsis and Commentary (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1942), 17 – 18, 31; cf. also Socrates’ own story of a murder-suicide in the Hagia Sophia, which he describes as a μολυσμὸν τοῦ ναοῦ (7.33). 52   On the Alexandrian Jew Adamantius as another possible source for Socrates, see Van Nuffelen, Un héritage de paix et de piété, 394; for Socrates’ intellectual circle in Constantinople, see note 25 above. 50

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The short answer is that we do not know. No surviving imperial legislation mentions the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria or Hypatia’s death; nor does any other source offer information on the topic. Nevertheless, many scholars have endeavored to connect the events in Alexandria in the spring of 415 to three constitutions preserved in the Theodosian Code, 12.12.15, 16.2.42, and 16.2.43.53 Despite the fact that these texts may imply some censure or reduction in the powers of the Alexandrian patriarch, and concern the apparently “terrifying” activities of a (para‑)clerical confraternity, the parabalani, I believe that the temptation to connect them with death of Hypatia should be resisted; there is no evidence to support it. Still, this connection is made often enough that it is worth a brief digression to examine the first text, 16.2.42. On October 5, 416, the consistory directed Monaxius – recently appointed for the second time as praetorian prefect of the east – as follows:54 Whereas, among other useless claims of the Alexandrian delegation, this request also was written into their decrees, that the Most Reverend bishop . . . [a lacuna follows] certain persons to depart from the City of Alexandria, and this claim was inserted in the petition of the delegation because of the terror of those who are called parabalani, it is the pleasure of Our Clemency that clerics shall have nothing to do with public affairs and with matters pertaining to the municipal council.55

Following this preamble, the constitution imposes limits on the “terrifying” parabalani. Despite some confusion as to the sense of this unusual title, it now seems – as ably argued by Glen Bowersock – that it is derived from παραβάλλω, “to stake, expose to risk,” and means “risk-takers.” Bowersock suggests that the parabalani were a confraternity of social workers, devoted to the care of Alexandria’s diseased and destitute. 56 The constitution, however, seems more concerned with controlling the membership of parabalani than their activities. They are here limited in number to five hundred and forbidden from attending public spectacles or entering the municipal courts in a body. Oversight of their 53   Most recently, Glen W. Bowersock, “Parabalani: A Terrorist Charity in Late Antiquity,” Anabases 12 (2010), 45 – 46; Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria, 55 – 57; Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 99 – 100; Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 235 – 8 (refreshingly cautious in connecting the legislation to Hypatia), 314 – 16 (less cautious here!), 447, n. 51 (for early literature on the parabalani). 54   Here I follow Otto Seeck, Regesten der Kaiser und Päpste für die Jahre 311 bis 476 n. Chr. (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1919), 388 in emending the date in Mommsen’s edition (Sept. 29) to match that of the related constitution 12.12.15 (discussed below). 55   Cod. Theod. 16.2.42: “Quia inter cetera Alexandrinae legationis inutilia hoc etiam decretis scribtum est, ut reverentissimus episcopus de Alexandrina civitate aliquas . . . non exire, quod quidem terrore eorum, qui parabalani nuncupantur, legationi insertum est, placet nostrae clementiae, ut nihil commune clerici cum publicis actibus vel ad curiam pertinentibus habeant”; Theodor Mommsen and Paul M. Meyer, eds., Theodosiani libri xvi (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 1.2:850. Translation after Clyde Pharr, Theresa S. Davidson, and Mary B. Pharr, The Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 448. I have omitted their conjecture as to the sense of the lacuna. 56   Bowersock, “Parabalani,” 45 – 54.

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membership belongs to the augustal prefect, subject to the praetorian prefect’s approval; the prefects are instructed that “the wealthy and those who would purchase this office shall not be appointed, but the poor from the guilds.”57 Despite the clear reference to Cyril in the preamble, it is a reach to characterize the parabalani as a religiously-motivated street gang such as those at which Socrates’ account may hint. Although it is not clear from the text whether the parabalani possessed clerical status in the eyes of the law (as, perhaps, takers of minor orders), this interpretation makes the most sense of the constitution. In this light, the parabalani appear – as Peter Brown puts it – not as terrorists, but as tax-dodgers. The banning from membership of “the wealthy and those who would purchase this office,” and the fact that membership was made subject to approval by the augustal and praetorian prefects, strongly suggests that appointment as a member of the confraternity conferred clerical or para-clerical status and brought with it exemptions from onerous municipal duties such as those regularly imposed upon the city’s decuriones. Hence also the ban on attendance at the courts or public spectacles en masse, which seems intended to deny the parabalani collegial status.58 We should read this constitution in conjunction with 12.12.15, given to Monaxius on the same day, which seems to censure the Alexandrian curia for dispatching delegations to the capital without the required approval from the augustal and praetorian prefects.59 This must be the cause of the irritation directed against the “Alexandrian delegation” of 16.2.42, and reinforces the idea that it is the curia, and not Cyril, which has earned a rebuke from the imperial consistory. This reading is in turn reinforced by 16.2.43, dated February 3, 418 (again to Monaxius); this rescript increases the number of the parabalani to six hundred, and transfers oversight of their membership from the augustal prefect to the bishop. If there was any censorship of Cyril intended in 16.2.42 – perhaps lost in the lacuna in the opening lines – he seems to have been restored by 418 to imperial favor.

Pulcheria and Consistory Politics With the question of the parabalani put to rest, we can turn now to the last piece of the puzzle – the contemporary political situation in Constantinople. After the death of Arcadius in May 408, the early years of Theodosius II’s minority 57   Cod. Theod. 16.2.42: “ita ut non divites et qui hunc locum redimant, sed pauperes a corporatis.” 58   Peter Brown, private communication, April 2016; cf. Arnold H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284 – 602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), 2:911, where he also identifies the parabalani as minor clerics. 59   This connection is noted by Haas (Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 315), but I find his effort to connect 12.12.15 with Cyril and Hypatia to be unpersuasive. On the date see n. 54 above.

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were characterized by the dominance of two old political hands. One was the court eunuch Antiochus, cubicularius in the imperial bedchamber and, thanks to Arcadius’ high opinion of him, the young emperor’s official tutor.60 The other was Anthemius, praetorian prefect of the east for almost a decade between 405 and 414.61 Between them these two men seem to have kept the young children of Arcadius (Theodosius, Pulcheria, and her two younger sisters) on a tight rein, maintaining the dominance of the civil administration over the weak imperial office that had endured since the death of Theodosius I.62 Anthemius’ control of the consistory in the years of his prefecture seems to have been almost absolute; as Socrates himself bluntly puts it, “the prefect Anthemius controlled the entire administration.”63 By 415, however, the balance of power at court had shifted dramatically. On July 4 of the previous year, Pulcheria, then fifteen years old, was proclaimed augusta.64 As Cameron has noted, this was an exceptional move; no emperor’s sister had taken the title since Ulpia Marciana in 102.65 In assuming this title, Pulcheria was following in the footsteps of her mother Eudoxia and grandmother Flacilla, but she was to go further. At some point around the date of her proclamation she also led her sisters in a vow of perpetual celibacy, commemorated – as publicly as possible – with an inscribed altar placed in the Hagia Sophia.66 Although the religious motivations for the vow recorded so fulsomely by Sozomen must have played a role in Pulcheria’s choice, the practical considerations were paramount. By making herself and her sisters permanently ineligible for marriage, Pulcheria decisively strengthened her growing dominance in the palace and permanently forestalled the possibility that the daughters of Arcadius could be used to further the imperial ambitions of any member of the Constantinopolitan elite – such as the powerful Anthemius.67 Although no dismissals are recorded, both Anthemius and Antiochus seem to have fallen from power at about this time.68 60   PLRE 2:101 – 2, “Antiochus 5”; the only source for his role as Theodosius’ tutor is Malalas, but the fanciful story that Antiochus was chosen for this position by Yazdgerd I of Persia, preserved in Theophanes and later sources, clearly reflects his very real influence over Theodosius. 61   PLRE 2:93 – 95, “Anthemius 1.” 62   For this reading of the politics of Arcadius’ reign, see Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 301 – 36, esp. 333 – 6. 63  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.1.1: Ἀνθεμίου τοῦ ὑπάρχου τὴν διοίκησιν ποιουμένου τῶν ὅλων. 64   PLRE 2:929 – 30, “Aelia Pulcheria”; Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 97. 65   Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 399 – 400, n. 4; for Trajan’s sister Ulpia Marciana, see Hildegard Temporini, “Marciana,” s. v. in Brill’s New Pauly. 66   For these events see the panegyrical account of Pulcheria in Sozom. Hist. eccl. 9.1 – 3. 67  Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 90 – 97; although cf. the more cautious readings of Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 399 – 403. 68   Although it is possible that he died at this time, as Holum notes (Theodosian Empresses, 96), the coincidence is certainly suspicious. The case of Antiochus is more difficult – Theophanes reports that he was supplanted by Pulcheria in 412 / 413 (after which Holum, Theodosian

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Anthemius was briefly replaced as praetorian prefect by Monaxius, whose tenure lasted only from April to November of that year. Although Monaxius would return to the prefecture for a longer tenure in August of 416, he was replaced in late 414 by Aurelianus.69 Aurelianus, even more than Anthemius or Antiochus, was the quintessential politician of the Theodosian era, with long experience in the civil administration stretching back into the 380s; his career had survived sentences of both death and exile in the tumultuous days of Gainas.70 As Cameron has noted, it is likely that it was Aurelianus’ support and political acumen that enabled the lasting success of Pulcheria’s bid for power in 414.71 Kenneth Holum has argued that Pulcheria’s rise to power was accompanied by a change in imperial policy towards pagans and Jews.72 He even tentatively connects the events in Alexandria in 415 with a constitution issued on October 20 of that year, addressed to Aurelianus and delivering a stern rebuke to Gamaliel, the Palestine-based patriarch of the Jews. 73 The infractions that earned this rebuke are not entirely clear, since the law reiterates a number of legal prohibitions on Jewish interactions with Christians, but Gamaliel is deprived of his honorary title as prefect, and, the law continues, “hereafter [the magister officiorum] shall cause no synagogues to be founded, and if there are any synagogues in desert places which can be destroyed without sedition, he shall have it done.”74 Obviously, by October Hypatia had already been dead for several months, and so we cannot draw a direct line between this constitution and Cyril’s move against the Jews of Alexandria. Still, some commentators have seen in this law the culmination of a significant shift in the imperial consistory’s attitude towards the empire’s Jews – that is to say, a shift away from a long-standing tradition of tolerance and legal accommodation, and towards a persecutory stance informed by Christian anti-Judaism.75 Others, however, have rejected this as an over-inEmpresses, 91), but elsewhere that he was demoted and tonsured by Theodosius in 443 / 444; on this muddle see Cyril Mango, Roger Scott, and Geoffrey Greatrex, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History A. D. 284 – 813 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 127, 150 – 51. 69   PLRE 2:764 – 5, “Monaxius.” 70   PLRE 1:128 – 9, “Aurelianus 3,” although cf. the very significant re-dating of his career in Cameron, Barbarians and Politics, 161 – 75, 182 – 91, 233 – 6. 71   Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 402 – 3. 72  Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 98 – 101. 73   PLRE 1:385, “Gamalielus.” 74   Cod. Theod. 16.8.22: “ac deinceps nullas condi faciat synagogas et si quae sint in solitudine, si sine seditione possint deponi, perficiat.” 75   Jeremy Cohen, “Roman Imperial Policy toward the Jews from Constantine until the End of the Palestinian Patriarchate (ca. 429),” Byzantine Studies / Études byzantines 3.1 (1976): 1 – 2, 19 – 21, 24 – 25; Cohen himself is critical of this interpretation but provides a survey of contrary views.

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terpretation of the evidence, and prefer to see Theodosius’ Jewish legislation as maintaining the protection of Jewish rights and worship, even as its language became more critical of Judaism.76 The resolution of this debate is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that it does not seem possible to securely tie a change in the consistory’s approach to the legal status of Jews to Theodosius’ early years – and thus, implicitly, to Pulcheria. We can only perceive, beginning in the 380s and culminating during the decades of Theodosius’ long reign, a growing tension between religious communities in the cities of the eastern empire, and a parallel concern on the part of the consistory both to control the empire’s Jewish communities and to limit violence between Christians and Jews.77 Even so, we should not imagine that events in Alexandria were unconnected to the situation in the capital. Indeed, Cyril’s and Orestes’ actions can be read as two contrasting responses to Pulcheria’s power play and the passing away of Anthemius’ familiar, predictable administration. Cyril, aware that the new regime in Constantinople had staked its reputation on virginal piety and an ostentatious public Christianity, seized the opportunity to move against first the city’s Jews and then his chief political rival – conveniently smeared as a pagan.78 But even as the bishop pushed the boundaries of his jurisdiction and power, Orestes found himself paralyzed, unsure of the climate in the capital and therefore unsure of his own position.79 As Peter Brown has noted, the fate of the official in the provinces was to be always unsure whether a sudden policy change or shift in the balance of power in the capital would leave him without the support at court upon which his confident policy decisions depended.80 Without sure knowledge of the new consistory’s views, Orestes could only send reports to Constantinople as the situation in Alexandria spiraled out of control, hoping for an imperial directive that would guarantee his policy against Cyril. With this in mind, Cyril’s audacity and Orestes’ impotence become explicable. We should not think that the potentes of Alexandria were unaware of goings on 76   Bernard S. Bachrach, “The Jewish Community of the Later Roman Empire as Seen in the Codex Theodosianus,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”: Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity, eds. Jacob Neusner, Ernest S. Frerichs, and Caroline McCracken-Flesher (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985), 412 – 15; Amnon Linder, “The Legal Status of the Jews in the Roman Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 144 – 8. 77   Fergus Millar, “The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora between Paganism and Christianity, A. D. 312 – 438,” in Rome, the Greek World, and the East, vol. 3: The Greek World, the Jews, and the East, eds. Hannah M. Cotton and Guy M. Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 451 – 4; Millar, “Christian Emperors, Christian Church, and the Jews of the Diaspora in the Greek East, A. D. 379 – 450,” in Rome, the Greek World, and the East, vol.  3, 461 – 6. 78   On the religious atmosphere of the palace under Pulcheria, see Holum, Theodosian Empresses, 91 – 92. 79   Suggested by Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 302. 80   Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 15 – 17.

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at the imperial court. Rather, and especially at times of political uncertainty, provincials such as the patriarch and the prefect strove mightily to keep a finger on the pulse of events in Constantinople. This is strikingly illustrated by the Breve directorum, or “bribe-list,” of Cyril and the associated letter of his archdeacon Epiphanius – two documents that together preserve a remarkably detailed picture of Cyril’s friends, allies, and contacts in Constantinople during the height of the Nestorian controversy.81 The two documents mention an array of figures – from Pulcheria herself, through prominent archimandrites, cubicularii, the praetorian prefect, and the master of offices, to various lesser but apparently well-placed servants and clergy. Now, Cyril’s networks were probably not as expansive or penetrating in 415 as they would be by 432. Nevertheless, the “bribe-list” and Epiphanius’ letter testify compellingly to Cyril’s ability build and utilize complex, far-reaching networks of influence and patronage. Although Cyril’s contacts in Constantinople in the 430s must have been the product of years of careful development and cultivation, we should imagine that he would have inherited some of his uncle’s allies as soon as he ascended the episcopal throne. If in Constantinople, so much the more in Alexandria. What lies behind Orestes’ apparent weakness is the reality of a transplanted imperial official facing off against an established, local patron with a network of allies and clients of impressive horizontal and vertical scope – the product of decades of Theophilus’ leadership. This, more than anything else, explains Orestes’ association with the city’s “Hellene” elite; an official who was new to the city would have found allies most quickly and readily among his own social class. As audacious as the mature Cyril appears in his contest with Nestorius, he does not give the impression of foolhardiness or recklessness; he took no action unless he believed he had the political capital required to pull it off. Thus, in Socrates’ account, we see Cyril attempting to undermine the augustal prefect’s power in a way he believed was calculated to demand the acquiescence, if not the approval, of Pulcheria and the dominant party in Constantinople.

Conclusions Hypatia’s murder made a lasting impression on contemporaries. This much at least is clear from its inclusion in Socrates’ account as well as references to the same event in the works of Philostorgius, Damascius, John Malalas, and John of Nikiu.82 For Socrates and his immediate contemporaries, however, it was not 81   On this pair of documents, see Beers, “The Payment Programme of Cyril of Alexandria,” 75 – 79 and passim; for the text, see ACO 1.4:222 – 5; for a translation, John I. McEnerney, St. Cyril of Alexandria: Letters (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 2:151 – 3, 189 – 92. 82   For these and other sources which reference Hypatia’s death, PLRE 2:575 – 6, “Hypatia 1.”

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the loss of a Neoplatonist teacher beloved by her students that troubled them. Rather, it was the apparent signal that Cyril had begun his episcopacy following closely in the footsteps of his uncle. Theophilus had never been one to shy away from controversy or to neglect the opportunities presented by violence and crisis, and now it seemed that Cyril was happy to do the same. Although Cyril’s anti-Novatian efforts and his apparently conciliatory attitude towards the monastic communities so fiercely divided by Theophilus’ activities suggest that he intended to avoid some of the criticisms that had been leveled against his uncle, the opportunity presented by Jewish-Christian unrest and Orestes’ decision to arrest Hierax proved too much to resist. As much as Cyril may have been aware of his uncle’s failings, his concept of the patriarch’s role in city and empire, and the political tools available to him, had been shaped by Theophilus’ example. After all, a bishop could hardly stand by while the Christians in his care were subject to the violent assaults of Jews and pagans! As it happened, however, Cyril was no more capable than Orestes of controlling the situation once Alexandrians took to the streets. Ammonius’ assault on the prefect, and the patriarch’s abysmal failure to control the narrative of that event in its aftermath, suggest that Cyril soon found himself out of his depth. Hypatia’s death only reinforces this reading of events; whatever fate Cyril may have wished or planned for Orestes’ confidante, it could hardly have been her brutal dismemberment in his own church. Pulcheria’s role in these events, admittedly, can only be guessed at. The circumstances of her rise to power at the imperial court may well have inspired Cyril’s activities, and encouraged him to think that he would be able to operate with impunity. If, as seems to be the case, the death of Hypatia earned no response from Constantinople, it may be a testament to the relative weakness and instability of Pulcheria’s young regime. At the same time, if the parabalani constitutions in the Theodosian Code are concerned with eliminating a tax-haven operating within a clerical confraternity, as I have suggested, it may be that the bishop ended up falling afoul of the consistory in other circumstances not long after Hypatia’s death. It does seem, however, that in the course of these events Cyril identified Pulcheria as a member of imperial family on whose Christian zeal he might depend in the future; perhaps they even established lines of communication at this time. Fifteen years later, as the patriarch prepared to unseat his heretical Constantinopolitan rival, it was to Pulcheria that he turned as a strong supporter and the enemy of another troublemaking bishop. Nestorius, lacking the benefits of Cyril’s experience, did not know which friends to make and which enemies to avoid, and his naïveté would cost him dearly.

The Shattered Icon: An Alternative Reading of Hypatia’s Killing (Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 – 7, John of Nikiu, Chron. 84.100 – 103, and Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.23)1 Mareile Haase Für Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier

Introduction: Orchestrating Violence The Internet and other media have globally disseminated visual and textual information about recent incidents of extreme violence unleashed upon some of the most celebrated archaeological sites, such as Apamea, Dura-Europos and Mari in Syria, and Hatra, Nineveh, Nimrud and Khorsabad in Iraq. These incidents highlight the vulnerability of the world’s cultural heritage and its local advocates. They have also sparked a renewed debate about image destruction.2 The attack with pickaxes and sledgehammers on exhibits in Iraq’s Mosul Museum or the invasion of Palmyra with bulldozers and explosives not only resulted in the destruction of major monuments, but they also led to the horrendous execution of octogenarian Palmyrene archaeologist and director of antiquities Khaled al-Asaad, whose body was hung in public, his severed head placed at his feet. Visualisations of this execution, as well as of others, were made available to the public on the World Wide Web and have received graphic verbal accounts in the news. In the rhetoric of the offenders, these eruptions of violence are religiously motivated and directed against polytheism and idol worship,3 as was the dyna1   My warmest thanks go to the organizers of the conference, Dawn LaValle Norman and Alex Petkas, for their gracious hospitality and helpfulness, and to the audience in Princeton for valuable suggestions. I am deeply grateful to Andreas Bendlin who commented on the manuscript. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; all dates are CE unless otherwise specified. 2   See Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum,” The Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 641 – 59; Horst Bredekamp, Der Bildakt (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2015), 223 – 28 (Bamiyan); Horst Bredekamp, Das Beispiel Palmyra (Köln: König, 2016); Finbarr Barry Flood, “Idol-Breaking as Image-Making in the ‘Islamic State’,” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 7 (2016): 116 – 26. 3   Cf. Ben Hubbard, “Shielding Syrian Antiquities, to a Grisly Death at ISIS’ Hands,” The New York Times (19 August 2015): “In the photo of Mr. Asaad’s dead body, red writing on a white placard suspended from his waist calls Mr. Asaad an ‘apostate’ and lists his alleged crimes, including representing Syria at ‘infidel conferences,’ serving as ‘the director of idolatry’ in Palmyra . . .”

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miting of the monumental sixth-century Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley as decreed by radical clerics on February  26, 2001.4 While these assaults target images as religiously charged objects, they also instrumentalise their value as cultural icons. Moreover, the terrorist attacks committed by the “Islamic State” combine assaults on monuments and humans in a way that makes them interchangeable as targets. This parallelism of human victims and images is captured in a drawing by Muslim cartoonist Jehad Awartani, which shows two ISIS militants clad in similar black mummery and with identical position and gesture; one is putting a knife to the throat of a bust from the Mosul museum, the other to the throat of a captive. Another caricature, by Mehdi “Amo” Rasooli, shows an ISIS fighter pointing his gun to the head of an Assyrian king’s statue.5 The substitutability of statue and human in the context of violence against images, art historian Horst Bredekamp opines, comes to the fore with Byzantine Iconoclasm and becomes pervasive in the confessional conflicts of the early modern period.6 In this contribution, however, I  engage with a late antique example of this phenomenon. I offer a reading of three texts that respectively deal with the killing of a high-profile intellectual and the destruction of an eminent cult image in late antique Alexandria: the representation of Hypatia’s killing in Socrates of Constantinople (Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 – 7); the account of her death by Coptic bishop John of Nikiu (Chron. 84.100 – 103); and Rufinus of Concordia’s narrative (Hist. eccl. 11.23) of the destruction of the cult image of Serapis under patriarch Theophilus in 391 / 92.7 John explicitly relates Hypatia’s killing to the destruction of ‘idololatry’ in Alexandria. Socrates and Rufinus stand out both on account of the detail they provide and because they wrote shortly after the events. The publication of Rufinus’ “revised, updated, and expanded [Latin] edition”8 of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church History is usually dated to 402 / 3.9 Moreover, 4

  English translation of the edict: Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” 655.   Ömür Harmanşah, “ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media,” Near Eastern Archeology 78 (2015): 170 – 77, here 171 – 72, figs. 1 and 3. 6  Bredekamp, Der Bildakt, 206. 7   R. Malcolm Errington, Roman Imperial Policy from Julian to Theodosius (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 249 – 52, esp. 250 with n. 109 and Johannes Hahn, “Vetustus error extinctus est: Wann wurde das Sarapeion von Alexandria zerstört?” Historia 55 (2006): 368 – 83 have proposed a date in early 392. Contra: Richard W. Burgess and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, “The ‘Alexandrian World Chronicle,’ Its Consularia and the Date of the Destruction of the Serapeum (with an Appendix on the List of Praefecti Augustales),” Millennium 10.1 (2013): 39 – 113, here 96 – 102. 8   Mark Humphries, “Rufinus’ Eusebius: Translation, Continuation, and Edition in the Latin Ecclesiastical History,” JECS 16 (2008): 143 – 64, here 163. 9  Françoise Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle: l’apport de l’‘Histoire ecclésiastique’ de Rufin d’Aquilée (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1981), 13 n. 3; Philip R. Amidon, trans., Rufinus of Aquileia: History of the Church, Fathers of the Church 133 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 6. According to Concetta Molè Ventura, Principi fanciulli: 5

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Rufinus used a Greek source10 even closer in date to the attack on the Serapeum, plausibly the account, now lost, of Serapis’ fall that Jerome’s student Sophronius penned very soon after the event.11 As for Socrates, if he published his Church History around 439 / 40,12 his narrative postdates Hypatia’s killing in 415, during Cyril of Alexandria’s patriarchate, by barely one generation. For the contemporary events in his Church History, including those of 414 / 415, Socrates’ sources may have included oral informants. But Socrates also names Rufinus’ Church History (including its final two books) as a main source and explicitly references Rufinus for his Books 3 – 7 (Socrates, Hist. eccl. 2.1).13 Intertextuality between Socrates and Rufinus’ account of Serapis’ overthrow, which occurred less than one generation prior to Hypatia’s death, is thus a likely possibility. I  therefore argue that Socrates and Rufinus share several motifs. These motifs include the act of collective aggression culminating in dismemberment and subsequent burning, its staging as a public spectacle, and the setting of the violent event in or near a (former) temple of the traditional religion. I propose that Socrates, followed by John of Nikiu, draws on literary motifs and real-life patterns of statue destruction, while Rufinus, when he refers to the cult image of Serapis as an “old man” (senex: Hist. eccl. 11.23) and uses language suggestive of homicide, makes the destruction of the statue resemble the killing of a living person. legittimismo costituzionale e storiografia cristiana nella tarda antichità, Testi e studi di storia antica 2 (Catania: Ed. del Prisma, 1992), 12 – 20, the collection of materials and the writing of at least a part of Rufinus’ Church History might significantly predate the work’s publication, an assumption that would bring Rufinus’ account even closer chronologically to the destruction of Serapis’ image. 10   Sources for Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 10 and 11: Amidon, Rufinus of Aquileia, 12 – 14; his sources specifically for the Alexandrian events: Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, 161; Amidon, Rufinus of Aquileia, 466 n. 40. According to Martin Wallraff, Jonathan Stutz and Nicholas Marinides, eds., Gelasius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History: The Extant Fragments, With an Appendix Containing the Fragments from Dogmatic Writings, trans. Nicholas Marinides, GCS, N. F. 25 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), xxxi, lxxvi – viii, Rufinus drew on Gelasius of Caesarea for most of Book 10, but not for Book 11. 11  Jerome, Vir. ill. 134, dated to 392 / 3 (Alan D. Booth, “The Chronology of Jerome’s Early Years,” Phoenix 35 [1981]: 237 – 59, here 241), mentions the “remarkable book” that Sophronius “recently wrote” on the topic: Sophronius . . . nuper de subversione Serapis insignem librum conposuit. 12   Martin Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates: Untersuchungen zu Geschichtsdarstellung, Methode und Person, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 68 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 210 – 12; Pierre Périchon and Pierre Maraval, eds., Socrate de Constantinople, Histoire Ecclésiastique Livre I, Sources Chrétiennes 477 (Paris: Le Cerf, 2004), 10; Peter Van Nuffelen, Un héritage de paix et de piété: étude sur les Histoires ecclésiastiques de Socrate et de Sozomène, Orientalia Lovanensia Analecta 142 (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 10 – 14. 13   Socrates’ sources: Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates, 75 – 83 (Book  7), 185 – 94; for Socrates’ many references to Rufinus: ibid., 186 n. 182; see also Theresa Urbainczyk, Socrates of Constantinople: Historian of Church and State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 19, 49 – 52, 58 – 59, 102; Périchon and Maraval, Socrate de Constantinople, Histoire Ecclésiastique Livre I, 23 – 32.

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While the iconoclastic coloring of the episode of Hypatia’s killing has been briefly acknowledged,14 it has never been studied in systematic detail. Few scholars, moreover, cross-reference Rufinus’ description of Serapis’ fall to note the motif of statue destruction in accounts of Hypatia’s death, Troels Kristensen being an exception.15 Even Kristensen, however, does not identify the religious-historical categories that underpin Rufinus’ account and facilitate the equation of human killing and statue destruction. Besides, Kristensen’s conclusion that “the mutilation of Hypatia’s body cannot be seen as mindless violence, but rather was linked to a culturally defined discourse of equating body and image” is problematic. It reveals the absence of a clear distinction between Hypatia’s death as a historical event and that event’s (multiple and partly divergent) literary representations.16 Although the literary texts establish a clear equation of body and image, it is not legitimate to conclude that the same equation also determined the action of Hypatia’s killers. Other interpretations have dominated discussions of Hypatia’s death. Many hold Hypatia’s killing to reflect an alleged Alexandrian pattern or script of public show executions of “criminals”; others have viewed her as a “pagan martyr”; some stress the imagery of “human sacrifice”; and yet others compare the public shaming of prominent women at the Ptolemaic court. As I discuss in my commentary elsewhere in this volume,17 few of these interpretations can readily be applied to Socrates’ account, although some of them are more pertinent to his text than others. However, if we turn from the search for fixed patterns or scripts to the investigation of family resemblances, we may be in a better position to 14   Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 116; Edward J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 46 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 209 – 10. Scholars who rely on Peter Brown’s reading of Hypatia’s death include David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 279; Stefan Schmidt, “Der Sturz des Serapis: Zur Bedeutung paganer Götterbilder in der spätantiken Gesellschaft Alex­andrias,” in Alexandria, ed. Felix Albrecht, Reinhard Feldmeier and Tobias Georges, Civitatum Orbis Mediterranei Studia 1 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 149 – 74, here 169 and n. 78. 15   Troels Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity, Aarhus Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity 12 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), 179. Silvia Ronchey, Ipazia: la vera storia (Milan: Rizzoli, 2010), 283, holds that Theodoret’s account of Serapis’ fall (Hist. E. 5.22) is close to how Hypatia died, but she is undecided as to whether the parallel, which she takes to be a sign of the “ritual character” of Hypatia’s killing, is fictional or based on historical reality. 16   A similar problem affects Watts’ attempt (Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, Women in Antiquity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 107 – 20) to distil a coherent narrative from a collation of diverse accounts of Hypatia’s death – the very accounts he subsequently analyses as exponents of her earliest “memory” (121 – 34). For while a “link between Hypatia’s murder and the Serapeum destruction” is indeed established by John of Nikiu’s later account (Chron. 84.103), this does not allow for Watts’ conclusion that this link existed “in the mind of her killers” (182 n. 30). 17   Appendix B.6 – 8, this volume.

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comprehend why Socrates’ narrative of Hypatia’s killing partakes in some motifs that are otherwise linked to show executions, the public shaming of women, and sacrifice. Socrates’ text exhibits some family resemblance with these themes and shares in a repertoire of features that may come together to form varying constellations. It is a trait of family resemblances that the different layers of meaning become complementary but are not mutually exclusive. Family resemblance allows us to recognise in Socrates’ narrative motific affinity with a variety of themes, without forcing us to exclude the relevance of one motif at the expense of another. In the following sections I investigate the family resemblance between Socrates’ account of Hypatia’s death and the motif of the destruction of divine statues.

Socrates of Constantinople on Hypatia’s Death Socrates’ Church History proffers an early narrative of Hypatia’s killing,18 prefaced with an account of the events immediately preceding her death (Hist. eccl. 7.13 – 14): During the conflict between the praefectus Augustalis Orestes and the Alexandrian episcopate, the appeals of both factions to the court at Constantinople were ineffective, so that animosities were kept alive. Physically and verbally attacked by a group of Nitrian monks, Orestes pleaded his status as a Christian baptised by the bishop of Constantinople, Atticus. Far from embracing Orestes as a fellow Christian, the Nitrian monks must have perceived Orestes’ reference to Alexandria’s rival, Constantinople, and her archbishop as an act of provocation:19 a monk named Ammonius started stoning the prefect, and only when some Alexandrians came to the rescue, Orestes barely made an escape. While Jens-Uwe Krause suggests that the assassination even of high officials in the context of urban unrest in late antiquity was not unheard of,20 and while stoning attacks on officials are not unparalleled,21 in Socrates’ account the attack on a top-ranking imperial official directly results in the public execution of the perpetrator. Orestes commands that Ammonius be publicly tortured to death. Cyril for his part has Ammonius’ corpse laid out in a church with the intention 18

  Further late antique accounts of Hypatia’s death either considerably post-date the event (Damascius, Vita Isidori F *102 Zintzen) or are much less detailed (Philostorgius, Hist. eccl. 8.9; Hesychius [Suda IV 644,1 – 11] s. v. Ὑπατία; Malalas, Chronographia 14.12, ed. Thurn, 280). For Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ Latin translation of Socrates’ text (Hist. eccl. tripart. 11.12.1 – 5, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 643 – 44), cf. Appendix B.9b, this volume. 19   Jean Rougé, “Les débuts de l’épiscopat de Cyrille d’Alexandrie et le code Théodosien,” in Alexandrina: hellénisme, judaïsme et christianisme à Alexandrie: Mélanges offerts à P. Claude Mondésert (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 339 – 49, here 341. 20   Jens-Uwe Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität in der Spätantike (Munich: Beck, 2014), 87 – 88. 21   Lib. Or. 47.7 – 8; Collectio Avellana 29, ed. Günther, 1:74 – 76; Vita Theodori Syceotae 76, ed. Festugière, 1:63 – 64.

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to proclaim him a martyr, to be revered as Thaumasius (“Marvellous / Admirable One”). Rumour spreads that it was Hypatia, Orestes’ close acquaintance, who stood between him and Cyril. Socrates writes: And so men of a hot spirit, having conspired, whom a certain Petrus, a lector, led, look out for the poor creature when she returns home from some place or other. And having thrown her out of the litter (δίφρος), they drag her with them to the church named Kaisarion. And after stripping off her clothes, they killed her with tiles (ὄστρακα), and after tearing her limb by limb, and after gathering the limbs on to the so-called Kinaron, they let her be consumed by fire. This caused no little disgrace to Cyril and the Church of the Alexandrians: for murder and combat and such-like are completely alien to those who take heed of the things of Christ. And these things happened in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate, in the tenth consulate of Honorius and in the sixth of Theodosius, in the month of March, during Lent.22

Socrates’ account, while terse, mentions several stages: Hypatia’s being ambushed, thrown out of her vehicle and dragged through the streets of Alexandria to the Caesareum; the stripping of her clothes, which implies the degrading display of her naked body; her being stoned to death by thick-walled pottery sherds or tiles, which would not only have crushed her with their weight but also bruised her with sharp edges and points; her being torn “limb by limb,” in effect a dismemberment of her corpse; and the destruction of her remains by fire. The attackers use techniques that emphasise the infliction of both pain and shame. The various stages increase in violence as they move from ambush to manhandling and public shaming, to execution and subsequent maltreatment of the corpse. They culminate in the complete annihilation of Hypatia’s body and personhood. Socrates’ narrative has provoked a plethora of divergent interpretations, due partly to scholarly disagreement about the meaning of key expressions and phrases. For instance, Hypatia’s killing has been seen as a result of Christian violence by a large group of uneducated aggressors, her death the accidental outcome of unpremeditated mob action. Some scholars have interpreted Socrates’ δίφρος as a reference to a teacher’s chair, inferring that Hypatia was dragged from a lecture hall, which they identify with the recently excavated structures at Kom el-Dikka. Perhaps most influentially, scholars have understood Socrates’ 22   Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 – 7, ed. Hansen, 361, here printed after the corrected text of Pierre Périchon and Pierre Maraval, eds., Socrate de Constantinople, Histoire Ecclésiastique Livre VII, Sources chrétiennes 506 (Paris: Le Cerf, 2007), 58, 60: καὶ δὴ συμφρονήσαντες ἄνδρες τὸ φρόνημα ἔνθερμοι, ὧν ἡγεῖτο Πέτρος τις ἀναγνώστης, ἐπιτηροῦσι τὴν ἄνθρωπον ἐπανιοῦσαν ἐπὶ οἰκίαν ποθέν, καὶ ἐκ τοῦ δίφρου ἐκβαλόντες ἐπὶ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, ᾗ ἐπώνυμον Καισάριον, συνέλκουσιν, ἀποδύσαντές τε τὴν ἐσθῆτα ὀστράκοις ἀνεῖλον· καὶ μεληδὸν διασπάσαντες ἐπὶ τὸν καλούμενον Κιναρῶνα τὰ μέλη συνάραντες πυρὶ κατανήλωσαν. τοῦτο οὐ μικρὸν μῶμον Κυρίλλῳ καὶ τῇ Ἀλεξανδρέων ἐκκλησίᾳ εἰργάσατο· ἀλλότριον γὰρ παντελῶς τῶν φρονούντων τὰ Χριστοῦ φόνοι καὶ μάχαι καὶ τὰ τούτοις παραπλήσια. καὶ ταῦτα πέπρακται τῷ τετάρτῳ ἔτει τῆς Κυρίλλου ἐπισκοπῆς ἐν ὑπατείᾳ Ὁνωρίου τὸ δέκατον καὶ Θεοδοσίου τὸ ἕκτον ἐν μηνὶ Μαρτίῳ νηστειῶν οὐσῶν.

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ὄστρακα to denote sherds used as cutting dies to slit Hypatia’s throat or dismember her body. Some, following Edward Gibbon’s influential interpretation of the philosopher’s death, have even suggested that the ὄστρακα were mollusc shells employed in her flaying. For a detailed critique of these views, I  refer the reader to my commentary elsewhere in this volume.23 Here, I  summarize the most salient results, on which the present contribution builds: To Socrates the attack on Hypatia was neither accidental nor a result of Christian mob violence. Rather, I hold that her killing was a premeditated act (συμφρονήσαντες; cf. Cassiodorus, Hist. eccl. tripart. 11.12.4, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 644: conspirantes) undertaken by an unruly group of young clerical hotspurs, who were led by a lector (ἀναγνώστης), a low-ranking member of Alexandria’s Church hierarchy. These young men, who were not necessarily indigent or uneducated, may have wished to endear themselves to their bishop, Cyril, when they pulled the philosopher out of her litter – which is how I understand the meaning of δίφρος – and dragged her toward the site of the Great Church in the Caesareum. In Socrates’ view, the fact that the killing took place during the Lenten season only highlights the assault’s utter inappropriateness. When Socrates employs the expression τὴν ἄνθρωπον (“the poor creature”), I hold that he expresses a degree of commiseration towards Hypatia and highlights the humiliation she suffers at the hands of her attackers. Socrates foregrounds the conspirators’ violence and, through their association with Alexandria’s bishop, may implicitly criticise Cyril. With regard to the Lenten season, I note that the time of the major Christian festival must be viewed as a period of heightened religious tension, with a potential for outbreaks of violence towards non-Christians. Socrates’ narrative proffers an approximate topographical setting for Hypatia’s murder (. . . ἐπὶ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, ᾗ ἐπώνυμον Καισάριον), which we may profitably combine with our knowledge about that area’s topography. I venture a hypothesis about the locale, in close proximity of the church, where according to Socrates’ text Hypatia was assassinated: I tentatively identify the former Forum as the location of her death and pay particular attention to the symbolic significance of the Caesareum site, one prominent Alexandrian venue of inter-religious as well as intra-religious conflict. As for the concrete circumstances of Hypatia’s killing, I understand Socrates’ ὄστρακα to refer to heavy pottery sherds or tiles, rather than oyster shells. The attackers, however, did not use their tools to either cut the victim’s throat or flay or dismember their victim’s body. Rather, I propose that Hypatia was killed by stoning, a view that is coherent with Socrates’ text and is strengthened by comparative evidence. This proposal finds further support in the Latin translation of Socrates’ ὄστρακα as lapides in Cassiodorus’ Historia ecclesiastica tripartita. 23

  Appendix B, this volume.

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Before I continue to investigate Socrates’ use of literary motifs and real-life patterns of statue destruction, I turn to John of Nikiu, because he establishes an explicit link between Hypatia’s killing and the Alexandrian bishops’ crusade against ‘idololatry.’

Hypatia’s Death in John of Nikiu’s Chronicle Yuḥannā “al-Mudabbir” (“the Overseer” [sc. of the monasteries of Egypt]), more commonly known as John, bishop of Nikiu, a town in the South-Western Nile delta, narrates Hypatia’s death in a work known among modern scholars as the Chronicle.24 Composed in Egypt in the second half of the seventh century, the Chronicle survives incomplete in an early seventeenth-century Ethiopian version of which four manuscripts are known to date. The Ethiopian version is based on a lost Arabic one, which in turn is based on a Coptic original, also lost.25 It is vital to keep in mind that the complex transmission history of the Chronicle may have distorted and / or shortened the narrative. Any interpretation of John’s text must be read with this caveat in mind. John’s sources include earlier Byzantine chronicles and (ecclesiastic) histories,26 among them Socrates of Constantinople’s, although it must remain unclear whether John’s dependence on Socrates is direct. Watts offers a useful discussion of passages from the Chronicle at large that point to Socrates as a source.27 Yet in order to establish John’s dependence on Socrates (or a common source) for his account of Hypatia’s death, it suffices to investigate the proper names and date specifications common to both texts: John mentions the main assailant Peter by name, as does only Socrates (as well as Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ Latin version of Socrates); John and Socrates (Cassiodorus / Epiphanius) are the only late antique narratives of Hypatia’s death that feature the Great 24   Hermann Zotenberg, ed., Chronique de Jean, évêque de Nikiou: texte éthiopien publié et traduit (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1883); Robert H. Charles, trans., The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu: Translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text (London: Williams and Norgate, 1916). Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikiu, cronista bizantino-copto del VII secolo,” in Βυζάντιον: Αφιέρωμα στον Ανδρέα Ν. Στράτο (Athens: Stratos, 1986), 353 – 98; Gianfranco Fiaccadori, “John of Nikiou,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1 (600 – 900), ed. David R. Thomas and Barbara Roggema (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 209 – 18; James Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 181 – 89; Philip Booth, “Shades of Blues and Greens in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou,” ByzZ 104 (2011): 555 – 601, here 555 – 60. 25   Fiaccadori, “John of Nikiou,” 212; Booth, “Shades of Blues,” 556 – 57. 26   John of Nikiu’s sources: Carile, “Giovanni di Nikiu,” 362 – 63; Fiaccadori, “John of Nikiou,” 213; Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 182 – 84. 27   Edward J. Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable or Unacceptable Violence?” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 333 – 42, here 339 nn. 28 and 30.

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Church in the Caesareum; John mentions the Kinaron, a Greek hapax that otherwise appears only in Socrates; and only Socrates (Cassiodorus / Epiphanius) and John know of the Lenten date of the killing. This evident dependency entails the question why John, a  Monophysite bishop invested in representing in an exalted light the regime of “the holy Cyril . . ., the great star which lighted up all places by his doctrine, being clothed with the Holy Spirit” (Chron. 79.12, trans. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 76), uses material deriving from a source which is openly critical of the Alexandrian patriarchate. One possible answer is that John simply reverses his source’s hostility to extol the very actions and traits of Cyril that Socrates finds despicable. This is what John writes about Hypatia’s death, according to Charles’ translation:28 [100] And thereafter a multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate – now this Peter was a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ – and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the praefectus through her enchantments. [101] And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her seated on a (lofty) chair; and having made her descend, they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion. Now this was in the days of the fast. [102] And they tare off her clothing and dragged her [till they brought her] through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Kinaron, and they burned her body with fire. [103] And all the people surrounded the patriarch Cyril and named him “new Theophilus”; for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.

The extant version of the text does not mention the dismemberment of Hypatia’s body or other violent details. Hypatia is manhandled but then “merely” dragged to death. It is possible that in order not to thwart his own hagiographical portrayal of Cyril triumphant, John domesticates the violence of the killing scene. Still, it is important to remain wary of the transmitted text. The dittography, which Charles signals in his English translation,29 points to a scribal error in the very passage about Hypatia’s death, so that that passage must be considered partly corrupt. Apart from John’s loyalty to Cyril, another factor that determines Hypatia’s negative portrayal is his concept of history, which is dominated by the idea of divine retribution.30 John’s Hypatia, the maleficent sorcerer and mischief-maker, therefore deserves her fate. John’s view possibly even challenges Socrates’ perspective when he writes that “Peter was a perfect believer in all respects in 28   John of Nikiu, Chron. 84.100 – 103, Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean, 346; Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 102. 29  Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 102: “[till they brought her]” (Chron. 84.102; dittography not highlighted in Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean, 346). 30   Thus Fiaccadori, “John of Nikiou,” 214.

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Jesus Christ” (Chron. 84.100, trans. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 102), as if to counter Socrates’ denunciation of the perpetrators’ lack in “Christ-mindedness” (Hist. eccl. 7.15.6). It has escaped the attention of scholars that the Chronicle attributes the instigation of Hypatia’s killing to Cyril when they contend that the Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius, a proponent of traditional religion, is unique in claiming that the bishop ordered the attack.31 However, in the chapter summaries prefixed to the Chronicle the relevant part of chapter 84 is paraphrased as follows:32 And further concerning a heathen woman of Alexandria and the tumults which she caused between the Jews and Christians in Alexandria. And how the holy Cyril took the synagogue of the Jews and made it a church in consequence of his controversy with the Jews. And how they dragged the heathen woman through the streets till she died. And how they burned her body with fire by the command of the patriarch, Abba Cyril.

Some have assumed that it was the Chronicle’s Arabic translator who prefixed the chapter summaries to the work in the tenth century or soon thereafter.33 It is nonetheless plausible that the burning of Hypatia’s body by Cyril’s explicit command was already part of John of Nikiu’s original text: The numbering of the summaries in part diverges from the numbering of the chapters; if this is proof of abridgement of the transmitted text,34 it follows that the author of the summaries had a version at his disposal that was more complete than the version presently available. Besides, one should expect the summaries to present essential information, rather than any potential embellishments. The use of the epithet in “holy Cyril” may be taken as additional evidence that the summary is close to the Coptic original in this place. It could be argued that the chapter summary refers to Cyril’s instigation only of the combustion of Hypatia’s body. More plausibly, however, the adverbial phrase “by the command of Abba Cyril” refers to all preceding clauses. I hold that according to the author of the chapter summaries, Cyril’s responsibility extended to having ordered Hypatia’s killing. Rather than attracting criticism, as in the accounts by Socrates and Damascius, John’s Cyril earns public acclaim through Hypatia’s killing, which John refash-

31  Watts, Hypatia, 117; cf. John A. McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Its History, Theology, and Texts, Vigiliae Christianae Supplement 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 14; Stephen J. Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity, 1: The Popes of Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 71. Doxographical survey of the tendency in some modern scholarship to downplay Cyril’s active involvement in Hypatia’s killing: Luciano Canfora, “Cirillo e Ipazia nella storiografia cattolica,” Anabases 12 (2010): 93 – 102. 32  Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 10 ad cap. LXXXIII (LXXXIV); cf. Zotenberg, Chronique de Jean, 233 (emphasis mine). 33  Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, iii. Tentative date: Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 184. 34   As Booth, “Shades of Blues and Greens,” 559 argues.

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ions as a heroic deed. Cyril is accorded the title “new Theophilus,” because “he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city” (Chron. 84.103, trans. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 102). If Charles’ translation of the passage is faithful to the original text, then the Chronicle, by likening Cyril to Theophilus, who had supervised the attack on the Alexandrian Serapeum, presents Hypatia’s killing as standing in a line with the previous destruction of the statue of Serapis. Watts proposes that the comparison is established by the celebratory mood of the Christian citizens of Alexandria on both occasions.35 But the Chronicle explicitly ties the destruction of “idololatry” in Alexandria to the killing of Hypatia. The elimination of the worship of false gods is in fact a topos that seems to have been regularly linked to Alexandria’s bishops by the ecclesiastical tradition.36 It thus allows Theophilus and Cyril to take their places within a golden chain of the city’s great bishops. If, then, some perceived Hypatia’s killing to be equivalent to the overthrow of “idololatry,” I hold that we must compare the details of her execution to those of the destruction of Serapis’ statue. In the next section, I focus on Rufinus’ version of that event.

The Overthrow of Serapis in Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.23 History as Remedy With Books 10 and 11 of his Church History, Rufinus continues Eusebius to 395, the year of the death of Theodosius I. Book 11 includes a detailed narrative of the attack of 391 / 2 on the Alexandrian Serapeum,37 as well as a description of the sanctuary and cult image of Serapis (Hist. eccl. 11.22 – 30). Rufinus sojourned in Alexandria and Egypt between 372 and 380,38 then left for Jerusalem to found 35   Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 41 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 199. 36  A logos attributed to Athanasius ascribes the city’s deliverance from ‘idololatry’ to St. Mark: Oskar von Lemm, “Kleine koptische Studien XLI: Zur Topographie Alexandriens,” Bulletin de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences 21.3 (1904): 253 – 57, here 257. 37   Other major primary narratives: Socrates, Hist. eccl. 5.16 – 17, whose teachers, the grammarians Ammonius and Helladius, took part in the defence of the Serapeum and may be among Socrates’ oral sources; Sozomen, HE 7.15, which is close to Socrates’ account; Theodoret, Hist. E. 5.22, who does not mention the riots but zooms in on the destruction of the cult image; Eunapius, VS 6.11.1 – 5, ed. Giangrande, 38 – 39 = 6.107 – 11, ed. Goulet, 30 – 40, the earliest, albeit brief, surviving account, and a rare representative of the perspective of traditional religion. Discussion of these sources: Antonio Baldini, “Problemi della tradizione sulla ‘distruzione’ del Serapeo di Alessandria,” Rivista storica dell’antichità 15 (1985): 97 – 152; Annick Martin, “Sarapis et les chrétiens d’Alexandrie: un reéxamen,” in Alexandrie médiévale 3. Études alexandrines 16, ed. Jean-Yves Empereur and Christian Décobert (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2008), 41 – 57. 38  Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, 161; Molè Ventura, Principi fanciulli, 49 – 50 n. 84.

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a monastery on the Mount of Olives. By the time he wrote about the Serapeum events, he had again relocated, this time to Aquileia. The attack on the Serapeum resulted in the toppling of the cult image,39 rather than in a complete demolition of all structures within the sanctuary’s enclosure,40 despite claims to the contrary by some Christian authors.41 While Rufinus was not an eyewitness to this event, the importance he attaches to Alexandria probably reflects his personal experience and the interest he took in the city, as well as his knowledge of local topography. It is therefore likely that Rufinus’ description of the Serapeum complex integrates his own autopsy (cf. Hist. eccl. 11.4) with the information he found in Sophronius, his probable source. Rufinus conceives his Church History as a remedium, a spiritual “cure,” in the form of a message of encouragement addressed to the Christians in Aquileia, who faced the threat of the approaching Goths under Alaric.42 In accordance with his intention to fortify and edify, Rufinus makes abundant use of what 39   A detailed discussion of the attack on the Serapeum is beyond the scope of this contribution. For the topic, see Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, esp. 159 – 279; Michael Sabottka, Das Serapeum in Alexandria: Untersuchungen zur Architektur und Baugeschichte des Heiligtums von der früheren ptolemäischen Zeit bis zur Zerstörung 391 n. Chr. Ph. D. Thesis Technical University of Berlin, 1985 [Microfiche 1989; repr. Études alexandrines 15, Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2008], 311 – 31; Johannes Hahn, “The Conversion of the Cult Statues: The Destruction of the Serapeum 392 A. D. and the Transformation of Alexandria into the ‘Christ-Loving’ City,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel and Ulrich Gotter, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 163 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 335 – 65; Watts, Riot in Alexandria, 190 – 215; Schmidt, “Der Sturz des Serapis.” 40   The colonnaded court survived the attack, and the archaeological evidence suggests that churches were built west of, rather than inside, the court: Judith S. McKenzie, Sheila Gibson, and Andres T. Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the Archaeological Evidence,” JRS 94 (2004): 73 – 121, here 107 – 10. It is therefore misleading to speak of a “destruction of the Serapeum” without clarifying to which structure(s) within the enclosure one refers. Jitse Dijkstra (“The Fate of Temples in Late Antique Egypt,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique ‘Paganism,’ ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan, Late Antique Archaeology 7 [Leiden: Brill, 2011], 389 – 436, here 394, 399 and “Religious Violence in Late Antique Egypt Reconsidered: The Cases of Alexandria, Panopolis and Philae,” Journal of Early Christian History 5.2 [2015]: 24 – 48, here 31 – 36) discusses the Serapeum in the wider context of attacks on temples in late antique Egypt, emphasising the more sporadic and only partial demolition of temples as well as the pragmatic aspects of their reuse. 41   For instance, John of Nikiu (Chron. 78.45, 83.38) mentions the Serapeum’s “destruction” and “conversion” (Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, 75, 88), evidence that these expressions, although they are frequently used “neutrally” in scholarship on the attack of 391 / 2, were in historical actuality buzzwords of Christian triumphalist rhetoric. 42   Rufinus’ intended audience and actual readers: Molè Ventura, Principi fanciulli, 5 – 57. Rufinus’ historical vision and his relationship to Eusebius’ Church History: Molè Ventura, Principi fanciulli, 172 – 82; Therese Fuhrer, “Rufins Historia ecclesiastica: ‘Geschichte’ und Geschichten von Kämpfen und Siegen der Orthodoxie,” in Die Welt des Sokrates von Konstantinopel: Studien zu Politik, Religion und Kultur im späten 4. und frühen 5. Jh. n. Chr. zu Ehren von Christoph Schäublin, ed. Balbina Bäbler and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (Munich: Saur, 2001), 60 – 70; Humphries, “Rufinus’ Eusebius,”; see also Amidon, Rufinus of Aquileia, 7 – 12.

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Van Uytfanghe calls the ‘hagiographical discourse’.43 We may describe Rufinus’ historiography as an elastic frame that is stretched in many places by inclusion of miracle stories about the power of true Christian faith. Rufinus’ mindset expresses itself stylistically through binary oppositions, which juxtapose superstitio, error, pagani, and perfidia with vera religio, religiosi, and fides.44 His central message is that God, as happened many times before, will save the religiosi, leading them towards victory over misbelief. Rufinus’ portrayal of the fall of Alexandrian Serapis should be read in this very vein, as a miracle story distending the historiographical frame and designed to impress Christianity’s supremacy on the reader. In Rufinus’ triumphalist perspective, the emperor Theodosius initiates the final defeat of ‘idololatry’, and the fall of Serapis is an important step towards that end,45 even a “paradigm” for the final extinction of traditional cults in the Roman world at large.46 Together with the Frigidus episode,47 Serapis’ overthrow forms the powerful end and culmination of Rufinus’ Church History: Yet as we had begun to say, after the rescript had been read out, our people were now ready to overturn the originator of the error. However, some conviction had been disseminated by these very pagans to the effect that, should a human hand touch that image, the earth, splitting open, would dissolve into Chaos right away and the sky all of a sudden would come tumbling down into the abyss. This matter gave the people only some tiny pause, when – lo! – one of the soldiers, armed more with faith than with weapons, having grasped a two-edged axe, rose up and with full force gave a blow to the jaw of the old fraud. Both peoples started shouting, but the sky did not come tumbling down nor did the earth cave in. When he thereupon struck again and again, he felled the smoky tutelary deity of rotten wood. And the thing, once it had been thrown down, when fire was set to it, went up in flames as easily as withered wood. After this the head was torn from the neck and, upon the removal of the modius, dragged away. Then the feet and the other limbs, cut down with axes and snatched away with ropes, were pulled asunder, and over separate locations, limb by limb, the lethargic doter was burnt before the eyes of his worshipping Alexandria. At last the remaining trunk was cremated in the amphitheatre, and this was the end of the empty superstition and the ancient delusion of Serapis.48 43   The “hagiographical discourse” in Patristic literature: Marc Van Uytfanghe, “Heiligenverehrung II (Hagiographie),” RAC 14 (1988): 150 – 83, here 159 – 78. 44   Fuhrer, “Rufins Historia ecclesiastica,” 62. 45  Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, 159 – 63. 46   Hahn, “The Conversion of the Cult Statues,” 345, followed by Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 74. 47  Rufinus, Hist. eccl.  11.32 – 33; cf. Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, 309 – 22, 332 – 33, 343 – 44; Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome, 93 – 131. 48  Rufinus, Hist. eccl. 11.23, ed. Mommsen, 1028: verum ut dicere coeperamus, rescripto reci­ tato parati quidem erant nostrorum populi ad subvertendum erroris auctorem, persuasio tamen quaedam ab ipsis gentilibus fuerat dispersa, quod, si humana manus simulacrum illud contigisset, terra dehiscens ilico solveretur in chaos caelumque repente rueret in praeceps. quae res paululum stuporem quendam populis dabat, cum ecce unus ex militibus fide quam armis magis munitus

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The Anthropomorphic Cult Image: Wooden Object and Human Form The image of the god is struck down with an axe and then beheaded, so that the modius, the symbol of the god’s power, breaks. The image is dismembered limb by limb (membratim), after which the separate parts are transferred to different locales, where they are burnt.49 The combustion of the remaining part of Serapis’ body, its trunk, takes place in the amphitheatre (in anphitheatro), where the event could be turned into a public spectacle attracting a large audience. The perception of the image of Serapis in the text oscillates between a human being and a thing, a telling feature that reveals the ambivalent response of many Christians to the images of the traditional gods: For them, these images belong to the material rather than the spiritual world. But the anthropomorphic form elicits a sociomorphic response that exceeds in intensity the behaviour usually triggered by material objects (“living presence response”).50 Rufinus stresses the cult image’s materiality, with its inherent wear and tear brought about by age (it is smoky and rotten: fumosus, puter), and its transience. The wooden material of divine statues is a topos in Christian polemics,51 which dismiss them as “pieces of wood”.52 For Rufinus, there can be no doubt about the man-made nature of this “thing”. And yet, the power of the statue’s anthropomorphic shape is constantly perceptible and threatens to disrupt the emphasis on the image’s mere materiality. The delusive character of traditional religion is a polemical trope. For this reason, Rufinus, in the section immediately preceding his account of the cult statue’s destruction, describes the mechanical and magnetic devices that allowed for animation of the statue and the staging of its interaction with the sun (Hist. correptam bipennem insurgens omni nisu maxillae veteratoris inlidit. clamor adtollitur utrorumque populorum, neque tamen aut caelum ruit aut terra descendit. inde iterum atque iterum repetens, putris ligni fumosum genium caedit, quodque deiectum igni adhibito tam facile quam lignum aridum conflagravit. post hoc revulsum cervicibus et depresso modio trahitur caput, tum pedes aliaque membra caesa securibus et rapta funibus distrahuntur, ac per singula loca membratim in conspectu cultricis Alexandriae senex veternosus exuritur. ad ultimum truncus qui superfuerat in anphitheatro concrematur vanaeque superstitionis et erroris antiqui Serapis hic finis fuit. 49   Toppling, mutilation, dragging and disposal are recurring features in the destruction of statues more generally: Peter Stewart, Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 272 – 77. 50   For the notion, see Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object, Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus 16 (Berlin: De Gruyter; Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015). 51   Theodoret’s narrative of Serapis’ toppling (Hist. E. 5.22) emphasises the statue’s (wooden) materiality: Serapis is “of wood” (ξύλινος), “inanimate” (ἄψυχος), and “a dwelling place of mice” (μυῶν οἰκητήριον). 52   This is how David Frankfurter (“‘Things Unbefitting Christians’: Violence and Christianization in Fifth-Century Panopolis,” JECS 8 (2000): 273 – 95, esp. 282 – 85) convincingly interprets a fifth-century sermon by abbot Besa of Atripe. Frankfurter also highlights the scriptural premises of this idea (Jer 10:3, 8; Isa 44:9 – 20).

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eccl. 11.23).53 Such imagery draws on an Egyptian ritual attested as the “Uniting with the Solar Disk” (ẖnm ỉtn) in temples of the Ptolemaic period.54 For that ritual, divine images were symbolically recharged on select days such as the New Year’s festival by being exposed to the sunrays on the temple roof. The statue’s enlivenment would have further enhanced their ability to trigger a sociomorphic response in worshippers beguiled by their “living presence.” Rufinus is probably aware of this effect when he denounces such technical devices as mere stage tricks and props aimed at the deception of Serapis’ gullible followers. In Rufinus’ representation, if this “god” works “wonders,” they are really brought about by human ingenuity, and aimed at human dupability, in marked contrast to the divine intervention on which the followers of the vera religio can rely. Rufinus’ language polemically plays on the cult image’s anthropomorphism. The statue of Serapis is likened to an old fraud (veterator) and a lethargic doter (senex veternosus), and even the expression erroris auctor evokes a human agent responsible for delusion. The soldier attacking Serapis seems to be hitting a man’s jaw (maxillae veteratoris inlidit) like a boxer striking the decisive blow; but since he is using an axe, he is also reminiscent of a woodcutter felling a tree. Rufinus’ portrayal is complemented by less patent anthropomorphisation, which however is no less derogatory. Puter describes the worm-eaten state of the wooden image, but the word can also be employed with reference to the decay of wounded or diseased body parts and human corpses.55 And while caedere is often applied to describe the smashing of inanimate objects and the felling of trees,56 the verb is also used to designate the beating or killing of humans, the slaying of an enemy, or the destruction of a hostile army.57 Likewise, aridus is employed with reference to dry wood, but can also describe withered human limbs.58 Rufinus’ choice, then, of terms that apply to the characterisation of both inanimate objects and human beings encapsulates and reveals an ambivalent response to divine images.

53  Automata in the Serapeum: Françoise Thélamon, “Sérapis et le baiser du soleil: les ‘truquages’ du Sérapeum d’Alexandrie selon Rufin et Quodvultdeus,” in Aquileia e l’Africa, ed. Sergio Tavano, Antichità Altoadriatiche  5 (Udine: Arti grafiche friulane, 1974), 227 – 50; Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, 181 – 85, 194 – 99; Hélène Fragaki, “Automates et statues merveilleuses dans l’Alexandrie antique,” Journal des Savants (2012.1): 29 – 67, here 58 – 59. The Neoplatonic Asclepiodotus was credited with being an inventor of such mechanical devices for temples: Damascius, Vita Isidori F 209 Zintzen. 54   E. g. in the Temple of Khnum at Esna: Serge Sauneron, Esna V: les fêtes religieuses d’Esna aux derniers siècles du paganisme (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1962), 121 – 83; Christiane Zivie-Coche and Françoise Dunand, Hommes et dieux en Égypte: 3000 a. C. – 395 p. C. (Paris: Cybèle, 2006), 366 – 68. 55   OLD 1527 s. v. putris (puter) 1. 56   OLD 251 s. v. caedo 4 and 5. 57   OLD 250 – 51 s. v. caedo 1 and 3. 58   OLD 169 s. v. aridus 2a and 4.

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Precedents in Roman culture for the substitutability of body and image59 find one notable expression in the replacement of the person of the emperor by his portrait, attested throughout the imperial period.60 In the Antioch riot of 387, statues of the imperial couple were overthrown, dragged through the city and verbally abused (Sozomen, HE 7.23). Libanius mentions the cursing and stoning of imperial portraits (Or. 22.7). Eric Varner suggests that the deliberate disfigurement of portraits can be read as a surrogate attack on the person represented by the portrait; such attacks were conceptually linked to the maltreatment of corpses of capital offenders and arena victims and thus engaged concepts of infamy and punishment.61 In Theodoret (Hist. E. 5.22), the head of Serapis’ dismembered statue is paraded through the city like that of a criminal. The episode illustrates how Serapis’ toppling could be perceived as a decapitation, a public execution in effigy.62 The substitutability of image and body is not limited to divine or imperial images. Archaeological excavation in Aphrodisias has yielded a carefully assembled fifth-century portrait gallery of contemporary philosophers and intellectuals of the Hellenic past. The shield portraits and busts are linked to a grand building that the excavator tentatively interprets as a mansion with integrated facilities for higher learning; it may have belonged to an owner with Neoplatonic affinities in “a period of tense co-existence and conflict between Platonists and Christians.”63 The portrait heads display signs of deliberate breaking, defacement and beheading, which likely took place in the sixth century. The physical violence 59  Stewart, Statues in Roman Society, esp. 298; see also Peter Stewart, “The Destruction of Statues in Late Antiquity,” in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed. Richard Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 159 – 89. 60   For that analogy and the emperor’s ubiquitous presence in the provinces in the form of his image, see Peter Stewart, “The Image of the Roman Emperor,” in Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects, ed. Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 243 – 58. 61   Eric R. Varner, “Punishment after Death: Mutilation of Images and Corpse Abuse in Ancient Rome,” Mortality 6.1 (2001): 45 – 64; Eric R. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae and Roman Imperial Portraiture, Monumenta Graeca et Romana 10 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 3 – 6 and passim; evidence from Egypt: Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods, 180 – 82; more recent examples of punishment in effigy (Bildstrafen): Bredekamp, Der Bildakt, 198 – 205. 62   Beheading of (mostly imperial) statues: Eric R. Varner, “Execution in Effigy: Severed Heads and Decapitated Statues in Imperial Rome,” in Roman Bodies: Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Andrew Hopkins and Maria Wyke (Rome: British School at Rome, 2005), 67 – 82, esp. 73 – 77; parading of heads in late antiquity: Ralph W. Mathisen, “Beasts, Burning, and Beheading: Show Executions in Late Antiquity,” in Rules and Violence: On the Cultural History of Collective Violence from Late Antiquity to the Confessional Age. Regeln und Gewalt: Zur Kulturgeschichte der kollektiven Gewalt von der Spätantike bis zum konfessionellen Zeitalter, ed. Cora Dietl and Titus Knäpper (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 1 – 29, here 19 – 28. 63   Roland R. R. Smith, “Late Roman Philosopher Portraits from Aphrodisias,” JRS 80 (1990): 127 – 55, 177 (quote: 155). Treatment of statues in late antique Aphrodisias: Roland R. R. Smith, “Aphrodisias,” in The Last Statues of Antiquity, ed. Roland R. R. Smith and Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 145 – 59.

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against these likenesses was provoked by the intellectual and cultural values they embody, and it was predicated upon the substitutability of image and human. The Trunk of Serapis and the “Death” of Traditional Religion The qualification of Serapis as a “lethargic doter” refers to his iconography, which draws on those of Zeus, Asclepius and Hades, deities who were usually represented as bearded men of mature age.64 I argue that, true to the triumphalist tendency of his Church History, Rufinus uses metaphor as a polemical device to highlight the decline of the traditional cults in general, their vanished vitality and potency, and their proximity to death and decay. Just like the cult image itself, the belief system to which it pertains has already become food for the worms – or so Rufinus gleefully implies: it does not take much to topple Serapis. The image of the torso (truncus), a headless and limbless body, supports this interpretation, ripe as it is with associations of former greatness having come to a miserable and inglorious end. King Priam’s mutilated corpse on the shore near Troy, after the sack of the city (Vergil, Aen. 2.554 – 58), may well have come to the minds of Rufinus’ readers. In Vergil, the demise of Troy’s last king parallels the end of his city; Troy burning and its ruined citadel are his last sight, as it were. Like a mean criminal, Priam is denied a proper burial; his desecrated corpse lies discarded on the beach. In Priam’s case, as in Serapis’, the headless torso, although still enormous (ingens . . . truncus), has lost its former identity: it has become a “body without a name” (sine nomine corpus). Like English “trunk,” Latin truncus means both “torso” and “tree trunk”.65 In the case of Serapis, his statue, missing its head, arms, and legs, is in the end reduced to what it once was – a tree trunk, the reference to the statue’s materiality coming full circle. Scholars think that Lucan (Bell. Civ. 1.685 – 86) intertextually engages with Vergil (who may himself engage with the historiographical tradition on Pompey’s death) when he describes Pompey’s corpse as a disfigured trunk (deformis truncus) lying on the riversands (fluminea harena) by the Nile.66 As Rufinus explored the motif of Serapis’ truncus in the “arena” of the amphitheatre, his informed readers, I hold, would likewise have appreciated the literary tradition in which 64

  A second-century statue in sitting position from Theadelphia / Fayum exemplifies Serapis’ characteristic iconography and is a rare instance of a surviving wooden image of the god: Alexandria, Graeco-Roman Museum 23352; Gisèle Clerc and Jean Leclant, “Sarapis,” LIMC 7 (1994): 666 – 92, here 669 no. 8b pl. 504. 65   OLD 1982 s. v. truncus (2) 1, 2. 66   Emanuele Narducci, “Il tronco di Pompeo (Troia e Roma nella Pharsalia),” Maia 25 (1973): 317 – 25; Nicholas M. Horsfall, Virgil, Aeneid 2: A Commentary, Mnemosyne Supplement 299 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 417 – 23; Sergio Casali, ed., Virgilio, Eneide 2: Introduzione, traduzione e commento, Syllabus 1 (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2017), 265 – 67. Pompey’s death on the Nile: Eleni Manolaraki, Noscendi Nilum Cupido: Imagining Egypt from Lucan to Philostratus, Trends in Classics, Supplementary Volume 18 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 45 – 58.

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he placed himself.67 Dependency is established as much by use of the same motif as by choice of words. Rufinus’ text creates an intertextual connection between the mythical, the epic, and the historical, its author cognisant of the trunk as a literary symbol which highlights, just as it does in the literary tradition on which he draws, civic crisis and, in the context of Serapis’ fall, religious change. Rufinus chooses a graphic image through which he condenses his message about the fall of Serapis and, indeed, of traditional religion as a turning point in (religious) history. Rufinus’ Re-Reading of Serapis’ Iconography Even allowing for some rhetorical exaggeration, Rufinus refers to the cult statue’s material characteristics. While there is a debate as to whether the Ptolemaic cult image continued unchanged into the Roman imperial phase of the sanctuary,68 scholars agree that the Ptolemaic statue of Serapis was conceived in Hellenic style and corresponded to the type with kalathos / modius, sceptre, and Cerberus that is known from numerous smaller-scale representations.69 67   Pompey’s beheaded truncus in ancient historiography and Priam’s trunk in other Latin authors: Franco Caviglia, “Priamo (1),” Enciclopedia Virgiliana 4 (1988): 264 – 68, here 267. Vergil’s Aeneid as one of Rufinus’ literary models: Fuhrer, “Rufins Historia ecclesiastica,” 68 with n. 28; quotations from the Aeneid in Rufinus: Pierre Courcelle, Lecteurs païens et lecteurs chrétiens de l’Énéide 1: les témoignages littéraires, Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres n. s. 4 (Paris: De Boccard, 1984), 83, 112, 163, and 687. Vergil was taught to Christian students by Jerome in Bethlehem: Rufinus, Apol. Hier. 2.11, and was read by the Latin Fathers: Harald Hagendahl, Latin Fathers and the Classics: A Study on the Apologists, Jerome and Other Christian Writers, Göteborgs universitets årsskrift 64.2, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 6 (Göteborg: Elanders, 1958), 413 – 15, 424; Stefan Freund, Vergil im frühen Christentum: Untersuchungen zu den Vergilzitaten bei Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Novatian, Cyprian und Arnobius, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums N. F. 1, 16 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003). – Priam’s trunk is a motif more common in literature than in the visual arts, judging by its absence from the scenes of his death assembled by Jennifer Neils, “Priamos,” LIMC 7 (1994): 507 – 22, here 516 – 20 nos. 87 – 139, pls. 405 – 12. 68   Building history of the Alexandrian Serapeum: Sabottka, Das Serapeum in Alexandria; McKenzie, Gibson, and Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria”. According to the latter, 98 – 99, the Alexandrian Serapeum underwent rebuilding between 181 and 217; cf. Judith S. McKenzie, “The Serapeum of Alexandria: Its Destruction and Reconstruction” JRA 22 (2009): 772 – 82, here 779 and already Susan Handler, “Architecture on the Roman Coins of Alexandria,” AJA 75 (1971): 57 – 74, here 65, 68. 69   Iconography of Alexandrian Serapis: Wilhelm Hornbostel, Sarapis: Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte, den Erscheinungsformen und Wandlungen der Gestalt eines Gottes, Études préliminaires aux Religions Orientales dans l’Empire romain 32 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), esp. 33 – 130; Clerc and Leclant, “Sarapis,” 666, 668 – 70 nos. 1 – 19, 689 – 90; Stefan Schmidt, “Sarapis: Ein neuer Gott für die Griechen in Ägypten,” in Ägypten, Griechenland, Rom: Abwehr und Berührung, ed. Herbert Beck, Peter C. Bol and Maraike Bückling (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2005), 291 – 304. Smallscale representations of the Serapeum and its statue: Sabottka, Das Serapeum in Alexandria, 299 – 310; Hélène Fragaki, Images antiques d’Alexandrie, Ier s. av. J.‑C.–VIIIe s. apr. J.‑C., Études alexandrines 20 (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2011), 9 – 15, 26, 62 – 63, 85.

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Rufinus draws on and reinterprets the statue’s materiality in various ways. I highlight three features. First, the statue’s color may have been unusual. Athenodorus son of Sandon, a Stoic scholar from Tarsus, describes the materials of Serapis’ image as colored with blue (κυανῷ), which rendered the complexion of the image (τὸ χρῶμα τοῦ ἀγάλματος) fairly dark (μελάντερον).70 The dark hue has been interpreted by reference to traditional iconography: Egyptian representations of Osiris frequently show the god with his skin tinted a greenish or dark shade.71 Basalt busts of Serapis may imitate this trait.72 An illustration in the “Alexandrian World Chronicle,”73 written in the sixth century but drawing on a fifth-century source,74 depicts Serapis in his temple with a noticeably dark complexion,75 in contrast to the much lighter-colored face of Theophilus standing atop the architecture. While age may have darkened the colors of the papyrus drawing, we must not exclude the possibility that the Roman-period statue of Alexandrian Serapis featured a dark complexion. It is conceivable that Rufinus either misunderstood or distorted this trait when he described the deity as “smoke-blackened” (fumosum genium), although smoke from lamps may well have intensified the statue’s already dark hue. Second, Rufinus describes a statue of colossal dimensions. Judith McKenzie has reconstructed a width of nine metres for the interior of the Roman-period naos of the Serapeum, while the column height was nearly eleven meters.76 Rufinus says that the hands of the statue grazed the walls of the naos. Small-scale renderings, notably the drawing in the “Alexandrian World Chronicle,” visualise the statue’s monumental dimensions by showing the cult image of Serapis narrowly encased in his naos. Such proportions are due, at least in part, to space constraints on the image carrier, but if the actual naos closely framed the monumental statue,77 this would have optically intensified both the statue’s dimen70

  FGH III C 746 F 4 ap. Clem. Al. Protr. 4.48.4 – 6.   Cf. also Plutarch, Is. Os. 359E (μελάγχρουν τὸν Ὄσιριν), 364B. 72   Jean Charbonneaux, “Bryaxis et le Sarapis d’Alexandrie,” Monuments et Mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot 52.2 (1961): 15 – 26, here 16. 73   “Alexandrian World Chronicle,” Moscow, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, 310 / 8, Adolf Bauer and Josef Strzygowski, “Eine alexandrinische Weltchronik,” Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften Wien, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 51.2 (1905): 1 – 204. Richard W. Burgess and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, “The ‘Alexandrian World Chronicle’,”; Bruno Bleckmann and Jonathan Gross, “(G 4) Alexandrinische Weltchronik,” in Consularia Constantinopolitana und verwandte Quellen: Consularia Constantinopolitana, Fastenquelle des Sokrates, Berliner Chronik, Alexandrische Weltchronik, ed. Maria Becker, Bruno Bleckmann, Jonathan Gross and Mehran A. Nickbakht, Kleine und fragmentarische Historiker der Spätantike (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2016), 285 – 330. 74   Palaeographical date: Burgess and Dijkstra, “The ‘Alexandrian World Chronicle’,” 63 – 66; date of the “Grundquelle”: Bleckmann and Gross, “Alexandrinische Weltchronik,” esp. 299 – 303. 75   Also noted by Judith McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 B. C. to A. D. 700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 246. 76   McKenzie, Gibson and Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria,” 92, 108. 77  Hornbostel, Sarapis, 105 – 06, followed by Sabottka, Das Serapeum in Alexandria, 175, suggests that the Roman-period naos surrounded the cult statue narrowly, like a tabernacle. 71

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sions and the awe-inspiring impression it made on the viewer, an effect palpable in Rufinus’ account.78 Third, Rufinus seems to describe a composite statue. He notes diverse metals and wood. Theodoret (Hist. E. 5.22) also mentions wood as a material for the statue. It is therefore reasonable to contend that Serapis’ image consisted of a wooden core and further materials.79 The composite technique would have heightened the statue’s lifelike impact, intensifying its potential to trigger responses based on its anthropomorphic features. Moreover, Alexandria was home to an important ivory-carving industry.80 Remnants of a Roman-period gold and ivory statue, tentatively identified as Isis or Serapis and intentionally destroyed and burnt, have been unearthed in a fifth-century destruction layer west of Kom el-Dikka.81 A sandaled foot in New York has been ascribed to a monumental Roman-period acrolith of a seated Serapis, possibly of Alexandrian craftsmanship.82 It is thus plausible to imagine Serapis’ truncus in Rufinus to have been the wooden core of an acrolith, stripped of its cladding made from more valuable materials. Rufinus, then, achieves something remarkable: he describes the process of disassembling a composite statue where parts made from different materials are wrested from its wooden core, but he artfully reframes this mechanical process as the dismemberment of a human being. It is this rhetorical device that establishes a valid comparison with the Hypatia narrative. Euhemerism, the Tombs of the Gods, and the Tomb of Apis Rufinus’ metaphor of Serapis as an old man who approaches, and indeed suffers, death plays with marked irony on the anthropomorphic shape of traditional deities, an example of the polemical Christian instrumentalisation of euhemeristic theories.83 Rufinus presents the divergent (and hence, in his view, unre78

 Theodoret, Hist. E. 5.22 likewise emphasises the statue’s formidable size.  Hornbostel, Sarapis, 101 – 02; Marianne Bergmann, “Sarapis im 3. Jh. v. Chr.,” in Alexandreia und das ptolemäische Ägypten: Kulturbegegnungen in hellenistischer Zeit, ed. Gregor Weber (Berlin: Verlag Antike, 2010), 109 – 35, here 114. 80  Elżbieta Rodziewicz, Bone and Ivory Carvings from Alexandria: French Excavations 1992 – 2004, Études alexandrines  12 (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2007); Elżbieta Rodziewicz, Ivory and Bone Sculpture in Ancient Alexandria, Antiquités alexandrines 2 (Alex­andria: Centre d’Études alexandrines, 2016). 81  Elżbieta Rodziewicz, “Remarks on a Chryselephantine Statue from Alexandria,” in Roma e l’Egitto nell’antichità classica: atti del I Congresso Internazionale Italo-Egiziano, Cairo, 6 – 9 febbraio 1989 (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992), 317 – 28; Kenneth D. S. Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132 – 33 no. 51; Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods, 128 – 29, 182; Rodziewicz, Ivory and Bone Sculpture, 92 – 101 (with figs.). 82   Metropolitan Museum of Art 25.78.43; Lapatin, Chryselephantine Statuary, 130 – 32 no.  47, figs.  240 – 42. 83   Euhemeristic arguments in Patristic literature: Klaus Thraede, “Euhemerismus,” RAC 6 (1966), 877 – 90, here 883 – 89; Marek Winiarczyk, The “Sacred History” of Euhemerus of Messene, 79

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liable) traditions about the origin of Serapis’ cult. In one of these narratives, Serapis is connected with a “head of household or king” (patrem familias seu regem: Hist. eccl. 11.23) called Apis, a mortal who received post-mortem divine honours in Egyptian Memphis as a benefactor to his fellow citizens. This is a common euhemeristic motif and a reference to the Memphite background of Serapis’ cult.84 In the same chapter Rufinus relates a tradition that derives the name Serapis from σορός (coffin) and explains it as the tomb (sepulchrum) of Apis. Augustine traces the same etymology to Varro;85 Rufinus selects it from among various ancient derivations of Serapis’ name86 because it agrees with his euhemeristic argument. In the same vein Rufinus refers to Serapis’ sanctuary as Serapis sepulchrum, “the tomb of Serapis” (Hist. eccl. 11.27) and characterises the end of his cult as the “death of Serapis, who had never been alive” (post occasum Serapis, qui numquam vixerat: 11.28). Just as occasus evokes both the “death” of the god and the “fall” of his cult image, the use of busta (“funeral pyres,” “tombs”: 11.27 – 28) for the sanctuaries of traditional deities all over Egypt evokes the temple as a “tomb” and an “incineration site” (of cult images). Ultimate proof of the gods’ original mortality, the identification of their tombs in concrete geographical locations was a defining feature in euhemeristic divine biography; Rufinus engages with the euhemeristic topos of mortal gods interred87 to add venom to his polemics and vigor to his remedium. Allegations of corpse veneration and derision of cult sites as tombs were mutually exchanged between Christians and followers of the traditional Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 312 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), esp. 148 – 54; Nickolas P. Roubekas, An Ancient Theory of Religion: Euhemerism from Antiquity to the Present (London: Routledge, 2017), 115 – 37. Euhemeristic topoi in Rufinus: Thélamon, Païens et chrétiens au IVe siècle, 179 – 81, who however does not investigate how this particular argument colors Rufinus’ imagery in his description of Serapis’ fall. 84   Euergetism as a euhemeristic motif: Winiarczyk, The “Sacred History” of Euhemerus of Messene, 41 – 46. For Egyptian gods as primeval kings in Greek historiography: ibid., 65 – 66. Osiris / Dionysus as a travelling culture bearer and the recipient of posthumous cult in Diodorus Siculus Book 1 (1.11, 13 – 23, 25 – 27, 88): ibid., 134 – 36. 85   Ancient derivations of Serapis’ name: Varro, De gente populi Romani 1 F 14 Fraccaro ap. Aug., Civ. 18.5; Alessandra Rolle, Dall’Oriente a Roma: Cibele, Iside e Serapide nell’opera di Varrone, Testi e studi di cultura classica 65 (Pisa: ETS, 2017), 193 – 208, esp. 198 – 203. The etymological derivation relies on assonance, but it is correct in acknowledging that the name Serapis is originally a compound. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1.21 attributes this etymology to Nymphodorus of Amphipolis (third cent. BCE). Rufinus’ works were read by Augustine: Antoon A. R. Bastiaensen, “Augustin et ses prédécesseurs latins chrétiens,” in Augustiniana traiectina: communications présentées au Colloque international d’Utrecht, ed. Jan den Boeft and Johannes van Oort (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1987), 25 – 57, here 39. 86   Discussed by Plutarch, Is. Os. 362C – D. Cyril of Alexandria, Adv. Iul. 1.16, ed. Riedweg and Kinzig, 33 – 34, adds a variation on this etymology and highlights Serapis’ alleged human origin and his connection with “death and interment” (θάνατος . . . καὶ ταφή). 87   For the trope, see Winiarczyk, The “Sacred History” of Euhemerus of Messene, 33 – 41, 151 and n. 206 – 07, and 167 – 81 (useful list of ancient sources).

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gods,88 but the effect of such an insult on Hellenic sensibilities is illustrated by Ammianus Marcellinus, who reports that the patriarch George of Cappadocia publicly referred to an Alexandrian temple as a tomb that needed to be torn down. “On hearing this,” Ammianus writes, “many were as if thunderstruck.”89 Ammianus interprets this incident as the last straw that ultimately led to George’s assassination; the topic was certainly a charged one. The pseudo-Clementine Recognitiones, of which Rufinus penned a Latin translation, present a catalogue of divine tombs (10.24 – 25), only to dismiss the worship of dead people (homines defuncti, that is, the traditional gods) as foolishness (a stultis hominibus ut dii adorantur). Worse, these so-called gods were not only mere mortals, but mortals of the worst sort – criminals who had been punished for their wrongdoings (homines puniti pro sceleribus).90 This argument negates the euhemeristic motif of the human benefactor who merits posthumous divine honours. The argument also presents a combination of ideas some of which are already part of Xenophanes of Colophon’s criticism of popular conceptions about the traditional gods (F 21 B10 – 12, 14 Diels-Kranz = D8 – 10, 12 Laks-Most). Specifically, it combines the euhemeristic idea that the gods were originally men with Xenophanes’ critique that the gods in myth and poetry resemble humans not only in their form but also in immoral and even unlawful behaviour, their “lawless deeds” (ἀθεμίστια ἔργα). Like the allegation of corpse veneration, the disparagement of the divine recipients of cult as criminals was an accusation deployed against one another by followers of traditional religion and Christians.91 I argue that this sharpened form of euhemeristic invective, which derides traditional gods as immoral dead men, also underlies Rufinus’ depiction of Serapis’ fall. Scholars have remarked that the demolition of the god’s image resembles 88

  Examples: Timothy D. Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 85 – 86. 89  22.11.7: quam diu, inquit, sepulchrum hoc stabit? quo audito velut fulmine multi perculsi . . . Cf. Jan W. den Boeft, Jan Willem Drijvers, Daniël den Hengst and Hans C. Teitler, eds., Philological and Historical Commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus XXII (Groningen: Forsten, 1995), 205 – 06; Amidon, Rufinus of Aquileia, 465. 90   For this ancient argument, see Winiarczyk, The “Sacred History” of Euhemerus of Messene, 123 – 24, 150 – 51 (‘negative Euhemerism’). Kenneth K. Ruthven, Myth, The Critical Idiom 31 (London: Methuen, 1976), 6 and Roubekas, An Ancient Theory of Religion, 121, credit the term “euhemerismus inversus,” a modern designation for this argument (the Latin guise is deceptive), to Kees W. Bolle, “In Defense of Euhemerus,” in Myth and Law Among the Indo-Europeans, ed. Jaan Puhvel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 19 – 38, here 23. Cf. also Kees W. Bolle, Religion among People: Essays on Religions and Politics (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017), 35 – 56, esp. 41 – 44. However, the term can be traced to Jacobus W. Schippers (De ontwikkeling der Euhemeristische godencritiek in de Christelijke Latijnse literatuur. Ph. D. Thesis University of Utrecht [Groningen: Wolters, 1952], passim and 112 – 13 for a table of primary attestations), who finds this type of invective first employed by Athenagoras and Tertullian. 91   Cf. Eunapius, VS 6.11.8 – 10, ed. Giangrande, 39 – 40 = 6.114 – 16, ed. Goulet, 41 about the cult of martyrs at Canopus.

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the punishment of a criminal.92 I hold that this similarity can be explained, in the context of the cult image’s destruction, as a euhemeristic motif. This derogatory concept of the deities of the opposite side as criminals is expressed through a violent response to divine imagery that is analogous to the punishment of humans. It is hardly unique to Alexandria or late antiquity: Writing about a fourteenth-century Turkic ruler over the Sultanate of Delhi, Flood remarks that “the Hindu icons destroyed as part of Firuz Shah Tughluq’s reassertion of orthodoxy were burned in a place otherwise reserved for public executions and the punishment of criminals.”93 For Rufinus (or for his likely source, Sophronius, originator of a similarly poignant wording if we accept Annick Martin’s suggestion)94 the demolition of Serapis’ Alexandrian image “was the end of the empty superstition and the ancient delusion of Serapis.” With his decision to accord the role of protagonist to an anonymous soldier, Rufinus decentres the role of bishop Theophilus in the demolition of the image. This is not out of hostility towards the Alexandrian bishop, but because of his larger scheme to foreground the role of emperor Theodosius as God’s instrument operant in history. Rufinus thereby sets himself apart from a literary tradition that extols Theophilus’ agency. Theodoret, for instance, like John of Nikiu, singles out Theophilus as the man who “set the city of Alexander free from the idololatrous deceit” (οὗτος τὴν Ἀλεξάνδρου πόλιν τῆς εἰδωλικῆς ἠλευθέρωσε πλάνης: Hist. E. 5.22);95 Theophilus “razed the idols’ precincts to the ground” (ἐκ βάθρων ἀνέσπασε τὰ τῶν εἰδώλων τεμένη) and debunked the priests’ stage trickery. Consequently, Theodoret’s Theophilus takes centre stage in the demolition of Serapis’ statue. Singularly unfazed by the image’s size and the predictions of doom meant to uphold its aura of integrity, it is he who coolly orders a man with an axe to strike. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Theophilus is said to have made himself master of the temple of Alexandrian Serapis at a propitious moment:96 There was a charioteer in Alexandria, who was the son of a mother called Mary. This man fell when a horse race was nearing its end. Immediately rising again, he overtook the man who had overthrown him and carried off the victory. And the multitude started shouting: “The Son of Mary fell and arose and prevailed.” While they were still shouting 92

  E. g. Christopher J. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 89; Watts, Riot in Alexandria, 194 – 95. 93   Flood, “Between Cult and Culture,” 648. 94   Martin, “Sarapis et les chrétiens d’Alexandrie,” 47. 95   Parallels for εἰδωλικὴ πλάνη in Patristic literature: PGL 408 s. v. εἰδωλικός 2. 96   Apophthegmata Patrum (alph.), Epiphanius 2 (PG 65:164): Ὁ αὐτὸς διηγήσατο, ὅτι ἦν τις ἡνίοχος κατὰ τὴν Ἀλεξανδρέων, ὃς ἦν μητρὸς Μαρίας υἱός. Οὗτος ἱππικοῦ ἐπιτελουμένου κατ­ έπεσεν· εἶτα ἀναστὰς παρῆλθε τὸν καταβεβληκότα, καὶ ἐνίκησε. Καὶ τὸ πλῆθος ἀνεβόησεν· Ὁ Υἱὸς Μαρίας πέπτωκε καὶ ἐγήγερται καὶ ἐνίκησε. Ταύτης ἔτι τῆς φωνῆς λεγομένης, ἐνέπεσεν ἡ περὶ τοῦ ἱεροῦ τοῦ Σεράπιδος φήμη τῷ πλήθει, ὅτι ὁ μέγας Θεόφιλος ἀνελθὼν, τὸ τοῦ Σεράπιδος κατέστρεψεν εἴδωλον, καὶ τοῦ ναοῦ γέγονεν ἐγκρατής.

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these words, there arose among the multitude the rumour about the sanctuary of Serapis that the great Theophilus had gone up there, had overthrown the idol of Serapis, and had brought the temple under his control.

The last phrase of this passage (καὶ τοῦ ναοῦ γέγονεν ἐγκρατής) seems to capture the very gesture visualised in the “Alexandrian World Chronicle”’s drawing of Theophilus triumphant; both the Apophthegmata and the drawing illustrate contemporary perceptions of the local bishop’s eminent role in pulling the strings in the attacks on temples and images. Yet the snapshot in the Apophthegmata depicts Theophilus’ triumph as a repetition of the triumph of Christ, the “son of Mary.” The charioteer’s earthly victory is presented as a new resurrection and hailed by a crowd of believers with their rallying cry. The downfall of Serapis thus provides an inverted image of the resurrection of Christ and, as in Rufinus, becomes an instance of Christian salvation.

The Substitutability of Body and Image in Socrates and Rufinus Summing up, I highlight four features in Socrates and Rufinus that illustrate the substitutability of body and image: first, the public setting of each event; second, dismemberment limb by limb; third, destruction by fire; and fourth, stoning, which, although not attested in the case of Serapis’ destruction, is found elsewhere in attacks against sacred images and objects. Staging Death: Spectacularisation In his discussion of Alexandrian Serapis, Hahn emphasises the careful orchestration of the destruction of divine images as public events.97 Rufinus highlights this aspect when he refers to a personified devotee (cultrix) Alexandria as the main audience for the destruction of Serapis’ statue and evokes the image of the city’s entire Hellenic population witnessing the spectacle. In Socrates, Hypatia is dragged through Alexandria’s streets and killed in a public location, perhaps the former Roman Forum, near the Great Church in the Caesareum.98 Both Socrates and Rufinus name as the location of the dismemberment a sanctuary or, in the case of the Great Church, a former sacred site of traditional religion. Both the sanctuary of Serapis and the Caesareum were focal points in the religious topography of pre-Christian Alexandria. The public route along which Hypatia’s body is dragged in Socrates is paralleled in Rufinus by the var97   Johannes Hahn, “Public Rituals of Depaganization in Late Antiquity,” in Religious Practices and Christianization of the Late Antique City (4th – 7 th Cent.), ed. Aude Busine, RGRW 182 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 115 – 40, here 125 – 28. 98   For this reconstruction, see Appendix B.5, this volume.

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ious locales in which the different parts of Serapis’ image are cremated (which permits all of Alexandria to witness the spectacle). In both texts, moreover, the events take place in the presence (and in Rufinus, with the complicity) of the population, and both Socrates and Rufinus present them as theatre-like spectacles. The burning of Serapis’ trunk in Alexandria’s amphitheatre, as it is depicted in Rufinus, acquires traits of a public execution in the arena. In present-day conflicts, too, it is common for orchestrated executions to take place in carefully chosen settings. Palmyra’s Roman amphitheatre provided the sad example of a backdrop for mass execution in May 2015. The execution, of which a video was circulated, served as a prelude to the destruction of ancient monuments by the “Islamic State.”99 Dismemberment There exists a literal correspondence between μεληδόν in Socrates (rendered as membratim in Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ Latin translation) and membratim in Rufinus. Dismemberment is an extreme act of violence. There are associations of animal behaviour, predator attack and beastly ravage, for which there exist several mythical paradigms. Tellingly, while Damascius does not mention that Hypatia was torn apart, he compares her attackers to a pack of wild animals.100 Ripping someone apart is the very counter-image of civilised behaviour and social order. Cultic and mythical associations link disarticulation to Dionysiac contexts where raging Maenads engage in the rending (σπαραγμός) of wild animals – or of humans, as in the myths of Pentheus and Orpheus –, which were re-enacted in the theatre,101 are reflected in the visual arts and became a topic of philosophical speculation and a target of Christian invective.102 A common  99   Roman show executions: Kathleen M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” JRS 80 (1990): 44 – 73; Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1998); late antiquity: Ralph W. Mathisen, “Beasts, Burning, and Beheading.” Palmyra’s Roman amphitheatre as an “arena of death” (“Todesbühne”): Bredekamp, Das Beispiel Palmyra, 2 – 3. 100   Vita Isidori F *102,34 Zintzen: πολλοὶ ἀθρόοι θηριώδεις ἄνθρωποι, “many men in one, beast-like.” Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia 16 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 279 – 80, 291 – 92 refers the expression θηριώδης to Platonic anthropology. 101   Sparagmos in Euripides: Benjamin Weaver, “Euripides’ Bacchae and Classical Typologies of Pentheus’ Sparagmos, 510 – 406 BC,” BICS 52 (2009): 15 – 43. 102  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 208, 215 – 16 highlights the motif ’s relation to Neoplatonic doctrines about the world-soul. Dionysiac sparagmos in Christian authors: Francesco Massa, Tra la vigna e la croce: Dioniso nei discorsi letterari e figurativi cristiani (II – IV s.), Potsdamer Altertumswissenschaftliche Beiträge 47 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014), 55 – 56, 70, 105, 168, 174 – 75; myth of Orpheus in late antiquity: Laurence Vieillefon, La figure d’Orphée dans l’antiquité tardive: les mutations d’un mythe, du héros païen au chantre chrétien (Paris: De Boccard, 2003).

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theme underlies these myths in which the protagonists provoke a god’s wrath, as a result of which they become entangled in a chain of events leading to dismemberment as punishment for hubris. The victim’s utter helplessness when facing a much greater power is a constant feature in these myths. Hypatia’s powerlessness informs Socrates’ sympathetic depiction of her death, while Rufinus plays with the motif of Serapis’ senile weakness during the statue’s dismemberment and its aftermath. The use of the verb διασπᾶν in the narratives of Hypatia’s death by Socrates, Philostorgius, and Hesychius constitutes an explicit terminological link to the motif of σπαραγμός,103 while Rufinus meticulously chronicles every single stage in the statue’s dismembering. In an Alexandrian context, however, we should not exclude a motif prevalent in traditional Egyptian religion, namely the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Seth. The districts, or nomes, of Upper and Lower Egypt were interpreted as parts of Osiris’ body.104 In third- and fourth-century Graeco-Egyptian ritual texts, practitioners threaten to scatter Osiris’ limbs so that they may reverse cosmic order and bring about chaos, if the divine agent addressed in the ritual is not going to do their bidding.105 The ritual motif of the threat “to scatter Osiris’ limbs to Seth / Typhon” (τὰ μέλη τοῦ Ὀσίριδος διασκεδάσειν τῷ Τυφῶνι) also entered Neoplatonic debate and via the latter found its way into Patristic literature.106 I therefore hold it likely that many of Socrates’ readers would have been able to recognise dismemberment not only as a Dionysiac but also as an Osirian motif. Serapis is the Greek name of the osirified Apis, the animal manifestation of the Memphite god Ptah. The theology of Serapis absorbed elements of traditional Osirian religion.107 Rufinus’ readers were probably cognisant of the close connection between these deities and recognised the disarticulation of Serapis as an Osirian motif. That according to the myth Osiris’ body parts were found and mended by his sister-spouse Isis is not an argument against this interpretation. Single mythemes 103

  See Appendix B.8, this volume.   Horst Beinlich, Die “Osirisreliquien”: Zum Motiv der Körperzergliederung in der altägyptischen Religion, ÄgAbh 42 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984); Joachim Friedrich Quack, “Resting in Pieces and Integrating the Oikoumene: On the Mental Expansion of the Religious Landscape by Means of the Body Parts of Osiris,” in Entangled Worlds: Religious Confluences between East and West in the Roman Empire. The Cults of Isis, Mithras, and Jupiter Dolichenus, ed. Svenja Nagel, Joachim Friedrich Quack and Christian Witschel, Orientalische Religionen in der Antike 22 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 244 – 73. 105  Cf. PGM 57.1 – 37 for an implied threat to scatter Osiris’ limbs. 106  Porphyry, Aneb. F 64 Saffrey – Segonds ap. Eus. Praep. ev. 5.10.3 – 5; Iamblichus, Myst. 6.5. 107   Joachim Friedrich Quack and Bjørn Paarmann, “Sarapis: ein Gott zwischen griechischer und ägyptischer Religion,” in Aneignung und Abgrenzung: Wechselnde Perspektiven auf die Antithese von “Ost” und “West” in der griechischen Antike, ed. Nicolas Zenzen, Tonio Hölscher and Kai Trampedach, Oikumene 10 (Heidelberg: Verlag Antike, 2013), 229 – 91; Mark Smith, Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 356 – 420. 104

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can be isolated from a narrative complex if that seems desirable; the creation of mythical allusion does not demand faithful attachment to the expected outcome of a story. On the contrary, a surprise ending could endow a familiar narrative with fresh enjoyment. According to Martial, when another myth involving laceration, the Orpheus myth, was re-enacted in the arena, the damnatus ad bestias in the guise of “Orpheus” was lacerated by bears rather than by Maenads, although it is the latter whom an audience familiar with the myth would have had in mind. Besides, according to the mythical script the bears should have been expected to listen gratefully to Orpheus’ music. As Martial wrily comments on his version of the myth, “only this thing happened contrary to the story.”108 While I do not wish to suggest that either Hypatia’s killers or those destroying Serapis’ statue set about their respective endeavours with the plan to re-enact Osirian dismemberment, I think it likely that the literary scenes narrated by Socrates and Rufinus would have conjured up associations of Osirian myth in at least some readers. Harich-Schwarzbauer remarks that the late antique texts concerning Hypatia do not explicitly relate her to Egyptosophy, suggesting Hypatia’s “distance from Egypt.”109 Still, there unquestionably were late antique readers of Socrates who must have been familiar with Egyptian tradition and would have brought their own associations to his Church History. The same holds true for Rufinus’ readers. Destruction by Fire In Socrates, Hypatia’s corpse is destroyed by fire, a post-mortem maltreatment of her body that effects yet another form of public humiliation. That the burning also implies a denial of burial is an aspect underemphasised by scholarship: Hypatia’s human remains are discarded and there are no funerary rites, no proper burial, and no permanent memorial. This denial of burial completes the process of memory sanction applied to her personhood.110 In Rufinus, the burning of Serapis’ trunk in the Alexandrian amphitheatre likewise evokes memory sanction, this time against the god and, by extension, his cult and traditional religion more generally. Denial of burial is brought into play by the theme of the truncus, with its intertextual intimations of Priam’s ignoble death and mutilation, as well as the discarding of the king’s corpse into the sea. While I do not 108

 Martial, Liber Spectaculorum 24.8: haec tantum res est facta παρ᾽ ἱστορίαν.   Harich – Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, 351: “Ägyptenferne.” 110   Denial of burial as legal penalty and memory sanction in Democratic Athens: Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 216 – 18; in Roman culture: Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 131 – 33 and passim; Stewart, Statues in Roman Society, 276; Harriet I. Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 70, 299 n. 9 – 10. 109

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wish to foreground in Hypatia’s case the motif of the outcast,111 with Serapis there is the added dimension of the god’s elimination as if it were the execution of a criminal. I hold this to be the literary representation of what I would term a performative version of “negative Euhemerism,” with the inherent charge that the traditional gods were criminals. It follows that Euhemerism is not only a literary, but also a performable motif. The Stoning of Statues As I argue elsewhere in this volume, the Hypatia of Socrates’ account is stoned to death.112 While no ancient narrative mentions stoning in relation to Alexandrian Serapis, the throwing of stones is indeed attested in attacks on sacred objects and statues; it is thus a trait in support of the substitutability of body and image. A salient example of the stoning of a divine statue is set in early fifth-century Terenouthis in the Egyptian Delta and concerns a stone image (ἄγαλμα λίθινον, likely a cult image) within a temple, by then defunct.113 Every morning, the narrative goes, the monk Anoub “stoned the statue’s face” (ἐλιθοβόλει τὸ πρόσωπον τοῦ ἀγάλματος), but every night “he said to it ‘Forgive me’” (ἔλεγεν αὐτῷ·Συγχώρησόν μοι). Such vacillation apparently required some rationalisation: the unmoved statue, Anoub lectures a baffled fellow monk who has caught him off-guard, is supposed to exemplify the appropriate mental attitude to monastic life. The perception of equivalence between image and human body is triggered by the image’s anthropomorphic form and relies on the social agents’ momentary inability, or unwillingness, to make and uphold a clear distinction between signified and signifier. For David Freedberg, it is this blurring of signified and signifier that triggers sociomorphic responses toward images, including their attack.114 For Anna Leone, the reason for such blurring is that “early Christians grew up in a pagan culture that influenced their perceptions, actions, and even dreams . . . In this process, statues of gods are equated with the gods themselves.”115 Anoub’s treatment of the divine statue in the above episode illustrates how deference to and the attack on an image are opposite poles on a continuum: 111

  See Appendix B.6, this volume.   See Appendix B.9b, this volume. 113   Apophthegmata Patrum (alph.), Anoub  1 (PG 65:129); on this text, David Brakke, “From Temple to Cell, from Gods to Demons: Pagan Temples in the Monastic Topography of Fourth-Century Egypt,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel and Ulrich Gotter, RGRW 163 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 91 – 112, here 100 – 01. 114   David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1989), 325. 115   Anna Leone, The End of the Pagan City: Religion, Economy, and Urbanism in Late Antique North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 142 n. 90. 112

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to assail an image is to acknowledge its inherent power, and either response, be it hostile or submissive, is based on a blurring of signified and signifier. From that perspective, the smashing of a divine statue and its worship are akin to one another; they differ not in substance but in quality. To borrow an aphorism of Bredekamp’s, “iconoclasm confirms what it refutes.”116

Socrates’ “Spoken Image”: The Literary Construction of Hypatia’s Death as a “Substitutive Image Act” Now that we have established that the motif of statue destruction informs Socrates’ narrative of Hypatia’s death (and that of John of Nikiu), we face another question: How literally should we take the details of her killing in these texts? While I am not suggesting that the narrative of her death is completely fabricated, Socrates presents a literary staging of Hypatia’s destruction where her death is likened to the elimination of one of the major cult images of the Eastern Mediterranean, Alexandrian Serapis. Regarding his possible aims in exploring this parallel, I offer two suggestions. I have argued above in favour of intertextuality between Socrates and Rufinus’ account of Serapis’ overthrow, an event still fresh on the minds of Socrates’ readers. I therefore propose, first, that Socrates chose to introduce into his ­representation of Hypatia’s killing allusions to statue destruction that were reminiscent of the overthrow of Serapis because he wanted his readers’ imagination to wander back and forth between these two events. In a critical re-evaluation of cases of physical conflict between traditionalists and Christians in the western empire, Michele Salzman insists that a difference was felt between the destruction of non-Christian property and the physical assault on non-Christian citizens. Watts argues that this distinction is reflected in imperial legislation and underlies Socrates’ negative remarks about Cyril and the Alexandrian Church.117 I would contend that the theme of statue-destruction in Socrates bears on this very distinction. By introducing this theme, Socrates warns that, while the violent destruction of traditional cult images may be acceptable to Christians, excessive violence against fellow humans is not, regardless of the victims’ religious or philosophical orientation. This is why Socrates is eager to stress that Hypatia’s murder took place during Lent, a time that should be dedicated to the preparation of body and mind for Easter celebration.118 And while Salzman 116

 Bredekamp, Der Bildakt, 210: “Der Bildersturm bekräftigt, was er ablehnt.”   Michele R. Salzman, “Rethinking Pagan-Christian Violence,” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 265 – 85; Watts, City and School, 199 – 200. 118   See discussion in Appendix B.10, this volume. 117

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highlights how narratives of violence between Christians and non-Christians in the west served to advertise the power and influence of the Christian clergy,119 Socrates tells a cautionary tale about the abuse of clerical and episcopal power. Socrates of Constantinople’s criticism of the conditions in Constantinople’s rival, Alexandria, under Cyril’s spiritual leadership could hardly be more poignant. The assaults committed by the “Islamic State,” with which I began my contribution, include murder where human lives are sacrificed for the purpose of visual propaganda. Such assaults, in a present-day war that uses images as one of its weapons, raise the question of the mutual substitutability of bodies and images, a procedure that Horst Bredekamp has termed “substitutive image act” (substitutiver Bildakt)120 and categorised as the “technique” (Verfahren) of a “heightened iconoclasm” (gesteigerter Ikonoklasmus).121 In the case of the “Islamic State,” humans are humiliated and killed in order to produce images of violence for global dissemination and manipulation of public opinion. Conversely, images are destroyed as if they were human. The destruction of such images is carefully choreographed, in order to generate and circulate videos of orchestrated violence, as Ömür Harmanşah has shown with reference to the smashing of statues in the Mosul museum.122 A blurring of signified and signifier lies at the root of the substitutive image act; aggression against material objects can all too easily spill over into violence against humans. I argue that criticism of this same mechanism underlies Socrates’ account where the attackers turn their aggression against Hypatia rather than against a material object. When the members of the “Islamic State” choreograph their violence for the purpose of disseminating images, their action presupposes a deliberate conflation of human body and image. Socrates’ imagery, I contend, has the opposite effect: it disambiguates signified and signifier. Second, Plato is illustrative of the existence of an intellectual engagement with mental imagery and its emotional effects as well as the power of texts to create such imagery. Plato may unduly overemphasise the power of images to seduce when he accuses the sophists of deploying “spoken images” (εἴδωλα λεγόμενα) in order to ensnare their audiences (Soph. 234c – e), and of utilizing discursive practices that use (mental) imagery to manipulate opinion. However, the power of images (including the mental images created in the reading process) to capture, lead, and manipulate audiences was widely acknowledged in

119

  Salzman, “Rethinking Pagan-Christian Violence,” esp. 267, 283.  Bredekamp, Der Bildakt, 175 – 228 counts punishment in effigy and aggression against images among the social contexts in which this technique is typically deployed. 121  Bredekamp, Das Beispiel Palmyra, 6 – 7. 122  Harmanşah, “ISIS, Heritage”; cf. Flood, “Idol-Breaking as Image-Making.” I would add that the orchestration includes the date: The “Islamic State” released that video on February 26, 2015, the exact date on which the edict on ‘idol destruction’ had been issued 14 years earlier. 120

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Greek and Roman rhetoric. In light of this pervasive rhetorical tradition,123 it is hardly surprising that Socrates of Constantinople, too, should use the power of mental imagery for his own purposes and devise his narrative so as to create an emotionally charged mental image. I propose that his intention is to insert his textual image of Hypatia’s death into the void created by the lack of reactions, particularly by the imperial court, to her murder.124 Wolfram Kinzig has suggested that Cyril wrote his Contra Iulianum, which is dedicated to Theodosius II, in the years between 416 and 428, partly to placate an imperial court displeased with the social upheavals that disturbed life in Alexandria in the early years of his episcopate, and to restore his see’s tarnished theological and intellectual reputation.125 If we believe John Malalas, that strategy proved successful: the emperor “loved Cyril” (Chronographia 14.11, ed. Thurn, 280: ἐφίλει γὰρ Κύριλλον). Socrates’ intention was to establish some justice and balance after the fact. Cyril may have thought that he had had the last word in the affair, but Socrates’ literary imagery yielded a very efficient weapon against the silence of the authorities. Hypatia’s death scene – created by Socrates of Constantinople, appropriated for his own purposes by John of Nikiu, and further enhanced and perpetuated by Edward Gibbon and later scholars – belongs to a genre of graphic narrative that was bound to generate long-lasting mental impressions. Socrates countered Cyril with the rhetorical weapons available to a church historian, which would turn out to be extraordinarily effective: Hypatia’s death scene has haunted the minds of individual readers for one millennium and a half and thereby has become part of a collective mental image depository that is shared by many. The mental imagery created by Socrates of Constantinople was thus material to the longevity of Hypatia’s fame in literature, the arts, and academe.

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  Cf. van Eck, “Art, Agency and Living Presence,” 31 – 44.   For the lack of official reactions to Hypatia’s killing, also see Appendix B.10, this volume. 125   Wolfram Kinzig, “Allgemeine Einleitung: 6. Kyrill – Contra Iulianum,” in Kyrill von Alexandrien, Werke 1: “Gegen Julian” Teil 1, Buch 1 – 5, ed. Christoph Riedweg, GCS, N. F. 20 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), cix – clxxxvi, here cix – cxvi. 124

The Private Devotions of Intellectual Hellenes David Frankfurter Introduction While Hypatia herself is not remembered as a pious Hellene – an explicit devotee of one god or another1 – the broader society of intellectual Hellenes in Egypt of which she was a member (including poets, philosophers, theurgists, and some regional officials) were often credited by late antique authors with overt expressions of piety – ritual acts at temples or in secret chambers. The question has always been, however, whether their Hellenic devotions bore any relationship to traditional expressions of Egyptian religion, such as clearly persevered in many parts of Egypt and in many forms through late antiquity.2 Thus with Hypatia: as a woman in late antique Alexandria, would she have maintained a small altar with ancestral lares and figurines specific to her gender, her heritage, and her identification with Egypt (or Athens, or Corinth, or Thebes): say, an Isis holding a torch? An Artemis with a bow? The Magna Mater enthroned with animals? Or a child god to signify mysteries – Harpocrates? Mithras? Would she have practiced devotions before such a shrine out of family-borne habitus, or with esoteric complements borne of theurgical animation practices, or tentatively, like some modern post-religion academic, trying to be sure such an image didn’t contradict her philosophy?3 Modern historians have 1   Cf. Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.15. In general, see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 63 – 64. 2   On religion as practiced in Egypt through (and in some places beyond) the fourth century CE, see David Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). I am using “Hellene” in place of “pagan” to designate the Hellenism-identified culture of intellectual non-Christians under discussion in this essay. “Pagan” distorts the character of the subjects by assimilation to a Christian construct of popular religion. Although potentially confusing to some classicists, Hellene has the merits of conveying a self-designation and signifying a type of hybrid culture developed in the fourth century partly in opposition to Christianity and partly to revitalize certain features of Greek tradition. Notwithstanding their use of “pagan,” see perspectives on this late antique Hellene culture by Glen W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Polymnia Athanassiadi, “Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius,” JHS 113 (1993): 1 – 29; and David Frankfurter, “The Consequences of Hellenism in Late Antique Egypt,” ARG 2 (2000): 184 – 92. 3   The proposition that Hellenic philosophers might involve theurgical animation rites in the course of manipulating devotional figurines is not entirely hypothetical, as statue animation rituals constituted a central tradition of theurgy by the time of Iamblichus: see Sarah Iles Johnston,

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usually imagined these late ancient philosophers as somehow aloof from everyday or calendrical devotional practices, assuming or retrojecting a kind of secularism that is probably anachronistic for antiquity. Philosophers might well have drawn particular meanings out of ritual practices (as did, for example, theurgists), but it is unlikely that they eschewed such practices entirely.4 Indeed, one could imagine that the special interest in Hypatia’s sorcery in the seventh-century historian John of Nikiu (otherwise of little use as an independent source) might have translated memories of her more prosaic ritual practices, much as in late medieval times clerics routinely cast popular use of protective charms in terms of Satanic sorcery.5 In an essay published in 2000 I argued that, in their staged religious performances by ancient temples, those intellectual Hellenes of Alexandria who crop up in the works of Eunapius, Damascius, and Zachariah of Mytilene had invented a religious culture entirely removed from Egyptian religious traditions. Rather than coming out of cultural worlds bound to traditional Egyptian cults and maintaining traditional relationships with Egyptian shrines (functioning or dilapidated), they belonged to a new, hybrid Hellenic culture that had little cultural connection with those shrines and their traditions of devotion. It was a kind of staged appropriation of holy sites in which figures like Antoninus presented themselves as spiritual pilgrims, true heirs to ancient priestly wisdom, much like contemporary pseudo-shamans and new age tourists. The hybrid Hellenic piety of late antique intellectuals had no roots in, and little in common with, the earlier priestly culture of text-based maintenance of daily cult – even its Hellenized forms represented in the Greek Magical Papyri – nor even the devotional worlds of Egyptian folk beyond the temples. To put it simply, this was no “paganism” but a kind of philosopher’s new age spirituality avant la lettre.6 But perhaps, in reconsidering this scenario, l was too black-and-white in my portrayal of these intellectual Hellenes. Would there not have been any continuity between the hybrid pieties of these individuals and traditional Egyptian religion? If they had little connection with Egyptian temples as local cults – sites of religious and calendrical orientation and beneficence, if the philosophical “Animating Statues: A Case-Study in Ritual,” Arethusa 41 (2008): 445 – 77, and for late antiquity: Todd Krulak, “Powers and Poiēseis: Statue Animation and Divine Manifestation in Proclus Diadochus’ Commentary on the Timaeus,” Divine Powers in Late Antiquity, eds. Anna Marmodoro and Irini-Fotini Viltanioti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 88 – 107. 4   On philosophers’ general engagement with theurgy and the reinterpretation of traditional ritual practices in late antiquity see Heidi Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C. E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and esp. on the culture of Hypatia’s academy, Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 46 – 49. 5   John of Nikiu, Chronicle, Charles, trans. 4.87, 100. 6   Frankfurter, “Consequences of Hellenism in Late Antique Egypt,” 184 – 92. See also Dzielska, Hypatia, 80 – 83.

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piety they espoused bore nothing in common with priestly lore, there is nonetheless suggestive evidence that their domestic devotional lives did involve ritual expressions of a traditional sort. Thus in this paper I will examine a number of references to domestic ritual maintained by avowed Hellenes in the fourth and fifth centuries. While concentrating on Egypt I will draw comparatively from authors elsewhere in the late empire and finish with the archaeological site of the so-called House of Proclus from fifth-century Athens. In the final section I will look at some examples of crypto-devotion as a religious phenomenon in the fifth and later centuries – that is, when secrecy itself is maintained deliberately to protect domestic ritual practices: how does the experience of domestic or private rites change in the context of threat and with the necessity to conceal and dissimulate? All of these materials have led me to take more seriously the traditional domestic expressions of intellectual Hellenes: not as examples of some abstract “paganism” but rather as habits that rooted them in family tradition or sanctified body and space according to heritage or regional practice.

Philosopher-Victims of the Bes-Oracle Inquisition It is a brief passage in Ammianus that indicates that the lines between philosophers and traditional religion may have been fuzzier than I initially imagined. In 359 ce the emperor Constantius ordered the closure of a popular oracle cult in Abydos, Egypt, and a purge of anyone associated with it. This oracle cult had developed over the prior two centuries in the Osiris temple of Abydos, but it was the popular protective fertility god Bes who issued the oracles, and the oracles could be solicited from afar, Ammianus tells us, by sending written inquiries. By the fourth century the cult’s repository of inquiries included some of a political nature – hence the imperial wrath.7 What we see, then, is the growth of the Bes oracle, and expansion of its clientele, from a regional catchment area to one almost Mediterranean-wide, literate, and politically inquisitive. Constantinus’ inquisition itself, we are told, is set up in Palestine, and the initial victims are politicians and philosophers, including one Demetrius (“a philosopher of advanced years”), who is charged with “offering sacrifice several times.”8 (This would have been as part of some public cult 7   Amm. Marc. 19.12.12 John C. Rolfe, ed. / tr, Ammianus Marcellinus I. LCL (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950), 534 – 41. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 169 – 74, and “Voices, Books, and Dreams: The Diversification of Divination Media in Late Antique Egypt,” Mantikē: Studies in Ancient Divination, RGRW 155, ed. Sarah Iles Johnston and Peter Struck (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 233 – 54. See also Françoise Dunand, “La consultation oraculaire en Égypte tardive: l’Oracle de Bès à Abydos,” Oracles et Prophéties dans l’antiquité, ed. Jean-Georges Heintz (Paris. De Boccard, 1997), 65 – 84. 8   Amm. Marc. 19.12.12, Walter Hamilton, trans. The Later Roman Empire (A. D. 353 – 378) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 182.

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celebration of Bes). And yet, Ammianus continues, Demetrius “declared that he had done so from early youth for the purpose of propitiating [Bes], not to make illicit inquiries into his future prospects.” In other words, his relationship to Bes revolved around regular, personal devotions of a private character rather than esoteric invocations of some philosophical hybrid, some cosmic and mysterious god of fate. In this regard Demetrius’ interests resembled those of many Egyptians of the Roman period, whose devotions to Bes are captured in the vast corpus of terracotta figurines excavated in Egypt.9

Gesios of Atripe and the Cache of Temple Images Sometime in the early fifth century the charismatic prophet and abbot Shenoute of Atripe began a sustained attack on the ex-governor of his region in Upper Egypt, Flavius Aelius Gesios. From what we know of him and more generally of members of his class of provincial administrators Gesios would have belonged to this Hellenic religious culture of paideia, philosophical learning, and broad cultural networks  – thus culturally at some remove from the agricultural rhythms of local religion.10 And yet cultural remove should not imply aloofness, for Gesios was clearly involved with local religion in some interesting ways. There are diverse allusions in Shenoute’s sermons to Gesios’ early denunciation of Christian doctrine in some context we don’t know, then his (at least) intended submission to the religion at some later point in the fourth century.11 But then, following the incineration of the local temple by Shenoute and his monks, Shenoute hears that Gesios has conducted some purification ceremony in the temple’s ruins, and then that he has rescued temple images to keep in his house.12  9

  Frankfurter, “Consequences of Hellenism,” 185 – 86; Religion in Roman Egypt, 124 – 31. Terracotta figurines: e. g. Françoise Dunand, Catalogue des terres cuites gréco-romaines d’Égypte (Paris: Louvre, 1990), 38 – 50, § 30 – 65; László Török, Hellenistic and Roman Terracottas from Egypt (Rome: “L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1995), 32 – 41, § 10 – 28, with Ladislas Castiglione,”Greichisch-ägyptische Studien: Beitrag zu dem griechisch-ägyptischen Privatkult,” Acta antiqua hungaricae 5 (1957): 220 – 27 (referring to Török § 11). 10   See Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 35 – 41. 11   Stephen Emmel, “Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt: Rhetoric and Reality,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, RGRW 163, ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 174 – 77. 12   Primary sources on these incidents: Shenoute, “Let Our Eyes,” ed. Emmel, ibid.; “Not Because a Fox Barks,” ed. Johannes Leipoldt and W. Crum. Sinuthii archimandritae vita et opera omnia 3 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1906 – 13), 82, 1 – 4; “On the Last Judgment,” fol. XLIr – v, ed. Heike Behlmer, Schenute von Atripe: De iudicio (Turin: Museo Egizio, 1996), 91 – 92, trans. 248. See Behlmer, “Historical Evidence from Shenoute’s De extremo iudicio,” Sesto Congresso internazionale di Egittologia: Atti (Turin: Società Italiana per il Gas p. A., 1993), 13 and Jacques Van der Vliet, “Spätantikes Heidentum in Ägypten im Spiegel der koptischen Literatur,” Begegnung

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For Shenoute, these acts show him to be a crypto-heathen, the worst kind of heretic, especially in front of the impressionable folk. And so Shenoute and his monks break into Gesios’ house, proceed through it to some inner chamber, and throw the images outside, to expose them – and Gesios – to God and the community of Christians. We learn all this from Shenoute’s own polemical sermons. This is his sermon announcing success: . . . I took his gods, whom he worships by lighting a lot of lamps for them, and offering up incense to them on the altars, with what they call kuphi, and breaking bread before them. And . . . we made an example of him by removing his idols from a private chamber during the night quietly even though the doors protected them securely.13

Shenoute elaborates on what he found in Gesios’ house: . . . You saw them all, each according to its type, even the images of priests with shaven heads and altars in their hands, everything that was in the temples back when . . . Theodosios the righteous emperor had not yet given orders that they should be laid waste.14

He then turns to a different sort of defense, arguing that if anyone should complain about his monks, that . . . they used to enter people’s houses and remove their images [then go ahead and],” inquire into whom they are images of, or what acts are performed for them, including even the ell, the measure of the water’s rise. This object, which we bring in gratitude to the holy church, they have brought before the likenesses of demons, just as we [found] it standing at their feet in the midst of [those demonic images] . . .15 If it had not been we who smashed [images] in the temple that we burned along with everything inside it, we might not have recognized them. Might there be some [of you] who doubt me? [Whatever], the things we found in the temple are also what [Gesios] worships in that place.16

So, to summarize, Gesios rescued a range of images that had been in the local temple before destruction, and he was performing some ritual acts before them – acts of a character, in Shenoute’s words, that cleaves not to typical anti-heathen caricature (sorcery and blood-spattered altars) but rather evokes traditionally recognizable forms of devotional practice.17 So is this merely a rhetorical construction? A minor debate has arisen between those who see this chamber of images now in Gesios’ house as an elaborate, if secret, domestic shrine and those who von Heidentum und Christentum im spätantiken Ägypten, Riggisberger Berichte 1 (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 1993), 108 – 9. 13   Ed. / trans. Emmel, “Shenoute and the Destruction of Temples in Egypt,” [Fr. 1, 21], 185. 14   Emmel, [Fr. 1, 3], 182 – 83. 15   Emmel, [Fr. 2, 5 – 6], 188, emended and emphasis mine. 16   Emmel, [Fr. 2, 9 – 11], 188. 17   See, e. g. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 121 – 42; Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche, Gods and Men in Egypt, 3000 BCE to 395 CE, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 299 – 306.

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see it as a kind of elite art collection.18 Shenoute points out that the images he has found prove that Gesios has “not contented himself (simply) with the images of effeminate men and lewd and licentious women” – suggestive of classical garden statuary – but “has made for himself the image of Kronos and the images of the other demons”: i. e., actual sacred images.19 This line might suggest that Gesios had (at one point) claimed that the images in his house were merely classical garden statuary. But this dissimulation (if it were indeed Gesios’) would clearly have been defensive, not in any way representative of the actual status of the images he was keeping. Shenoute draws attention to Gesios’ devotional acts (which the abbot no doubt heard about through local rumor networks) – lighting lamps, burning incense, and so on – which certainly signify more than antiquities collecting. Is Shenoute reading more into Gesios’ objects than Gesios himself did – i. e., for rhetorical effect, to cast Gesios as a dedicated heathen when in fact he was not? Some have taken this position; yet, given Shenoute’s range of accusations, it seems the more difficult interpretation historically to imagine that these images he found in Gesios’ house had in actuality no more value to Gesios than modern garden statuary. It is an argument based on the assumption that sacred images retained no material force or ritual value in the fourth and fifth centuries ce, an assumption shown repeatedly to be incorrect by the various image caches and iconoclastic mutilations from late antiquity.20 Taking Gesios’ cache, then, as holding religious value (broadly defined), what is important to note is that domestic devotions could acquire an inclusive aspect under crisis, gathering more materials, foci, and activities under the aegis of ritual responsibilities that sustain fortune. Traditional images deemed potent or important because of their prior location in a temple will gain pride of place and private veneration in a domestic shrine, even if not crafted for that kind of altar, like the Nile measurement. Gesios is not rescuing irrelevant artifacts, simply aesthetic treasures, but precious symbols of agricultural and protective potency. And consequently his devotional gestures are not hollow and “primitivist” but intimately interactive, much as puja is performed among South Asian families before household deities.21 18   See, e. g. Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 80 (shrine); Ariel G. Lopez, Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 111 (art collection); Béatrice Caseau, “Le crypto paganisme et les frontières du licite: un jeu de masques?” Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire: The Breaking of a Dialogue, ed. Peter Brown and Rita Lizzi Testa (Münster: LIT, 2011), 543 – 44 (open question); Emmel, “Shenoute and the Destruction of Temples in Egypt,” 181 (open question). 19   “Let Our Eyes,” fr. 1, 3, trans. Emmel, “Shenoute and the Destruction of Temples in Egypt,” 182 – 83; cf. Ibid., 171. 20   See esp. Troels Myrup Kristensen, Making and Breaking the Gods: Christian Responses to Pagan Sculpture in Late Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013). 21   See, e. g. Stephen Huyler, Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999), 66 – 113.

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Domestic Statuary in Late Antiquity: Powers and Meanings Much of the attitude among contemporary historians that late antique imagecaches could not have been viable ritual assemblages stems from a confusion over the meaning and power of images in antiquity. Raised more often on museum fare than in families with domestic altars, modern Roman historians cannot easily conceive how a finely-carved marble Diana or commemorative figures of “priests with shaven heads and altars in their hands,”22 as Shenoute puts it, could seriously populate a domestic altar in the late fourth century ce. There is a romantic appeal to the aromatic Roman sculpture garden with its gurgling fountain, antique gods, and elite aesthetics that underlies this secular-art-collection model of the image-cache.23 But thanks to the work of David Freedberg, Peter Stewart, Jaś Elsner, and others we can begin to take seriously the ambiguity of iconographic presence, the power of the image’s gaze and eyes, the function of the altar as a site for ancestral and regional bricolage, and the vocabulary of traditional gestures and substances that link image and devotee – that is, how images meant and functioned in Roman and later antiquity.24 All these principles should encourage us to be more flexible and contextual with our interpretations of domestic images, even in the case of elite intellectual Hellenes. These functions of and expectations for devotional images are described in more personal terms by Apuleius of Madaura, whose Apology (against accusations of sorcery) dwells briefly on how he commissioned an image for his own everyday use. Apuleius describes how he asked a skilled craftsman . . . to carve a statuette of any god he [the craftsman himself] wanted, to whom I could address my regular prayers [ex more meo supplicassem], from any kind of material provided it was a kind of wood . . . For I usually carry with me, wherever I go, a statuette of 22

  Shenoute, “Let Our Eyes,” fr. 1, 3, trans Emmel 182.   Alan Cameron was the most readily inclined to retroject this image of the sculpture garden to late antiquity: e. g. on a late antique report of a shrine in Menouthis in the late fifth-century, containing “the sort of mythological statues that stood in any of the older and grander houses in a town of any size,” Cameron, “Poets and Pagans in Byzantine Egypt,” Egypt in the Byzantine World, 200 – 700, ed. Roger S. Bagnall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26. The value and religious significance of domestic statuary was much more complex: see, e. g. sources in following note. 24   David Freedberg, The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Peter Stewart, Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jaś Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Alessandra Bravi, “Ornamenta, Monumenta, Exempla: Greek Images of Gods in the Public Spaces of Constantinople,” in Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome, RGRW 170, ed. Joannis Mylonopoulos (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 289 – 301. On the religious potency of Egyptian images in particular see David Frankfurter, “The Vitality of Egyptian Images in Late Antique Egypt: Christian Memory and Response,” in The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East, ed. Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise A. Friedland, and Sharon Herbert (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 659 – 78. 23

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some god, . . . On feasts I offer up incense and wine to it, and sometimes an animal victim [aliquando victima supplicare].25

Here, then, is a useful “insider’s” perspective on a domestic image, and a portable one at that. It is instructive that Apuleius presents the image as less important for which god was represented than for its function as a focus for devotions at festival times. Apuleius may be diminishing the importance of the god the craftsman carved for him – Mercury, in this case – since other sources make clear that it did indeed matter whether one made devotions before Mercury, Asclepius, Isis, or Bes, as we saw earlier with the philosopher Demetrius in the 359 inquisition.26 Yet in denying the importance of which god Apuleius lays out an important context for domestic images, even for the elite and erudite: ritual focus. “Religion” for this social echelon was not just a matter of temple festivals but involved a private scope as well – the configuration, perhaps, of a ritual space in which figurines and larger images could be addressed and animated acccording to theurgical tradition.27 Closer examination of the dispositions and components of elite Hellenes’ private devotions indeed reveals a somewhat different ritual world from typical Mediterranean local religion, yet not the “new-age” hybrid I introduced at the beginning of this paper. Take Libanius, for example: in grief for his brother he retreats to “the altars, the supplications, the power of the gods” – specifically their images, since he declares he cannot look into their radiant faces. Presumably at this point in the fourth century (382 ce) the shrine he describes is of a private sort – a small building on one’s estate grounds.28 But the shrine thus serves as a recourse in times of crisis and uncertainty – a space of religious authority and material reassurance. Might these glimpses of elite religious dispositions justify a less cynical perspective on private devotional acts among intellectual Hellenes? (And might Hypatia herself have had access to such a shrine – indoors 25  Apuleius, apol. 61, 63, trans. Vincent Hunink, in S. J. Harrison, ed., Apuleius: Rhetorical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 84, 85. 26   See also Porph., Abst. 2.16.4. 27   See above, n. 3. 28   A. F. Norman, ed. Libanius: Autobiography and Selected Letters, vol. 1. LCL (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 262 – 63. See Ellen Perry, “Divine Statues in the Works of Libanius of Antioch,” in Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East, 441 – 48. For Egypt we find an array of such minor shrines along a street in fourth-century Panopolis: P. Berlin 16365, ed. Zbigniew Borkowski, Une description topographique des immeubles à Panopolis (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1975), and closer to Alexandria the small temple of Ras elSoda. In general on the topography of Alexandrian shrines see Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 141 – 50. Kim Bowes’ discussion of elite landowners’ elaboration of domestic shrines in the area of Rome might suggest a broader phenomenon, the elaborated domestic / local shrine structure (much as Libanius describes, ibid.): Kim Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 27 – 37.

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or among the buildings of the Alexandrian academy?)29 With these questions in mind let us turn finally to an important archaeological site from outside Egypt that bears on private devotions among the Hellenic elite in late antiquity.

Ritual Practices in the House of Proclus, 5th Century CE Athens In a fifth-century house on the Athenian Areopagus, attributed to the philosopher Proclus, there was discovered a small room with a shrine to Cybele and a bearded male god. This house, like others in the neighborhood, held several marble figures and busts of gods – in this case Isis, in the form of a head from a larger cult statue, and a male figure.30 The date and the iconography of the house point to the kind of intellectual Hellene addressed in this volume. But are these artifacts evidence of religious activity? As with the Gesios / Shenoute conflict above, we must reckon with the modern scholarly assumption that fine marble sculpture at this stage of history could only be objets d’art for display, no more ritually potent than the Venus de Milo in the Louvre and conceivably owned by some fine Christian family as well. Again, this is an anachronism born of modern art collecting. For the fifth century ce (and even beyond) we should consider seriously the complex value of such statuary – especially repurposed and remounted parts of statuary – as materializations of tradition and divine presence. Indeed, Proclus himself wrote a commentary on Plato’s Timaeus that specifically elaborated on the theurgical animation of divine statuary.31 So it makes more sense to approach these materials as a ritually meaningful iconographic assemblage than to start with the assumption that nobody could possibly have venerated Cybele in the mid-fifth century. Archaeologist Arja Karivieri described the shrine further as including: . . . two reliefs, one representing the Mother of the Gods in a naiskos and the other depicting a votive scene, possibly an offering to Asclepius, set into the small niches of the north wall. Below these reliefs there was a re-positioned relief base or plinth, the front of which was decorated with a relief from the mid-fourth century [bce].32

29   On the archaeology of the philosophers’ lecture rooms in Alexandria see Judith McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 BC to AD 700 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007), 208 – 20. 30   Alison Frantz, The Athenian Agora XXIV. Late Antiquity: A. D. 267 – 700 (Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1988), 43 – 44; Arja Karivieri, “The ‘House of Proclus’ on the Southern Slope of the Acropolis: A Contribution,” Post-Herulian Athens: Aspects of Life and Culture in Athens, A. D. 267 – 529, ed. Paavo Castrén (Helsinki: Finnish Institute, 1994), 132, 136 – 38. 31   See Krulak, “Powers and Poiēseis.” 32   Karivieri, “The ‘House of Proclus’,” 119.

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This plinth, which likely originated as a mortuary monument and had additional reliefs on other sides, invisible after repositioning, seems to have served as an altar for offerings for the late antique inhabitants.33 The altar-niche is clearly a version of the Roman household shrine – a lararium of sorts – constituting the center of ritual activities in the Roman home that unified the inhabitants, ancestors, and domestic spirits.34 It is hard to say whether it was built in such a way as to be secret. In his recent discussion of lararia and their material and iconographic components John Bodel emphasized the combinations of elements from civic cult and ancestral tradition that the family arranged on the altar for ceremonial devotion.35 One can see a similar process in this Athenian house behind the arrangement of repurposed and obscure images: an effort to construct an altar for spirits, a focus for ritual, using available and familiar images, some standing, some in plaques, with a space for offerings. Modern domestic altars of the African diaspora involve the same assemblages, the same material approximation, the same effort to create effective mediation from what is at hand in the cultural environment.36 There is something functional and ritually purposeful about this shrine. Three and a half meters beneath street-level, in the westernmost room of this house, archaeologists found another ritual assemblage, this one commemorating a particular ceremony: a piglet, slaughtered and (presumably) buried with the knife still inside it, as well as seven cups, a jug, and an unused lamp from the fifth century ce – that is, from around the time of the house’s construction.37 Archaeologists’ imaginations have run wild with this assemblage, from late antique reenactments of the Eleusinian Thesmophoria to the special intimacy between Cybele and pigs.38 Most recently Christian Wildberg has pro33

 Frantz, The Athenian Agora, 43.   Karivieri, “The ‘House of Proclus’,” 118 – 24. 35   John Bodel, “Cicero’s Minerva, Penates, and the Mother of the Lares: An Outline of Roman Domestic Religion,” Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, ed. John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 248 – 75. 36   Robert Farris Thompson, Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African-Americas (New York: The Museum for African Art, 1993); and Frankfurter, Religion in Roman Egypt, 138 – 42. 37   See I. Karra in Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century AD, ed. Anastasia Lazaridou (New York: Onassis Foundation, 2011), 79. Archaeologists do not seem to have recorded the depth of this deposit beyond its distance from the modern street level, so it is impossible to gauge where it lay vis-à-vis the original floor-level. I would argue, however, that it is unlikely the assemblage was left on the domicile floor at any point – for reasons of hygiene and the realities of leaving a ritual slaughter and its equipment on the floor. It must have been buried beneath the floor. 38   Karivieri, “The ‘House of Proclus’,” 133 – 35; Helen G. Saradi with Demetrios Eliopoulos, “Late Paganism and Christianisation in Greece,” in Archaeology of Late Antique ‘Paganism’, Late Antique Archaeology 7, ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 277 – 79. 34

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posed that the sacrifice was the philosopher Proclus’ own, serving to welcome the goddess Athena, who was supposed to have come to him in a dream.39 But when a sacrificial assemblage is placed beneath the floor of a building, its most likely context would be a foundation deposit: that is, the piglet was slaughtered as a purification and blessing on the building site, either at the commencement of construction or at the building’s shift to a new religious moment or function.40 The cups and jug held the wine consumed at that event, extending the commemorative value of the deposit to a group act. The knife left in place declared the completion of a killing rather than a preparation for a feast or the procurement of blood. As Kathryn McClymond has recently pointed out, most “sacrifices” in religions are not focused on the death itself but on the acquisition of blood, meat, or entrails for extispicy.41 And yet, like other slaughters at foundation events, this one did emphasize death, perhaps because the nature of this kind of assemblage was to kill, to take life, rather than simply to produce blood or have a feast. The assemblage had therefore to accentuate the death itself, a requisite for building. Interpreting the pig-sacrifice in this way points to a more subtle piety in this late period of Hellenic devotion. The foundation sacrifice is, after all, the very epitome of ritual in the domestic sphere, since it founds the construction of (or transformation of) the domus. Far from the public animal slaughters proscribed in the Theodosian Codes as a nightmarish “essence” of heathenism  – “the accursed immolation of victims and damnable sacrifices”42 – the foundation ceremony is more of a gesture, a blessing, towards the longevity, fortune, and sociability of the house and a bulwark against the chthonic demons that might 39   Christian Wildberg, “Proclus of Athens: A Life,” in All from One: A Guide to Proclus, ed. Pieter d’Hoine and Marije Martijn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 15 – 18. Dream of Athena: Procl. § 30. Most compelling in Wildberg’s hypothesis is the parallel scenario from Aeschylus’ Eumenides, in which Orestes performs just such a piglet sacrifice to welcome Athena (276 – 98; see Wildberg, “Proclus of Athens: A Life,” 18). 40   Paavo Castrén, “Paganism and Christianity in Athens and Vicinity during the Fourth to Sixth Centuries A. D.,” in The Idea and Ideal of the Town Between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. G. P. Brogiolo and Bryan Ward – Perkins (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 218; Béatrice Caseau, “Le crypto paganisme et les frontières du licite,” 567. A broad understanding of foundation sacrifice as including shifts in a building’s function or mode would cover a private scenario such as Wildberg proposes (prior note). Compare the instructions in a Coptic ritual formulary (VI / VII CE) “for a foundation, to lay it: Prepare a wax figure. Write the amulets on it. Bury it at that place on the eleventh of the month. In order that it may be destroyed: Take embalming salt. Utter the prayer over it three times. Throw it into it on the twenty-third of the month.” (Cairo 45060, trans. Marvin Meyer, Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, ed. Marvin M. Meyer and Richard Smith [San Francisco: Harper, 1994], 272). 41   Kathryn McClymond, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 42   Cod.Theod. 16.10.25 [435 CE], ed. / trans. Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), 476, adjusted; cf. 16.10.2, 10, 12.

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threaten it. As Kim Bowes has recently described such foundation deposits, they “mark a moment in time – construction or boundary-making – and thus like . . . other domestic rites . . . serve to ritualize major family moments.”43 In and of itself it does not indicate religious identity – Christian or Hellene – or affiliation with a particular heritage. The foundation deposit is simply what one does when one builds a house (or adjusts its function or religious orientation), like touching a doorpost on entering, or pouring libations at a tomb. It is habitus, not ideology. But then, perhaps, that is what intellectual Hellenes, for all their neo-Platonic speculations, engaged in, no less than countryfolk. This Athenian house with the domestic shrine probably – by its statuary and mosaic floors – housed a philosopher of distinctly non-Christian interests, yet he and his friends put care and attention in the fortune that that house would bestow – care and attention ritualized in ways that may or may not have been consistent with their philosophical convictions.

Meanings of Domestic Ritual Practices: From Private to Secret By focusing specifically on intellectual Hellenes I have avoided issues around the definition, identity, or boundaries of so-called pagans and Christians in late antiquity. Much of the evidence available to substantiate persisting native religious traditions in the late antique Mediterranean world is actually ambiguous stuff: can we say these people were not Christian if they were sleeping at a local temple to get dreams of Bes or visiting a spring-shrine to gain a pregnancy? If they were populating the John and Cyrus or Thekla shrines at these saints’ festivals does it mean they were Christian? Overall, as Ramsay MacMullen and others have demonstrated, “pagan” and “Christian” do not describe meaningfully exclusive attitudes in the late antique world.44 Yet when we focus on intellectual Hellenes we have a small society that, for all appearances, really did try to construct elements of a religious world rooted somehow, if tendentiously, in older religious traditions. And I would argue that the conception of that piety and those religious traditions were influenced not only by philosophy but also by anti-heathen laws and riots, especially at the end of the fourth century. Thus it is worth dwelling briefly on how traditional domestic devotions became reconceived as the walls of the house became not 43   Kimberly Bowes, “At Home,” A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World, ed. Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke (Oxford: Blackwell 2015), 216. 44   In general see Caseau, “Crypto paganisme”; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Christopher P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and now David Frankfurter, “Onomastic Statistics and the Christianization of Egypt: A Response to Depauw and Clarysse,” VChr 68 (2014): 284 – 89.

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just social containment and general protection but bulwarks of secrecy. John of Ephesus tells the story of pogrom against idolaters in Antioch of 579 that turned up a domestic Christian icon that had, on its reverse, an image of Apollo. It is quite likely that some people took their private devotions to ancestral deities to this degree of secrecy and dissimulation.45 But in that way those devotions have changed. The traditional lararium is constructed and venerated in some site in the interior but beckons to the exterior: to local temples and distant pilgrimages, to ancestral festivals and occasional deities, to impromptu landscape shrines and charismatic healers.46 Compare, then, such central domestic shrines to the site of a domestic ceremony meant to bring “all good things” to one Verius Sedatus in Roman Autricum, now Chartres. Archaeologists found three incense burners, each inscribed to invoke “the omnipotent numina” with magical names, the whole assemblage apparently meant to be laid out according to the cardinal directions – all in the cellar of his house.47 Here it is likely that the householder did indeed deem the ceremony – however beneficial – as something to be performed in secret, and not necessarily out of deference to local laws about magia. So when the walls of the house are imagined as preventing the notice of Christian confraternities and monks, the domestic shrine becomes ipso facto secret: a solitary and insulated thing, something to maintain rather than a node in a broader religious geography. We see intimations of this process in the removed, rather isolated position of the shrine in the “House of Proclus,” but even more in the Shenoute text. Gesios brings images of religious value into his house and stows them in a locked room, because he fears Shenoute will destroy them (as he eventually does). But these images come from a temple. Already the geography of religion is changed: now a domestic space has to contain meaningfully the diverse images that had functioned in their respective temple niches. How does one treat or venerate them outside a temple, if one is not a priest? Do these images extend a domestic shrine or transform it? What, exactly, is Gesios’ sense of responsibility to these images? And then what happens to a traditional domestic shrine, thus insulated against religious threats and purges, after a couple generations, when the householders have begun to visit Christian sites and maybe importing icons or pil45  John of Ephesus, E. H. 3.29, trans. R. Payne Smith (Oxford: OUP, 1860), 214. Compare the depiction of a domestic shrine in the inner room of a heathen’s house, according to a fifth / sixth-century Coptic legend: Cyril of Alexandria [attr.], Sixth Miracle of the Three Youths, ed. Henri De Vis, Homélies coptes de la Vaticane (1929; repr. Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 2:185 – 89. 46   See David Frankfurter, “The Interpenetration of Ritual Spaces in Late Antique Religions: An Overview,” ARG 10 (2008): 211 – 22. 47   Richard Gordon, Dominique Joly, and William Van Andringa, “A Prayer for Blessings on Three Ritual Objects Discovered at Chartres-Autricum,” Magical Practice in the Latin West, ed. Richard L. Gordon and Francisco Marco Simón, RGRW 168 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 488 – 90.

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grims’ ampules to add to the altar? Perhaps the total assemblage then returns to its older, exteriorized function as a ceremonial bricolage of family interests (Mary and Asclepius?), or perhaps there remains, for some family members, a sense of secrecy in puja to old gods. We may conclude that crypto-devotion in any social or cultural sphere  – urban or rural, locally oriented or philosophical Hellene – rapidly changes the meaning of the traditions that it endeavors to maintain.48 To guard one’s altar from religious reformers and their mobs, even from one’s neighbors or family-members;49 to invent ways of concealing or protecting; to cultivate an exterior Christianitas that makes room for traditional devotions inside – all those strategies lead to new amalgamations or collapsings of ritual action in the home.

Conclusion In the most general sense, this paper has sought to clarify the religious nature of intellectual Hellenism: what did it mean to eschew Christian practices in the late fourth and fifth centuries? What did it mean to maintain devotions to older gods or to manage some privately meaningful synthesis of Asclepius and Christ devotion? What assumptions do we modern, post-Enlightenment people bring to imagining the daily lives of philosophers in late antique Alexandria? And lacking any evidence beyond her particular, broad-ranging culture of philosophers, intellectuals, poets, and politicians, can we imagine Hypatia herself engaged in traditional Greco-Roman or Egyptian domestic rites – for their everyday fortune or for theurgical procedures? At least in the domestic domain, devotional practices meant different things to different householders: from contact with ancestors, to assurance of fortune, to symbolizing neo-Platonic mysteries, to resistance to a hegemonic institution. But when these devotional practices turned from private to secret, I have argued, the very nature of religion would have changed. But, I suspect, most traditional practices did not take place in juxtaposition to Christianity; rather, they ran alongside of, then ultimately merged with Christian practices.

48   See further Hubert Cancik, “Occulte adhuc colunt: Repression und Metamorphose der römischen Religion in der Spätantike,” in Secrecy and Concealment: Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, ed. Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 191 – 201, and more generally Paul Christopher Johnson, Secrets, Gossip, and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 49   See, e. g. David Frankfurter, “‘Things Unbefitting Christians’: Violence and Christianization in Fifth-Century Panopolis,” JECS 8.2 (2000): 273 – 95.

‘A Mere Geometer’? Hypatia in the context of Alexandrian Neoplatonism Sebastian Gertz Introduction To her most famous student, Hypatia was no less than a “true guide to the mysteries of philosophy” (τῆς γνησίας καθηγεμόνος τῶν φιλοσοφίας ὀργίων), capable of inspiring her listeners to a lifelong pursuit of wisdom.1 To us moderns, on the other hand, she might seem a rather unlikely philosophical saint, given the poor state of our evidence on nearly all aspects of her teachings and intellectual affiliations: none of the titles of her attested works suggest any degree of scholarly engagement with the tradition of Plato and Aristotle on her part.2 In this contribution, I examine what kind of philosophy Hypatia would have taught, and how the intellectual context of her time and place would have influenced her teaching of it. I begin by examining the notion that Hypatia was a mathematician with little interest or competence in other areas of philosophy, a view that is echoed in some of our ancient sources and has been revived more recently by A. Bernard. In section II, I reject this view and argue that Hypatia’s philosophical activity is likely to have extended beyond the exact sciences to areas such as Platonic metaphysics and psychology, interpreted in the tradition of Plotinus and Porphyry. In my final section, I suggest that we can enrich our understanding of her philosophical practice and commitments by looking at the wider context of Neoplatonism in Alexandria.

‘A Mere Geometer’? A major difficulty facing any appraisal of Hypatia as a philosopher is the fact that later Neoplatonists, who, one would have thought, ought to have been sympathetic to her cause, are either silent about or dismissive of her philosophical 1

  See Syn. Letters 137.8 – 9 Garzya-Roques   According to the Suda, Hypatia wrote commentaries on Diophantus, the ‘Astronomical Canon’ and the Conics of Apollonius. See the entry “Hypatia” Υ.  166.3 – 5, Suda: ἔγραψεν ὑπόμνημα εἰς Διόφαντον, [add. Tannery] τὸν ἀστρονομικὸν Κανόνα, εἰς τὰ Κωνικὰ Ἀπολλωνίου ὑπόμνημα). 2

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achievements. A case in point is Damascius’ Philosophical History: his portrayal of Hypatia’s life and death (43A – E Athanassiadi) makes little reference at all to her intellectual accomplishments, but instead emphasizes her natural, ethical and purificatory virtues. Damascius, like other late Neoplatonists, assumes that virtue can be presented on a scale encompassing at least six degrees of perfection, with theoretical and theurgic virtues at the pinnacle of philosophical attainment.3 His praise of Hypatia’s lower-grade virtues is thus a back-handed compliment that highlights both her limitations as a mystical thinker as well as her nobility of character. In another fragment, Damascius compares Hypatia with the Alexandrian philosopher Isidore, who was active several generations after her death. Isidore, says Damascius, differs from Hypatia “not just as a man from a woman but also as a real philosopher from a geometer” (οὐ μόνον οἷα γυναικὸς ἀνήρ, ἀλλὰ καὶ οἷα γεωμετρικῆς τῷ ὄντι φιλόσοφος).4 The context of this remark is unknown, but it fits well with Damascius’ low estimation of philosophy in Alexandria in the early fifth century. As he writes elsewhere in the Philosophical History, when explaining why the ruling authorities took advice from Hypatia: “Even if philosophy itself was dead, its name at least still seemed honorable and worthy of admiration to those who ran the affairs of the city.”5 Given how little we know about philosophy in Alexandria in the time preceding Theon and Hypatia, and really for the most part of the fourth century, Damascius may have had good reasons for being dismissive of it.6 His opinion of Hypatia might thus have been colored negatively by the general state of Alexandrian philosophy in and around her time.7 3   Cf. Dominic J. O’Meara, “Patterns of Perfection in Damascius’ Life of Isidore,” Phronesis 51.1 (2006): 74 – 90 for a discussion of the Neoplatonic scale of virtues in Damascius’ Philosophical History, and especially 77 – 78 for Hypatia. In order, they are (i) natural virtue, which humans share with some species of animals; (ii) virtues of character, which are acquired through habituation; (iii) civic virtue, which is primarily displayed in the proper ordering of the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit, and reason); (iv) purificatory virtues, which a philosopher achieves by separating him or herself from the body as far as possible; and, at the higher end of the scale, (v) contemplative, (vi) exemplary, and (vii) hieratic virtues. Unlike O’Meara, I understand the famous vignette of Hypatia displaying her sanitary towels to a suitor as illustrating her purificatory rather than her ethical virtue. The point of the story is that Hypatia dissociates herself from her body and has in some degree achieved separation from it, not that she has a habitual disposition to act virtuously. 4   Fr. 106A. Polymnia Athanassiadi. Damascius: The Philosophical History (Athens: Apameia, 1999). On this fragment, see Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia: Beiträge zur Klassischen Philologie, Vol 16 (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2011), 263 – 265, with whom I am in broad agreement here. 5   43E Athanassiadi: εἰ γὰρ καὶ τὸ πρᾶγμα ἀπόλωλεν, ἀλλὰ τό γε ὄνομα φιλοσοφίας ἔτι μεγαλοπρεπές τε καὶ ἀξιάγαστον εἶναι ἐδόκει τοῖς μεταχειριζομένοις τὰ πρῶτα τῆς πολιτείας. 6   This is not to deny the polemical purpose behind Damascius’ dismissive comment about philosophy in Hypatia’s time. By deploring the ineptness of earlier Platonic teachers, Damascius can elevate the stature of the true hero of his Philosophical History, Isidore of Alexandria. 7   It is worth noting here that Hypatia’s career coincided with something of a low point in the relations between Athens and Alexandria. Synesius, one of her students, remarks in one of

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But Damascius’ unflattering comparison of Hypatia with Isidore can also be explained on more philosophical grounds: on one level, we might think that it is Hypatia’s special interest in mathematics that sets her apart from the “real philosopher,” who presumably pursues more elevated subjects, and particularly theology. According to the traditional division of philosophy into practice and theory, mathematics is a subpart of philosophy’s theoretical half, placed intermediate between natural science and theology.8 From a Platonist perspective, the study of mathematics can be viewed as subordinate to that of theology (i. e. metaphysics) for two important reasons: first, because the objects of mathematics in some way possess a lesser reality than the intelligible forms; and second, because mathematics employs an intellectual faculty that is less perfect, and more tied to sensible reality, than pure thinking about the forms (geometry, for example, uses perceptible representations of immaterial truths, such as diagrams of circles that are drawn in sand).9 For both these reasons (and it is far from clear which of these Damascius, when demoting Hypatia’s intellectual stature, intends), mathematics, when compared to the supreme science of theology, has a merely preparatory function for the higher contemplation that Isidore and his like pursued.10 And so, according to this division of the sciences, just as theology is superior to mathematics, the philosopher occupied with theology has a higher status than the mathematician. Damascius’ word on Hypatia, of course, is not final, and it has been noted since the time of Photius that the Philosophical History elevates the stature of one philosopher (either Damascius himself, or, more charitably, Isidore) through character assassinations of any others.11 A more troubling fact, however, is that even within the later Neoplatonic tradition more widely, Hypatia seems to have remained an outsider. Where we find lists of Platonic torchbearers that have kept the flame of true knowledge alive, Hypatia is never mentioned.12 The great chain of wisdom did not, apparently, have Hypatia as one of its links. Her marginal status in the Platonic succession narratives can at least be partly explained by the his letters that the Athens of his day is famous for bee-keeping rather than philosophy, and that students are being bribed by honey to attend lectures. See Syn. Letters 136.16 – 22 Garzya-Roques.  8   On this division of philosophy, see Pierre Hadot, “Les divisions des parties de la philosophie dans l’Antiquité,” MH 26 (1979): 202 – 203, who relates it back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1025b – 1026a.  9   The canonical point of reference for this view of the function of mathematics is the division of the Line in Plato’s Republic 509d – 511e, where mathematics occupies the place of rational thinking (dianoia) and is presented as inferior to the direct grasp of intelligible forms (noēsis). 10   Cf. fr. 22, Athanassiadi for Isidore’s ascent to divine inspiration, beyond purely rational thought. 11   See Photius’ caustic remark at Bibl. 181.126a27 – 30. 12   This point has been well made by Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death and Works,” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 197.

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fact that, as Alan Cameron put it, “she herself did not have the right teachers”.13 She was, to the best of our knowledge, unconnected to the Athenian school of Neoplatonism that experienced a renaissance under Plutarch of Athens. Rumors of her stay in Athens, based on the misinterpretation of a passing remark in Damascius, have been greatly exaggerated.14 Nor is there any reason to think that she would have studied under some local follower of Iamblichus such as Antoninus at Canopus, who is said to have dedicated himself to “the worship of the gods” and “their secret rites”.15 In sum, Hypatia’s main instruction in philosophy, perhaps largely delivered by her father, was cut off from the main intellectual conduits that would feed into the later Neoplatonic tradition and that would qualify a philosopher for membership in the “sacred race”, as Damascius calls the defenders of Platonic orthodoxy.16

What kind of Platonism? Given Hypatia’s marginal status within the Platonic tradition, it should perhaps come as no surprise that even her identity as a Platonic philosopher has been questioned. Alain Bernard, for example, declares that Hypatia’s Platonism “is in fact no more than one possibility among many others”.17 In his view, the ancient evidence suggests that Hypatia was, not a Platonist, but a Ptolemist. Ptolemism, argues Bernard, is a philosophy developed through the study of Ptolemy’s Almagest, combining mathematics with the study of celestial motions. For the Ptolemist, understanding the order and regularity that is manifest in the movement of the heavens can also lead to ethical improvement, in the same way that Plato could claim in the Republic that we can put our characters into order by modeling them on a paradigm of justice in heaven (592b). Given Bernard’s challenge to the commonly held view that Hypatia taught some form of Platonism, it is worth revisiting the relevant evidence, before looking at her activity as a teacher in Alexandria in a wider context. As will become clear, there is no good reason to doubt that Hypatia was a Platonist of some description, although the precise nature of her likely doctrinal commitments can be less confidently asserted. 13

  See Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death and Works,” 196.   The remark in question is fr. 43A4 – 5 Athanassiadi: οἵ τε ἄρχοντες ἀεὶ προχειριζόμενοι τῆς πόλεως ἐφοίτων πρῶτοι πρὸς αὐτήν, ὡς καὶ Ἀθήνησι διετέλει γινόμενον. City notables in Alexandria would consult Hypatia, just as the Athenians of old would take their concerns to philosophers; but Hypatia may well never have set foot in Athens. 15  Eun. VS 6.10.6.5 – 6 Giangrande (471 Boissonade). 16   See fr. 73A Athanassiadi for the designation “the sacred race” (ἡ ἱερὰ γενεά). 17   Alain Bernard, “The Alexandrian school: Theon of Alexandria and Hypatia,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, vol. 1, ed. Lloyd Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 417. 14

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A crucial piece of evidence in this regard is the notice in Socrates Scholasticus Ecclesiastical History 7.15, according to which Hypatia took over the “doctrine” (διατριβή) of Plato from Plotinus.18 The word for “doctrine” here, διατριβή, can also mean “philosophical school”; but since Plotinus never taught at Alexandria, and therefore had no school there, it is preferable to understand Socrates’ comment in a different way.19 Most likely, he means that Hypatia took over a particular interpretation of Plato from Plotinus, rather than any formal teaching duties. I can see no compelling reason to doubt this part of Socrates’ account. Admittedly, Bernard is right to point out that associating Hypatia with a “respectable” (i. e. a non-pleasure-seeking, non-materialistic) philosophical school, such as Plotinus’, suits the larger purpose of Socrates’ narrative: as Hypatia’s nobility increases, so does the hideousness of Cyril’s (supposed) crime.20 But if we make the reasonable assumption that the dramatic events leading up to Hypatia’s murder are likely to have stayed in people’s memories, it is questionable whether Socrates would simply have fabricated a part of his story that could easily have been contradicted by his contemporaries.21 A second important source of information for the kind of Platonism that Hypatia taught is her immediate context, in particular her correspondence with Synesius, her student and lifelong friend. Hypatia’s teachings made a deep and lasting impression on Synesius; as I mentioned in my introduction, he refers to her as “the true guide to the mysteries of philosophy” and regards her as a spiritual mentor and philosophical authority.22 For all that, though, Synesius gives us little direct evidence for the kind of philosophy taught at Alexandria; the sacred truths of philosophy were not to be committed to writing. Synesius’ general silence about Hypatia’s teachings has not deterred scholars, of course: they correctly assume that the large contours of Synesius’ thought would have been shaped by Hypatia, who seems to have been the dominant intellectual influence in his life. When Synesius writes that “the goal for human beings is to live according to intellect” (Letter 137), for example, it seems reasonable to suppose 18  Socr. Hist. eccl., 7.15.4 – 5. Bright, ed. “She [Hypatia] attained such a level of education that she surpassed the other philosophers of her time and took over the doctrine of Plato from Plotinus.” (τὴν δὲ Πλατωνικὴν ἀπὸ Πλωτίνου καταγομένην διατριβὴν διαδέξασθαι). 19   I am here following an interpretation that has been forcefully presented by Étienne Évrard, “A quel titre Hypatie enseigna-t-elle la philosophie?” Revue des Etudes Grecques, 90 (1977): 69 – 74. See also Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 194 – 6 for a detailed discussion of Socrates’ remark on Hypatia (quoted in n. 18 above). 20   See Bernard, “The Alexandrian school”, 420. 21   Cf. Damascius’ PH, fr. 106B, Athanassiadi, which refers to the impact that the “memory of these events” (plausibly referring to the murder of Hypatia) had on the Alexandrians’ attitude towards the philosopher Isidore. 22   See n. 1 above. For a fuller account of Hypatia’s role as a spiritual guide in Synesius’ letters, see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 46 – 9.

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that Hypatia would have defined the goal and perfection of human nature in similar terms. Likewise, Synesius’ effusive praise of the benefits of astronomy surely reveals something of the enthusiasm for the starry heavens displayed by his teacher, from whom he himself learned about the construction of the astrolabe:23 Astronomy itself is a venerable science, and might become a stepping stone to something more august, a science which I think is a convenient passage to mystic theology, for the happy body of heaven has matter underneath it, and its motion has seemed to the leaders in philosophy to be an imitation of mind. It proceeds to its demonstrations in no uncertain way, for it uses as its servants geometry and arithmetic, which it would not be improper to call a fixed standard of truth.24

But despite its apparent successes, this general method of inference, from Synesius’ beliefs to those of Hypatia, is most uncertain when applied to particular cases. The history of philosophy knows many examples where a student embraces ideas that have little in common with his or her teacher; and the fact that Hypatia and Synesius maintained a cordial relationship until Synesius’ death does not imply that they must have been in agreement on all or any abstruse metaphysical subjects. Matters are further complicated by the ambiguous nature of Synesius’ own reflections on many of the issues that have a direct bearing on the question of Hypatia’s Platonism. Take for example the debate over whether, as Plotinus thought, the practice of virtuous ethical activity joined with intellectual contemplation is alone necessary for the soul’s vision of intelligible reality, or whether ritual practices and divine benevolence are needed in addition, as the Syrian philosopher Iamblichus would have argued.25 In his treatise On Dreams, Synesius attempts to steer a middle course between the intellectualist Plotinians on the one hand, and the suspicious ritual magic of the theurgists on the other. For Synesius, the vision of the intelligibles must be available to more than just a few 23

  For Hypatia’s contribution, see Synes., De Dono., 138.9 – 10 Terzaghi.   De Dono 4.5 – 13 Terzaghi: ἀστρονομία γὰρ αὐτή τε ὑπέρσεμνός ἐστιν ἐπιστήμη, καὶ τάχ’ ἀναβιβασμὸς ἐπί τι πρεσβύτερον γένοιτ’ ἄν· ἣν ἐγὼ προσεχὲς ἡγοῦμαι πορθμεῖον τῆς ἀπορρήτου θεολογίας. ὕλην τε γὰρ ὑποβέβληται τὸ μακάριον οὐρανοῦ σῶμα, οὗ καὶ τὴν κίνησιν νοῦ μίμησιν εἶναι τοῖς κορυφαιοτάτοις ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ δοκεῖ· καὶ ἐπὶ τὰς ἀποδείξεις οὐκ ἀμφισβητησίμως πορεύεται, ἀλλ’ ὑπηρέτισι χρῆται γεωμετρίᾳ τε καὶ ἀριθμητικῇ, ἃς ἀστραβῆ τῆς ἀληθείας κανόνα τις εἰπὼν οὐκ ἂν ἁμάρτοι τοῦ πρέποντος. (tr. Fitzgerald) 25   The larger question behind the disagreement between Plotinus and Iamblichus turns on whether, as Plotinus suggests, one part of our soul always remains in the intelligible world. In Plotinus’ view, the undescended part of the soul always contemplates the intelligibles, but our awareness of this contemplation may be affected when the lowest part of the soul is disturbed. See e. g. Enn. IV.8.8, 1 – 6. Iamblichus, on the other hand, criticizes Plotinus on this point and argues that the soul undergoes a profound change in the process of embodiment; see e. g. de Anima 381.6 – 13, Dillon and Finamore, eds.; Commentarius in Timaeum fr. 87, Dillon, ed. Consequently, he stresses the importance of theurgic rites and prayer in preparing the soul to receive divine inspiration. 24

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chosen philosophers, while also being accessible through legal means, i. e. without the use of pagan rituals.26 Synesius’ praise of dreams insists that the imagination is the faculty that can put us in contact with the divine in sleep: And if anyone believes that the ascent (ἀναγωγή) is indeed a great thing, but has no faith in the imagination, that this too is a means by which the blessed contact may sometimes be achieved, let him hear what the holy oracles say about the different roads: [. . .] ‘To some he gave by teaching a token to grasp the light, others he impregnated with his strength even as they slept.’27

What would Hypatia, to whom Synesius sent his work On Dreams, have made of this passage, with its emphasis on the power of the imagination to raise our souls to intellect? Presumably, her response to these musings cannot have been wholly negative, since Synesius did after all publish his work, and we may assume that he would not have done so if the peer review had suggested otherwise.28 But the question whether Hypatia was in agreement with Synesius’ praise of the imagination, or instead considered this particular faculty to be a hindrance on the way to a true grasp of reality, remains unanswerable. All we can infer is that Hypatia was likely au fait with the finer details of Neoplatonism: in sending Hypatia his obscure treatise On Dreams, Synesius must surely have felt that she would be competent to judge the merits of a work that presupposes familiarity with the philosophy of Plotinus and its subsequent transformation in the work of Porphyry.29 What would have given him the confidence that he was writing to a competent judge, if not the fact that he would had heard her converse about these subjects at some point in his student days? We may even go one step further and suppose that Hypatia would have shared the formal goal of the “ascent” 26   On the conflict between the law and the practice of ritual magic, see Synesius’ remark at Insomn.133C, which shows the continued influence of anti-Pagan legislation such as Thedosius’ edicts of 391 A. D. 27   Insomn.135A – B. fr. 118 des Places: τοῖς δὲ (φησὶ) διδακτὸν ἔδωκε φάους γνώρισμα λαβέσθαι· τοὺς δὲ καὶ ὑπνώοντας ἑῆς ἐνεκάρπισεν ἀλκῆς. According to Synesius’ interpretation of this verse from the Chaldean Oracles (the “holy oracles” in the quoted passage), learning and inspiration in sleep are two alternative ways of reaching knowledge of the divine. See Sebastian Gertz, “Dream divination and the Neoplatonic search for salvation,” in On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination. Sapere XXIV, Donald A. Russell and Hans-Günther Nesselrath, eds (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 111 – 24.for a discussion of On Dreams in the context of Neoplatonic soteriology, and Henri-Irénée Marrou, “Synesius of Cyrene and Alexandrian Neoplatonism,” in The Conflict of Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, A. Momigliano, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 126 – 50 for a wider account of Synesius’ Neoplatonism. 28  See Letter 154, in which Synesius solicits feedback from “the philosopher” (i. e. Hypatia) on Insomn. and other writings. 29   Compare Synesius’ praise of the imagination with e. g. Plotinus’ claim that the higher soul should strive to forget what is below it (Enn. 4.3.32), and, by way of contrast, Porphyry’s concession that theurgy can have a role in the philosophical life in so far as it can purify the pneumatic soul (anima spiritalis), which, like the imagination, is the proper recipient of material images emanating from things (cf. Augustine, City of God X.9).

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of the soul to intellect, and that Synesius was here providing a solution to difficulties that he had already wrestled with as an auditor of Hypatia’s lectures. But here speculation must end. There is one firm result we can take away from these remarks on Synesius’ On Dreams and its possible reception by Hypatia, and it is a negative one. It is highly unlikely that Hypatia would have been the old-fashioned representative of a simple, pre-Plotinian form of Platonism, as John Rist had argued in his 1965 article on Hypatia. In his view, we should assume that Hypatia’s philosophy would have had the greatest similarities with the ideas of her immediate successor Hierocles of Alexandria, who is the author of a work On Providence and a commentary on the Golden Verses attributed to Pythagoras.30 In Rist’s view, Hierocles is closer in spirit to the Middle Platonists than to either Iamblichus or Plotinus, presumably because unlike his successors, Hierocles operates with a simple theology that does not make explicit reference to a transcendent first principle.31 More recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that the philosophy of Hierocles is not some return to a simpler form of Platonism; whatever simplifications it contains may be due to the particular pedagogical requirements involved in teaching introductory works of philosophy.32 In other respects, Hierocles’ philosophy is only intelligible in the light of later developments in the Neoplatonic tradition since Plotinus. Particularly telling is Hierocles’ belief in the existence of a luminous body that “attaches” to the soul and acts as the principle of life for the physical, flesh-and-bones body. This “luminous body” was often equated with the soul-vehicle (ὄχημα) onto which Plato’s Demiurge mounts the souls that return to heaven. Plotinus made little use of the soul-vehicle, but his successors Porphyry and Iamblichus gave it a more prominent role as an intermediary or “buffer” between the soul and the physical body, the immaterial and the material. Hierocles links the purification of the luminous body directly to “the sacred ordinances and the arts of sacred rites”, i. e. to “god-working” or theurgy: Purifications of the rational soul are the mathematical sciences, and elevating deliverance is the dialectical revelation of being. [. . .] [I]t is necessary that telestic purifications go along with mathematical purifications and that hieratic elevation accompany the deliverance wrought by dialectics. These practices in a special way purify and perfect the pneumatic vehicle of the rational soul: they separate it from the lifelessness of matter, and they also render it to be in a capable state for the fellowship with pure spirits. For it is not lawful for the impure to lay hold of the pure.33 30

  See John Rist, “Hypatia of Alexandria,” Phoenix 19 (1965): 219.   Ibid., 218. 32   See Ilsetraut Hadot, Athenian and Alexandrian Neoplatonism (Leiden: Brill, 2015) for a compelling case to this effect, summarizing her earlier research on Hierocles and the question of Alexandrian Neoplatonism. 33  Hierocl., in CA 26.21.1 – 22.8 Köhler; ed., Schibli, trans. 31

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By insisting on the need to purify the luminous vehicle of the soul through “the art of sacred rites”, therefore, Hierocles follows in a tradition of Platonism that only developed after Plotinus; he was certainly not a Middle Platonist. Rist’s effort to glean the nature of Hypatia’s teaching and approach to philosophy by likening her to her near contemporary and fellow Platonist Hierocles was therefore based on the false assumption that both were representatives of an old-fashioned Platonism that had little contact with Plotinus and his successors. However, could Rist’s proposal be recast into a more acceptable form? Could Hypatia have anticipated Hierocles by giving some role to the ritual tradition of theurgy in the ascent of the soul, for example? Synesius, after all, knew the Bible of the theurgists, the so-called Chaldean Oracles.34 It might thus seem natural to think that he became acquainted with them while studying with Hypatia. And if Hypatia knew the Bible of the theurgists, she may well have been a theurgist, herself. i. e. a follower of the kind of Neoplatonism expounded by Iamblichus. However, the example of Synesius confirms that knowledge of the Chaldaean Oracles did not entail a commitment to pagan ritual and its theoretical underpinnings in later Neoplatonism. When he talks about the purification of the luminous vehicle, Synesius is noticeably circumspect on the role of ritual purifications in cleansing the luminous body, in contrast to Hierocles (who, as we have seen, gives the art of sacred rites some role in the ascent): “As to rituals – well, let our argument comply with the laws of the country, and leave them undisturbed; but there can be no harm in its taking on divination.”35 Although there may be some few instances where Synesius displayed some acquaintance with Chaldaean ritual practices, the passage quoted just above sums up his approach well.36 He is in general content to heed legislation aimed at curbing magic and theurgy, and goes as far as to suggest that the soul-vehicle could be purified by no more than a moderate diet and an upright way of living.37 Therefore, even if Synesius did ultimately derive his knowledge of the Chaldaean Oracles from Hypatia, there is no way of telling what they would have meant to her. Like any 34   These dark sayings were probably compiled in the second-century CE; later Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus, who wrote an extensive, now lost, commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, regarded them as divinely revealed. For a collection of the fragments, see Ruth Majercik, Chaldean Oracles. Text, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1989). Synesius refers to and quotes from the Oracles repeatedly in Insomn., e. g. at 135A – B (4.38 – 46 Terzaghi); 135C (5.4 – 5); 138D (7.47 – 51); 140D (9.6 – 9). 35   Insomn., 133C. 36   One striking piece of evidence in the Insomn. that could suggest a particular ritual can be found at 132B, where Synesius explains the Iynges of the magi in the context of a larger discourse on cosmic sympathy, without any apparent disapproval. An Iynx is a magical instrument (a rotating iron disk, most likely) used in love charms and probably also in Chaldean ritual; see frs 77 – 79. Majercik, Chaldean Oracles, 206. 37   The relevant legislation may be Cod.Theod. IX.16.3. For moderation as an aid to inspired dreams, see Insomn. 143B.

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good religious text, the Oracles could mean many things to many people. Within Platonism itself, there were multiple alternatives: Plotinus knew the Oracles, but paid relatively little attention to them; and Porphyry, who could use the language of the Oracles to describe the soul’s ascent, seems to have been at best ambivalent about the ability of theurgy to help in the purification of the irrational soul.38 Besides, nothing in our sources suggests that Hypatia cared passionately about the pagan cults; she does not seem to have had any involvement in the unsuccessful defense of the Serapeion in 391, and hostile sources such as John of Nikiu would surely have picked up any rumors about her involvement in suspicious ritual practices. But instead of charging Hypatia with drawing down demons that disguise themselves as gods, which is how Christian like Augustine would have viewed theurgy, John denounces her interests in “magic, astrolabes, and instruments of music” quite generally.39 In sum, there is no compelling reason to think of Hypatia as a Platonist in the tradition of Iamblichus. For all we know, she, like Plotinus, could have expected the gods to come to her, and not the other way around.40

Hypatia in the context of ‘Alexandrian Neoplatonism’ So far, I have defended Hypatia’s claim to being a Platonist in the Plotinian tradition against various alternative accounts that see in her either a Ptolemist, a Middle Platonist or an Iamblichean. In the next part of this paper, I suggest that we can imagine Hypatia’s activity as a teacher more fully by looking at the wider context of Alexandrian Neoplatonism. First, however, something must be said about the label ‘Alexandrian Neoplatonism’. According to a traditional view, set forth most compellingly by Karl Praechter in two seminal papers, ‘Alexandrian’ Neoplatonism differed from its Athenian counterpart in a number of important and related respects.41 First, the Alexandrian school emphasized scientific and logical education over metaphysics, focusing on the study of Aristotle rather than Plato; second, it included in its audience Christians; and third, it functioned as a neutral institution that would assimilate Platonic doctrines to Christian views or at any rate smooth 38   Plotinus’ discussion of suicide in Ennead I.9 is something of a commentary on one verse of the Oracles (’Do not take yourself out, lest you depart [taking something with you]’). For Porphyry’s attitude to (pseudo‑) Chaldaean lore, see e. g. de Regressu Animae, fr. 4 Bidez. 39   John of Nikiu, Chronicle LXXXIV.87, R. H. Charles, ed. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu (Merchantville: Arx Publishing, 2007), 100. 40   Cf. Porph., Plot, 10.35 – 6. 41   See Karl Praechter, “Richtungen und Schulen in Neuplatonismus”, in Genethliakon Carl Robert (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1910) and “Christlich-neuplatonische Beziehungen”, ByzZ 2 (1912): 1 – 27.

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over the issues that separated pagans from Christians, such as the question of the eternity of the world, the existence of the pagan gods or the role of pagan mythology in education. Praechter’s thesis about the differences between Alexandrian and Athenian Neoplatonism has come under sustained attack in recent decades, and for good reasons. Both schools were closely linked: Hierocles, for example, was taught by the Platonist Plutarch in Athens before taking up teaching in Alexandria after Hypatia’s death; and Ammonius, a philosopher who taught in Alexandria in the late fifth and early sixth century CE, sent his student Simplicius to Athens.42 Many of the Platonic heads of school in Athens received their training in Alexandria, for instance, Syrianus, Isidore and Damascius.43 Given these close ties between the two schools, the idea of a fundamental difference in their approach to teaching philosophy may seem unlikely from the start. Even more damaging for Praechter’s thesis was the fact that some alleged instances of pagan philosophers assimilating their views to Christian doctrine turned out to be spurious. As we have seen with the example of Hierocles, his apparently simpler theology that has the demiurge take the place of “the divine” need not indicate any radical change of doctrine, since he was writing for the equivalent of first-year undergraduates. Similarly, Praechter’s claim that Hierocles took over the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo has required significant modification. Hierocles argues that making matter ungenerated in time would make it equal in worth to god – an impious doctrine!44 Consequently, god must create matter, in the sense of being its creative cause, even though this creation does not take place in time. But although the view that god has created matter could at first sight appear close to Christian views of the creation of the universe from nothing, it can be traced back to Porphyry, who never taught or studied in Alexandria, and can hardly be accused of bending Platonic doctrine to fit with Christian sentiments.45 Therefore, Hierocles’ view on matter cannot serve as an example of a general rapprochement between Christians and pagans that is specific to the Alexandrian setting. The label ‘Alexandrian Neoplatonism’, then, needs to be used with caution, as these brief remarks on Praechter’s thesis have tried to illustrate. Yet I wish to 42

  On Hierocles, see Phot., Bibl. 214.173a37 – 8; on Simplicius’ debts to both Ammonius and Damascius, see e. g. in Cat., 59.23; 183.18 (Ammonius); 642.17; 774.28 (Damascius). 43   Syrianus’ Alexandrian origin seems to be suggested by Damascius, PH, fr. 56 Athanassiadi. For the circumstances surrounding Isidore’s move to Athens, see Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 121 – 3. 44   Cf. the report of Hierocles’ doctrine in Phot., Bibl. 251.460b22 – 461a23. 45   See the report of Porphyry’s arguments in Procl., in Ti., I. 394.12 – 16. See also Ilsetraut Hadot, Studies on the Neoplatonist Hierocles (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004), 21 – 7 for a presentation of Porphyry’s view on the creation of matter and a successful attempt to situate Hierocles in the context of later Platonist critiques of Middle Platonic authors such as Atticus.

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argue that despite these reservations, we can come to a fuller understanding of Hypatia as a teacher and philosopher by viewing her in the context of ‘Alexandrian Neoplatonism’. I begin with a comment in Damascius’ Philosophical History, which states that Hypatia “publicly explained Plato, Aristotle, and the works of any other philosopher” while proceeding through the town in her philosopher’s cloak.46 Damascius’ description bears the same undercurrent of hostility as his other remarks about Hypatia: she may have given public lectures on Plato and Aristotle, but it is something of a stretch to imagine her as an itinerant Cynic cornering passers-by with questions and arguments. Likewise, Damascius’ claim that Hypatia would expound “the works of any other philosopher” is hardly a compliment: he is not trying to have us admire Hypatia’s intellectual versatility, but rather to sneer at her lack of selectivity and judgment. However, if we can accept that Hypatia taught both Plato and Aristotle to the public, and perhaps some more recent philosophers in addition, we are faced with an interesting question: how would she have taught these philosophers? In particular, how would she have explained their apparent differences and disagreements? What judgment would she have passed on the merits of Aristotle’s arguments against Plato’s theory of forms, for example? Of course this is an area for speculation, but it seems likely to me that anyone teaching both philosophers is going to have to take some view on their relationship. Platonists both before and after Hypatia adopted the view that Plato and Aristotle were in agreement on many fundamental points, and that it was the task of a skillful interpreter to reconcile the two.47 When Aristotle, for example, attacks the Platonic notion that souls are self-moving in On the Soul I.3, a commentator might point out that Aristotle’s critique applies not to Plato himself but only to a mistaken way of understanding self-motion. Our commentator might then explain that Aristotle seeks to preserve the common meaning of names; when Aristotle denies that souls are self-moving, he means that they are not literally moving themselves through space. What Plato means by self-motion, on the other hand, is that souls 46   Fr.  43A4 – 7 Athanassiadi: περιβαλλομένη δὲ τρίβωνα ἡ γυνὴ καὶ διὰ μέσου τοῦ ἄστεως ποιουμένη τὰς προόδους ἐξηγεῖτο δημοσίᾳ τοῖς ἀκροᾶσθαι βουλομένοις ἢ τὸν Πλάτωνα ἢ τὸν Ἀριστοτέλην ἢ τὰ ἄλλου ὅτου δὴ τῶν φιλοσόφων. For the significance of the word δημοσίᾳ (‘in public’), see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 258 – 9, who points out the implicit contrast between Hypatia’s public activity and the self-absorbed profundity of the philosopher Isidore. 47  Simplicius, in Cat. 8.7.23 – 32: “His judgment must be impartial (adekaston), so that he may neither, out of superficial understanding, show to be unacceptable something that has been well said, nor, if some point should require demonstration, should he obstinately persist in trying to demonstrate that Aristotle is always and everywhere infallible, as if he had enrolled himself in the Philosopher’s school. [The good exegete] must, I believe, not convict the philosophers of disagreement (diaphônia) by looking only at the letter (lexis) of what [Aristotle] says against Plato; but he must look towards the spirit (nous), and track down the harmony (sumphônia) which reigns between them on the majority of points.” (tr. Barney / Menn).

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are the origin of their own activity of thinking, desiring etc. Therefore, there is no contradiction between the views of Plato and Aristotle, only a deceptive surface appearance of disagreement that vanishes when a more subtle interpretation has been applied.48 This way of “harmonizing” Plato and Aristotle must have been common currency in Alexandria. We know that the shadowy figure of Ammonius Saccas, an Alexandrian of the third century CE who taught Plotinus, believed in the harmony of the two philosophers, and Hypatia’s immediate successor Hierocles likewise remained wedded to the idea, as indeed did virtually all Alexandrian Neoplatonists after him.49 Therefore, given that Hypatia lectured on both Plato and Aristotle, it is overwhelmingly likely that she would have tried to downplay or explain away tensions between the two thinkers, arguing perhaps that Aristotle is more suitable for beginning students because he preserves the ordinary significance of names, while Plato uses a more elevated language that is more suitable for advanced students. The project of harmonizing Plato and Aristotle was so firmly entrenched in the philosophical culture of her time that it is difficult to believe she would not have been engaged in it in one form or another. I now turn to a second aspect of Hypatia’s activity as a teacher that can be interestingly related to the wider context of ‘Alexandrian Neoplatonism’. Although, as we have seen, one has to apply the label with caution, it can help us think about how Hypatia would have taught ‘pagan’ philosophy to an audience of students that would have included Christians like Synesius and his group of friends in Alexandria. When teaching Plato or Aristotle, Hypatia must have been aware that there were fundamental disagreements between pagans and Christians on questions such as the eternity of the world, the resurrection of the body and the identity of the divine principle. Prima facie, Hypatia might have adopted one of two different strategies: she could either have avoided controversial subjects, or else have attempted to find compromise formulations that would make Hellenic doctrines as acceptable to her Christian students as possible. As it happens, we can find examples for both strategies in the later history of Alexandrian Neoplatonism. When it comes to avoiding controversial subjects, we can recall the mysterious agreement that the Platonist Ammonius is supposed to have made with the ruling powers in Alexandria. Damascius, never hesitant to pass judgment, tells us that Ammonius, “who was shamefully greedy and always looking out for profit”, reached an agreement with the over-

48   See Sebastian Gertz, “Do Plato and Aristotle agree on self-motion in souls?” in Conversations Platonic and Neoplatonic: Intellect, Soul, and Nature John F. Finamore and Robert M. Berchman, eds (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2010), 73 – 87 on this issue. 49   One should exempt here the figure of John Philoponus, who capitalizes on the apparent disagreements between Plato and Aristotle in, for example, his magnum opus de aeternitate, published in 529 CE.

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seer or bishop of the prevailing doctrine (viz. Christianity) at the time.50 There has been much discussion about the content of that agreement, which seems to have enabled Ammonius to carry on teaching Platonic philosophy in a time when religious tensions between pagans and Christians were rife. One likely hypothesis is that Ammonius made an agreement not to mention certain kinds of doctrines or practices in the course of his teaching. It has been pointed out, for example, that Ammonius, in his surviving commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation, is notably silent on a subject that would have an obvious bearing on the religious practices associated with late ancient Platonism – the subject of divine names. At On Interpretation 16a27, Aristotle claims that “no name is by nature”, a claim which, if true, would imply that the name of the gods are simply human conventions and do not possess an innate efficacy on which the worshipper can draw in prayer and worship. An orthodox defender of Platonism, such as Proclus, would urge that Aristotle’s dictum must be restricted in its application, and does not extend to divine names.51 Ammonius’ apparent reluctance to pursue this line of argument, so it is argued, might reveal the effect of the deal he struck with the Alexandrian patriarch to avoid explicit discussion of pagan religious practices.52 It is not likely that Ammonius would have avoided all controversial subjects, however; a later dialogue (written by the Christian Zacharias of Mytilene) with the title Ammonius makes it clear that Christians saw in Ammonius a staunch proponent of the doctrine that the world is co-eternal with god – an impious view for Christians, but one that may be argued to follow from the Platonic position that god must always exercise his creative power on the world.53 Even Ammonius’ conscience, it seems, could not be bought in its entirety. Nothing in our sources for Hypatia suggests that she would have struck a deal like that between Ammonius and the Patriarch of Alexandria. But even in the absence of any formal agreement with, say, the Patriarch Cyril to avoid discussing certain subjects in her lectures, Hypatia may have negotiated tensions between Hellenic and Christian thought in subtler ways. If this would in fact 50  Damascius, PH fr. 118B Athanassiadi: “Ammonius, who was shamefully greedy and always looking out for profit, came to an agreement with the then overseer of the prevailing doctrine.” (ὁ δὲ Ἀμμώνιος αἰσχροκερδὴς ὢν καὶ πάντα ὁρῶν εἰς χρηματισμὸν ὁντιναοῦν, ὁμολογίας τίθεται πρὸς τὸν ἐπισκοποῦντα τὸ τηνικαῦτα τὴν κρατοῦσαν δόξαν). 51   See his Commentary on Plato’s Cratylus, in Crat. e. g. scholion XXX, 10.29 – 11.1. 52   See Richard Sorabji, “Divine Names and Sordid Deals in Ammonius’ Alexandria,” in The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity, A. Smith, ed. (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2005) for this proposal. 53   What precisely is meant by the claim that god and the world are co-eternal, and whether Ammonius did in fact uphold some version of this view, are matters that I cannot pursue here. For discussion of these issues, see the introduction to my translation of Zacharias of Mytilene’s Ammonius, in Sebastian Gertz, John Dillon and Donald A. Russell trans, Aeneas of Gaza: Theophrastus with Zacharias of Mytilene: Ammonius (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012).

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have been her method of teaching, we can look to the Platonist Olympiodorus, who taught in Alexandria during the sixth century CE, to illustrate the challenges Hypatia might have faced as a pagan teacher of Christian students.54 Olympiodorus, who was a student of Ammonius, taught introductory courses on Plato and Aristotle, just as we might imagine Hypatia doing a century earlier.55 His commentaries survive in the form of notes taken by students, and tell us much about his role, not only as a teacher of philosophy, but also as a guardian of Hellenic culture more broadly. He anticipates, for example, that his students might find many aspects of traditional mythology, such as Zeus’ adulterous liaisons, troubling if not offensive. He defends traditional Greek mythology on the grounds that the stories told by the poets are too absurd to be believed or to inspire immoral conduct: [I]t is senseless to say, as the poets do56, that Cronus devoured his children and regurgitated them, while Zeus became a swan. If we punish men who do such things, how much more inappropriate is it to attribute such behavior to the gods? This is why there is 57 reason to fear that the delicate souls of the young will accept them as true, since the young are difficult to sway towards such behavior. For this reason, let us admit the more monstrous tales for the sake of the poets, because no one could come to believe these stories due to their implausibility. (my translation)

Olympiodorus’ defense of Hellenic culture against the sensitivities of his partly Christian audience puts him at odds with Plato himself, of course: Plato’s Socrates argues in the Republic that the distorted value system of the poets is liable to become internalized by the young, where it breeds corruption and immorality.58 Olympiodorus, on the other hand, sees the external incongruity of myths as evidence for their harmlessness. What they conceal under their repulsive exterior are truths that can be reconciled with the kind of rationalistic theology Plato himself defends in Book 2 of the Republic, starting from the premise that the gods do not deceive and do no evil. 54   This is not to deny that Olympiodorus, who was teaching philosophy in Alexandria more than a century after Hypatia’s death in the aftermath of the religious violence and persecutions of the later fifth century, and particularly the 480s, is likely to have been even more keenly aware of the need for circumspection than his famous predecessor. 55   Hypatia’s own teaching of Plato and Aristotle may, for the most part, have been of an introductory nature, given her own predilection for astronomy and mathematics, as Christian Lacombrade, “Hypatia,” RAC 16 (1994): 962 points out. 56   Cf. Hes., Th., 459 – 67. 57  Olymp., Proll. 12.1 – 8. From the context of the passage, we should expect Olympiodorus to say that there is no reason to fear that the young shall be corrupted by traditional mythology, precisely because the stories are so incongruous, and because young people do not naturally tend towards immoral conduct. For this reason, I have added a negation () before deos at line 4. The point can be established by contraposition: if the young are liable to believe that myths are true, they will also be inclined to act immorally; but if, as Olympiodorus says, they are not easily moved to immoral conduct, they are also not likely to believe outrageous tales. 58   See Pl. R. 377b – c.

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As a teacher of ‘pagan’ philosophy, Olympiodorus would have considered himself as the defender of Hellenic culture more widely, and it is not too farfetched to assume that Hypatia may have viewed her own position in similar terms. In Olympiodorus’ case, the best defense of Hellenic culture he could muster seems to have involved a series of tactical retreats. His Platonism has been described as “pliable in the extreme”, and examples for the kinds of compromises he was ready to make in the classroom are not hard to come by.59 In one revealing instance, Olympiodorus tells his students not to be disturbed when they hear the words “the power of Cronus” or “the power of Zeus”; instead, they should consider the reality that underlies the names: Do not be disturbed by names, hearing talk of a Power of Cronus or a Power of Zeus or suchlike, but concentrate on the objects themselves, for we signify something different when we use these names. If you wish, think that these Powers do not have individual essences and are not distinct from one another, but place them within the first cause and say that there are within it both intellectual and vital powers.60

In other words, the pagan divinities need not be understood as beings that possess individual essences and that are separate from one another; his (Christian) students may place “Cronus” and “Zeus” into the first principle of everything, making them the intellective and vital powers of the one true god of Christianity rather than independent members of an assembly of gods. To give one final example of Olympiodorus’ readiness to accommodate the sensibilities of his no doubt partly Christian audience, we can turn to his Commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades. Here, when commenting on Socrates’ statement “I was prevented by some daimon” (103A), Olympiodorus explains that “the commentators” have used this occasion to expound the theory of daemons. For Platonists like Proclus, the daimones are beings that are intermediaries between the human and the divine. They fall into six different categories, from those daimones that connect humans to the divine to the lowest form associated with matter. Socrates’ famed “divine sign” or daimonion belongs to the class of divine daimones, who would communicate with him through a kind of emanation in the region next to Socrates’ ear, rather than by actual speech. Once Olympiodorus has set out the demonology of “the commentators”, he continues to give his own view:

59   See Leendert G. Westerink, The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1976), 23 for the diagnosis of “extreme pliability”, and Michael J. Griffin, “‘Pliable Platonism?’: Olympiodorus and the Profession of Philosophy in Sixth-Century Alexandria,” in Plato in the Third Sophistic, R. C. Fowler, ed (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014) for a recent account of Olympiodorus’ role as a philosopher and teacher. 60  Olympiodorus, in Grg., 47.2.21 – 3.1 Westerink, in the translation of Robin Jackson, Kimon Lycos and Harold Tarrant, Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

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[W]e, for our part, will attempt to run through all this in a manner that leads to reconciliation with the views that are current. (After all, Socrates was condemned to the hemlock for introducing new daimonic [beings] to the youths, and believing in gods that the state did not consider gods.) So it should be noted that the “allotted daimon” is really the “conscience” (to suneidos); this is the “crowning peak” of the soul, that which is faultless in us, an unswerving judge and witness before Minos and Rhadamanthys to what [has happened] here [on earth].61

Olympiodorus recognizes that the prevailing view of the commentators, to think of Socrates’ divine sign as a spirit being, runs counter to “the views that are current”62 in his time. Christian apologists, of course, had argued for generations that the daimones of the pagans were evil and deceitful without exception, a view that is incompatible with the Platonic understanding of daimones as messengers between gods and humans. There is no question, then, that Olympiodorus is offering his auditors a compromise solution when describing the daimonion as nothing other than a person’s conscience. This equation was itself no innovation on Olympiodorus’ part and can be found in the writings of the Middle Platonist Apuleius, for example.63 But we may well suspect that Olympiodorus’ reasons for choosing this particular interpretation of the daimonion over that of “the commentators” were not strictly philosophical, as he himself acknowledges when recalling Socrates’ fate in the passage above.

Conclusion Alexandrian Platonists like Ammonius and Olympiodorus were in a vulnerable position. They lacked the financial independence of the Athenian school of Neoplatonism, which could rely on endowments to fund its teaching.64 Compromises with the Christians were, in one way or another, inevitable. Hypatia’s position is unlikely to have been very different; she did not occupy an official chair of philosophy, but taught privately. In her role as a teacher, she would have been an expositor of ‘pagan’ culture quite generally, as well as a defender of the view that the greatest thinkers of the Greek philosophical tradition, Plato and Aristotle, were in agreement on questions as diverse as the immortality of the soul, the eternity of the world and the reality of the forms. As far as we can tell, Hypatia taught philosophy in the tradition of Plotinus and Porphyry; if she was at all aware of the newer intellectual developments that would ultimately win 61  Olympiodorus, in Alc. 22.14 – 23.4 Westerink, in Michael Griffin, trans., Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1 – 9 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 62  Olympiodorus, in Alc. 22.15. 63   See Apuleius, De deo Socratis, Beaujeu, ed., 16. 64   On these endowments (διαδοχικά), see Damascius, PH fr. 102 Athanassiadi and Olympiodorus, in Alc., 141.1 – 3 Westerink.

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the day in the philosophy of Hierocles, most noticeably the emphasis on esoteric practices to purify the vehicle of the soul, there is no evidence to suggest that they influenced her thinking. Far from being a ‘mere geometer’, she is likely to have viewed her own area of expertise, the study of mathematics, in a Platonic light, as a discipline that can prepare the understanding for a clearer vision of timeless and unchanging truth. The letters of Synesius are an eloquent witness to the lasting and transformative effect of her teachings.

Hypatia’s Sisters? Gender and the Triumph of Knowledge in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca Joshua Fincher Introduction The life and death of Hypatia were events that deeply resonated throughout the intellectual and religious culture of the fifth century well beyond her death. Whether one reads Socrates Scholasticus’ tragic, the Suda’s laudatory, or John of Nikiu’s critical account, the events surrounding Hypatia’s career and death contributed to and exacerbated a distinct cultural anxiety among both pagans and Christians, especially among the educated classes, an anxiety that several authors in this volume seek to contextualize and reconstruct.1 A dominant source of anxiety that emerges in both accounts is that Hypatia was an educated woman performing (and performing well) a traditionally male-dominated role in intellectual and political culture, an achievement that earns her Socrates’ pity and praise and John’s scorn.2 For Socrates and the Suda, Hypatia’s unique role offers an opportunity to praise her as an admirable, moral, and self-confident philosopher who was unjustly a collateral victim of the jealousy (φθόνος) and slander (διαβολή) of political opportunists and zealots (ἔνθερμοι).3 For John, Hypatia is a dangerous deceiver whose apparent education and intelligence arise from Satan and witchcraft that enchants her students, political leaders, and the city of Alexandria itself. As John considers Hypatia and her influence a rival to Christian supremacy and integrity and an instrument of Satan, the killing of Hypatia is celebrated as a purifying deed that forever removes the threat of paganism from Alexandria. Both accounts manifest a concern about female intellectual power and the transgression of both gendered intellectual boundaries and reli1

  See Seng, Petkas, and Haase in this volume; see also Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015) for an excellent general discussion of cultural forces and tensions at play in “the last pagan generation.” 2   There were other female teachers and philosophers that preceded Hypatia, yet none who seemed to have exactly matched Hypatia’s intellectual and political influence. Still, several of these female philosophers faced a similar critical reception by contemporary male intellectuals. Edward Watts provides an illuminating rundown of female philosophers in the period and draws parallels and contrasts with Hypatia. See Edward J. Watts Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). It is from his chapter titled “Hypatia’s Sisters” (93 – 106) that I draw my own. 3  Socr. 7.15. Suda s. v. Ὑπατία (Adler Υ 166).

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gious / ideological spheres. In this paper I explore Nonnus’ Dionysiaca,4 a vast epic poem in forty-eight books on the career of Dionysus, and Nonnus’ presentation of female intellectuals therein as another, albeit more methodologically problematic, resonance of the Hypatia controversy that engages with the anxiety, both ideological and gendered, that attended this cause célèbre of fifth-century intellectual life, which we find expressed by John, the Suda, and Socrates. In engaging in my analysis, I propose to integrate the Dionysiaca within the community of possible fifth-century readings of Hypatia’s death, which was surely wider and more nuanced than our few sources allow us to believe. If one were to divide the spectrum of sources we do have into the polarities of those sympathetic to Hypatia (Socrates, Suda) and antagonistic to Hypatia (John), in my reading of the poem, the Dionysiaca appears to align itself with the sympathetic camp and voices a critique of the antagonistic camp.5 In doing so, I first operate under the assumption that the Suda as well as John represent an understanding of Hypatia’s career and death that was part of the receptive community discourse leading up to and in the aftermath of her murder. Second, I fully acknowledge that any simple binary is hardly reflective of the multiple possible readings of her death. Nonetheless, I will employ this binary, as problematic as it is and as reflective of our limited source material, for the convenience of this paper while not intending to suggest that these are exclusive categories or the only possible readings. Although it is an unresolved issue (and potentially irresolvable), by scholarly consensus the dates proposed for Nonnus and the Dionysiaca are consistent with those of Hypatia’s milieu. The poem is likely a product of the early to mid-fifth century,6 and it was composed either in Panopolis in Upper Egypt or in Alexandria itself.7 Thus, we have in the Dionysiaca a literary product that perhaps 4

  Translations of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca are based on W. H. D. Rouse, trans., Dionysiaca, LCL, vols. 344, 354, 356 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940). 5   I will continue to use sympathetic to refer to readings that align with the perspective of Socrates and the Suda and antagonistic to refer to readings that align with the perspective of John throughout this paper. 6   For the notoriously difficult dating of the Dionysiaca (and Nonnus’ life in general), see Laura Miguélez-Cavero, Poems in Context: Greek Poetry in the Egyptian Thebais 200 – 600 AD (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 17 – 19. Miguélez-Cavero reviews four possible dating schemes for the Dionysiaca: before 390 (unlikely as it is based on a conversion narrative that is no longer supported); after 390 and before 405; after 397 and before 470; and after 440 and before 490. Robert Shorrock advocates a fifth-century date, Robert Shorrock, The Challenge of Epic: Allusive Engagement in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 1. I find the 397 – 470 option the most convincing as it casts the widest net and respects the largest amount of evidence; however even in this scheme, there are several problems, primarily conjectures about the style, allusion, and primacy of Cyrus of Panopolis. The most one can say for certain about the poem’s date seems to be that it is a product of the mid-fifth century. 7   Daria Gigli Piccardi, “Nonno, Proteo e l’isola di Faro,” Prometheus 19 (1993): 230 – 4; Enrico Livrea, Nonno di Panopoli, Parafrasi del Vangelo di S. Giovanni, Canto XVIII. (Naples: D’Auria, 1989), 440; Shorrock, The Challenge of Epic.

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coincides with, or at least stands in close proximity to, the context surrounding Hypatia’s life. As a significant literary work composed probably during the lifetime of some of Hypatia’s students and possibly during the lifetime of her murderers and (most likely) Cyril, the Dionysiaca is both involved in the cultural climate of Hypatia’s Alexandria and is likely to have reflected on an event that was infamous when Socrates wrote his account (at least up to 439 CE). In looking for literary resonances of the Hypatia controversy, the Dionysiaca should strike us as a prime candidate. Of course, the greatest difficulty in considering any reflection of historical or contemporary events in the Dionysiaca is the fact that it is a mythological epic poem, not a historical work. Any reading of Hypatia in the Dionysiaca requires a foray into the uncertain realm of allegory, symbolism, intentionality, and audience. This is why I use the term “resonance”; I do not mean to say that Nonnus intended characters in the Dionysiaca to be read as straightforward allegories of Hypatia. Rather, my attention focuses on the thematic and dialogic correspondences between descriptions of, reactions to, and criticisms of Hypatia and the discourse on female intellectualism, gender performance, and traditionalism found in the mythological narrative of the Dionysiaca. Through these correspondences, the audience is invited to make connections between the poem’s polyvalent narrative and significant contemporary events.8 Because I focus on what I see as “resonances” and not direct allegories or allusions, two points must be kept in mind. First, there will not be a precise one-toone correspondence between the life of Hypatia in all its details and the female intellectual characters, all three of them, that I read as resonant of Hypatia in the Dionysiaca. Second, the locus of interpretation here is the reader, although I would propose that a measure of intentionality underlies the poet’s creation of resonant situations. Nonnus, I argue, constructs a narrative and a series of characters that are suggestive, in alternatively broad and specific terms and details, of the intellectual milieu of Hypatia’s world, Hypatia’s intellectual career, and intellectualism, abstracted into non-Hypatian fields of study, itself. He arranges details that create an interpretive setting that evokes a connection to Hypatia, then a response in the reader, while guiding the reader’s interpretation of his setting toward a specific end, namely, the situation of the Dionysiaca on the sympathetic side of the reception of Hypatia as an intellectual and specifically a female intellectual. 8   Of course, interpreting any literary production allegorically in Late Antiquity was standard practice, both with new and traditional texts. For practices and prevalence, see Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); John Dillon, “Image, Symbol, and Analogy: Three Basic Concepts of Neoplatonic Allegorical Exegesis,” in The Significance of Neoplatonism, ed. R. Baine Harris (Norfolk: Old Dominion University, 1976), 247 – 62.

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In this paper, I will explore one of the Dionysiaca’s narratives, the narrative in Book 41 that describes the birth of Beroe, the personification of Beirut, to Aphrodite and Aphrodite’s visit to the house of Harmonia, and the series of characters in those scenes (Beroe, Aphrodite, and Harmonia) that have the potential to be read in relation to Hypatia and the controversy surrounding her. I say “potential” because the Dionysiaca has been notoriously difficult to connect convincingly to any unified agenda or symbolic / allegorical system of correspondences, whether political, social, philosophical, or religious. Nonnus’ own opinions, religious background, and life circumstances are almost entirely unknown, a situation that makes it difficult to speculate about, or place limits to, the poem’s ideological aims.9 While certain sections of the poem do appear to lend themselves to a limited reading in support of one ideology or another, a larger unified theme remains elusive and rarely operates in more than a few sections. Shorrock’s 2011 monograph convincingly argues that this ambiguity is a deliberate move on Nonnus’ part, and he contends that perhaps one of the primary themes of the poem is an opposition to totalizing discourse and evaluative binaries that distinguish ideological boundaries and contemporary Christian / pagan discourse.10 Nonnus appears to exhibit an interest in unpacking, probing, and analyzing the modes of discourse, knowledge, gender, and ideology in his contemporary world through the lens of myth. It is with the optimistic assumption that the Dionysiaca does engage with the religious and polemical discourse of Hypatia’s Alexandria, if not through allegory at least thematically and in such a way as to possibly provoke a connection in the reader, that I will analyze the narrative in Book 41 that seems to evoke Hypatia’s unique role as a female, non-Christian academic and philosopher who faced criticism in an increasingly polarized religious climate in Alexandria. The Dionysiaca’s own apparent ambiguity and reluctance to directly engage with one or another religious or political ideology has discouraged any confident discussion of its relation to specific contemporary events. This new attempt to tease out a historicizing responsiveness within the poem to specific contemporary cultural events allows both an increased appreciation for the poem’s relationship to its social, cultural, and ideological context as well as a greater understanding of the resonant power of traumatic cultural experiences, such as the killing of Hypatia.

 9   Attempts have been made to try and reconstruct Nonnus’ biography, but conclusions prove elusive. The most recent discussion of the topic is Domenico Accorinti, “The Poet from Panopolis: An Obscure Biography and a Controversial Figure,” in Brill’s Companion to Nonnus, ed. D. Accorinti (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 11 – 53. 10   See Robert Shorrock, The Myth of Paganism: Nonnus, Dionysus and the World of Late Antiquity (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011), especially 116 – 32, whose thesis builds on Maijastina Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures c. 360 – 430 (London: Routledge, 2007).

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Nonnus’ Dionysus and his presentation of the god offer some interesting parallels to Hypatia and the antagonistic discourse that may have surrounded her, if we are to take John’s description as an indication of the criticism that she faced. The Dionysiaca centers on Dionysus (an effeminate god known for frustrating gender expectations) and his salvific, didactic mission to bring the knowledge of wine to the world.11 Unlike traditional masculine heroes, Dionysus is driven by the desire to teach rather than kill, and he surrounds himself with intelligent women through whose cleverness he accomplishes his didactic goals.12 It is primarily through the intelligence of Dionysus’ female operatives that he achieves some of his most important successes.13 The poem is punctuated with critiques of the god, voiced by traditionalist males interested in maintaining gender expectations and roles. These critics question Dionysus’ heroism, mission, and divinity because of his associations with the feminine and suspect his scientific knowledge of being a corrupting, feminine, and effeminizing invention.14 For instance, Orontes in Book 17 criticizes Dionysus because of his femininity and use of female followers, alleging that the god cannot operate in the masculine world of battle with feminine traits.15 Dionysus’ use of wine and metamorphosis is consistently compared to the use of sorcery as a means to beguile and entrap the manly Indians in his feminine wiles and an attempt to corrupt the Indians’ traditional religion and worship of Hydaspes.16 The god is accused of being an impostor, of lies, and of cowardice for not fulfilling traditional expectations of masculine heroic behavior and appearance while engaging in warfare.17 These criticisms, which stretch back to Euripides’ Bacchae and the Iliad, for Nonnus’ audience might even more strongly have evoked Christian apologetic rhetoric against Dionysus. Apologists criticized the god for precisely the same traits we see voiced by his critics in the Dionysiaca, with a particular emphasis on his embrace of the feminine, the value of his wine, problematic masculinity, and magical abilities.18 11   This mission is articulated throughout the Dionysiaca as a means of saving humanity from psychological pain and restoring hope. This is best reflected in the complaint of Aion and the command of Zeus at the opening of Book 7. 12  Shorrock, The Challenge of Epic, 137 – 9. 13   For example Chalcomede’s seduction of the Indian general Morrheus in Books 33 – 35, Ambrosia’s restraint of Lycurgus in Book 21, or Nicaea’s care for Iacchus in Book 48. 14   A full listing and examination of these psogoi can be found in Laura Miguélez-Cavero, “Invective at the Service of Encomium in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus of Panopolis,” Mnemosyne 63 (2010): 32. I am not entirely convinced of her contention that their primary function is rhetorical, to temper the praise of Dionysus elsewhere in the poem, although I allow that her scheme is one significant function out of several possibilities. Rather, I think the tone may be somewhat more serious than Miguélez-Cavero allows. 15  Non. D. 17.170 – 91; 249 – 61. 16   For example: Non. D. 22.74 – 81; 36.339 – 53; 39.33 – 74. 17   Ibid., 17.100 – 32; 45.66 – 94; 46.10 – 51. 18  E. Ba. 453 – 59; Hom. Il. 6.132 – 137; Clem. Al. Protr. 2; Lact. Div. Ins. 1.10; Prudentius Ad. Sym. 1.122 – 144. See discussion in Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue, 163 – 4.

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Dionysus emerges as an embattled divinity in the Dionysiaca whose ability to succeed in masculine pursuits despite his nonconforming gender presentation earns him suspicion and criticism from traditionalists. In the same way, from the perspective of the antagonists, Hypatia stands as a female intellectual whose intelligence, academic activities, and persuasive abilities cause suspicion and whose non-compliance with traditional and religious gender expectations earn her and her work criticism from the masculine church leadership.19 The critiques of Dionysus bear a striking resemblance to the rhetoric John uses in characterizing and condemning Hypatia in his antagonistic account. John’s primary critique of Hypatia is as a sorceress. Her intellectual pursuits and the very instruments used in her work are identified with magic and Satan and serve primarily as a means of enchanting the people of Alexandria, just as Dionysus’ teaching of viticulture is identified with magic and seduction. John accuses Hypatia of corrupting Christians and turning people from Christianity to magic as Deriades criticizes Dionysus for corrupting the god Hydaspes, whom the Indians worship as a primary divinity, with wine.20 It is the female Hypatia’s influence over male Christians in political power, like Orestes, as well as her taking on of authoritative characteristics in the academic world (sitting in her “(lofty) chair”) that John singles out as signs of Hypatia’s pernicious character and justifications for her death. For an audience that may have known of arguments like John’s leveled against Hypatia, likely voiced in proximity to her death by antagonistic readers, the correspondences to the Dionysiaca’s psogoi with their similar themes to the accusations of Christian apologetic rhetoric would likely have encouraged a reading of the two together and activated the readers’ sensitivity to similarities to Hypatia. Similarly, by casting the critics of Dionysus and their critiques as reflective of antagonistic Christian apologists, Nonnus aligns his own protagonists and his own poem with the sympathetic approach of the Suda and Socrates. In the narrative of Book 41, Nonnus presents a series of female figures who engage in activity that would be recognizable as “academic” and masculine. Far from criticizing them as non-sympathetic readers, such as John, might have, Nonnus celebrates females in positions of intellectual and cultural power, echoing Socrates’ and the Suda’s positive characterization of Hypatia and her work. It is precisely these women’s engagement in the intellectual world that makes them desirable, successful, and effective. In doing so, Nonnus presents a case for the effectiveness of crossing traditional boundaries and an expansive understanding of women’s involvement and success in intellectual pursuits. Additionally, his use of figures strongly associated with the soul and learning in Neoplatonic allegory draw the two closely together. Given the discourse on polemic, intellec19

 Watts, Hypatia 94 – 97 documents a similar, though non-religious, attack on the philosopher Pandrosion. 20  Non. D. 21.258 – 63; 39.33 – 74.

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tualism, and gender established throughout the poem in relation to its protagonist, this narrative can be related to the question of Hypatia’s legitimacy as a scholar and to potential attacks on her as a female intellectual. Nonnus seems to use these scenes and characters to express support for women intellectuals and antagonistic criticism of those who would delegitimize their efforts and insist on traditional gendered norms in the pursuit of knowledge. In Book 41 of the Dionysiaca, Nonnus describes the birth and childhood of the daughter of Aphrodite and Adonis, the nymph Beroe, the eponymous personification of the city of Beirut, as well as Aphrodite’s consultation of the prophetic tablets that are kept by the goddess Harmonia so she may discover the future fame of Beirut in the Roman Empire.21 Nonnus uses this book as a chance to offer an encomium of and mythologized foundation for the Roman law school at Beirut with a full panoply of epic tropes.22 But what I would like to draw attention to in my discussion of this episode is its emphatic validation of women as practitioners, researchers, and controllers of knowledge. This validation is accomplished by presenting Beroe as a practitioner of knowledge, Aphrodite as a researcher, and Harmonia as a controller of universal knowledge.23 Thus, the role of women in each stage of the intellectual process is carefully validated and celebrated by Nonnus in Book 41, offering readers a complete and positive depiction of women in the intellectual world. In the presentation of each of these figures, one can see much that evokes Socrates’ sympathetic Hypatia narrative as well as an idealized portrait of feminine intellectualism, casting this narrative as a potential response to the antagonistic critiques of women in 21   The fact that Nonnus enters into the world of personification, a rhetorical trope that activates the interpretive skills and attention of readers for connections to contemporary events and institutions, makes it even more likely that readers might have been encouraged to see correspondences to Hypatia in these passages. On personification, see Emma Stafford, Worshipping Virtues: Personification and the Divine in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2000). 22   See Linda J. Hall, Roman Berytus: Beirut in Late Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2008), 53 for a discussion of this narrative’s historical significance in Roman Beirut. See Fontini Hadjittofi, “Nonnus’ unclassical epic: imaginary geography in the Dionysiaca,” in Unclassical Traditions, Volume II: Perspectives from East and West in Late Antiquity, ed. C. Kelly, R. Flower, M. S., Cambridge Classical Journal Supplementary 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 29 – 42; Pierre Chuvin, Mythologie et géographie dionysiaques. Recherches sur l’oeuvre de Nonnos de Panopolis (Clermont-Ferrand: Adosa, 1991), 196 – 221 and David Hernández de la Fuente, Bakkhos Anax: un studio sobre Nono de Panopolis (Madrid: CSIC, 2008), 98 – 116 for an analysis of Nonnus’ geography in its historical and poetic context. See Birte Poulsen, “City Personifications in Late Antiquity,” in Using Images in Late Antiquity, eds. S. Birk, T. Kristensen, and B. Poulsen (Oxford: Oxbow, 2014), 209 – 226 on city personifications in the visual arts of Late Antiquity. 23   For a discussion on gender in personification and the deliberateness of and tensions created by femininity in a personification, see Diana Burton, “The Gender of Death,” in Personification in the Greek World: from Antiquity to Byzantium ed. E. Stafford and J. Herrin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 45 – 68; Penelope Murray, “The Muses: Creativity Personified?” in Personification in the Greek World: from Antiquity to Byzantium, eds. E. Stafford and J. Herrin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 147 – 60.

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positions of intellectual power and a reception of the “slander” identified by Socrates that led to Hypatia’s murder. Beroe is depicted as a practitioner of scholarship from the moment of her emergence, as signaled by Nonnus’ parade of heavily symbolic personifications that attend her birth (Hermes, Time, the Seasons, and Themis). Her scholarly attributes and activities are all connected with the Roman legal school at Beirut and its rhetorical training that Nonnus celebrates through the representation of Beroe. Hermes serves as the male midwife (μογοστόκος ἤλυθεν Ἑρμῆς, “Hermes came as the labor-helper”)24 for Aphrodite, a major inversion of expected gender roles, and uses as implements for the birth a prophetic “Latin tablet” (Λατινίδα δέλτον)25 while Themis attends with the “laws of Solon” (θεσμὰ Σόλωνος ἔχουσα).26 In fact, Beroe emerges from the womb onto the Athenian legal code, the “Attic book” (καὶ Ἀτθίδος ὑψόθι βίβλου παῖδα σοφὴν ἐλόχευσε “and she brought forth the wise child right upon the Attic book”).27 Nonnus compares the method of Beroe’s birth to the Spartan practice of giving birth to sons on a shield as a means of presaging and directing their future as soldiers (41.168 – 9). Just as a Spartan, militaristic male throughout his life draws honor from his shield, so Beroe will draw her honor from the law, books, and intelligence, the prominent symbolic elements in her birth. The comparison is ironic because Beroe, a female, is claiming the law, a profession dominated by males, as her special timē, reversing typical gender and cultural expectations for a female child, while the Spartan comparison expresses a practice that enforces traditional gender and culture expectations for males. Despite the fact that the gender rules for a semi-divine personification might be slightly looser than those for a human child, within the world of the Dionysiaca, there is a constant discourse on the adherence of its protagonist and his followers to gender expectations (mentioned above) which activates the reader’s sensitivity to gender within the poem. Since gender and its transgression is a key theme of Nonnus’ narrative and the characters’ interactions with each other, the irony of this reverse-sex simile that references a hyper-masculine human rather than a more fluid divine culture draws attention to the transgressiveness of Beroe and activates the reader’s sensitivity to gender roles. The simile contributes to the tension that plays out throughout the poem and the story of Beroe – whether masculine militarism is a true heroic endeavor or intelligence and knowledge associated with femininity. The birth is notably marked by cosmic signs that expand the scope of Beroe’s power and authority: the winds are redefined as transmitters of Beroe’s laws across the earth, Oceanus represents the universal spread of her laws by sea, and 24

 Non. D. 41.161.   Ibid., 41.160. 26   Ibid., 41.165. 27   Ibid., 41.167 – 8. 25

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Time prophetically robes her with justice and rejoices that Beroe’s law promises him eternal renewal. Beroe’s intellectual endeavors give her power over the older, male gods and the forces of nature as well as the ability to influence the fabric of the cosmos. Beroe, in this description, is the necessary link to create universal order and cosmic balance and renewal. The rejoicing of the animals as well converts a standard trope of Aphrodite’s epiphany into a celebration of Beroe’s legal scholarship and its effects.28 Unlike typical scenes of animals rejoicing at an epiphany of Aphrodite, in which they end up engaging in sexual activity, reflecting the goddess’ erotic nature, for Beroe natural opposites (wolves and sheep, panthers and hares) embrace each other for joy, creating not a sexual but a social concord. It is Beroe’s laws and her legal skills that will form the social concord and reconciliation prophetically reflected in the animals. Unlike her mother, whose erotic powers are strongly associated with the feminine, Beroe has an ability to create social harmony through her masculine intelligence and academic pursuits, a conversion of the erotic into the social and a desexualization of Beroe’s character that divides her from her mother’s powerful femininity. The narrative of Beroe’s youth develops the prophetic elements of her birth into the cornerstone of her character. Astraea, who tutors the young woman, miraculously transforms breast milk into laws and gives Beroe Attic honey and water from Athens and Delphi (41.21 – 27); these gifts express her ability to thrive at rhetoric, writing, and study, as well as represent the pursuit of a complete paideia through study of poetry (the Delphic water), and prose / rhetoric (the Attic water).29 Astraea even gives Beroe Virgo’s cornstalk to wear as a necklace, a badge to indicate her legal education.30 Beroe is pepaideumenē, perhaps 28

  The most famous exposition of this trope is Hom. hVen. 66 – 74.   This trope, particularly in Callimachus’ usage, is well known; for a discussion of its history and examples see N. B. Crowther, “Water and Wine as Symbols of Inspiration,” Mnemosyne 32 (1979): 1 – 11 and Peter Knox, “Wine, Water, and Callimachean Polemics,” HSCP  89 (1985): 107 – 119. Shorrock, The Challenge of Epic, 121 – 137, 207 – 214 contends that Nonnus self-consciously develops wine as an alternative poetic symbol for inspiration. 30   A text that is somewhat interesting to read in combination with this trope is AP 9.400. Although the attribution and addressee of the epigram, once thought to be addressed to the philosopher Hypatia, are entirely uncertain and disputed (see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 22 – 23; G. Luck, “Palladas Christian or Pagan?” HSCP 63 (1958): 455 – 71), the poem does seem to praise a woman for her intelligence. While I would not confidently advance the possibility that we might read this detail in Nonnus as reflective of the epigram in such a way that would have bearing on our understanding of the addressee, I nonetheless find the connection to be interesting and perhaps illustrative of a possible poetic trope associated with praise for women, specifically those engaged in intellectual pursuits. In the text, the poet likens listening to his Hypatia to looking upon the “starry house of Virgo” (ὅταν βλέπω σε, προσκυνῶ, καὶ τοὺς λόγους, / τῆς παρθένου τὸν οἶκον ἀστρῷον βλέπων· / εἰς οὐρανὸν γάρ ἐστί σου τὰ πράγματα, / Ὑπατία σεμνή, τῶν λόγων εὐμορφία, / ἄχραντον ἄστρον τῆς σοφῆς παιδεύσεως). This may be a trope associated with the praise of educated women in general, as Dzielska reads it, and Nonnus’ deployment of Virgo here may reflect that usage. As a further example, Manilius describes the constellation Virgo as a magistra (4.382), expressly connecting education and the constellation. 29

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one of the most significant and valuable qualifications in the competitive cultural male world of Late Antiquity.31 With her education complete, she immediately embraces virginity and becomes a follower of Artemis (41.229 – 249), which excites and frustrates possible male divine lovers, including Zeus. In Nonnus’ final summation of Beroe’s character, he notes that: . . . if ever the girl uttered her voice trickling sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, winning Persuasion sat ever upon her lips and enchanted the clever wits of men whom nothing else could charm. εἴ ποτε κούρη / λαροτέρην σίμβλοιο μελίρρυτον ἤπυε φωνήν, / ἡδυεπὴς ἀκόρητος ἐφίστατο χείλεσι Πειθὼ / καὶ πινυτὰς οἴστρησεν ἀκηλήτων φρένας ἀνδρῶν.32

Beroe’s powers of speech specifically target and induce emotion (οἴστρησεν) in men who are ἀκήλητοι, or immune to enchantment. Peitho’s attendance on Beroe serves as a transformation of one of Aphrodite’s typical attributes.33 While the Peitho that attends Aphrodite is linked to erotic goals, Beroe’s Peitho serves to make her rhetoric effective and persuasive in her didactic aims. Yet another trope of Aphrodite’s is repurposed by Beroe for academic and social functions. For her persuasion, her intelligence, and her appearance, Beroe wins herself a circle of male suitors to whom she is indifferent and whose wooing she flees. Inasmuch as we might see John’s antagonistic description of Hypatia in the psogoi against Dionysus, so we can see Socrates’ and the Suda’s sympathetic description in the characterization of Beroe. Beroe’s main attributes are her innate intelligence, her choice of texts, knowledge, and study as her timē, her mastery of all aspects of paideia, her virginity despite her physical attractiveness, her wide popularity and the wide significance of her teaching, and her ability to persuade unpersuadable men with her oratory and paideia. Socrates’ and the Suda’s portrait of Hypatia presents her as possessing strikingly similar attributes.34 Hypatia’s intellectual training and mental cultivation match Beroe’s education and intelligence, and Socrates singles out her mastery of paideia (ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον δὲ προὔβη παιδείας), her specific intellectual allegiances and choices 31   See Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California, 2006); Peter Brown, “Paidea and Power,” in Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1992), 35 – 70; William Johnson, Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) for a discussion of paideia, prestige, and elite competition in Late Antiquity. 32   Non. D. 41.250 – 253. 33  Peitho is one of the Dionysiaca’s most frequently presented personifications. See Non. D. 10.280, 11.280, 16.139, 24.263, 25.150, 33.111, 34.292 for just a few examples of her role in seduction. See Stafford, Worshipping Virtues, explicitly on Peitho for the background and functions of this personification and Katerina Carvounis, “Peitho in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca: The Case of Cadmus and Harmonia,” in Nonnus of Panopolis in Context: I, ed. K. Spanoudakis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 21 – 38 for her appearance in Nonnus. 34   See also Watts, Hypatia 102 – 106.

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in educational specialization (Πλατωνικὴν ἀπὸ Πλωτίνου καταγομένην διατριβὴν διαδέξασθαι: “Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy”),35 and her intellectual skills that surpassed her contemporaries (ὑπερακοντίσαι τοὺς κατ’ αὐτὴν φιλοσόφους). For Hypatia, as Beroe, her devotion to virginity and study, instead of marriage and traditionally feminine pursuits (represented by Beroe’s repurposing of Aphrodite’s tropes in the Dionysiaca), were significant parts of her reputation, as the Suda’s story about her rejection of the anonymous suitor demonstrates along with the emphasis on her virginity (διετέλει παρθένος “she remained a virgin”).36 As Hypatia avoids and tries to “cure” her suitor’s advances, in the same way Beroe resists or ignores Dionysus’ and Poseidon’s interests throughout Books 41 – 43.37 Additionally, the Suda is emphatic about Hypatia’s beauty (οὕτω σφόδρα καλή τε οὖσα καὶ εὐειδής: “she was so very beautiful and attractive”),38 as much as Nonnus is regarding Beroe’s appearance, as well as its role in attracting male attention. Finally, one might wonder, how can we connect the political and legal activity of Beroe to the astronomical and mathematical focus that characterizes the historical Hypatia’s best known oeuvre. The Suda’s explanation that she φιλοσοφίας ἥψατο τῆς ἄλλης οὐκ ἀγεννῶς (“embraced the rest of philosophy [beyond mathematics] with diligence”) that she was δικαία (“just”), that she spoke on Aristotle and Plato, that she was πολιτικήν (civic-minded), and that the leaders of the city attended her lectures (οἵ τε ἄρχοντες ἀεὶ προχειριζόμενοι τῆς πόλεως) suggest that she engaged in political and legal discourse and was involved or at least an influencer of Alexandrian politics. Thus, given the potential political elements to Hypatia’s intellectual work, as well as the Suda’s insistence on her political influence, it might not be such a stretch to connect the two, even if we do so in less exuberant terms than Nonnus does in his description of Beroe. John, the Suda, and Socrates place Hypatia’s popularity and oratorical abilities at the center of the controversy. Socrates notes that people from everywhere (οἱ πανταχόθεν φιλοσοφεῖν βουλόμενοι) gathered to Hypatia, and the Suda makes the crowds surrounding Hypatia and Cyril’s envy of her popularity the reason for her murder; John as well negatively notes the multitudes that surrounded her, 35

  Suda s. v. Ὑπατία.  Ibid. 37   A bit of the Suda’s story about Hypatia’s failed cure for love (music) may be reflected at Non. D. 42.178 – 81, in which the poet remarks that while it is possible for someone to have enough of music, a man in love can never get enough of desire: πάντων γὰρ κόρος ἐστὶ παρ’ ἀνδράσιν, ἡδέος ὕπνου / μολπῆς τ’ εὐκελάδοιο καὶ ὁππότε κάμπτεται ἀνὴρ / εἰς δρόμον ὀρχηστῆρα· γυναιμανέοντι δὲ μούνῳ / οὐ κόρος ἐστὶ πόθων (“for men can have enough of all things, of sweet sleep and melodious song, and when one turns in the moving dance, but only the man mad for love never has enough of longing”). Additionally, further in Book 42 Dionysus receives Pan’s instructions on how to cure love, emphasizing didactic attempts to curtail emotion. 38   Suda s. v. Ὑπατία. 36

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which include, to his disapproval, Christians. Just as Beroe’s teachings and laws are spread widely around the world by the cosmic personifications, so Hypatia’s teachings achieve a universal appeal both among the Alexandrians, non-pagans, and foreign students. Similarly, Hypatia’s powerful oratory and its effect on males especially is key to the events leading to her death. For John, as noted, Hypatia commands magic and deception to such an extent that it can lure in believers and grant her control over men. Nonnus’ use of ἀκηλήτων (“immune to charms”),39 potentially engages with this discourse. This word itself, used first in the Odyssey to describe Odysseus’ resistance to Circe’s enchantments, is significant in religious and philosophical discourse in Late Antiquity. Clement of Alexandria uses it to speak of the Christians who are “immune” to the seduction of pagan images, and Porphyry uses it to describe the fortitude of those who have achieved apatheia against invocations of the gods and magic.40 In Nonnus’ Paraphrase it is used of the minds of the Pharisees and of those who resist Jesus’ words.41 Nonnus’ word choice here and its connection to religious discourse is a significant element that encourages a reading connecting contemporary discourse to Beroe. By selecting a polysemous term in contemporary religious and philosophical literature, Nonnus introduces two possible readings of Beroe’s rhetorical abilities that could reflect both sympathetic and antagonistic readings. One could, from a sympathetic perspective, read this in terms of intellectual fortitude and philosophical prowess, while from an antagonistic perspective one could read it as characteristic of intransigent paganism and false belief. This nicely echoes the power of Hypatia’s words to both create desire (as in the Suda) or overcome a Christian’s training and devotion to God through persuasion and rhetoric (for John). In Nonnus’ presentation of the term, it appears in the former category, aligning Nonnus’ perspective with the sympathetic reading. In Socrates, Hypatia’s paideia, reputation, and ability to speak make her comfortable participating in male political and official gatherings (ἐν μέσῳ ἀνδρῶν “in the middle of men”) with παρρησία (“freedom of speaking”).42 The Suda as well notes the double abilities of Hypatia as a speaker who can exercise rhetoric effectively and affect males both in power and in love: ἔν τε τοῖς λόγοις οὖσαν ἐντρεχῆ καὶ διαλεκτικὴν ἔν τε τοῖς ἔργοις ἔμφρονά τε καὶ πολιτικήν (“both skillful and eloquent in words and prudent and civil in deeds”).43 Like 39

  Chronicle. 84.87.   Clem. Al. Paed. 3.11.77. Porph. apud Eus. PE 5.10.10. The genesis of the term, and much of the philosophical debate surrounding its meaning, can be centered on Hom. Od. 10.329 (see also Porph. ad Od. 329). Musaeus seems to play on Porphyry’s connection between apatheia and akēlētos at Musae. 319. 41  Non. P. 3.58, 4.10, 5.181, 7.177. See Mark Anthony Prost, ed. Nonnos of Panopolis, The Paraphrase of the Gospel of John. Trans. M. A. P. Ventura (CA: The Writing Shop Press, 2006). 42  Socr. Hist. eccl. 7.15. 43   Suda. s. v. Ὑπατία. 40

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Hypatia, Beroe transcends traditional feminine roles and interests and thrives in a masculine academic sphere, as well as a masculine political sphere, beyond the expectations of traditional women’s roles. Nonnus chooses to celebrate this Hypatia-like figure and her ability to dominate in a male sphere, by portraying her dominance of males as a positive feature and emphasizing the immense benefits of her skills and practice of intelligence for the world. In the same way, the Suda and Socrates praise Hypatia for her public role in the city, her academic interests, and her ability to address males authoritatively and beneficially. The correspondences between the multiple renditions of Hypatia and Nonnus’ Beroe could certainly have caused readers to see a correspondence between Nonnus’ personification and the philosopher. Following Nonnus’ narrative of Beroe’s youth, Aphrodite travels to the palace of Harmonia to consult the tablets that contain all knowledge that the goddess keeps intending to learn about the fate of Beroe’s / Beirut’s intellectual activities.44 This scene is a doublet with one in Book 12 that houses another universal set of tablets at the palace of Helios, which offers a masculine contrast with the scene in 41.45 Harmonia represents in many ways an authoritative keeper of wisdom, a librarian, whose learned house, which is itself a round architectural representation of the cosmos, underlines the totality and encyclopedism of Harmonia’s accrued knowledge.46 The house itself is an intentional, geometric construction by Harmonia of the universe (τύπῳ τετράζυγι κόσμου αὐτοπαγῆ “a house, self-built, shaped like the great universe with its four quarters joined in one”,47; εἰκόνα κόσμου “an image of the universe”)48 created as an architectural manifestation of the universal wisdom contained within in the tablets and Harmonia’s own encyclopedic gaze. Further, Nonnus relates that Aphrodite finds Harmonia busy embroidering a detailed tapestry map of the world that shows Ocean, seas, rivers, the sky and constellations, and lands, demonstrating the goddess’ possession of universal knowledge as well as her deployment of that knowledge in a seemingly academic pursuit, schematized mapmaking.49 This 44   I explore this passage and Harmonia’s house in “The Tablets of Harmonia and the Role of Poet and Reader in the Dionysiaca,” in Nonnus of Panopolis in Context: II, ed. H. Bannert and F. Kröll (Leiden: Brill, 2016), for its metapoetic references and commentary on the roles of author and reader. 45   On their connections as doublets, see Francis Vian, Nonnos de Panopolis, Les Dionysiaques. Tome  V: Chants XI – XIII, (Paris: Societe des belles lettres, 1995), 55 – 56. 46   It should also be noted that Harmonia’s name holds significance in rhetoric and literary composition. The concept is applied both to the sonic and thematic composition of a text as well as stylistic appropriateness and judgment. (D. H. Dem. 35 – 39, 48) This further reinforces the appropriateness of Harmonia, composition and rhetorical skill gained through literary study and training personified, in relation to Beroe and her significance as an intellectual. 47  Non. D., 41.277 – 8. 48   Ibid., 41.281. 49   See Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1991), for the significance of mapmaking and map display in the Roman

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tapestry both reflects Nonnus’ previous statements about the universal extent of Beroe’s laws, carried to the corners of the earth by wind and seas, and transforms a traditional feminine activity, weaving, into a scholarly exercise, encapsulating the juncture of women’s crafts with scholarship (emphasized at θήλεος ἱστοῦ “the womanly loom”).50 In evoking an architectural ensemble that both reifies and houses a comprehensive textual description of the world, Nonnus may reference the idea of the Library of Alexandria itself, whose purported goal was to gather together all human knowledge to provide a complete collection of the world’s history and literature.51 The map that Harmonia constructs may remind the reader of that made by Eratosthenes, a figure associated with the library, as well as the presence of maps and geographical descriptions in ancient libraries in general.52 Additionally, Harmonia’s schematic representations of the cosmos call to mind Hypatia’s contributions to the construction of Synesius’ astrolabe as well as her possible association with Synesius’ hydroscope.53 Nonnus takes pains to emphasize that Harmonia’s “library” is, in its construction, a feminine space, inhabited by a female divinity and protected from the masculine winds (consistently associated with male erotic conquest)54 by female personifications of the cardinal directions (41.281 – 7). Similarly, while the male god Helios was in command of knowledge in Book 12, here it is firmly under the command of the female Harmonia; in essence, Helios’ masculine library is translated into a library in which women preside over intellectual activity. Harmonia establishes the scope of her universal knowledge by responding to Aphrodite’s requests and showing imperial project and A. O. W. Dilke, “The Culmination of Cartography in Ptolemy,” in The History of Cartography, Vol I, ed. J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 185 – 9 for the technical and academic requirements for cartographical study in antiquity. 50  Non. D., 41.303. 51   Ps.-Aristeas 9: τὸ συναγαγεῖν, εἰ δυνατόν, ἅπαντα τὰ κατὰ τὴν οἰκουμένην βιβλία (“to gather together, if possible, all the books in the world”). Although, of course, Aristeas and his claims have been rightly viewed with suspicion (Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146 (2002): 348 – 362), nonetheless it is the concept of the comprehensive library, rather than historical and factual accuracy, that Nonnus may engage with here. 52   Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 41 – 2. One might take the comparison further and identify Harmonia with the polymath Eratosthenes, whose work encompassed a comprehensive dossier of intellectual projects (Catherine Connors, “Eratosthenes, Strabo, and the Geographer’s Gaze,” Pacific Coast Philology 46 (2011): 139 – 152) and who described the shape of the world using mythological narrative in his Hermes. The synoptic gaze of Harmonia works nicely with what we know of Eratosthenes’ description of the earth, and Nonnus seems to have a fascination with this scholar whose Erigone he may reference at 47.229 – 64 (Frederick Solmsen, “Eratosthenes’ Erigone. A reconstruction,” TAPhA 78 (1947): 252 – 75). 53  Syn. de Dono. 14; Ep. 15; and John of Nikiu’s association of Hypatia with astrolabes. See Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, 53 – 5. 54   See, for example, Non. D. 1.69, 136, 11.457, 37.158.

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her the tablets, the pinakes (πινάκεσσιν ἔχω μαντήια κόσμου, “I have the oracles of the universe on tablets”).55 Nonnus draws attention to the word pinax in this passage, as in Book 12, this scene’s doublet, he describes them as archaic kurbeis (faceted inscribed tablets) of Harmonia.56 By altering the terminology he uses between the parallel scenes, Nonnus may be providing the learned reader with another connection to the library, the famous Pinakes of Callimachus that catalogued the holdings of Alexandria’s library and organized the vast amounts of information into a comprehensible format.57 It is the Callimachean activity of describing the world, the library’s encyclopedic holding, in an organized system of lists and tables that reflects the text of Harmonia’s pinakes. Harmonia’s own scholarly description of the tablets, which are connected to the planets, offers an occasion for Harmonia to offer a learned list of the order and characteristics of the planets and guide Aphrodite to the specific tablets which will answer her query. In Harmonia, we can see a woman, whose femininity and creation of feminine space Nonnus emphasizes, that holds a position as the caretaker, organizer, and producer of knowledge. References to traditional forms of scholarship and systematization of knowledge as well as scholarly venues suggest that Harmonia could be considered as a manifestation of the learning and practices found in the library and ancient scholarship. Her own scholarly interests in astronomy and geography align with the little we can confidently say of the historical Hypatia, who was associated with geometry and astronomy by Socrates and the Suda. While with Beroe we might notice a manifestation of Hypatia’s public role as a political influence, with Harmonia we might note a depiction of her less political and more scientific and esoteric interests. In fact, if Cameron’s discussion of Hypatia’s involvement in the editing of Ptolemy’s mathematical tables is correct, we could read a trace of her work in Harmonia’s fascination with the schematized representation of knowledge, such as the pinakes she keeps, her fascination with the maps, and her construction of her own “table”, akin to Callimachus’, in her list of the planets.58 Additionally, the scientific paraphernalia is singled out in John’s antagonistic account of Hypatia, the astrolabes, musical instruments, and magic, indicate that an emphasis on these scientific objects may paint Harmonia’s wisdom and intellectual production as something decidedly non-Christian, if one were to read it from an antagonist perspective. The image of Harmonia, a woman surrounded by and in command of texts, who engages with 55

 Non. D. 41.340.   Ibid., 12.32. 57   For an extensive discussion of the Pinakes, see Rudolf Blum, Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1991). 58   Alan Cameron, “Isidore of Miletus and Hypatia of Alexandria: On the Editing of Mathematical Texts,” GRBS 31 (1990): 103 – 27. See also Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, 46 – 59 and Gertz in this volume for discussions of Hypatia’s work. 56

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scientific, cartographical, and astronomical activity and even lectures Aphrodite on astronomy, might strongly suggest the image of Hypatia to an audience familiar with her reputation as a mathematician and scholar. Aphrodite, in this scene, plays the role of the seeker of wisdom, the student and researcher in Harmonia’s library. She describes her mission as if she were a legal scholar, by noting that she has received control over marriage laws from Hermes, establishing her credentials and aligning her own timē with the cosmic and salvific motivation of both Beroe and Dionysus (βιαζομένους ἵνα μούνη ἀνέρας, / οὓς ἔσπειρα, γάμου θεσμοῖσι σαώσω “that I alone, by enforcing the laws of marriage, may preserve the men whom I have sown”).59 Aphrodite’s research prospectus is to discover whether Beirut is the oldest city and whether it or another city will be the seat of legal study and authority, having the βασιληίδος ὄργανα φωνῆς (“the organ of sovereign voice”).60 Aphrodite displays her own show of intellectual curiosity and research when, after satisfying herself by looking at the Tablet of Saturn, which solves her allied question of the age of the city of Beirut in relation to other cities as well as the Roman name of the town. When she has finished with Harmonia’s instructions, she moves on to the Tablet of Mercury. While Harmonia did not direct Aphrodite to this tablet for an answer to her question, Aphrodite seems to have interpreted Harmonia’s description of the Mercury tablet as holding the “secrets of law” (ᾧ ἔνι πάντα τετεύχαται ὄργια θεσμῶν “upon which are written all the secrets of law”)61 as a reason to perform her own research beyond Harmonia’s guidance. This demonstrates a level of analytical ability in Aphrodite that suits a scholarly approach to textual research by examining more than one resource to develop a comprehensive conclusion. Additionally, her ascent to Harmonia’s cosmic house and her interactions with the planets has strong Neoplatonic resonances and evokes the language of enlightenment, yearning for knowledge, and the soul’s ascent. This imagery vividly demonstrates the process of the Neoplatonists’ pursuit of knowledge, which is likely to have been significant in Hypatia’s philosophical teachings if we are to connect her to Plotinus.62 In Plotinus, it is Aphrodite who manifests as a significant double image of the soul and its process through the world of Neoplatonic learning, but Aphrodite’s setting in the Dionysiaca, liter59

 Non. D. 41.336 – 7.   Ibid., 41.320. 61   Ibid., 41.344. 62   See Crystal Addey, Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods (London: Routledge, 2016) for a thorough exploration of Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus’ astrological theory as well as a discussion of the ascent of the soul and knowledge (see also Birger Pearson, “Theurgic Tendencies in Gnosticism and Iamblichus’ Concept of Theurgy,” in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, ed. R. Wallis and J. Bregman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 253 – 75. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, 65 – 77 presents an optimistic but consonant account of the possible role astrology and astronomy played in Hypatia’s work using Synesius’ letters. For Neoplatonism in Nonnus, see Hernández de la Fuente, Bakkhos Anax. 60

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ally among the stars, connects her to the Uranian Aphrodite, the soul that seeks and feels higher, purer love.63 Again, the rejection of earthly love, manifested in Hypatia’s supposed rejection of suitors, in favor of ethereal love, matches the reputation of Hypatia. On the Tablet of Mercury, Aphrodite finds a list of male protoi heuretai, inventors of mathematics, astronomy, music, oratory, and writing, a list of famous mythologized culture heroes who both benefitted humanity with their inventions and founded intellectual life.64 Again, this recalls the Pinakes of Callimachus and his lists of authors and information in a systematic format.65 At the end of this list, we find Beroe presented in strikingly powerful terms as the hero of the Battle of Actium. In this passage, Nonnus brings into tension masculine militarism and feminine intelligence, resolving it in favor of the latter in Beroe. Augustus, the male military leader traditionally credited with the victory at Actium, is mentioned only as an indicator of the battle’s temporality (σκῆπτρον ὅλης Αὔγουστος ὅτε χθονὸς ἡνιοχεύσει “when Augustus shall hold the scepter of the world”),66 while Beroe is presented as the one responsible for defeating Cleopatra’s ships, not with weapons but with legal study, establishing her city as a cosmic protector of the world. Nonnus particularly heightens the awkwardness of his rewriting of history to privilege Beroe: δικάζει / Βηρυτὸς βιότοιο γαληναίοιο τιθήνη / γαῖαν ὁμοῦ καὶ πόντον, ἀκαμπέι τείχεϊ θεσμῶν / ἄστεα πυργώσασα, μία πτόλις ἄστεα κόσμου (“until Berytos the nurse of quiet life does justice on land and sea, fortifying the cities with the unshakeable wall of law, one city for all the cities of the world”).67 It is the academic school that Beroe fosters and embodies that creates peace and security “on land and sea” rather than military victories. Just as Nonnus has marginalized Augustus to a footnote at Actium, so he appropriates a traditional Roman formula (terra marique) for Beroe’s authority.68 In this startling rendition of Actium, Nonnus reconfigures military history in terms that offer the credit to the study and learning embodied by the women Beroe, Harmonia, and Aphrodite, rather than warfare, associated with Roman 63   See Mark Edwards, “The Tale of Cupid and Psyche,” ZPE 94 (1992): 77 – 90; Patricia Cox Miller, “The Myth of Eros and Psyche in Plotinus and Gnosticism,” in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, eds. R. T. Wallis and J. Bregman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 223 – 38. 64   The list of inventors and inventions (41.369 – 84) includes: Pan (syrinx), Hermes (lyre), Hyagnis (aulos), Orpheus (mystic song), Linos (εὐέπεια), Arcas (the calendar and solar cycle), Endymion (moon phases and finger counting), Cadmus (writing), Solon (laws), and Cecrops (Athenian marriage law). In “The Tablets of Harmonia,” I examine this list as representatives of literary genres and a means of expressing the totality of the literary tradition. 65   See Blum, Kallimachos, 124 – 225. The abbreviated list here of names and short entries on their inventions bears a strong resemblance to the fragments of Callimachus’ Pinakes as well as later Greek author lists. 66  Non. D. 41.389. 67   Ibid., 41.395 – 8. 68  Aug. R. G. 1.25, 2.43. Livy, AUC, 1.19.3 uses terra marique specifically in reference to Actium.

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military authority. Nonnus’ injection of Beroe into a list of male inventors as the only female presence validates the role of a women within the sphere of education and study by incorporating women into the “official” record of canonical inventors. Lists in antiquity create legitimacy and establish canonicity, what is officially correct and what is not. By including Beroe in the list of inventors, Nonnus establishes her legitimacy in the male intellectual world.69 As Dionysus and Nonnus argue throughout the poem for their own validity and justify their inclusion into the gods and the canon of epic poets,70 so in Beroe we can see Nonnus justifying the inclusion of a female academic, such as Hypatia, among the canon of educated men. In Beroe, Harmonia, and Aphrodite, Nonnus presents us three types of scholars, the practitioner, the master, and the researcher. In each case, he emphasizes the feminine aspects of these women and uses his narrative to validate and celebrate the female pursuit, practice, and custodianship of knowledge. The correspondences between his description of Beroe and Socrates’ and the Suda’s sympathetic presentation of Hypatia, between Harmonia and the work of Alexandrian scholars (and perhaps Hypatia’s own work), as well as Aphrodite’s display of intellectual curiosity and astuteness and the inclusion of women in the male-dominated canon of inventors argue strongly for the legitimacy of women in the academic sphere of antiquity. This series of concentrated representations of women scholars through symbolism, allegory, and personification, presented in proximity to the life of Hypatia, are very likely to have activated memories or at least the reputation of Hypatia for the reader. If read in connection to the events surrounding Hypatia’s career and death, Nonnus’ positive presentation of women scholars holds ramifications for contemporary discourse about her and seems to suggest that, at least in this section of the Dionysiaca, Nonnus aligns himself with the sympathetic critics of Hypatia’s murder and offers his own commentary on the legitimacy of Hypatia as an academic and a response to the antagonistic criticisms of church leaders towards her and her activities. Thus, Book 41 of the Dionysiaca has the potential to be read alongside Socrates, John, and the Suda as a further piece of reception on the murder of Hypatia, a statement of the poet’s attitude toward religious parties and attitudes in the fifth century, and a positioning of the Dionysiaca within the sympathetic / antagonistic spectrum of approaches to Hypatia. Although read through the allegorical and symbolic mythological vocabulary of an epic of Late Antiquity, one can see that the Dionysiaca, if not overtly commenting upon, seems to echo the resonances of the Hypatia affair. If we 69   Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 207. 70  Shorrock, The Challenge of Epic, 113 – 206. This is Shorrock’s primary thesis on the interaction between Homer, Nonnus, and canonicity.

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read the poem in connection to this event and assign the poem’s actors as resonances of Hypatia, the reading that emerges is that Nonnus presents women as perfectly capable of engaging in the world of education and attacks those who would challenge them. In the three goddesses he celebrates women in powerful academic positions who benefit the cosmos with their practicing and dissemination of wisdom. As one of its primary themes, the Dionysiaca represents the triumph of knowledge over all other skills and connects that knowledge (and that power) intimately with female characters, a message which must have challenged those who condemned Hypatia for these very abilities. The Dionysiaca does indeed provide Hypatia with a host of sisters (and brothers) who through the language of mythology, allegory, and epic poetry reflect on her unique career and tragic death.

The Ideal (Bleeding?) Female: Hypatia of Alexandria and Distorting Patriarchal Narratives Victoria Leonard Introduction* In 1989 the historian of Late Antiquity Lellia Cracco Ruggini wrote that the historical role of women as the exclusive concern of female scholars made her embarrassed to be a woman, just as she found it “irritating and irrelevant” that such journals as The International Journal of Women’s Studies or Memoria. Rivista delle Donne existed at all.1 Conversely, in Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity (2013) Lin Foxhall argued that the assumption of male superiority and the elision of the female in history were simply not noticed before the early twentieth century.2 The unimportance of women within the development of classical civilization and their absence from Greek and Roman history had seemed “natural” and remained largely unquestioned.3 This article seeks to articulate *  Different versions of this research were presented at the Classical Association Annual Conference (Bristol 2015), the 17 th International Conference on Patristic Studies (Oxford 2015), and Public Uni (Cardiff 2015), as well as the conference that precipitated this volume. I am grateful to the organisers of the conference, and to Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Ed Watts and Crystal Addey for their useful discussions, generously sharing research materials, and offering illuminating feedback on this article. Any mistakes, omissions or errors are mine despite their good guidance. 1   L. Cracco Ruggini, “Juridical Status and Historical Role of Women in Roman Patriarchal Society,” Klio 71.2 (1989): 604. 2   “Before the early twentieth century, attitudes towards gender hierarchies, notably the assumed superiority of men over women, was sufficiently embedded in western culture that scholars simply accepted the information provided by ancient writers about women, such as it was, at face value. Women’s lack of importance for the development of classical civilization and their absence from Greek and Roman history seemed “natural” and remained largely unquestioned.” L. Foxhall, Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3. 3   Gráinne McLaughlin highlights the misogyny inherent in ancient Greek philosophy and how this enduring ideology was transmitted through the middle ages “as part of the cultural heritage of European society.” Gráinne McLaughlin, “The Logistics of Gender from Classical Philosophy,” in Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization, eds. F. McHardy and E. Marshall (London: Routledge, 2004), 7. For the contextualisation of Hypatia within the field of ancient female philosophers and as a Cynic philosopher, see C. J. Addey, “Plato’s Women Readers,” Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity, eds. H. Tarrant, D. A. Layne, F. Renaud, and D. Baltzly (Leiden: Brill, 2018) 411 – 32. On the status of women in philosophy, note the observation of Barbara Levick: “Women in philosophy, as part of the elite and sharing its arrogated merits, notably

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and challenge the passive assumption of gender-based historical imbalance as a normative model, with a particular focus on the female philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. The subject of menstruation in antiquity can be a point of convergence for misogynistic discourses about women, and the first objective of this article is to identify how Hypatia’s display of her menstrual blood functions within her construct as a female paradigm. The second objective is to foreground the patriarchal and misogynistic narratives in some of the earliest sources on Hypatia that have so far remained hidden in plain sight. The third objective is to trace how these ideologies have shaped Hypatia’s historical image and evolved in the process of transmission, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards. Hypatia has been represented as a pure and virtuous female but she is ultimately weak, as demonstrated by her self-deprecating exhibition of menstrual blood in response to sexual attention, and is doomed to die horribly.4 This article appraises how far this uncomplicated narrative is supportable, and questions how the taboo-breaking narrative of menstrual display connects with the exemplary image of Hypatia: fundamentally, does the ideal female bleed?

Menstrual Visibility in Antiquity Evidence from antiquity is almost totally silent about menstrual management, an observation only emphasised by the scale of female monthly bleeding.5 Ancient writers understood that menstruation would affect a normal, healthy woman approximately every four weeks from the ages of around 14 to the onset of the menopause between the ages of 40 and 50.6 Pregnancy, prolonged lactaintellectual power, were an irritant.” (Barbara Levick, “Women, Power, and Philosophy at Rome and Beyond,” in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin, eds. G. Clark and T. Rajak [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 154.) 4   Synesius is exceptional in the sources on Hypatia as he does not represent her as a weak female. For discussion of the relationship between Synesius and Hypatia, see Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer in this volume. See also Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) 21 – 167. 5   For discussion of this absence in non-medical Greek texts, see Leslie Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 226 – 36. Noted also by Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 100 – 3. Because of the nature of the evidence that has survived, the evidence for menstruation from ancient Egypt is exceptional. See T. G. Wilfong, “Menstrual Synchrony and the ‘Place of Women’ in Ancient Egypt (Oriental Institute Museum Hieratic Ostracon 13512),” in Golds of Praise: Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honor of Edward F. Wente, eds. E. Teeter and J. A. Larson (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1999), 419 – 34. 6   According to Soranus, Gynaecology, 1.4.20. Soranos D’Éphèse. Maladies des femmes, ed. P. Burguière, D. Gourevitch and Y. Malinas (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988) vol. 1, 17. Soranus’ Gynaecology, trans. Owsei Temkin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 17. For a discussion of the age of the menopause in antiquity, see D. W. Amundsen and C. J. Diers, “The Age of Menopause in Classical Greece and Rome,” Human Biology, 42.1 (1970): 79 – 86.

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tion and malnourishment would all disrupt the frequency of a monthly cycle. But for much of a woman’s lifetime, more or less each month she would have to deal with bleeding that she was unable to control, a circumstance that must have affected and determined her activities and behaviour. There exists a stark imbalance between the scale of the experience of female monthly bleeding, and an almost total silence in evidence which tells us about the practical management of this regular occurrence. The subject is both mundane and taboo, a circumstance that still holds in the modern world.7 The information we do have from antiquity is transmitted through men and derives (at best) from male observation rather than female experience; it is impossible to know if women’s attitudes were the same or not.8 As Amy Richlin has noted, the limited evidence we do have about menstruating women in antiquity is often overwhelmingly negative, evoking attitudes of shame, self-disgust, and female bodily aversion.9 The normative ancient perception of menstruation and the potential disparity determined by gender between experience and the representation of experience provides an important context when approaching the menstrual narrative the philosopher Damascius associates with Hypatia. Writing in the early sixth century AD in his Philosophical History, Damascius relates how Hypatia used the physical evidence of her menstrual cycle to resist unwanted male sexual attention.10 Hypatia reputedly showed “the symbol of the impurity of birth” (τὸ σύμ 7   As argued by Sara Read: “menstruation is a commonplace experience for women the world over, yet it is often considered a subject to be left unspoken.” (S. Read, “‘Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout’: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England,” EMWJ 3 [2008]: 3)  8   Similarly, Read, “Sanitary Practices,” 19.  9   Amy Richlin, “Pliny’s Brassiere,” Roman Sexualities, eds. J. P. Hallett and M. Skinner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 204: “These beliefs are in keeping with attitudes expressed toward menstruation in other kinds of Roman texts. Menstruation and menstrual blood are mentioned only a few times in Roman satirical and moralizing literature, uniformly negatively.” The most infamous and extensive ancient discussion of menstrual blood occurs in Pliny, Natural History 7 XV, ed. / trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1963), 5; 64 – 66. For further discussion of relevant ancient sources, see Jack Lennon, “Menstrual Blood in Ancient Rome: An Unspeakable Impurity?” Class. Mediaev. 61 (2010): 71 – 87; Pollution and Religion in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For a discussion of menstruation in Jewish and Christian cultures, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity,” Women’s History and Ancient History, ed. S. B. Pomeroy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991), 273 – 99. Cf. van de Walle and Renne: “. . . remarkably, there do not seem to have been menstrual taboos in classical Greece, despite the attention Greek physicians devoted to the health implications of regular menses” (Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations, eds. E. Van de Walle and E. P. Renne [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], xix). 10   For the dating of Damascius’ work, see P. Athanassiadi, The Philosophical History (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), 42 – 3. For similar instances, see Ach. Tat. Leucippe and Clitophon, 4.7.7, where a man is dissuaded from having sex with Leucippe as she is menstruating. Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, ed. E. Vilborg (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1955), 75; Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. T. Whitmarsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 66. John Moschus records the story of a widow who persuaded a monk against raping her by de-

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βολον . . . τῆς ἀκαθάρτου γενέσεως), a bloodied menstrual cloth, to her student to turn his sexual desire for her into revulsion, accompanied with the words, “This is what you love, young man, nothing that is beautiful.”11 Damascius represents this act of self-denigration, intended to arouse feelings of intense disgust, as efficacious, and the student was shamed out of his love for his teacher.12 In her analysis of Pliny’s infamous treatment of the properties of menstrual blood, Richlin emphasizes the rarity and strangeness of such a discussion by a Roman writer.13 And why indeed do we have this exception from Damascius, where the very private female management of a monthly cycle is uniquely publicly displayed, an action accompanied by words supposedly spoken by Hypatia? How can we understand the incident, and how does it shape the received image we have of the philosopher? Although scholarly attention to Hypatia is far from lacking, such questions have not received critical consideration.

Damascius’ Hypatia Our biographical knowledge of Hypatia comes primarily from three sources: Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History, written in the mid-fifth century AD; Damascius’ Life of Isidore, written in the early sixth century; and the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, a  Coptic bishop writing in the seventh century.14 Although Socrates’ scribing the bad odours her body exudes whilst menstruating: “I am having my period. Nobody can come near me or bear the smell of me for the stench which mars my body.” . . . λέγει, ὅτι Ἐν τοῖς μηνιαίοις εἰμὶ, καὶ οὐδεὶς δύναταί μοι προσεγγίσαι, οὐδέ ὀσφρανθῆναί μου, ἀπὸ τῆς δυσωδίας, ταλανίζουσα τὸ σῶμα αὐτῆς. John Moschus, Prat. Spirit., ed. J.‑P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 87: 3, 205: 3095 – 6. trans. J. Wortley (Michigan: Cistercia Publications, 1992), 183 – 4. Isidore of Pelusium records the woman who put ashes on her face to put off her lover. Epistula 53 (LIII), ed. J.‑P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca 78: 2, 495 – 8. See Alan Cameron, Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 199. In Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks (2.2), in an attempt to avoid being forcibly rebaptised into Arian Christianity, a sanctified virgin begins spontaneously menstruating, contaminating the baptismal water with blood. Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, Histoire des Francs, trans. R. Latouche, 2 vols. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1963 – 65). 11   Dam., PH, 43 A and C (Athanassiadi, 128). My translation. See below for fuller quotation and a more detailed analysis. 12   Dam., PH, 43 A and C, (Athanassiadi, 128 – 9): τούτου μέντοι, φάναι, ἐρᾷς, ὦ νεανίσκε, καλοῦ δὲ οὐδενός∙ τὸν δὲ ὑπ᾽ αἰσχύνης και θάμβους τῆς ἀσχήμονος ἐπιδείξεως διατραπῆναί τε τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ διατεθῆναι σωφρονέστερον. “She said, ‘This is what you love, young man, nothing that is beautiful.’ He was overcome with shame and astonishment at the ugly sight and adopted a more rational attitude.” My translation. 13   Amy Richlin, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 248. 14   Arthur Urbano notes with curiosity the absence of a philosophical biography of Hypatia, especially as she would have been an obvious candidate for inclusion in Eunapius’ Vitae Sophistarum. Arthur Urbano, The Philosophical Life: Biography and the Crafting of Intellectual Identity in Late Antiquity (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 248.

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representation of Hypatia is strikingly idealistic, and John of Nikiu’s is strikingly derogatory, the bloody incident is found only in Damascius’ Philosophical History.15 Alternatively known as the Life of Isidore, the work is a biography of Damascius’ teacher Isidore.16 Many of Damascius’ writings are lost, and the Philosophical History only survives in fragments recorded in much later sources: by the Patriarch Photius in his Bibliotheca from the ninth century, and in the Suda, a Byzantine lexicon or encyclopaedia dating from the tenth century AD.17 Described as “splendidly irreverent hagiography”, the Philosophical History is a prosopographical study of male and female members of a philosophical circle concentrated on Athens, Alexandria and Aphrodisias.18 This includes Hypatia, whom Damascius describes as being educated by her father, wearing the tribon, the philosopher’s cloak, and teaching publicly.19 According to Damascius, Hypatia has a nature “nobler” than her father, and she is a gifted teacher.20 Despite her remarkable beauty, Hypatia practises sexual abstinence in the preservation of her virginity: As well as being a gifted teacher, she had reached the peak of moral virtue and was just and prudent; she remained a virgin, but as she was remarkably beautiful and attractive one of her students fell in love with her and, not being able to control his passion, he betrayed it to her as well. Ignorant legend has it that Hypatia cured him of his disease through music. But the truth is that when music failed to have any effect, she produced a rag used by women [γυναικεῖος ῥάκος] stained with menstrual blood, and showed him the sign of the impurity of birth [τὸ σύμβολον ἐπιδείξασαν τῆς ἀκαθάρτου γενέσεως] . . . 15   The anecdote about Hypatia’s bloody display has been reasonably assumed to be the work of Damascius, and at least for the purposes of this paper, we should understand that the anecdote is original. This clarification does not address the issue of intrinsic veracity. How far the narrative reflects truth or reality is a separate matter, and will not be considered here. On history governed by the credible rather than the actual, see Roger Scott, “Text and Context in Byzantine Historiography,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 251 – 62. 16   On the title of the work, see Athanassiadi, PH, 61 – 2. 17   For an introduction to Damascius, see G. Van Riel, “Damascius,” The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, vol. 2, ed. L. P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 667 – 96. 18   Polymnia Athanassiadi, “Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius,” JHS 113 (1993), 2. Photius notes that Damascius “. . . does not so much write the Life of Isidore, as that of many other people, both his contemporaries and his predecessors; he collects together their activities and also tales about them through a generous and even excessive use of digression.” Oὐ μήν γε μᾶλλον Ἰσιδώρου βίον ἢ πολλῶν ἄλλων, τῶν μὲν συνηκμακότων τἀνδρί, τῶν δὲ καὶ προγεγονότων συναναγράφει πράξεις τε καὶ διηγήματα τούων συνδιατεθεὶς καὶ πλείστῃ χρώμενος καὶ κατὰ κόρον τῇ παρεκδρομῇ. Athanassiadi, PH, “Testimonia”, III, 336 – 7. 19   Dam., PH, 43 A (Athanassiadi, 128). For discussion of the evidence Damascius provides about Hypatia, see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 231 – 93. For more on the tribon, see Arthur Urbano, “Sizing-Up the Philosopher’s Cloak: Christian Verbal and Visual Representations of the Tribon,” Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity, eds. K. Upson-Saia, C. Daniel-Hughes, and A. J. Batten (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 175 – 94. 20   Dam., PH, 43 A, trans. Athanassiadi, 128.

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she said, “This is what you love, young man, nothing that is beautiful.” He was overcome with shame and astonishment at the ugly sight and adopted a more rational attitude.21 Πρὸς δὲ τῷ διδασκαλικῷ καὶ ἐπ’ ἄκρον ἀναβᾶσα τῆς πρακτικῆς ἀρετῆς, δικαία τε καὶ σώφρω γεγονυῖα, διετέλει παρθένος, οὕτω σφόδρα καλή τε οὖσα καὶ εὐειδής, ὥστε καί ἐρασθῆναί τινα αὐτῆς τῶν προσφοιτώντων. Ὁ δὲ οὐχ οἷός τε ἦν κρατεῖν τοῦ ἔρωτος, ἀλλ᾽ αἴσθησιν ἤδη παρείχετο καὶ αὐτῇ τοῦ παθήματος. Οἱ μὲν οὖν ἀπαίδευτοι λόγοι φασί, διὰ μουσικῆς αὐτὸν ἀπαλλάξαι τῆς νόσου τὴν ῾Υπατίαν∙ ἡ δὲ ἀλήθεια διαγγέλλει πάλαι μὲν διεφθορέναι τὰ μουσικῆς, αὐτὴν δὲ προενεγκαμένην τι τῶν γυναικείων ῥακῶν †αἵματι βεβαμμένον† καὶ τὸ σύμβολον ἐπιδείξασαν τῆς ἀκαθάρτου γενέσεως . . . τούτου μέντοι, φάναι, ἐρᾷς, ὦ νεανίσκε, καλοῦ δὲ οὐδενός∙ τὸν δὲ ὑπ᾽ αἰσχύνης καὶ θάμβους τῆς ἀσχήμονος ἐπιδείξεως διατραπῆναί τε τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ διατεθῆναι σωφρονέστερον.

Hypatia’s exceptionality, in terms of her sexuality, intellect, virtue, beauty, and morality, provides the context for Damascius’ anecdote of the infatuated student and the bloodied cloth that deters his attentions so effectively. Damascius’ idealised portrayal of Hypatia is emphasised but also undercut by her anti-erotic menstrual display. The reaction of Hypatia’s student indicates how the incident is intended to be understood – it is shocking and revolting. Little critical attention has been given to the anecdote, and this perception remains largely unchallenged. However, the reasoning behind the inclusion of the anecdote by Damascius, its resonance within the reception of Hypatia, and its textual transmission, mean that straightforward understandings are not readily available. On a technical level, the nature of Damascius’ text at this point is incomplete: only brief fragments remain that are difficult to connect with one another, adding a layer of complexity and opacity to the narrative.22 The manuscript is corrupt following ῥακῶν, and αἵματι βεβαμμένον has been interpolated firstly by Asmus and then by Athanassiadi.23 The lacuna is disputed, and Zintzen has an alternative reading of αὐτοῦ βαλομένην. The ambiguity does not end there, and the anecdote is prefaced by Damascius with an alternative version of resistance to unwanted male sexual attention: “Ignorant legend [ἀπαίδευτοι λόγοι] has it that Hypatia cured him of his disease through music.”24 From the vague and terse 21   Dam., PH, 43 A and C, trans. Athanassiadi, 128 – 9. For discussion of this passage, see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 268 – 70 and Gemma Beretta, Ipazia d’Alessandria (Rome: Editori Riuniti University Press, 2014), 136 – 8. 22   As noted by Beretta, Ipazia, 136. 23   See Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 268 – 9. Athanassiadi’s edition of the text does not include the recognition that αἵματι βεβαμμένον is a modern interpolation. Athanassiadi, PH, 128. Johann Rudolf Asmus, Das Leben des Philosophen Isidoros von Damaskios aus Damaskos (Leipzig: Meiner, 1911), 32. Harich-Schwarzbauer conjectures that instead of a bloodied rag Hypatia displayed some kind of amulet which she drew from her clothing, perhaps a female figure with an oversized vulva. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 269. 24   Οἱ μὲν οὖν ἀπαίδευτοι λόγοι φασί, διὰ μουσικῆς αὐτὸν ἀπαλλάξαι τῆς νόσου τὴν Ὑπατιαν. Dam., PH, 43 A and C, trans. Athanassiadi, 128 – 9. Watts reads a philosophical significance into Hypatia’s attempts to deter her student through music, understanding it as “a proper, philosophical remedy that had Pythagorean roots, but this student had apparently fallen so far from the

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description the reference to an “ignorant legend” remains obscure, but it suggests the existence of alternative, now lost narratives of Hypatia that potentially destabilise any meaning we could find.25 Damascius records that Hypatia turned to the more extreme option of menstrual display only when her first attempt to cure her student was unsuccessful: “But the truth is that when music failed to have any effect, she produced a rag of the type used by women, stained with menstrual blood, and, showing him the symbol of the impurity of birth . . .” The specific meaning of the phrase “impurity of birth” (ἀκαθάρτου γενέσεως) is ambiguous; does it mean that the reproductive process of birth is impure? Or that women as a sexual category distinct from men are inherently impure? One understanding, albeit very rare, of γένεσις is female genitalia;26 could the implication be therefore that Hypatia is simply showing her student that she has a “dirty” vagina as a way to dissuade him of his physical desire for her? The lack of clarity with intrinsic femaleness and bodily fluids enables the maximal association of revulsion and shame, and reinforces the discourse of silence around menstruation. Where descriptions do occur, their imprecision inhibits the subject as mysterious and taboo, perpetuating the categorization of women and their bodily functions as “other”. The lack of detail compels the reader to extrapolate from the context and frames the action in mystery, as we see in the menstrual narrative associated with Hypatia. This sense of instability and ambiguity is compounded by the horror and aversion that causes the instantaneous reversal of Hypatia’s student in his sexualized attitude and intention. With a satirical eye, Damascius details the successes, failures, weaknesses and eccentricities of those within his intellectual purview to arrive at a definition of the ideal pagan leader.27 As Athanassiadi has observed, Damascius is “no charitable observer of human nature” and is “endowed with a superb sense of the ridiculous.”28 Damascius recognizes the potential for derision in female function and fluid, weaponizing menstruation as a symbol of innate female identity that shrivels male desire. The retelling of Hypatia’s transheights of philosophical contemplation that this remedy could not work.” Watts’ interpretation of the incident is entirely philosophical. Watts, Hypatia, 131 – 2. For further discussion see Cameron, Wandering Poets, 18 – 9; Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 264 – 6. 25  As Athanassiadi observes of Dam. PH, “[g]ossip too is of the essence of this book.” Athanassiadi, “Persecution and Response,” 3. 26  See PGL “γένεσις” (VII), 343. In (neo)platonic discourse γένεσις referred to generation or becoming, connoting birth, death, and all the physical processes associated with the material, corruptible world. According to Platonist philosophers all human beings are to some extent “impure” because they are involved in the processes of generation. See P. Vassilopoulou, “Creation or Metamorphosis? Plotinus on the Genesis of the World,” in Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics, eds. A. Alexandrakis and N. J. Moutafakis (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 207 – 228. For an example of the usage of the term, see Proclus, Inst., 45. Proclus. The Elements of Theology, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 47. 27   Noted by Athanassiadi, PH, 27. 28   Athanassiadi, “Persecution and Response,” 2.

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gressive, sexually repulsive display is the ancient equivalent of a dirty joke; the use of obscene imagery and the sardonic degradation of her body brings the ridiculous to Hypatia, revealing her as far from the ideal philosopher.29

Hypatia, Menstruation, and Modern Critical Reception Maria Dzielska has argued that “[t]he interpretation of the incident requires no complicated reasoning,” and indeed, Hypatia’s bloody display has been subject to very little scholarly scrutiny.30 One of few exceptions is Danuta Shanzer’s article from 1985, but interest in the incident extends only as far as discerning Hypatia’s philosophy as a Cynic, Platonist, or follower of Plotinus.31 If Hypatia’s bloody display is discussed then it is usually in language that replicates the original source – it is ugly and disgusting. For Dzielska it is a “vulgar story”, a “revolting act” that reveals Hypatia’s repugnance of her body.32 Cameron and Long describe it as “the most famous (if not the most attractive) story”, and they question how it could be interpreted as anything other than a “disgusting, deterrent gesture.”33 But do we have to see Hypatia’s actions as a gesture of self-disgust, of internalised female shame made exceptionally visible? In some senses Hypatia was an empowered woman. As Gillian Clark has argued, not marrying was a choice and not a force of circumstance.34 Preserving her virginity, staying 29   In his analysis of the dirty joke Legman argues that behaviour or subjects generate shock, laughter or offense, and dispel anxiety. The deep-seated anxiety provoked by the transgressive role-reversal of an unmarried and celibate professional woman philosopher is dispelled through the display of her menstrual rag, transforming the epitome of her womanness into an object of derisive humour. Gershon Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke. An Analysis of Sexual Humour (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 13 – 4. 30  Dzielska, Hypatia, 51. See also Dzielska, “Hypatia’s Death,” 65: “. . . scholarly inquiry into historical [sic] Hypatia seems by now fulfilled and complete. This is because our sources on Hypatia are so laconic, perfunctory, and vague that they can offer no ground for further study.” 31   Danuta Shanzer, “Merely a Cynic Gesture?”, RFC 113 (1985): 61 – 66. Shanzer argues that “The most obvious feature of the story related to Hypatia is that it shows the Neoplatonic philosopher acting in a way that would far better have befitted the Cynic.” Shanzer, “Merely a Cynic Gesture?” 62. 32  Dzielska, Hypatia, 51. Alan Cameron does not avoid inflammatory language when describing Hypatia, polarising her interpretation either as “a model of pagan virginity” or as “a slut”. Cameron, Wandering Poets, 185. On the rehabilitation of “slut” and the debate that surrounds the term, see K. Miriam, “Feminism, Neoliberalism, and SlutWalk,” Fem. Stud. 38.1 (2012): 26 – 6, and A. Hill, “SlutWalk as Perifeminist Response to Rape Logic: The Politics of Reclaiming a Name,” Crit. Stud. Media Commun. 13.1 (2016): 23 – 39. 33   Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 42; 43. 34   Gillian Clark, Monica. An Ordinary Saint (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13; 93. Clark sees Hypatia as exceptional even within a female philosophical context, arguing that marriage and child-bearing were not considered obstacles for female philosophers: “So, from such evidence as we have, Platonists thought that family life and bringing up children was appropriate for philosophers, and that it need not obstruct the pursuit of wisdom.” Gillian Clark, “Do Try

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with her father and remaining in a professional, educational and philosophical context were seemingly choices that brought her considerable benefit: she had status within Alexandria, and was successful and admired. From this perspective, Hypatia’s menstrual display can be seen not as period-shaming but as an act of defiance, a challenge to male sexual desire – this is what being a woman is, do you still want to have sex with me now? Hypatia’s words, ventriloquized as they are by Damascius, describing the sight of her menstrual blood as “nothing that is beautiful”, are not necessarily an endorsement; the shame and astonishment of her student does not necessarily reflect Hypatia’s attitude, although this is overwhelmingly how it has been interpreted.35 This issue is in some ways unknowable, so far removed as we are from Hypatia’s own thoughts, words, and deeds, which are represented only through a male mediator. But this does not diminish the necessity or urgency of challenging the misogynistic and sexist discourse that surrounds Hypatia, a discourse that is so dominant to have gone largely unquestioned.

Damascius’ Philosophical Exemplars: Isidore and Hypatia One way in which we can better understand the depiction of Hypatia’s menstrual narrative is to place it in a wider textual context of the Philosophical History, a work organised around biographical studies of philosophers, of which Isidore is preeminent.36 As Edward Watts has recently demonstrated, Damascius presents his teacher Isidore as an imperfect figure, but his flaws are transformed into virtues, and Isidore is a philosophical paradigm for imitation.37 Damascius says of Isidore that his senses were only “moderately acute, merely serving his needs”, This At Home: The Domestic Philosopher in Late Antiquity,” From Rome to Constantinople: Studies in Honour of Averil Cameron, eds. H. Amirav and B. T. Haar Romeny (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 172; similarly Clark, Monica, 93. For an explanation of Hypatia as a unique female intellectual in antiquity, see Watts, Hypatia, 267. 35   For example, Pierre Chuvin understands Hypatia’s actions as demonstrating her perception of the body as a “rubbish heap”, synonymous with the ascetic Christian conception. Pierre Chuvin, Chronique des Derniers Paiens (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991), 90. 36   PH is addressed and dedicated to Theodora, a pupil of Damascius and Isidore’s. See Dam., PH, “Testimonia” III, trans. Athanassiadi, 334 – 7. That the text was written for a female patron, and the audience included female philosophical students, complicates the gender dynamic within the text. I am grateful to Ed Watts for highlighting this issue. For a brief discussion of women in Damascius’ PH, see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 242 – 3. 37   Edward Watts, “Damascius’ Isidore: Collective Biography and a Perfectly Imperfect Philosophical Exemplar,” Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism, Byzantina et Slavica Cracoviensia 7, eds. M. Dzielska and K. Twardowska (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2013), 159 – 68. See Dam., PH, II.26 B, Athanassiadi, 102 – 3 for Damascius’ summary of Isidore as a human exemplar resembling the divine. For the argument that Damascius presents himself as approaching the ideal of a philosopher, see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 238 – 41.

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his memory was average and he had a tendency to be forgetful.38 But Damascius turns what at first sight seems to be a failure of character into a strength, comparing him to flashy philosophers who show-off their ability to recall theories and syllogisms whilst their inward knowledge of the soul is destitute.39 Conversely, Isidore is divinely favoured as his true philosophy and spiritual knowledge resides in the soul. Damascius’ portrayal of Isidore may seem pejoratively critical, but it is also redemptive. Damascius makes explicit and implicit comparisons of Isidore with other individuals, and Hypatia is notable among them.40 Damascius writes that “Isidore and Hypatia were very different, not only as man differs from woman, but as a true philosopher differs from a mathematician” (῾Ο ᾽Ισίδωρος πολὺ διαφέρων ἦ τῆς ῾Υπατίας, οὐ μόνον οἷα γυναικὸς ἀνήρ, ἀλλὰ καὶ οἷα γεωμετρικῆς τῷ ὄντι φιλόσοφος).41 Watts has argued that we should not see this as the gratuitous insult it initially appears to be, but as an attempt to explain better the achievements of Isidore without diminishing Hypatia’s virtues.42 The interpretation of the comparison is dependent on perspective; if we centralise Isidore then it is possible to see how comparison with a philosopher whose status and qualities have already been established would serve to elevate Isidore further. But as Damascius’ comparison of a “true philosopher” with a mathematician establishes a hierarchy of intellectual and spiritual endeavour which favours philosophy, this hierarchy logically applies to the comparison between men and women also: Damascius’ categorisation of sexual difference establishes the superiority of men over women.43 Even if we are not going to understand this parallel as a misogynistic slur, we should relate it to the 38

  Dam., PH, II.14, trans. Athanassiadi, 90 – 1.   Dam., PH, II.14, Athanassiadi, 90 – 1. 40   As observed by Photius, who understands such comparisons as intended to denigrate other philosophers in order to elevate Isidore: “Thus pulling down and throwing to the ground each one of those whom he [Damascius] had extolled and glorified, he imperceptibly establishes his own authority in every way above everybody else. This is why he continually matches praise of Isidore with criticism.” Οὕτως ἐκείνων ἕκαστον οὓς ἄνω φέρων ἐξῄρει κατασύρων καὶ ῥίπτων χαμαί, τὸ κράτος ἑαυτῷ κατὰ πάντων καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι λεληθότως ἀναρτᾷ. Διὸ καὶ Ἰσίδωρον οὐχ ἧττον ἐπαινῶν ἢ ψόγις περιβάλλων διατελεῑ. Athanassiadi, PH, “Testimonia”, III, 336 – 7. 41   Dam., PH, VII.106 A, trans. Athanassiadi, 254 – 5. 42   Watts, “Damascius’ Isidore,” 166. For a slightly different argument, see E. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 192. A more common critical interpretation understands the juxtaposition in a derogatory sense. See Cameron and Long (with Sherry), Barbarians and Politics, 41. 43   A trope similarly exploited by Jerome: “woman . . . is different from man as body is from soul.” Nec non et juxta litteram, quamdiu mulier partui servit et liberis, hanc habet ad virum differentiam, quam corpus ad animam. Jerome, Commentary on Ephesians, III ch. 5. Commentariorum in Epistolam ad Ephesios, Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. J.‑P. Migne, vol. 26, 658 (B) column 533 (Paris, 1845). See R. E. Heine, The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 237. See McLaughlin “Logistics of Gender,” 11 – 15, for further discussion of the inferences made by later thinkers from ancient philosophical thought that were enabled by gender polarities. 39

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instance where sexual difference and gender are again explicit, where Hypatia exhibits her menstrual blood as a provocative illustration of her femaleness, and the inherently limited nature of the female sex that this implies.44 The crucial difference is that Isidore’s flaws and failings are resolved within the text, and his status as a philosophical exemplar is not compromised. But there is no such redemption for Hypatia. Her “flaws”, her female sex and the biological messiness that goes along with this, are a compromise that cannot be resolved, and Hypatia is not advocated as a model to imitate. We began by asking how the menstrual narrative has shaped the received image of Hypatia, and without Damascius’ fragmentary account the paucity of the primary sources would be further reduced. The incident is absent in Socrates’ narrative of Hypatia, yielding an idealised, even sanitized version of the philosopher, virtuous and largely uncomplicated by the sexualised body. Socrates’ portrayal of Hypatia is complemented and crucially extended by Damascius. Damascius’ retelling introduces the problematic eroticised body into the narrative, which limits Hypatia as a successful teacher and philosopher.45 This is of considerable significance, given that it is the female, often highly sexualised body of Hypatia that continues to receive attention and emphasis. That Hypatia was recorded as not a young, menstruating woman but older (παλαιὰ) at the time of her death is easily overlooked when her body is reimagined.46 Concentration falls either on the sexual status of her body as desirable and beautiful as well as unpenetrated and chaste, or as physically attacked by the hostile mob, carried away, stripped naked, torn to pieces, with “her quivering limbs . . . deliv44   Cf. Damascius’ description of Heraiscus, who instinctively rejects any impurity connected with reproduction and immediately develops a headache on hearing the voice of a woman who is menstruating. Dam., PH, V 76 E, trans. Athanassiadi, 196 – 7. 45   Conversely Watts underlines the liberating effects of the narrative where Damascius is able to illustrate how Hypatia’s gender did not impede her ability to resist sexual temptation: “Memorable anecdotes illustrate, in graphic fashion, the ways in which Hypatia and Sosipatra were impervious to the pursuit of male suitors. This allows authors like Eunapius and Damascius to dispense with any notion that their subject’s gender may negatively impact her ability to resist carnal temptation.” Edward Watts, “Hypatia’s Sisters: Female Philosophers in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries,” in Within the Circle of Ancient Ideas and Virtues: Studies in Honour of Professor Maria Dzielska, eds. K. Twardowska, M. Salamon, S. Sprawski, M. Stachura, and S. Turlej (Cracow: Towarzystwo Wydawnicze “Historia Iagellonica”, 2014), 249. 46   In John Malalas’ Chronicle (14.12), Hypatia is observed as “the famous philosopher, who had a great reputation and was an old woman.” The Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. E. Jeffreys, M. Jeffreys, R. Scott and B. Croke (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies Sydney, University of Sydney, 1986), 196. Ioannis Malalae Chronographia, ed. H. Thurn (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 280: Κατ’ ἐκεῖνον δὲ τὸν καιρὸν παρρησίαν λαβόντες ὑπὸ τοῦ ἐπισκόπου οἱ Ἀλεξανδρεῖς ἔκαυσαν φρυγάνοις αὐθεντήσαντες Ὑπατίαν τὴν περιβόητον φιλόσοφον, περὶ ἧς μεγάλα ἐφέρετο · ἦν δὲ παλαιὰ γυνή. For a detailed assessment of the source on which debate rests, see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 335 – 40. For discussion of Hypatia’s age see Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 67 – 8; R. J. Penella, “When Was Hypatia Born?” Historia 33.1 (1984): 126 – 8.

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ered to the flames”, in Gibbon’s imaginings.47 If we recognise Hypatia’s body as foregrounded in the narratives told about her, especially in her later reception, Damascius’ attempt to disparage Hypatia by using her own menstruating body epitomised by the bloodied cloth becomes more resonant.

The Construct of Hypatia: Transmission and Evolution from Socrates Understanding how the menstrual narrative associated with Hypatia functions necessitates a broader consideration of her representation by ancient writers, and how this evolves in the process of transmission. The misogynistic appreciation of the female body that underlies Damascius’ portrayal of Hypatia is not inconsistent with the approach of other ancient writers. The received image of Hypatia from antiquity exploits typology and relies on polarities of representation that are ideologically determined or androcentric. This is consistent with the treatment of women in ancient evidence which is often idealizing and prescriptive, and Hypatia is no exception.48 Her representation in the three principal ancient sources (as well as the subsequent tradition) is dominated by her gender and her status in the city of Alexandria. Hypatia is extraordinary as a woman operating in a man’s world, and it is with her unusual status that male writers begin. But their representation is further overstated. With the exception of Synesius who corresponded with Hypatia, the Christian Church historian Socrates writing in Constantinople is our earliest principal source. In his brief account Hypatia is presented in stylised terms; she is a tragic victim, polarised as a remarkable and virtuous female on the one hand, but equally not immune to the political jealousies and factional in-fighting that caused her death. The swirling waters of narrative quickly grow cloudy and muddied; Socrates makes no explicit mention of the attributes for which Hypatia is famous – her beauty, youth, chastity, or her paganism. Socrates’ Hypatia is an extraordinary female, resisting the constraints of social expectation. She is not just a philosopher, she is an outstanding philosopher, surpassing all of her contemporaries.49 With her advanced intellect comes a confidence and easy manner which enabled her to appear in public, mixing with magistrates and men without feeling shame. She travelled openly in her carriage, enjoying meetings with Orestes, the prefect of Egypt, and lecturing 47   E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 4, 47. ed. Womersley, vol. II, 945. 48   A generalisation recognised by Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Mother (London: Routledge, 1990), 4. 49   For a valuable deconstruction of wisdom as a female quality, see E. A. Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Church. Hist. 67.1 (1998), 1 – 31.

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publicly. It is her visible lack of shame at being visible, which indicates an expectation of female shame that, for Socrates, is particularly remarkable.50 The violent attack and gruesome murder Hypatia suffers is arguably the principal reason Socrates devotes textual attention to her, as Watts has recognised: “Hypatia then had become a character in Socrates’ text whose profile did nothing more and nothing less than what the story required. She appeared in the text simply because she could be made to die in the most resonant way possible.”51 Socrates presents the fact of her death as a means of extending her exceptionality; it is a point of termination that assumes an ideological as well as a chronological significance.52 The subtle but unavoidable implication, therefore, is that her fate was a consequence of her lack of conformity. Socrates’ Hypatia is emblematic of the represented female in the Ecclesiastical History; statistically the visibility of women is very low, and only the most anomalous and extraordinary of women are embodied and named.53 One of the longest narrative passages with a sustained female focus is concerned with Helena, the mother of Constantine, and her arduous search for the true cross.54 Another female character, the shepherd Spyridon’s daughter Irene, a pious virgin, serves to demonstrate her father’s extraordinary sanctity in her miraculous usefulness even after her death, but her own life is of little interest.55 The women sparsely scattered through Socrates’ history tend to be imperial or royal, pious, and of liminal sexual status; virgins and prostitutes command attention. Nowhere are women represented who are not extraordinary. They constitute a distinct category of remarkable irregularity, often functioning only to service the literary representation of an associated male. The ideology that underlies Socrates’ writ50  Socr., Hist. eccl. 7.15 (160): “Neither did she feel shame to be amongst men.” . . . καὶ οὐκ ἦν τις αἰσχύνη ἐν μέσῳ ἀνδρῶν παρεῖναι αὐτήν. Sokrates Kirchengeschichte, ed. G. C. Hansen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 7.15.2.26 (360). See Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 200 – 1. On Socrates’ comment, see Edwards Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 148 fn. 364. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 200 – 1, points out that from the wider context shame (αἰσχύνη) would entail a loss of dignity and rank. For discussion of Hypatia’s public teaching, see Maria Dzielska, “Once More on Hypatia’s Death,” Byzantina et Slavica Cracoviensia 7, eds. M. Dzielska and K. Twardowska (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2013), 70 – 3. David Brakke’s discussion of the function of women to shame men in ascetic contexts in early Christian literature intersects usefully with shame as a productive theme in the narrative of Hypatia. David Brakke, “The Lady Appears: Materializations of ‘Woman’ in Early Monastic Literature,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33.3 (2003): 387 – 402. 51  Watts, Hypatia, 216 – 7. 52   Modern interpretations overwhelmingly perceive Hypatia’s death as a historical watershed. For example, see Watts, Hypatia, 118; 120; 133; Dzielska, Hypatia, 102; Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 234 – 8. 53   For a statistical analysis of women represented by the Church historians including Socrates, see Anne Jensen, God’s Self-Confident Daughters: Early Christianity and the Liberation of Women (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996), 1 – 28. 54  Socr., Hist. eccl., 1.17 (ed. Hansen, 55 – 7). 55   Ibid., 43 – 4.

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ings, where authority and visibility are male-dominated, is predominantly patriarchal, whilst his misogyny is less prominent, like the women in his history. Socrates’ Hypatia is firmly embedded within a category of female exceptionality, and her gender loudly calls attention to itself. As illustrated by Sarah B. Pomeroy, the attitude of ancient society towards the relative importance of the activities of men and women was such that women were less likely to be to be commemorated by enduring monuments or described by ancient writers.56 Liz James argues similarly, highlighting how women vanish from the historical record as simply not important enough to be included: “Their own births and deaths were of little concern, unless these also played a part in the author’s narrative about a significant man.”57 Although the late antique period saw an important shift that altered and complicated the status and visibility of women, the prevailing classical attitude towards women provides a context that usefully informs the representation of Hypatia. Virtue, dignity and intellectual accomplishment were not justification enough to record a woman’s life; for Socrates and Damascius exceptional beauty and chastity are also required literary conceits. The earliest sources on Hypatia give us a composite version of the philosopher as idealised and flawless, a paradigm of erudite femininity.58 She is beautiful but modest, wise and respected, a fluent and skilful public speaker, and of excellent character. She was contemporarily admired for her moral strictness, practising sexual abstinence and remaining a virgin. In her personal character, her beauty, her chastity, and her intellect, as well as her position, Hypatia was extraordinary. In a world full of men who made, occupied and wrote the world, Hypatia stands out as an example of a woman being talked about: she was far from an invisible female.59 Helen King has argued that we are distanced from ancient women by the screen of male writers.60 Hypatia’s intrinsic lack of obscurity as a female with status was seized upon by male authors 56   Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 228. 57  L. James, “Ghosts in the Machine: The Lives and Deaths of Constantinian Imperial Women,” Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, eds. B. Neil and L. Garland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 97. 58   Penella observes that “there may be some exaggeration in Damascius’ remarks . . . which represent a tradition that paints an ideal picture of Hypatia as a model of virtue, learning, and physical beauty.” Penella, “When Was Hypatia Born?”, 127. 59   Contravening the Thucydidean ideal of a woman to be least talked about by men. Thucydides, P. W., 2.46. As Paul Cartledge has argued, it was only through transgressive behaviour that women could make themselves visible. Paul Cartledge, “The Silent Women of Thucydides: 2.45.2 Re-viewed,” in Greek Literature in the Classical Period: The Prose of Historiography and Oratory, vol. 5, ed. G. Nagy (London: Routledge, 2001; originally published 1993), 267. Cf. Plutarch “Bravery of Women,” Moralia 1.243, ed. / trans. F. Cole Babbitt, vol. III (London: Heinemann, 1949) 474 – 5. 60   Helen King, “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women,” in Images of Women in Antiquity, ed. Av. Cameron and A. Kuhrt (London: Routledge, 1983), 109.

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to create an idealized female, polarized as extraordinary and transgressive. As a consequence Hypatia is still obscure. The representation of Hypatia by men, but also the nature of her life and death, her position as a philosopher, her religious affiliation, and the nature of the texts that tell us about her, make Hypatia a woman from whom we are decidedly distanced.

John of Nikiu’s Hypatia In our final principal source on Hypatia from Bishop John of Nikiu’s Chronicle, which dates from the seventh century, we find a further escalation and elaboration of Hypatia as imagined by Socrates and Damascius.61 Like other Church historians, John’s writings do not include the bloody display. Hypatia’s intellectual capacity as a philosopher and mathematician has become knowledge of magic and instruments, and her popularity in Alexandria has been achieved by bewitchment. Hypatia is presented as a dangerous unbeliever and magician, the sole cause of the division between the Prefect of Alexandria, Orestes, and the Patriarch Cyril: . . . she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic.62

The representation of Hypatia here is an irresistible opportunity to transform the patriarch Cyril into the “new Theophilus”63 in his destruction of “the last remains of idolatry”64 in Alexandria. Hypatia has become a demon-worshipping pagan, a dangerous and divisive magician who had “beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments,”65 justifying in much more absolute terms her murder not only as a deserved fate but as a triumphant victory for the Christians. But it is Socrates’ polarized representation of Hypatia with its inherent, covert misogyny that determined how Hypatia could be interpreted by later writers through evolving extremes, and how her reception in recent centuries could become even more acutely idealized.

61   For further discussion of John of Nikiu’s portrayal of Hypatia, see Watts, Hypatia, 229 – 35; H. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 335 – 40. 62   John of Nikiu, Chronicle, 84.87. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu. trans. R. H. Charles. Christian Roman Empire Series (Merchantville: Arx Publishing, 2007), 100. 63   John of Nikiu, Chronicle 84.103, 102. 64  Ibid. 65   Ibid., 84.87, 100.

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Hypatia in the Modern Imagination The elaboration and exaggeration of Hypatia rolls like a snowball through history, evident in later artists and writers along lines already established by ancient authors: she is represented according to an idealizing and sexualizing typology.66 Although the historical figure of Hypatia was not forgotten, in the anglo-centric imagination it was Charles Kingsley’s (1819 – 1876) novel Hypatia, published in 1853, that made the female philosopher widely known (see Fig. 1).67 In the preface to his novel Kingsley explicitly stated that his version of Hypatia built upon the textual foundation laid by Socrates.68 The tragic and erotic aspect of Hypatia’s life and death gripped ancient and modern minds alike, and Kingsley’s novel luxuriates in the hagiographic Hypatia, the passive and pure martyr who accepts her tragic fate with admirable endurance. Kingsley rather apophatically stipulated that “the young and innocent will do well to leave [Hypatia] altogether unread,” but his imaginative portrayal of the lynching of Hypatia caused real scandal. Alfred Lord Tennyson objected to Kingsley’s final scene in the Caesareum: She shook herself free from her tormentors, and springing back, rose for one moment to her full height naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around – shame and indignation in those wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ appealing – and who dare say, in vain? – from man to God.69

66   For surveys of the reception of Hypatia, see: A.‑F. Jaccottet, “Hypatie d’Alexandrie entre réalité historique et recuperations idéologiques: réflexions sur la place de l’Antiquité dans l’imaginaire modern,” in Tradition classique: dialogues avec l’Antiquité, ed. D. Bouvier and D. van MalMaeder (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 2010), 143 – 55; Dzielska, Hypatia, 1 – 26; J.  Paul, “Subverting Sex and Love in Alejandro Amenabar’s ‘Agora’,” in Screening Sex and Love in the Ancient World, ed. M. S. Cyrino (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 227 – 41; S. Ronchey, “Hypatia the Intellectual,” in Roman Women, ed. A. Fraschetti, trans. L. Lappin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 160 – 89; Watts, Hypatia, 237 – 5 and Watts in this volume. Susan Chitty notes that Kingsley’s Hypatia looked and behaved as if she had stepped off a Greek vase. Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk. A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 152. In a similar vein Watts compares the attack and murder of Hypatia to the destruction of the Serapis statue. Watts, Hypatia, 234, as well as Haase in this volume in greater detail. 67   On Kingsley’s Hypatia, see Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 32 – 3; 203 – 7. On Kingsley’s construction of gender including female suffering and martyrdom to male aggression, see L. Fasick, “Charles Kingsley’s Scientific Treatment of Gender,” in Muscular Christianity. Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. D. E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 105 – 7. 68   “I have, in my sketch of Hypatia and her fate, closely followed authentic history, especially Socrates’ account.” Charles Kingsley, Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (London: Macmillan, 1889), 8. 69  Kingsley, Hypatia, vii; 322.

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Fig. 1:  Charles Kingsley, Hypatia. Or, New Foes with an Old Face, first published 1853; image by Edmund H. Garrett from an edition published in 1897.

Although the erotic tendency in Kingsley has been interpreted as verging on the sadomasochistic,70 it was not Kingsley’s gratuitous glorification of Hypatia or her violent murder that offended Tennyson, it was her nakedness: Hypatia’s mistreatment by the Alexandrians I [Tennyson] found almost too horrible. It is very powerful and tragic; but I objected to the word “naked.” Pelagia’s nakedness has nothing which revolts one . . . but I really was hurt at having Hypatia stript, tho’ I see that it adds to the tragic, and the picture as well as the moral is a fine one.71

Kingsley’s Hypatia inspired two very different artistic responses: in 1867 Julia Margaret Cameron created a portrait of Hypatia fully-clothed, looking downcast and static but not subjugated (see Fig. 2.). The image is not as familiar or enduring as some of the more dramatic imaginings of Hypatia, particularly the 70   Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 233. For a different interpretation, see Maureen Moran, “The Art of Looking Dangerously: Victorian Images of Martyrdom,” in Victorian Literature and Culture, (2004): 480 – 2. 71   Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1897), 367.

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Fig. 2:  Julia Margaret Cameron, Hypatia (1867).

Fig. 3:  Charles William Mitchell, Hypatia (1885).

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pre-Raphaelite painting by Charles William Mitchell (1854 – 1903) in his “Hypatia”, which was first exhibited in 1885 (see Fig. 3.). In a scene of “mystic eroticism”, Mitchell gave full and dramatic visualization to Kingsley’s Hypatia at the moment of her death, naked except for the covering her incredibly long hair offers and in front of a Christian altar, in a highly sexualized and sadomasochistic image.72 Words from Kingsley’s novel were also put to music by various artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Ella ‘Jimmy’ Overbeck (1874 – 1919?), a lesbian cross-dressing composer most famous for her affair with the Russian poet Zinaida Nikolayevna Hippius.73 Overbeck composed a score for voice and piano to accompany words from Kingsley’s Hypatia in “A Slave Girl’s Song”, a piece that lingered on erotic pleasure and physical beauty. The reception of Hypatia took another turn with the film Agora, released in 2009, starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenábar.74 Joanna Paul, in her recent work on the film, notes that Agora builds on the conventional view of Hypatia, with the casting of Rachel Weisz as a highly attractive young woman in the leading role as part of that conservatism: “. . . it would be an unusual filmgoer who did not appreciate her beauty or acknowledge that a star’s bankability rests on their appearance as well as their ability.”75 Paul argues that it is refreshing to see mainstream Hollywood epic tackling different issues, including feminism and the female voice.76 Whilst this is true, the portrayal of Hypatia in Agora is not radical, and exploits the stereotypes of idealised chastity and purity combined with extraordinary intellectual ability and exceptional beauty.77 Hypa72   Nacho García, “City of Lights: Ancient Alexandria in Cinema and Modern Imagination,” in Imagining Ancient Cities in Film: From Babylon to Cinecittà, ed. M. Garcia Morcillo, P. Hanesworth, and Ó. Lapeña Marchena (London: Routledge, 2015), 117. Moran’s argument that there is no explicit connection to “voyeuristic sexual or sadistic pleasures” in Mitchell’s painting, or that it does not “invite erotic appraisal despite the bare breast” lacks credibility. Moran, “The Art of Looking Dangerously,” 481. 73   E. Overbeck, “A Slave Girl’s Song” from ‘Hypatia’ by C. Kingsley (London: Robert Cocks and Co., 1894). On Overbeck, see Sophie Fuller, “‘Devoted Attention’: Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-Siècle Britain,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, eds. S. Fuller and L. Whitesell (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2002), 79 – 101. For further Kingsley-inspired musical compositions, see C. H. Lloyd, “The Longbeards’ Saga: Chorus for Male Voices with Pianoforte Obbligato” (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1887), and P. Godfrey, “The Song of the Amal: Ballad for Chorus and Orchestra” (London: Novello and Co., 1904). 74   On Amenábar’s Agora see also the contribution by Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle in this volume. 75   Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 231. For a comparative discussion of gender and sexuality within Agora and Life of Brian, see Anise K. Strong, “Hypatia and Brian: Early Christianity as Greek Mythological Drama,” in Classical Myth on Screen, eds. M. S. Cyrino and M. E. Safran (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 195 – 206. 76   Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 239 – 40. 77   This is recognised and qualified by Paul: “We cannot claim, then, that this Hypatia is asexualized or that her gender is entirely immaterial to the film’s narrative; yet her interactions with the male characters subvert the typical offerings of ancient world films, and for most of Agora, at least, she maintains her agency and self-determination.” Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 231.

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tia’s menstrual reveal is imagined in the film: Orestes is now the love interest, and Hypatia presents him with her bloodied cloth in front of her class, telling him that there is “little harmony or beauty in that”. This is not an act of defiance or celebration; it is an austere gift, and Hypatia is serious and downcast in her giving. Orestes is initially shocked and then angry, seemingly humiliated before the class, throwing the cloth at her feet and storming out. Davus the slave, who is also enamoured with her, collects the rag and interprets it as a divine sign from his Christian god. The characterisation of Davus enables a seemingly more positive appreciation of menstruation, but his response to her menstrual cloth made visible is still troubling; his behaviour is sexually charged and voyeuristic in his illicit attempts to possess Hypatia without her knowledge or consent, an act which precedes his attempt to rape her.78

Inescapable Narratives? The potential for the historical figure of Hypatia to inspire in ways beyond a cyclical conservatism was recognised in 1986 after a journal of feminist philosophy was founded in her name. But the journal has since been the subject of stringent criticism from within the field for its perpetuation of androcentric bias and its lack of progressive feminist discourse.79 To push the boundaries of intellectual convention is difficult and risky. To conform to existing stereotypes and narrative models is easier, especially when the tension between sex and death is proximate and ripe for replication. Hypatia’s exceptional status, intellect and beauty, her prized virginity, and her tragic fate created an irresistible formula for writers both ancient and modern, as well as artists, academics and film producers. The established narrative pattern in the reception of Hypatia from the fifth century to the present day makes the veil of misogyny through which her life is viewed difficult to discern and almost impossible to sweep away.80 So inherent is it in our understanding of Hypatia, that to deconstruct thoroughly the 78

  For further discussion of Davus, see Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 230.   “But, more and more, Hypatia has become the source of my frustration. While so many books and journals are filled with exciting, creative, cutting edge feminist discourse, Hypatia is filled with articles that are not an inch more than a baby step away from traditional, masculinist philosophy. I sit at the edge of my seat, impatiently waiting for the next issue to come, only to be disappointed by its conservative contents. I feel as if Hypatia is breaking ground with a spoon when a plough is in order.” J. Trigilio, “Open Letter to the Editors and Advisors of Hypatia,” Hypatia 6.2 (1991): 219. See also E. Frances, “Some Thoughts on the Contents of Hypatia,” Hypatia 5.3 (1990): 159 – 61; H.  B.  Holmes, “Does Hypatia Rock Boats?” Hypatia 5.3 (1990): 162 – 4. 80   Cf. Maurice Sartre: “Hypatia’s story was removed from the historian’s purview before it even came into focus, and the ideological stakes that have been attached to her name for nearly three centuries have somewhat obscured the realities.” Maurice Sartre, “The Death of Hypatia, or Remaining Pagan in a Christian World,” Histoires Grecques: Snapshots from Antiquity, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 370. 79

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ancient sources risks nihilism. Hypatia can only be located within patriarchal and misogynistic narratives, within which menstruation functions uncomfortably, at their very core.

Conclusion Although the efficacy of Hypatia’s actions to transform sexual desire into revulsion is suspicious, this paper has not undertaken to challenge the incident in historical terms or to hold up a counter-narrative of Hypatia; instead the aim has been to reveal and interrogate the underlying narrative structure itself, which operates as a preconceived and oversimplified formula within which the category of female must be made to fit. It is likely that Hypatia would have been elided entirely from the historical record but for the narrative interest that her horrific murder elicited.81 The hindsight knowledge of Hypatia’s brutal murder facilitates her narrative conformity to a type and her representation in idealised terms. According to the literary tradition, Hypatia was dragged from her carriage to the Caesareum, recently converted into a church, where a Christian mob stripped her and tore her skin off with roof tiles. Her body was dismembered and her remains were burnt on the outskirts of the city.82 The historical occurrence of Hypatia’s murder irresistibly beckons the misogynistic narrative of the punishment of the female whose assumption of public intellectual status, outstanding beauty, and rejection of sex and marriage, exceed the boundaries of expected female propriety. Hypatia’s display of her bloodied menstrual cloth, intended to deflate desire and instil disgust, is very much part of this construction. The reminder of the female need to bleed comes at a crucial point in Hypatia’s representation: when her beauty, chastity and intellect have been eulogised, the menstrual pad made visible jolts the male viewer (and reader) out of their reverie with the powerful reminder that despite all of her qualities, Hypatia remains a weak female. Menstruation is a female flaw that immediately distinguishes between the strong male and the compromised female. The narrative is fundamentally misogynistic because it relies on the assumption that menstrual blood is always repulsive, and that an insight into the management of female bleeding would be received as a shameful insult rather than a more positive gesture.83 81   This is recognised by Jaccottet, “Hypatie d’Alexandrie,” 140; 141: “Mais c’est cette fin atroce qui va garantir l’immortalité à Hypatie, qui va la faire échapper à l’oubli qu’ont connu d’autre femmes intellectuelles peut-être bien aussi brillantes que le fut Hypatia.” 82   On the murder of Hypatia, see Edward Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable or Unacceptable Violence?” in Violence in Late Antiquity. Perceptions and Practices, ed. H. A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 333 – 43. 83   Period-shaming occurs in modern as well as ancient responses to visible women, as demonstrated by the Republican candidate Donald Trump in his insinuation that the news

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This understanding of Hypatia’s menstrual display as an act of shame and self-deprecation, reflecting a universal aversion to the leaking, bleeding, awkward female body, can be productively challenged.84 A  shift in perspective enables the possibility of seeing Hypatia’s actions as a defiant confrontation of undesirable and persistent male sexual attention, countering the normative negative interpretation. Although this is postulated as possible rather than veritable (or, for that matter, verifiable), this challenge is especially important, not only because it has not been previously considered, but because it simultaneously highlights the misogyny that underlies the menstrual narrative, and that the ancient male representation of female bodily function may not accurately reflect how women conceived of or managed their own menstrual experiences. This exposes the disparity between male representation and female experience and reveals that what is understood as a universal reaction to menstrual blood is in fact exclusively male. We can deconstruct Damascius’ menstruating Hypatia and the biologically premised subordination of women to men that it reinscribes, but it remains a fundamental element of our understanding of Hypatia that cannot be ignored. From the androcentric perspective that is the legacy of antiquity, we can see that the ideal female does not bleed; but then again, the ideal is not female. presenter Megyn Kelly was menstruating after they clashed during a televised debate. Trump implied a connection between what he saw as Kelly’s poor-quality journalism and her period that was intended as shameful and demeaning. In the CNN exchange Trump attacked her, saying: “I don’t have a lot of respect for Megyn Kelly . . . she is not very tough or very sharp. She is zippo . . . You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” See H. Yan, “Donald Trump’s ‘blood’ comment about Megyn Kelly draws outrage,” CNN Politics, 8 August 2015, http://edition.cnn.com / 2015 / 08 / 08 / politics / donald-trump-cnn-megynkelly-comment / . Trump denigrated Kelly’s professional standing and ability as a journalist by exploiting her sex and turning the accusation of menstruation into a slanderous jibe, a way to mock and ridicule. The ideology that Trump played on, that periods are disgusting and humiliating, similarly underpins the story of Hypatia’s bloody display. But although the reaction to the menstrual narrative associated with Hypatia has not been one of overt scrutiny and deconstruction, the defiant reaction to Trump’s period-shaming was strongly vociferous, especially on social media. A Twitter hashtag, #PeriodsAreNotAnInsult, was used to tweet Trump with details of women’s monthly flows: Zoé @zoeivmist, “I thought I had horrible period cramps but I was just ovary acting.” and @kat_victorious, “to Donald Trump – on the third day of my period AND still a functioning member of society! Who knew?!” H. Saul, “Women are live-tweeting their periods at Donald Trump to prove menstruation can’t be used against them as an insult,” The Independent, 10 August 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk / news / people / women-are-live-tweetingtheir-periods-at-donald-trump-to-prove-menstruation-cant-be-used-against-10448931.html. 84   This contrasts with Michael Deakin’s approach in his interpretation of Hypatia’s menstrual display: “. . . we should try to find the import of this story. It may well disquiet some of today’s feminists (and others) that a woman should find her vagina (even her menstruating vagina) ‘unclean’ and ‘not [of] beauty,’ but we need to observe the case without using twenty first-century eyes.” M. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (Amherst: Prometheus, 2007), 62. The significance Deakin finds is that a woman’s “preserved first menses” had cross-cultural “healing properties” and that Hypatia’s “menstrual napkin” was a “powerful symbol” (Deakin, Mathematician and Martyr, 63).

Hypatia and her Eighteenth-Century Reception Edward Watts Introduction As many of the papers in this volume show, one of the greatest challenges scholars face when considering the life and career of Hypatia is recovering her successes and achievements when her tragic death has overshadowed them in late antique sources. Indeed, it is remarkable how quickly Hypatia the person was overwhelmed in the historical imagination by Hypatia the martyr and literary character. Hypatia the person was an amazing woman. Trained as a mathematician in the great Alexandrian tradition of Pappus and Ptolemy, Hypatia pushed beyond both the limits of her curriculum and the example of her father to become one of the most important philosophers of the later fourth century.1 She mentored Synesius, one of late antiquity’s most famous Christian intellectuals, and stood near the center of civic and intellectual life in the Mediterranean’s second largest city for a generation.2 And yet what Hypatia accomplished in her life has come to be dwarfed by the way in which she died. This happened almost immediately. The earliest surviving source to speak about Hypatia’s death was Socrates Scholasticus, her younger contemporary and a student of men who taught in Alexandria at the same time that Hypatia did.3 When Socrates wrote about Hypatia two decades after her death, however, he transformed the powerful and accomplished woman that she was into a hollow literary character who inhabited the world of his Ecclesiastical History simply because her death reflected poorly on Cyril of Alexandria, a figure who Socrates disliked intensely. Socrates’ portrait of Hypatia is striking for the utterly precise way in which he balanced details about Hypatia with indictments of Cyril and the Alexandrian political climate he created.4 Hypatia appears in the final book of the Ecclesiasti1   Edward Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 37 – 50. 2   On her social role see Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 313 – 17; Watts, Hypatia, 79 – 92. 3   These men were the Constantinopolitan professors Ammonius and Helladius. For discussion of their interaction with Socrates see Hist. eccl. 5.16. 4   For additional discussion of Hypatia’s murder within the larger context of Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History see Walter F. Beers’ paper in this volume.

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cal History as part of a larger discussion about the connection between the attitudes of individual bishops towards the minority Novatian Christian community and the political situation in their home cities. This is an example of the idea running throughout Socrates’ text that “when public affairs are disturbed so too are those of the church, as if from a sort of sympathy.”5 The first fifteen chapters of the seventh book develop this theme by showing how events in Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria illustrate that ecclesiastical affairs provide the basic rhythm to which secular events move.6 Socrates’ narrative jumps from city to city, but its basic progression is clear. In Constantinople, a period that could have been chaotic and dangerous was instead smooth and calm because the city’s bishop behaved moderately towards Novatians. In Rome, Socrates describes how its bishop, Innocent I, took away the churches of the Novatians in the city. Socrates then characterizes the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 as an event precipitated by Innocent’s actions.7 The murder of Hypatia brings to a climax Socrates’ entire tale of three cities. Like any skilled writer, Socrates invested significant effort in making such a critical part of his history work thematically.8 This meant that Socrates sketched his Hypatia very precisely. In the first sentences of the chapter, he offers a mini-panegyric of Hypatia. The daughter of Theon, Hypatia was the most gifted philosopher of her age whose virtue and purity of mind gave her the authority to regularly address assemblies of men. Her frequent interactions with men were not a concern, Socrates explains, because of her great virtue and dignity. At the exact halfway point in the chapter, Socrates abruptly shifts the narrative. He writes: “The political rivalry of that time armed itself against her.”9 The second half of the chapter then describes the horror and brutality of Hypatia’s murder. Socrates describes the passions that enflamed the mob in a way that contrasts clearly with Hypatia’s own moderation. He similarly recounts the stripping and violation of 5   ἳνα γνωσθῇ ὅπως, τῶν δημοσίων ταραττομένων, ὡς ἔκ τινος συμπαθείας καὶ τὰ τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν ἐταράττετο. (HE 5.Pro.1 – 11). For discussion of this idea in Socrates’ text see Glenn Chesnut, The First Christian Histories: Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986), 192 – 7; Theresa Urbainczyk, Socrates of Constantinople (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 69 – 81. 6   Edward Watts, “Interpreting Catastrophe: Disasters in the Works of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Socrates Scholasticus, Philostorgius, and Timothy Aelurus,” JLA 2 (2009): 83 – 7. 7   “It is said that, as [Alaric] advanced towards Rome, a certain man, who was a monk, took hold and exhorted him: “Do not exult over such evils, nor rejoice in murder and carnage.” But he [Alaric] responded: “It is not I who travels this course willingly. But there is someone who compels me each day and says ‘Proceed and ravage the city of Rome.’” Λέγεται δὲ ὡς ἀπιόντι αὐτῷ ἐπι τὴν Ῥώμην εὐλαβής τις ἀνὴρ, μοναχὸς τὸν βίον, παρῄνει, “μὴ ἐπιχαίρειν ἑν τηλικούτοις κακοîς, μηδὲ χαίρειν φόνοις καὶ αἵμασιν.” Ὁ δὲ, “Οὐκ ἐγὼ,” ἔφη, “ἐθελοντὴς ἐπὶ τὰ ἐκεῖ πορεύομαι· ἀλλά τις καθ’ἑκάστην ὀχλεῖ μοι βιαζόμενος, καὶ λέγων, “Ἀπιθι, τὴν Ῥωμαίων πόρθησον πόλιν.” (Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.10). 8   For the Roman narrative see Watts, “Interpreting Catastrophe,” 85 – 6. 9   Κατὰ δὴ ταύτης τότε ὁ φθόνος ὡπλίσατο. (Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15).

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her body by the mob in a way that opposes it to the dignity that she enjoyed in life. The entire discussion then culminates in Socrates’ statement that “nothing can be further from the spirit of Christianity” than actions like this. Nothing that Socrates says about Hypatia is demonstrably untrue and he does not manufacture any information about her life, but he also has no interest in giving a full and well-rounded account of Hypatia the person. All of the details that Socrates provides about Hypatia stand in rhetorical opposition to the attributes of the Christian mob that killed her. Hypatia then had become a character in Socrates’ text whose profile did nothing more and nothing less than what the story required. She appeared in the text simply because she could be made to die in the most resonant and shocking way possible. This morphing of Hypatia the person into Hypatia the literary character soon gave authors the freedom to define and redefine Hypatia in ways that had much more to do with their authorial interests than they did with what Hypatia herself had actually achieved. In the sixth century, for example, the pagan philosopher Damascius transformed Hypatia into a prototypical philosophical martyr whose experience helped to define appropriate philosophical responses to Christian pressure.10 In the seventh century, John of Nikiu made her into a sorceress. By the fourteenth century, Nicephorus Gregoras used Hypatia as a model for the philosophical empress Eudokia Palaeologus.11 As we know perhaps too well, modern authors and artists have taken even greater liberties with Hypatia. In the 1850s, Charles Kingsley presented Hypatia as a young, lily-white skinned, blonde haired philosopher whose wisdom was limited by her unwillingness to integrate Christian ideas and whose political impact was blunted by the failure of the Byzantine state to be conquered by Germans. In 1867, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron famously depicted Hypatia in a modified Greek peasant costume. By the 1980s, the poet Ursule Molinaro could make Hypatia into an icon for sexually liberated women whose passion for philosophy was matched only by her great sexual appetite.12 And, most recently, Amenábar’s Agora offered us a twenty-first century Hypatia defined not by her subtle philosophy but by her amazing proto-Copernican contributions to STEM disciplines. It is not hard to imagine that all of this would have greatly confounded (and, in some cases, probably greatly offended) the historical Hypatia. She was not any of these characters and, if she thought about her legacy at all when she lived, 10   For the broader context of this discourse of resistance see Edward Watts, Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities. Transformation of the Classical Heritage 46 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 71 – 88. 11   Historia Romana 8.3 at p 294, ln. 2 – 5. 12   Ursule Molinaro, “A Christian Martyr in Reverse. Hypatia: 370 – 415 AD. A vivid portrait of the life and death of Hypatia as seen through the eyes of a feminist poet and novelist,” Hypatia 4.1 (1989), 6 – 8.

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she could never have imagined that future generations would think of her as a symbol of sexual liberation. There was, however, a brief time in the 1720s when the literary character of Hypatia nearly settled on an image of the philosopher that the woman herself might have been willing to tolerate. My purpose in the remainder of this essay will be to take us back to that moment, explain why it happened, and show why it ultimately proved so fleeting.

The Eighteenth-Century Moment As the 1720s dawned, the basic story of Hypatia’s death was relatively widely known. It had been recounted regularly in medieval chronicles and church histories. It had also become a feature of the big, integrative church histories and imperial histories that began to appear in the early modern period. Some of these portraits developed out of rather sophisticated textual and philological analysis, but, with the notable exception of a Latin language dissertation written in 1689, few authors had yet moved beyond the basic model of Hypatia as a foil to Cyril first seen in Socrates Scholasticus.13 Scholars still tended to describe Hypatia’s life in a way that served largely to set up their narration of her death. Volume 14 of Tillemont’s monumental Memoires pour servir à l’Histoire Ecclesiastique des six Prémiers Siecles (posthumously published in 1709) is somewhat typical.14 It includes a three-page discussion of Hypatia and her career that stitches together materials taken from Synesius, Socrates, Theophanes, the Suda, and Photius while also arguing persuasively against the authenticity of a spurious letter from Hypatia to Cyril that Christian Lupus had published in the 1680s.15 Tillemont knew his sources well, summarized them faithfully, and even treated the Lupus letter with admirable sophistication. At the same time, though, Tillemont titled this chapter “Hypacie philosophe est massacrée” and used it to set up his subsequent discussion of the Alexandrian parabalani, a Christian group of hospital attendants paid by the bishop. It was more sophisticated than Socrates, but still more of the same. This is what made the treatment of Hypatia in the 1720s so remarkable. Then, for the first sustained moment in almost 1300 years, scholars resolved to write about Hypatia and the significance of her accomplishments in life alongside the horrors of her death. The impetus for this came from a very odd set of events involving William Whiston, the scholar who succeeded Isaac Newton as Luca13   The 1689 work is D. J. A. Schmid, De Hipparcho, duobus Theonibus doctaque Hypatia (Jena, 1689). 14   M. Lenain de Tillemont, Mémoires pour Servir à l’Histoire Ecclesiastique des Six Prémiers Siècles, vol. 14 (Paris, 1709), 274 – 76. 15   C. Lupus, Diversae epistolae anno fere 432, Scriptae, per eundum Lupum editae (Louvain, 1682), 352.

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sian Chair at Cambridge, and Henry Sacheverell, an inflammatory clergyman and Tory propagandist whose sermons had once incited crowds in London to burn Presbyterian churches in the so-called Sacheverell Riots of 1710.16 Whiston was obviously an accomplished mathematician, but he was also an active theologian whose views ultimately brought him to conclude that the Christology of the fourth-century bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia was the actual creed of the early Christian church. These views led to accusations of Arianism by contemporaries, though Whiston was careful to emphasize that he was a Eusebian and not an Arian.17 It was to little avail, however. His statement of faith led to the loss of his professorship in 1710. This in turn caused him to embark on a second career as a sort of public lecturer and provocateur. Whiston’s story intersects with that of Hypatia because, on Friday evening, January  23, 1718, he attended services at St. Andrew’s church in Holborn. Although a Mr. Boxam read the prayers that evening, Sacheverell nonetheless rose from his seat in the middle of the service and tried to have Whiston expelled from the church.18 Given Sacheverell’s role in inciting religious violence eight years earlier, this represented a real threat. When Whiston refused to leave, Sacheverell stood up, called Whiston an Arian heretic, and then insisted that the service not continue until Whiston left. The congregation then began murmuring, with one woman calling Whiston “an old Rogue” but, in the end, Whiston’s stubbornness prevailed and the service concluded. By Sunday, January 25, Sacheverell had stationed guards to prevent Whiston from being seated. Whiston then had to listen to the service while standing in the back with the servants. By the next weekend, even the servants’ area was barred to him. This prompted Whiston to publish an account of this event in 1719, a document that dramatized this high-profile confrontation and concluded with Whiston’s own statement of Christian faith.19 Whiston’s publication inspired an even more hot-tempered author named John Toland to wade in to the controversy. An Irishman, Toland was a professional controversialist with a deep distrust of hierarchical Christian religious institutions. Born in 1670, Toland converted from Catholicism to Protestantism at age 16 and then, in 1696, published a work called Christianity not Mysterious in which he argued that the Bible contains no miracles that could not be understood rationally. The book caused such a stir that the Irish Parliament sentenced 16   On the Sacheverell Riots see Geoffrey Holmes, “The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Past and Present 72 (1976), 55 – 85. 17   Whiston was very careful to emphasize the distinction between a Eusebian and an Arian, a term that the “Athanasians” erroneously used to refer to Eusebians. See, for example, W. Whiston, Mr. Whiston’s Account of Dr. Sacheverell’s Proceedings in order to Exclude Him from St. Andrew’s Church in Holborn, (London, 1719), 11 – 12. 18  Whiston, Mr. Whiston’s Account of Dr. Sacheverell’s Proceedings, 3. 19   The story is retold in Whiston, Mr. Whiston’s Account of Dr. Sacheverell’s Proceedings, 3 – 10.

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Toland to die by burning at the stake, a penalty that he avoided by staying in England. His book was burned publicly instead. Toland never returned to Ireland for obvious reasons and spent the rest of his life teetering on the edge of poverty in London while writing prolifically about political, religious and historical topics.20 Toland’s reaction to the Whiston affair was contained in a 25‑page work called the Tetradymus that he published in 1720. The book formed a delightful medley of Tolandia that included four essays touching on topics that ranged from a non-miraculous explanation of the pillar of fire described in Exodus to a complicated (and rather convoluted) discussion of whether Jesus was called a Nazaren or a Nazarean. The highlight of the Tetradymus, however, was Toland’s essay on Hypatia. Toland claimed that the “unlawful and unchristian” treatment of Mr. Whiston inspired him to write about Hypatia. While “the good nature of the English people” ensured that Mr. Whiston suffered nothing more than a few insults from the mob in St. Andrews’ church that day, Hypatia’s fate showed that “in some other parts of the world” he would have feared being “torn to pieces for all his gown and innocence.”21 Toland also clearly appreciated the parallels between Whiston, a mathematician and philosopher who was attacked by a politically influential church official, and Hypatia, another mathematician and philosopher killed by a mob inspired by a Christian bishop. Whiston was something of an imprecise match for Hypatia, but, Toland implies, if not for the fine English temperament, Sacheverell would have been Cyril. Indeed, given Sacheverell’s earlier career, some would argue that he had already matched Cyril in his ability to incite religious violence. Toland gave his treatise on Hypatia the marvelously descriptive title: Hypatia: Or, the History of a most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d Lady; who was torn to Pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the Pride, Emulation, and Cruelty of their Archbishop, commonly but undeservedly stiled St. Cyril. The title correctly suggests that Toland’s project would end up with a thinly-veiled anti-clerical attack against radical Anglican leaders like Sacheverell. For Toland’s text to really offer a historical parallel to the Whiston-Sacheverell conflict, however, he needed not just to show that Cyril offered the ultimate endpoint for Sacheverell’s actions but that Whiston resembled Hypatia. This meant that, contrary to what had been done by other early modern authors, Toland needed to spend real time defining and developing the character of Hypatia. He would do this, he claimed, by recounting a story that was “never better attested” when “you consider the authority of her contempo20   On Toland’s life and intellectual interests see Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696 – 1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 21   John Toland, Tetradymus (London, 1720), viii.

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raries Synesius, Socrates, Philostorgius, and Damascius . . . and the subsequent accounts of Photius, Suidas, Hesychius, Nicephorus Callistus, Nicephoras Gregoras, and others.”22 What followed was a 34‑page work that used these sources to stitch together Hypatia’s life and career. Indeed, if the final ten pages of the essay had gone missing, Toland would have succeeded in putting together an interesting, scholarly, and sometimes surprisingly progressive portrait of Hypatia centered on the woman herself. The outlines of Toland’s project look somewhat familiar. Like Socrates, Toland ultimately planned to use Hypatia’s murder to contrast her virtue with the viciousness of the Alexandrian Christian leadership. But the first pages of the treatise do not use Hypatia as a foil for the villainy of the church at all. Hypatia instead becomes an exemplary figure who showed what women could achieve if they were allowed to do so. Toland begins with a strong (though simultaneously patronizing) statement that “women have no less reason to value themselves, that there existed a lady of such rare accomplishments, without the least blemish.”23 Loosely combining the Suda and the account of Socrates, Toland describes her education in the “most abstruse sciences.” He criticizes some people for thinking these things “the proper Occupation of Men, as requiring too much Labour and Application for the delicate Constitution of Women.”24 He found this idea completely absurd. Philosophy, he writes, is perfectly suitable for women, as is shown by the many women who have done it. Not only did Hypatia’s learning justifiably make her the head of the Platonic school in Alexandria but, Toland continues, this offers a lesson for his own time. The few women of his day who have taken a doctorate in “any of the Faculties . . . for which they have been loaded with fulsome Elogies,” still have no teaching positions.25 Hypatia’s career, Toland believes, points to what similar women could achieve if society just gave them the chance to do so. Toland’s discussion soon shifts from pointing out how the example of Hypatia makes contemporary restrictions on intelligent women look ridiculous. He never entirely lets the matter of her gender drop, however. Toland, for example, objected strongly to Damascius’ comment that “Isidore and Hypatia were very different, not only as a man differs from a woman, but as a true philosopher differs from a mathematician.”26 Toland wrote that Damascius’ use of gender as a natural point of comparison makes little sense. Saying that a female intellectual 22

 Toland, Tetradymus, viii.  Toland, Hypatia: Or, the History of a most beautiful, most vertuous, most learned, and every way accomplish’d Lady; who was torn to Pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the Pride, Emulation, and Cruelty of their Archbishop, commonly but undeservedly stiled St. Cyril, quoted here from the reprinted London edition of 1753, p. 3. 24  Toland, Hypatia, 5. 25  Toland, Hypatia, 7. 26   Damascius’ Comment is V. Isid, 106A. 23

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is inferior to a man because of her gender is “as if we in England for example did reckon King James superior to Queen Elizabeth because the first, forsooth, was a man and the last a woman.”27 It was, Toland felt, a foolish comment that demonstrated absolutely nothing. The body of Toland’s essay then reconstructs Hypatia’s life and work using the group of ancient sources that he describes in his preface.28 Toland’s portrait is more compelling and sympathetic than those found in most ancient authors, though occasionally it also dwells a little too long on Hypatia’s beauty and the effect that this had on men.29 The last few pages of the book take a different turn, however. It is here, when the account moves from Hypatia’s life to her death, that Toland’s anti-clericalism becomes pronounced. Toland blames the Jewish-Christian violence that erupted in 414 on an emperor who “desolated one of his principal cities” by creating a situation where “the Clergy were permitted to share in the government of civil Affairs.”30 But Toland reserves the most vitriol for Cyril. Even after the anti-Jewish violence and the attack on Orestes, Toland writes, “Cyril’s Rage was not yet satiated. Tho’ Orestes had the good luck to escape being murdered, Hypatia must fall a Sacrifice to the Prelate’s Pride.”31 The clergy too, Toland writes, felt that only “the Blood of Hypatia, shed in the most inhuman Manner, could glut” their fury.32 This leads to Toland’s final conclusion. It is, he argues, impossible “to revere so ambitious, so turbulent, so perfidious, and so cruel a Man, as a Saint,” but it is not surprising that Cyril is so revered. In Toland’s view, the elevation of Cyril made the title of saint a “deluge of ignorance, superstition, and tyranny which overwhelmed almost the whole Christian world.” Hypatia’s murder, then, marked the beginning of “persecutions that ensued . . . to suppress any efforts that might be used for the restoring of Virtue and Learning.”33 Toland’s portrait of Hypatia could have been received in two very different ways. On the one hand, the work clearly delivered on its promise to show early eighteenth-century contemporaries how dangerous threats to intellectual freedom like those posed by Henry Sacheverell could prove to be. Toland’s Hypatia could, then, easily be read as a text that worked much like a longer, more developed version of Socrates’ portrait from 1300 years earlier. There was, however, a different way to read Toland’s text. It did indeed conclude with the philoso27

 Toland, Hypatia, 22.   The one important source Toland omits is John of Nikiu, whose text would not make it to Europe until the late nineteenth century. 29   E. g. his comment on page 22: “A Lady of such uncommon Merit and Accomplishments as Hypatia . . . could not possibly fail being sometimes importuned with Addresses of Gallantry.” 30  Toland, Hypatia, 27. 31   Ibid., 29. 32   Ibid., 30. 33   Ibid., 36. 28

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pher’s murder, but Toland also spent a considerable amount of time speaking about Hypatia’s accomplishments in life and, particularly, the example she set for contemporary eighteenth-century women. This was a fresh and new way to think about Hypatia that focused on the person she was, the agency she exercised, and the unique legacy that she left. Intriguingly, audiences in the 1720s seem to have responded to both readings of Hypatia’s life. The immediate reaction to Toland’s text suggests that Anglicans in England clearly appreciated how his text related to contemporary English religious politics. The year after Toland’s Tetradymus appeared, the Englishman Thomas Lewis attacked Toland’s work in the pamphlet The History of Hypatia, a Most Impudent School-Mistress of Alexandria.34 Lewis was an Anglican controversialist who, in 1717, had been ordered to stand trial for sedition following the publication of a treatise he wrote that attacked Scottish Presbyterianism in his periodical The Scourge, in Vindication of the Church of England. It is, then, not at all surprising to see him jump eagerly into the fray against Toland. Toland’s Hypatia essay was, Lewis claims, an affront both to St. Cyril, whom he calls “a strenuous assertor of Orthodoxy and Church Discipline and of Dr. Sacheverell, his faithful successor in zeal against the modern Novatians and the Arian heretic.”35 Not only were Cyril and Sacheverell wrongly attacked, but Hypatia and Whiston were wrongly celebrated. Both were, Lewis claims, “thought to be astronomers and alike professed enemies to the Divinity of Christ.”36 Lewis further argues that Hypatia was no one special. She was merely an educated woman whose learning did not exceed that of many other women of the day. Indeed, Lewis remarked, Hypatia’s use of a menstrual napkin to ward off a suitor was a “stratagem to put an end to the courtship which I believe the most common prostitute in Venice would blush at.”37 “I am apt to believe,” he wrote, that “we should never have heard so much in Praise of this Woman, had it not been to derive an Odium upon the Christians, or to fix a Stain upon the Arch-bishop.”38 She is famous only because the “Puritan” Socrates and the “heathen” Damascius used her death to unfairly attack the reputation of Cyril. This is an activity that Toland has now repeated.39 Toland’s celebration of Hypatia was nothing more than a cynical attempt to misuse this incident to attack the “great champions of religion that maintain’d the Purity of the Faith against Arius, Nestorius, and a formidable band of other pestilent heretics.”40 The reference to Arius here was, of course, an allusion to Whiston as well as an implicit defense of Sacheverell. 34

  Printed by T. Bickerton, London, 1721. The full reference to this work is found above.  Lewis, Hypatia, 3. 36  Ibid., 3. 37  Ibid., 9. 38  Ibid., 3. 39   Ibid., 13 (Socr.), 30 (Dam.). 40  Lewis, Hypatia, 35. 35

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Given the English political and religious disputes of the 1710s and early 1720s, Lewis’ attack was rather predictable. Lewis cared little about the details of Hypatia’s career and essentially ignored Toland’s suggestion that Hypatia offered an example of what female intellectuals could do if given the chance. His work instead was designed to defend Cyril and, by extension, Henry Sacheverell from Toland’s charges that ecclesiastical leaders like them encouraged a climate of unlawfulness that led to riots and violence. Hypatia was again reduced to serving as a secondary character in a story primarily about Cyril.

Hypatia in Eighteenth-Century France A much more nuanced and unexpected response to Toland emerged in France in the later 1720s. Given the censorship through which all French periodicals of the 1720s needed to pass, it is harder to determine both the identities of the French authors who responded to Toland and the exact course of events that prompted their response. Beneath these layers of anonymity, however, lies the remarkable story of a certain Mademoiselle B. This woman, whose identity is unknown, was inspired by Hypatia’s example to commission a man known only by the initials M. G. to write a work about the philosopher. M. G., however, proved less interested in Hypatia’s significance as a model of female empowerment than he was in rebutting Toland’s slight of Cyril. The literary exchange between Mademoiselle B and M. G. points to a real debate about how to respond to Toland’s Hypatia in a country that cared little about either William Whiston or Henry Sacheverell but cared quite deeply about some of the other issues that Toland raised. Their views appeared in 1728 in volume 5 of the French periodical Continuation des Mémoires de Litterature et d’Histoire, edited by Pierre-Nicholas Desmolets.41 The centerpiece of the discussion was a “Dissertation sur Hypacie” written by M. G. In his preface, M. G. says that he undertook this project in response to a request made of him by Mademoiselle B that he tell her about Hypatia’s “actions and character.”42 The “Dissertation sur Hypacie” begins, as promised, with a discussion of Hypatia’s achievements. The author acknowledges that many educated women had been active as philosophers in the ancient world and mocks as absurd the notion expressed by some in the 1700s that learning made “some women ridiculous.” “How great,” he continues, “is the number of 41   The full title is “Dissertation sur Hypacie, où l’on justifie Saint Cyrille d’Alexandrie sur la mort de cette Sçavante” and it appears in Continuation des Mémoires de Litterature et d’Histoire, vol. 5.1, (Paris, 1728), 139 – 186. It is followed immediately by a letter of praise written by Mademoiselle B, published on pages 187 – 191. 42   “Dissertation sur Hypacie,” 139.

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learned women who are ridiculous? And, to tell the truth, science never made a good soul ridiculous regardless of the sex in which it was found.”43 Despite this, Hypatia was not a Christian and, the author claims, one must agree that “all those who acquire [learning] without Jesus Christ are a little less esteemed.”44 This seemingly minor point looms quite large as the “Dissertation” proceeds. Much of the body of the work follows Toland in using ancient sources to outline Hypatia’s career. Although the author makes some remarkable mistakes (like somehow coming to the conclusion that Hypatia lived for a time in Athens), his discussion is often philologically sophisticated. He correctly dismisses on chronological grounds the authenticity of the letter supposedly written by Hypatia to Cyril, he offers a sophisticated analysis of the various published editions of the Suda, and he even takes readers to task for supposing that Damascius was trying to diminish Hypatia by comparing her with Isidore.45 M. G.’s impressive command of both ancient sources and the early modern scholarship that treated them gives him a keen eye for both logical inconsistencies and poorly researched arguments. It also gives him a set of devastating weapons that he will ultimately use to defend Cyril against Toland. The carefully orchestrated argument against Toland emerges slowly across the work. A few scattered criticisms of Toland for misreading sources appear in the first few pages of the work, but these are just glancing blows designed to make the reader begin to question the reliability of Toland’s analysis. The truly devastating critique of Toland develops much more subtly through a series of deconstructions of the accounts of Hypatia’s murder given by Socrates, Philostorgius, and Damascius. The author places blame for Hypatia’s death not on Cyril but on a layman named Peter, the mob Peter led, and the passion that blinded them. He then systematically undermines the credibility of each of the authors who use the murder to criticize the bishop. Socrates, he argues, was consistently critical of Cyril across his history and offers no evidence for Cyril’s responsibility for Hypatia’s death. Philostorgius does not even mention Cyril at all. And Damascius was easily discredited because he was a pagan.46 He finally addresses the arguments of Toland explicitly. Despite all of the problems with these sources, Toland, “about whom I have already summarized some mistakes that he made on the subject of Hypatia, still dares to charge Cyril with the murder of this wise woman.” Toland pretends to say something new, our author writes, but he does not add anything to the claims of Socrates, Philostorgius, and Damascius which were just refuted. He also has no credibility. A man like this “who dares to attack God himself has no scruple to slander the saints. It is glori43

  Ibid., 143.   Ibid., 141. 45   Letter to Cyril, 158 – 59; Suda, 155 – 7; Isidore comparison, 163 – 4. 46   These arguments appear in pages 177 – 83. 44

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ous that Cyril never had for himself adversaries so heretical and impious.”47 This was, then, a powerful and extensive refutation of Toland written from a Catholic rather than an Anglican perspective. M. G.’s treatise does not end with this attack on Toland, however. The final page addresses a claim made by Damascius that the emperor Theodosius II was divinely punished for failing to hold Cyril responsible for Hypatia’s murder. While it is true that God will punish the deaths of innocents, the author writes: Hypatia died in paganism, in a time and a place where she was in an enlightened environment. She closed her eyes. This refusal, this ingratitude merited punishment, even in the eyes of men. And it was possibly for this reason that God allowed her to die this cruel death. He could not approve it, because he hates all iniquity, but is it believable that this death, however unjust, interested the Heavens strongly because it punished so severely and in so long a time this type of person? The public disorders committed against religion, which are so great in this century, and the kings that repeat them, merit such vengeance.48

It is here, in the very last lines of his treatise, that the author explains why the murder of Hypatia had such significance in the 1720s. In England, Toland’s use of Hypatia was intended to delegitimize the use of religious violence by clerical leaders. In France, however, Toland’s use of Hypatia as a tool to attack the legacy of Cyril, a saint in the Catholic Church, would not defuse religious violence. It instead threatened to set off further religious upheavals. Like Hypatia, Toland closed his eyes in an enlightened environment but, unlike Hypatia, he did so at a time when such things risked becoming the source of wars between nations. This “Dissertation,” which was ostensibly devoted to the life and deeds of a female philosopher, had mutated into a defense of Cyril and a critique of early eighteenth-century religious factionalism. This makes the letter from Mademoiselle B that immediately follows the “Dissertation” in this volume of the Memoires so interesting. Mademoiselle B clearly had asked M. G. to write a very different sort of historical study from the one that he actually published. She consequently had no interest whatsoever in the political argument that M. G. had made using the figure of Hypatia. Thus, in her letter, Mademoiselle B made a very interesting decision to simply ignore the bulk of the text that had been published. She chose instead to use her comments to guide the readers towards the understanding of Hypatia that she favored. Mademoiselle B begins by complimenting the author on an erudite and tasteful treatise that honored Hypatia. This makes him “quite different in this from the rest of men and the learned of our day, who do not wish to agree that there are wise women . . . (188) They pretend that science does not go along with a

47

  “Dissertation sur Hypacie,” 184.   Ibid., 186.

48

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sex of which the organs, so they say, are too weak” for “serious study.”49 The rest of the letter continues in this vein. Mademoiselle B eviscerates the logic that women must be somehow incapable of study or participation in learned conversations, she mocks the illogical idea that their organs are somehow weaker, and she points out that, if women were indeed inferior, this would mean that God had made an imperfect creation. She then concludes: “This is why it is wrong to dispense women from science . . . It is a reflection that I have made long ago. You have given me the place to share this with you. I wish for the public good that you have, on my behalf, a chance to instruct the public about this subject.”50 This short but gloriously passive-aggressive letter then willfully misrepresents what the “Dissertation sur Hypacie” accomplished. This learned woman wanted the text to use the life and deeds of Hypatia to make an argument that female intellectuals were just as capable as men. When she instead got a philologically powerful and rhetorical sophisticated anti-Toland polemic, Mademoiselle B simply refused to acknowledge the text for what it was. By congratulating the author for proving points on which he spent little time and ignoring the arguments he developed at much greater length, Mademoiselle B tried to remake the text into what she hoped it would be. She was, in short, attempting to transform Hypatia from a victim of religious intolerance into a person whose life and career demonstrated the true potential of female intellectuals. In so doing, she turned our attention away from Hypatia’s death and towards a more intense focus on Hypatia’s life.

Hypatia’s Legacy in the later Eighteenth Century Had the ideas of Mademoiselle B been taken seriously, it would be quite interesting to see how scholarship on Hypatia (and perhaps even the roles available to female intellectuals) might have evolved across the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, the efforts of Mademoiselle B went nowhere. Although Toland’s text remained popular enough to be reprinted as a stand-alone book in 1753, no one in England appears to have read Mademoiselle B’s letter or thought about her view that historians should focus on the example of Hypatia’s life rather than the circumstances of her death. In France, the situation proved even more depressing. Although the “Dissertation sur Hypacie” prompted a response in the next volume of the Continuation des Mémoires de Litterature et d’Histoire and would continue to generate reactions for the next five decades, no one ever engages with the Hypatia of Made49  “Lettre de Mademoiselle B. à M. G. sur la Dissertation précedente,” Continuation des Mémoires de Litterature et d’Histoire, vol. 5.1, (Paris, 1728), 187 – 191. She confirms that the anonymous author is a man when she addresses him as “Monsieur” on page 187. 50   “Lettre de Mademoiselle B.,” 191.

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moiselle B.51 It is one thing for her hopes about what Hypatia’s life could mean to both men and women to go unrealized. More upsetting was what happened instead to Hypatia’s legacy in the eighteenth century. As the century progressed, male authors again increasingly subordinated the details of Hypatia’s life to discussions about the implications of her death. She again became a symbol, a beautiful empty vessel whose virtue and learning existed only to be destroyed in a way that invited an author to assign blame. French intellectuals like Voltaire, and English authors like Edward Gibbon placed the blame for her murder squarely on Cyril and, either implicitly or explicitly, used this event to attack the Catholic Church’s canonization of him.52 Catholic authors (and even some French Protestants) followed the author of the anonymous “Dissertation sur Hypacie” and responded equally vigorously that Cyril was not responsible but that fault lay with either the Alexandrian mob or with Peter the Lector.53 As the arguments about Cyril’s responsibility got more heated, Hypatia again began to fade into the background. Nothing is more indicative of this trend than the entry on Hypatia that appeared in 1772 in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique.54 Although this is a lengthy entry, very little of it actually talks about Hypatia. Fully the first half of the entry asks the reader to consider the horror if Madame Anne Dacier, a specialist in Homer whose 1699 translation of the Iliad gave many French men of letters their first exposure to the text, was killed in Notre Dame cathedral by the archbishop of Paris because she refused to say that a poem written by a monk was superior to Homer. This, incidentally, evokes a real controversy between Madame Dacier, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, and the abbé Jean Terrasson 51   The anonymous letter of response is found in “Lettre à l’Auteur de la Dissertation sur Hypacie, inserée dans le Tome V de ces Mémoires, page 139” Continuation des Mémoires de Litterature et d’Histoire, vol. 6.1, (Paris, 1729), 97 – 106. The letter consists of a discussion of the scholarship connected to the spurious letter to Cyril that was once attributed to Hypatia. The “Dissertation” is engaged with directly by Voltaire as late as the 1770s. 52   Cyril is blamed by, among others, Diderot in the article “Éclecticisme” in Encyclopédie, vol. 5, pp. 282 – 3, part of a longer piece which draws upon the earlier work of J. Brucker, Historia Critica Philsophiae (Leipzig, 1742 – 44); Voltaire, “Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke ou le tombeau de fanatisme,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Nouvelle Édition, vol. 26 (Paris, 1879), 283 – 290 (originally written in 1736); idem, “Lettre XIV – A. M. Covelle, citoyen de Genève, par M. Baudinet,” included within Questions sur les Miracles, in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Nouvelle Édition, vol. 19, (Paris, 1860), 382 – 3 (originally compiled in 1765); E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 47.5. 53   Among the most vocal defenders of Cyril was the unnamed author of Histoire Critique de l’Éclectisme, ou des Nouveaux Platoniciens, (Paris, 1766), a 2‑volume response to the “Éclecticisme” article in the Encyclopédie. The defense of Cyril covers pages 286 – 301, the final 15 pages of the first volume, and includes a full bibliography of both contemporaries who blamed Cyril and those who defended him. 54   “Hipathie” in Dictionnaire Philosophique, 392 – 3 = Questions sur l’encyclopédie, vol. 9, 1772, pp. 138 – 40. The article was accessed from the reproduction found in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Nouvelle Édition, vol. 13 (Paris, 1860), 585 – 6.

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about the relative merits of Homer versus eighteenth-century French adaptations of his texts. The actual controversy ended in 1716 not with Dacier’s murder but with a congenial supper at which Dacier and La Motte drank to Homer’s health. If, however, Madame Dacier had instead been lynched in Notre Dame, Voltaire writes, we would have “precisely the history of Hypatia.” Voltaire has nothing more to say about Hypatia herself. The rest of the lengthy entry discusses the scholarly controversy about whether or not Cyril was responsible for her death. Voltaire even uses the entry to mock one critic who wrote a two-volume rebuttal of an article in Diderot’s Encyclopédie on Éclecticisme that spent a chapter discussing Hypatia. The worst part of Voltaire’s entry, however, comes at its conclusion. Voltaire wraps up this monstrosity with the callous comment that “when one finds a beautiful woman completely naked, it is not for the purpose of massacring her.”55 Fifty years after Toland and 45 years after Mademoiselle B, the shape and fate of Hypatia’s body had again completely overshadowed the depth and power of her mind. It was not until the twentieth century that discussions of Hypatia would return to the place that Mademoiselle B had pushed them. These discussions of the portrayal of Hypatia in the 1720s point to two different ways in which Hypatia’s life could be understood. One of these models was very old and traditional, while the other foreshadowed the way that Hypatia is often seen in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, Toland, Gibbon, and Voltaire ultimately presented Hypatia in ways not unlike how Socrates Scholasticus and John of Nikiu had done more than a millennium before. She remained notable primarily because her death showed what happened to free thinkers when Christian religious authorities incited violence against their opponents. This is not at all surprising. It is, of course, much more remarkable to see someone like Mademoiselle B willfully disregarding the political significance of Hypatia’s death in order to focus on the resonant example set by Hypatia’s life. This prominent French woman seems to have held no scholarly position and lacked the standing to push her point aggressively, but, more than 250 years before Hypatia’s name would be placed on a journal of feminist philosophy, she was already arguing for a radical reappraisal of Hypatia’s life and its meaning. What Mademoiselle B tried to do is significant. She did not, in my view, simply misjudge the historical moment in which she lived. She tried instead to use Toland’s portrait of Hypatia to change contemporary ideas about the scholarly role women could play. She probably was not surprised that her world proved unready to listen, but she probably also never regretted making the attempt. It is disappointing that the world was not ready for Mademoiselle B’s Hypatia, but it is nevertheless still important for us to recognize that her call to focus on Hypatia the person rather than Hypatia the symbol did once ring out. 55

 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 393.

Starring Hypatia: Amenábar’s Agora and the Tropology of Reception1 Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle Hypatia Writ Large It has often been noted that our knowledge of Hypatia is characterised by a fundamental tension: while her own work has (largely)2 been lost and testimony for her life and works is notoriously thin on the ground, her Nachleben in Western philosophical and artistic discourse is exceptionally rich and varied. Indeed, it may be argued that the scarcity of “original” sources has favoured the creation of a legend of Hypatia susceptible to re-imagination and re-appropriation. Hypatia has been called upon in the discussion of themes as diverse and divisive as the relation of science and religion, the (in)equality of the sexes, or the idea of the secular state. In recent work on Hypatia, it has almost become common practice to list her appearances throughout cultural history in catalogues that typically accentuate variation by jarringly juxtaposing high-brow discourse with the ephemeral and eccentric. A case in point is the opening paragraph of recent study by Alan Cameron: As a woman, she can be seen as a feminist as well as a pagan martyr. Her name has been a feminist symbol down the centuries, more recently a potent name in lesbian and gay circles. As an Egyptian, she has also been claimed as a black woman martyr. There is an asteroid named after her, a crater on the moon, and a journal of feminist studies. As early as 1886, the women of Wichita, Kansas, familiar from the movies of our youth as a lawless western cattle town, formed a literary society called the Hypatia Club. Lake Hypatia in Alabama is a retreat for freethinkers and atheists. Rather less in tune with her scholarly activity, there is Hypatia Capital, a merchant bank whose strategy focuses on the top female executives in the Fortune 1000. A few minutes’ googling will produce countless

1   I am grateful to Dawn LaValle Norman and Alex Petkas for the invitation to contribute to this volume. The chapter originated in a paper presented at their conference in Princeton (Dec. 2015) and the Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar Series (Feb. 2016). On both occasions, stimulating discussions ensued. 2   On Hypatia’s œuvre, see most recently the survey in Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death and Works,” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), who argues that Hypatia is responsible for significant parts of the extant edition of the Almagest. Cf. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (2nd ed.; trans. F. Lyra; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66 – 79.

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eulogies of Hypatia as a uniquely gifted philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, the second female scientist after Marie Curie, the only woman in antiquity appointed to a university chair, a theorist who anticipated Copernicus with the heliocentric hypothesis.3

As Cameron and others have shown, the “countless eulogies” of Hypatia are matched by a fair share of criticism and invective: Hypatia was also branded a woman with no shame, a demonic seducer, occultist or blasphemer.4 In her survey, Véronique Gély has demonstrated that it was in the seventeenth century in particular when Hypatian reception gained momentum as Hypatia emerged as a symbol in the factious debates of Enlightenment Europe.5 The symbolic re-appropriation and eristic reconstruction of Hypatia’s life as well as the ambivalence in her assessment, however, are already present in the earliest sources, as the contributions to this volume eloquently demonstrate.6 It has often been observed that, with the exception of Synesius whose death most probably predated Hypatia’s, all ancient texts (as well as their modern counterparts) share a clear focus on Hypatia’s violent death; in contrast, the specifics of her life and work are given little space – if any at all. Indeed, her death has been argued to be the primary reason why Hypatia’s name eschewed complete oblivion.7

3

  Alan Cameron, “Hypatia,” 185.   A concise survey on Hypatia’s reception is offered by Véronique Gély, “Hypatia,” in Brill’s New Pauly Supplements. Figures of Antiquity and Their Reception in Art, Literature and Music, ed. P. V. Möllendorff, A. Simons, L. Simonis; trans. D. Smart and C. M. Schroeder (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 247 – 251. Further studies on Hypatia’s reception include Johann Rudolf Asmus, “Hypatia in Tradition und Dichtung,” Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte 7 (1907): 11 – 44; Dzielska, Hypatia, 1 – 26; Anne-Françoise Jaccottet, “Hypatie d’Alexandrie entre réalité historique et récupérations idéologiques: réflexions sur la place de l’antiquité dans l’imaginaire moderne,” in Tradition classique: Dialogues avec l’Antiquité, ed. D. Bouvier, D. van Mal-Maeder (Lausanne: Étude des lettres, 2010); Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, “Hypatie d’Alexandrie,” Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire (http://journals.openedition.org / clio / 10575) 35 (2012): 201 – 214; Adeline Thulards, “Ipazia. Reinterpretazioni teatrali e romanzesche francesi del ventesimo secolo,” Itinera 4 (2012): 92 – 113; the contributions to Giuseppe Sertoli, ed., Figure di Ipazia (Roma: Aracne, 2014); Silvia Ronchey, Ipazia. La vera storia (Milano: Rizzoli, 2010), esp. chapters II and III; and most recently, Edward J. Watts, Hypatia. The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 135 – 147. Cf. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia. Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia 16 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 3 – 11 on the history of scholarship. 5  Gély, “Hypatia,” 247; cf. e. g. Asmus, “Hypatia,” 20 (“Die Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts drückte auch dem Hypatiaproblem ihren Stempel auf ”) and now Watts’ insightful contribution to this volume. 6   The main sources are assembled and discussed in Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia; English translations of the main sources can be found in Appendix A of this volume. For the ambivalences in our sources, see esp. the contributions of Seng, Haase, Beers to this volume. 7   Thus, Cameron, “Hypatia,” 185 bleakly asserts that “Hypatia’s principal claim to fame is being lynched by Christian fanatics.” Cf. e. g. Christian Lacombrade, “Hypatia,” RAC 16: 958 – 959; Jaccottet, “Hypatie,” 140 (“. . . nous ne saurions certainement rien d’Hypatie si elle n’était morte de façon tragique”). For a brief account of the significance attributed to Hypatia’s murder, see now Watts, Hypatia, 121 – 134, 149 – 150. 4

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In its circularity, of course, this argumentation does not hold. It does, however, alert us to the fact that the themes and motifs in Hypatia’s story curiously resonate with the structure of her reception. Hypatia’s story (and the story of her story) is almost emblematic of the idea of reception itself. The utter disproportion between the loss of Hypatia’s life and work – the narrative of her murder and the transmitted titles of her lost works are equally markers of absence – and her rich Nachleben almost reads as an allegory of fundamental claims of ‘reception theory.’ With the “original” always already lost, reception takes centre stage.8 “To get behind the symbol which Hypatia has become,” as the editors of this volume have challenged their contributors, is a daunting task. Indeed, their injunction may be better understood as a direction for research on Hypatia rather than its goal. It orients our efforts towards an end that, by its nature, must elude us: Hypatia ever becoming the symbol of something other than ‘herself ’. To study and understand Hypatia is necessarily to study and understand the history of her reception – fully knowing that this can only ever yield provisional results and insights. Hypatia’s reception is a vast field of study that keeps growing – and grows in complexity. Catalogues and inventories evoke this reception history and trade on the promise of cutting reception histories down to size and keeping them manageable.9 Even if we were able to delineate interdependencies and retrace influence between various acts of reception, however, this would teach us little about their meaning and importance. To understand acts of reception entails the laborious and often perplexing task of analysing them in their respective cultural milieux and historical conditioning. The study of reception is always a “messy business,” as one practitioner of reception studies would have it.10 Once we approach contemporary popular culture and the world of modern media, however, this messiness is inescapable. In the face of the simultaneous availability of vast masses of data – textual, auditory, visual – the paradigms of

 8   On the theoretical framework of (what in Anglophone Classics is subsumed under the term) “Reception Studies,” see the seminal study by Charles Martindale, Redeeming the text. Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and the recent re-evaluations in Charles Martindale, Richard F. Thomas, eds., Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Lorna Hardwick, Christopher Stray, eds., A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden: Blackwell, 2007); Lorna Hardwick, ed., Redeeming the text – twenty years on (Special Issue of Classical Receptions Journal 5.2; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On reception theory, see also below, pp. 234 – 235 in the current MS.  9   For a critique of the “catalogue raisonné approach” to Classical reception, see e. g. Simon Goldhill, “Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant is No Place to Start Reception Studies,” in Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice eds. E. Hall and S. Harrop (London: Duckworth, 2010), 60 – 62. 10   Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity. Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 15 defines the task of (Classical) reception studies as “the messy business of how meaning or significance . . . takes shape in society, over time, and between genres.”

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Fig. 1:  Hypatia Sans Pro® (design: Thomas Phinney © Adobe Systems Inc.), illustration from www.fontspring.com / fonts / adobe / hypatia-sans-pro.

influence or imitation have obviously lost their heuristic value, and theoretical insights into the complex constitution of meaning become palpable. Arguably the best illustration of this zero-point in Hypatia’s reception is the typeface reproduced in the illustration above. The type is called Hypatia Sans and was created by the American designer Thomas Phinney in 2007, then working for Adobe which included the font in the third edition of its Creative Suite software, ensuring worldwide distribution. To this day, the font is marketed as a “geometric sans serif with humanist undertones” which, moreover strikes a “balance between cold geometry and warm organic form.”11 In the blurb, these stylistic features are authenticated by appealing to the eponymous Hypatia – “the classical mathematician,”12 with her femininity as a marketable asset.13 The trope of the textually constructed and subjected woman invoked by feminist criticism is here quite literally (!) materialised.14 Stripped of all specificity and 11   For the description see www.fontspring.com / fonts / adobe / hypatia-sans-pro (accessed on 25 / 01 / 2017). On the German platform typografie.info, the typeface is similarly described as a “blend of mathematical accuracy and humanist principles” (“Die Schriftfamilie mischt mathematische Genauigkeit mit humanistischen Prinzipien,” www.typografie.info / 3 / Schriften / fonts. html / hypatia-sans-r10). 12  Ibid. 13  In Adobe Typekit Blog, Phinney provides some background on the design of the font and his choice of name: “. . . it’s named after Hypatia of Alexandria. I was looking for a classical mathematician / philosopher who was also into geometry. Also, the person needed to have a name that would be reasonably interesting, not too hard to spell, and be capable of being trademarked. That I came up with a woman to name it after was a bonus.” (https://blog.typekit. com / 2007 / 04 / 16 / hypatia_sans). 14   In lieu of extensive doxography, I refer to the now classic study by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Liter-

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Fig. 2:  Excerpt from Fran Bagenal, “Teaching as Hypatia of Alexandria,” Status. A Report on Women in Astronomy (January 2009): 11.

significance, Hypatia / ‘Hypatia’ now designates a purely formal register, “cold geometry” and “warm organic form,” and acts as a mere receptacle for the text of another. The challenges of reviving a Hypatia who has been thus mortified in litteris and “to get behind the symbol” are beautifully illustrated by “Teaching as Hypatia,” a project by the American planetary scientist Fran Bagenal. Preparing a course on the history of astronomy, Bagenal saw herself faced with “the names, dates and who-did-what of the long list of ‘dead white men’”;15 having come across Hypatia, she decided to teach disguised as Hypatia, thus insisting on Hypatia’s contribution to science (Fig. 2). In the report that Bagenal published ary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) and its more Classical inflection in Maria Wyke, “Written Women: Propertius’ scripta puella,” JRS 77 (1987): 47 – 61. Susan Gubar, “’The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Lectora 20 (2014): 249 – 269 (= repr. of Critical Inquiry 8 / 2 [1981]: 243 – 263) offers stimulating introductory reading. 15   Fran Bagenal, “Teaching as Hypatia,” Status. A Report on Women in Astronomy (January 2009): 11 (available at https://cswa.aas.org / status / Status_Jan09.pdf).

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both on-line and in a newsletter of the American Astronomical Society, Bagenal describes her experience, from borrowing the necessary props to delivering the lecture and gives a brief account of Hypatia’s life.16 Interestingly, both in the newsletter and on the webpage Bagenal sets her own words in a regular Times font but switches to Hypatia Sans in order to typeset three ‘quotations’ attributed to Hypatia. Bagenal thus not only reaffirms Hypatia’s scientific legacy but also re-inscribes the Alexandrian into her typeface (cf. illustration 2). Of course, the three quotes that Bagenal adduces are spurious, and Bagenal is certainly aware of this as she cautions her readers that most information found on Hypatia is “wishful thinking and mythology that has developed over the millennia.”17 But it is precisely this diffuse spread of often unsourced material that characterises much of Classical reception today. Quotations from Hypatia are, in fact, widespread, and more often than not it is impossible to retrace their precise origins.18 The quotes that Bagenal gives, however, seem to have their source in a slim volume by the American Elbert Hubbard, inspired publicist, soap salesman, dilettante polyhistor and self-styled sage.19 In 1908, Hubbard devoted a volume of his popular series “Little Journeys to the Homes of . . . Great Teachers” to Hypatia.20 Hubbard’s tongue-in-cheek account gives us such detailed information as her precise height, weight and exercise régime:21 Theon set out to produce a perfect human being, and whether his charts, theorems and formulas made up a complete law of eugenics, or whether it was dumb luck, this we know: he nearly succeeded. Hypatia was five feet nine, and weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds. This when she was twenty. She could walk ten miles without fatigue; 16   Bagenal, “Teaching as Hypatia,” 11 – 13. A  recording of her class is available online at https://www.youtube.com / watch?v=gwLufXkoT0E. I am most grateful to Prof. Bagenal for her permission to reproduce some of the material here. 17   Bagenal, “Teaching as Hypatia,” 12. 18   See www.quotationspage.com / quotes / Hypatia_of_Alexandria; http://atheistuniverse.net /  photo / hypatia-quote, or www.brainyquote.com / quotes / authors / h / hypatia.html; of course, the number of these and comparable collections is balanced by blogs and forums where the supposed quotations are unmasked as fakes (e.  g. http://www.roger-pearse.com / weblog / 2010 / 01 / 08 / sup posed-quotation-by-hypatia / ). 19   A concise account of Hubbard’s life and work is provided by Hank Nuwer, “Elbert Hubbard,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 91: American Magazine Journalists 1900 – 1960, ed. S. G. Riley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 149 – 156, with further references. On the Roycroft movement founded by Hubbard, see the contributions to Marie Via, Marjorie Searl, eds., Head, Heart, and Hand: Elbert Hubbard and the Roycrofters (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994). 20   Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers: Hypatia (East Aurora: The Roycrofters, 1908). Hubbard’s Little Journeys were an extensive series of biographical booklets, including e. g. Eminent Artists, Great Lovers, Famous Women and Great Business Men, published on a subscription basis from 1894 – 1908; apparently, the series had its origins in circulars that were included in soap deliveries (see Via and Searl, Head, Heart and Hand, 11). 21  Hubbard, Hypatia, 83 – 84.

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swim, row, ride horseback and climb mountains. Through a series of gentle calisthenics invented by her father, combined with breathing exercises, she had developed a body of rarest grace.

Considering Hubbard’s burlesque in context it is astonishing, but revealing, to see how much piecemeal information entered the popular mainstream from here. Even Hypatia’s portrait on the frontispiece of Hubbard’s “little book” has proved rather popular over the years and was even used on the poster of the academic conference on which the contributions of this volume are based.22 Apparently, it was chosen because it was not only aesthetically pleasing but also, crucially, in the public domain. How, then, do we approach the contemporary reception of a figure who has so long and so thoroughly run out of copyright? Alejandro Amenábar’s re-imagination of Hypatia in Agora, I believe, ought to be assessed against this backdrop of the extreme proliferation and diversification of Hypatia’s reception. The Spanish film production shot in English and starring British actress Rachel Weisz in the role of the philosopher has an exceptional place within this history. Even as the monumental production – the single most expensive film ever realised in Europe –23 failed to generate the return-on-investment the Spanish producers had hoped for,24 Agora powerfully re-introduced Hypatia to a wide contemporary audience. It prompted and influenced numerous engagements with Hypatia in academia and beyond, not to mention the debates, at times rather fierce, that it incited among film-goers and critics. As I will argue in the following, however, Amenábar’s film is more than the latest instantiation of the “Hypatia tradition.” Rather, the film engages with the hypertrophy of reception history that has come to define Hypatia. While Agora pays lip service to an aesthetics of historical authenticity, it knowingly invokes crucial stages of Hypatia’s previous reception; what is more, Agora exposes the mediatedness of its own account and thus invites reflection on the idea of reception itself.

22

  It is a drawing by Jules Maurice Gaspard, at the time a Roycrofter, who produced numerous illustrations for Hubbard’s publications; cf. Via and Searl, Head, Heart and Hand, 43. It can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org / wiki / File:Hypatia_ portrait.png and is in fact included in fig. 2 (above). 23   On the production size and budget of Agora (> € 50 m), see Barry Jordan, Alejandro Amenábar (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012), 235 – 239. 24   Despite its initial success at the Festival of Cannes, where Agora premiered in 2009, the film failed to attract the interest of distributors, especially in the crucial US market; cf. Jordan, Amenábar, 240 – 246; Joanna Paul, “Subverting Sex and Love in Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora,” in Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World (ed. M. S. Cyrino; New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 228 – 229.

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Agora and the Geometry of Storytelling From the outset, Amenábar’s Agora presents an uneasy mixture of genres and styles that defies the generic boundaries of classic cinema. From the decision to shoot on a vast open-air set on Malta (the same location where significant parts of Scott’s Gladiator [2000] and Petersen’s Troy [2004] were shot) and the incorporation of graphic battle scenes to the minutiae of set and costume design, Agora conforms to the aesthetic codes of Hollywood-style epic, and it overtly references this tradition.25 At the same time, however, it undermines it by centring its attention on the intellectual journey of its protagonist. A philosopher and scientist is not the typical hero, let alone heroine, in a sword-and-sandal epic. Not only does her intellectual work jarringly contrast with the genre’s martial preoccupations, but it also defies the gender stereotypes to which it typically caters. Yet, Agora does not shun but rather invites such comparisons. Indeed, already the movie’s setting in Alexandria sets Agora’s Hypatia against the many Cleopatrae of the genre’s history.26 An early scene which shows Hypatia stepping out of a bath under the desiring gaze of her slave27 is a clear nod to the tradition of Cleopatra’s silver screen depictions of which bathing scenes, arguably, are a mainstay.28 Rachel Weisz’ Hypatia is of no less stunning beauty than Claudette Colbert’s or Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra, and she, too, captivates the men who surround her. But crucially, Hypatia keeps her distance from all of them. Agora depicts her as detached and aloof, a woman – in fact, the only woman in the film, apart from a handful of extras – who ultimately remains foreign to the world around her. And just as Hypatia’s position is shown – at times, in overly explicit asides to the audience –29 to conflict with the gender expectations and social norms in fourth-century Alexandria, it is at odds with the generic pro25

  On the production and set design, see the documentation in Isabel Andrade, ed., Agora. El viaje al Mundo Antiguo de Alejandro Amenábar (Barcelona: Libros Cúpula, 2009), 149 – 168. 26   On the cinematic representation of Alexandria, see esp. Nacho García, “City of Lights. Ancient Alexandria in Cinema and Modern Imagination,” in Imagining Ancient Cities in Film. From Babylon to Cinecittà ed. M. García Morcillo et al. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 113 – 134. 27   Agora 00:06:15 (1). 28  Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) famously calls attention to this in her self-referential exhortation: “We must not disappoint the mighty Caesar. The Romans tell fabulous tales of my bath, and my handmaidens, and my morals.” The cinematic representation of Cleopatra is the subject of numerous studies, see especially Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past. Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (New York: Routledge, 1997), 73 – 109; Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema, rev. and expand. ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2001), 62 – 78; Martin M. Winkler, Cinema and Classical Texts. Apollo’s New Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 264 – 281. Cf. the contributions of Pina Polo and García Morcillo in Silke Knippschild, Marta García Morcillo, eds., Seduction and Power. Antiquity in the Visual and Performing Arts (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 29   The screenplay is at pains to emphasise historical alterity; a case in point is a remark by one of her father’s friends (Agora 00:22:10 [5]): “Her work is admirable. And she’s prudent and virtuous. But Theon, don’t forget her sad condition . . . [long pause] . . . being a woman, I mean.”

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tocols to which the film otherwise adheres. Various critics have captured this tension by describing Agora with the almost oxymoronic epithets “epic of ideas” or “un peplum intellectuel,”30 or by dubbing its female lead a “Helen of Troy . . . with a PhD.”31 Importantly, the narrative structure of Agora shares in the rigour and cool intellectualism which it attributes to its protagonist. Evoking early cinema with its mid-film intermissions, Agora is neatly divided into a diptych of corresponding halves which are both introduced and connected through a series of inter-titles.32 I shall give a synopsis of the film: As the camera slowly moves from black space to views of planet Earth and the moon, expository titles introduce fourth-century Alexandria as a place rife with religious tensions, evoking the decline of the ancient world in ostensibly Gibbonian terms.33 We then see Hypatia standing on the podium of a lecture hall: surrounded by an all-male audience and attended by her young slave Davus, she lectures on the perfection of the celestial bodies. Her teaching takes place in the Serapeum complex, which in Agora is conflated with the Library and the Museum of Alexandria;34 it is a centre both of pagan worship and secular learning. Outside its confines, the streets of Alexandria are in the grip of the increasingly violent confrontation between pagans and Christians. At first, Hypatia’s life is largely unaffected by the religious crisis, but, when it reaches her classroom, she advocates reconciliation and mutual tolerance. She is desired by both her student Orestes and her slave Davus, but keeps both at bay; in the case of Orestes, she rebuffs a public marriage proposal and hands him a menstrual rag so as to fend off his advances – a faithful rendering of the anecdote pre30   Neil McDonald, “An Epic of Ideas,” Quadrant 54.10 (2010): 115 – 117; Thomas Sotinel, “Agora: un peplum intellectuel pour célébrer Hypatie, mathématicienne et païenne.” Le Monde (5 January 2010); accessible on-line at: www.lemonde.fr / cinema / article / 2010 / 01 / 05 / agora-unpeplum-intellectuel-pour-celebrer-hypatie-mathematicienne-et-paienne_ 1287683_3476.html. 31  Jordan, Amenábar, 259. On Agora’s engagement with the tradition of historical epic, see e. g. Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 227 – 229; cf. Anja Wieber, “Women and Religion in Epic Films: The Fifties’ Advocate for Christian Conversion and Today’s Pillar of Paganism?” in Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts (ed. F. Carlà and I. Berti; London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 235 – 240. 32   Cf. e. g. Jordan, Amenábar, 251. 33   The introductory titles appear in single paragraphs; they read: “By the end of the 4th century A. D., the Roman Empire was on the verge of collapse. || Yet Alexandria, in the province of Egypt, still retained much of its splendor. It boasted one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the legendary lighthouse, as well as the greatest library on Earth. || The library was not only a cultural symbol, but also a religious one, a place where the pagans worshipped their ancestral gods. || The city’s long-established pagan cult was now challenged by the Jewish faith and a rapidly spreading religion until recently banned: Christianity”. For Gibbon’s own take on Hypatia as an emblem of “the decline and fall of the Empire”, see Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols.; ed. D. Wormesley (London: Penguin, 1995 [11776 – 1788]), 945 – 946 (chapter  47.5). 34   Cf. e. g. Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 234 – 237.

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served in Damascius that ingenuously identifies Damascius’ unnamed student with Orestes.35 When the pagans, led by the High Priest of Serapis and with the approval of Hypatia’s father, Theon, set out to attack the Christian population, the city is precipitated into overt strife. The ensuing clashes lead to the siege of the Serapeum. When an imperial edict orders the pagans to leave, the Serapeum is stormed by a violent mob of Christians who destroy not only all cult objects but also the book scrolls of the library. In the last sequence, Davus, who has joined the Christians and turned against his masters, violently confronts Hypatia, stopping just short of raping her. As he steps back, Davus hands Hypatia his sword and offers his life to her. Instead of punishing him, however, Hypatia releases Davus from slavery. As he walks away, the screen fades to black. Like the first act, the second starts with a view of planet Earth before the camera zooms in on Alexandria. A sequence of intertitles indicate the passing of time: Christianity is said to have gained the upper hand in Alexandria, and efforts “to safeguard Christian morality . . .” are ominously evoked.36 In the Serapeum, now restyled as a Christian Church, the old bishop Theophilus lies in state while his nephew Cyril is acclaimed as his successor; Cyril is shown as a hot-headed and ruthless politician who surrounds himself with a troop of fanatic men, the parabalani.37 While Hypatia dedicates herself to her studies and experiments (we do not see her lecture anymore), her former student Orestes has ascended to the prefecture of Alexandria. His former passion for Hypatia has given way to a relationship of mutual respect and friendship; indeed, she now regularly advises him in the matters of his administration. In particular, she advocates caution as the emboldened Christians clash with Alexandria’s Jewish population, and religious strife once more has Alexandria in its grip. Orestes’ attempts at mediation fail, and Cyril’s aggressive campaign leads to the expul35   Agora 00:23:42 (6); cf. Dam. Vita Isidori 43A and C. Damascius dismisses an alternative account according to which Hypatia used music to heal hear lovelorn student. This account has also left traces in Agora where early in the film Hypatia mentions to her father that she advised Orestes to focus on the beauty of music rather than her own (00:05:36 [2]). On the story of the menstrual rag, see now the excellent discussion in Victoria Leonard’s contribution to this volume. 36   The inter-titles, again appearing paragraph by paragraph, read: “After the storming of the library, many pagans converted to Christianity, and Alexandria enjoyed a time of peace. Hypatia continued her teaching and research, while her former disciples occupied important posts among the social elite. || The Roman Empire finally split into two parts. Many Christians saw this as a sign of the end of the world and decided to prepare themselves by living holier lives. || The order of monks known as “parabalani” took charge of patrolling the streets to safeguard Christian morality . . . || . . . now only complicated by the presence of the Jews”. 37   I follow the spelling adopted in Agora (parabalanus rather than parabolanus). For a concise account of the historical parabalani / parabolani and the respective etymologies of the names, see e. g. Glenn W. Bowersock, “Parabalani: A Terrorist Charity in Late Antiquity,” Anabases 12 (2010): 45 – 54 [accessible on-line at: http://anabases.revues.org / 1061] and now Beers’ and Petkas’ contributions to this volume.

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sion of the Jewish population. At the same time, the bishop increases his pressure on Orestes to embrace the Church’s leadership, which leads to a violent clash between the increasingly militant parabalani and Alexandria’s administration. Ultimately, the parabalani denounce Hypatia as a witch and decide to kill her. As Davus, the slave-turned-parabalanus, hears of their plans, he runs off to save his former mistress but arrives too late: the parabalani are already dragging Hypatia to the Serapeum.38 As they gather stones, however, Davus alone stays with Hypatia and suffocates her in his embrace thus sparing her the violence at the hands of the frenzied mob. At the end, the camera steadily zooms out of the Serapeum, leaving the cityscape of Alexandria behind, until it rests on a wide shot of the globe. End-titles tell of the aftermath of the events contrasting Hypatia’s death and the subsequent loss of her writings with the posthumous veneration of Cyril as “a saint and doctor of the Church”.39 Running counter to the film’s diptych structure, the scenes that depict Hypatia’s scientific endeavours form a linear sequence which extends through both halves of Agora. From the first scene in which she lectures on the perfection of the cosmos, Agora sends Hypatia on an intellectual journey that eventually leads her to recognise that Earth revolves around the Sun on an elliptical orbit. It is a tale of steady progression. Agora “takes us, almost step by step, through the evidential conundrums and the conceptual shifts required to resolve them,”40 Hypatia lectures on the Ptolemaic theory of planetary motion; she voices first doubts and considers heliocentrism; she proves the law of inertia; and ultimately, she abandons the idea of the perfect circular orbit for the ellipse.41 In terms of the film’s narration this is a salient arrangement: the teleological thrust of the astronomical sub-plot is opposed to the diptych of the main narrative from which progress is conspicuously absent. Indeed, there are so many 38  That Agora’s Hypatia is killed in the Serapeum rather than the Caesareum, as the ancient sources have it, underlines the connection between Hypatia’s scientific work and her death. She meets her end as she returns to her “academic origins,” and – as we shall see (below, p. 236) – her ultimate discovery coincides with her death. 39   The titles read: “Hypatia’s mutilated body was dragged through the streets and burnt on a pyre. Orestes disappeared, never to be seen again. Cyril seized power of Alexandria. || Much later, Cyril was declared a saint and doctor of the Church. || Although none of her works survived it is known that she was an outstanding astronomer and renowned for her mathematical studies on conic curves. || 1200 years later, in the 17th century, the astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered that one of these curves, the ellipse, governs the motions of the planets.” 40   Matthew Sharpe, “Philosophy and the View from Above in Alejandro’s Amenabar’s Agora,” Crossroads 6.1 (2012): 35, whose study offers the most accessible account of the science in Agora (esp. 35 – 39); cf. Jordan, Amenábar, 257 on the “progressive arc or pattern of development” of Hypatia’s research. 41   Agora 00:01:39 (1): first lecture; 00:12:05 (3): planetary motion according to Ptolemy; 00:39:03 (8): doubt of geocentrism; 01:00:34 (13): experiment on inertia; 01:05:09 (13): failed attempts at reconstructing Earth’s orbit; 01:23:46 (16): realisation that Earth’s orbit is not circular; 01:37:12 (19): reconstruction of the elliptical orbit.

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parallels and echoes between the two halves of the main narration that Agora appears to be governed by an eerie logic of Wiederholungszwang. The advocacy of violence by the High Priest of Serapis in the first half of Agora is mirrored by Cyril’s in the second; the infighting between pagans and Christians by the clash of Christians and Jews; Hypatia’s futile calls for moderation by Orestes’ failed attempts at mediating; the flight of the pagans from the Serapeum by the expulsion of the Jews from the city; and ultimately, the destruction of the Serapeum and Davus’ aborted assault by Hypatia’s death at Davus’ hands.42 This contrast between linear teleology and circular repetition is crucial for Agora. The spheres of history and science, the film suggests at first, are clearly demarcated and directly opposed. While history palpably “repeats itself,” the world of science follows a different logic, steadily advancing towards a transcendent truth. Yet Agora is far from unambiguous in its assessment of the relation between science and history. It is a historical epic haunted by conflicting views of historicity, immanence and transcendence. Hypatia’s first lecture – the first words spoken in Agora – is a case in point. In a solemn tone, Hypatia asserts the epistemological pre-eminence of astronomy by contrasting the perfection of the stars with life on Earth.43 . . . [T]he stars move neither up nor down; they merely revolve from East to West following the most perfect course ever conceived: the circle. Because the circle reigns in the heavens, the stars have never fallen and they never will – but . . . what about here? on Earth? Here, bodies do fall but their movements are not circular but linear.

The truths of astronomy are emphatically removed from the purview of human experience. But already here the clear-cut divide between science and history proves unstable. As the narrative of the film unfolds, the geometrical principles that underpin Hypatia’s cosmology assume a different resonance. In the plot of Agora, it is the vicissitudes of human history that describe a “circular” trajectory and ultimately remain unchanged while man’s grasp of the celestial sphere is defined by “linear” progress. Does this suggest, then, that there is a transcendent truth of the human condition, akin to that of scientific discovery? As we shall see, Agora not only encourages allegorical interpretations of this kind, but it also draws attention to the ideological stakes involved in it. At the height of religious strife in Alexandria, Orestes dismisses Hypatia’s astronomical speculations as incommensurate with the suffering that surrounds them:44 “Hypatia, look around you: death, horror, destruction! – If the stars move in a circle . . . why would they share their perfection with us?” His desperate question, of course, encapsulates the film’s obsessive exploration of 42

  On Hypatia’s death, see below, p. 235 – 237.   Agora 00:01:38 (1). 44   Agora 01:21:36 (15). 43

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Fig. 3:  ”Agora (2009): Hypatia constructs the elliptical orbit of Earth around the sun. Courtesy of Mod Producciones.

the relation between the enduring truths of science and the forces that shape human history. But curiously, it also proves to be a catalyst for Hypatia’s scientific progress. Struck by his words, she soon realises that the stars do not, in fact, “move in a circle” but describe elliptical orbits. Yet her discovery does not confirm but rather confute Orestes’ cynical conclusion: When Hypatia formulates the hypothesis of the elliptical orbit – a crucial insight and the climax of the astronomical subplot –45 her discussion and visualisation of the ellipse resonates with the political and religious conflict in Alexandria. The absolute perfection of the circle with its single centre gives way to the ellipse of which every point stands in a balanced relation to its two foci (see figure 3).46 Do not the conflicts in Alexandria arise from the failure of two groups to co-exist? Is Hypatia’s reconstruction, then, an allegory of tolerance and reconciliation? Or does she even transpose such ethical injunctions to the sphere of scientific inquiry, solving an astronomical conundrum by applying a lesson from ethics? Significantly, Hypatia’s geometrical reconstruction of the ellipse echoes an ethical imperative Hypatia herself has formulated earlier in the film. When, during one of her lectures on planetary motion, Orestes and Synesius clashed over a remark that questions the dignity of God’s creation, Hypatia intervened with an impassioned appeal for tolerance:47 45

  Agora 01:37:12 (19)   Cf. Hypatia’s commentary to her slave Aspasius: “So what if I divide the centre into two but what I keep constant is the sum of their two distances to the perimeter? [. . .] Watch. As I move this rod along the cord, as one segment increases the other segment decreases, and vice versa. Therefore the sum of the two is always going to be constant. [. . .] What figure will we obtain? An ellipse!” 47   Agora 00:13:45 (3). 46

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Hyp[atia] Syn[esius] Hyp. Syn.

“Synesius, what is Euclid’s first rule?” “Why the question?” “Just – answer me.” “If, er . . . if two things are equal to a third thing, then they are all equal to each other.” Hyp. “Good. Now, are you both not similar to me?” Syn. “Yes.” “And you, Orestes?” Hyp. Orestes “Yes.” Hyp. “Now – I am actually saying this to everybody in this room: More things unite us than divide us!”

In Hypatia’s invocation of the shared humanity of her listeners – the film-goers no less than her quarrelling students –,48 an axiom of geometry is expressly allegorised as a guideline to ethics. Even if Euclid’s rule does not strictly bear on Hypatia’s account of the ellipse, her emphasis on the equivalent relation which each point of the ellipse maintains to its foci clearly harkens back to this “triangulation of tolerance,” Agora’s potential for allegoresis thus undermines the idea of absolute or transcendent science. Scientific inquiry appears more and more enmeshed in (and concerned with) the fabric of human life and history. But there is another way in which Hypatia’s invocation of Euclid challenges our understanding of history in Agora. It is one of the instances where the screenplay comes closest to the textual record of historical Alexandria. Euclid’s first axiom is twice invoked in the correspondence of Hypatia’s pupil Synesius.49 In a letter to Hesychius, another of Hypatia’s students,50 he complains that his addressee failed to help his brother Euoptius and thus infringed the principles of “sacred geometry” (epist. 93): “You should have numbered Euoptius among 48   For similar “asides” to the contemporary audience, see above, n. 29, and below, p. 224. Still, Agora is at pains not to attribute universalist beliefs to Hypatia. She ends her appeal with the words: “Now, whatever may be going on in the streets we are brothers – we are brothers! I want you to remember that brawls are for slaves and riff-raff.” The exclusion of slaves from the “brotherhood” of her school is all the more striking as Hypatia had just invited her slave Davus to demonstrate in class the model of the solar system which he had built according to her teachings. 49   The presence of Synesius’ correspondence is highlighted later in Agora when Synesius bids Hypatia farewell as he leaves the besieged Serapeum: “Lady, sister, and mother, may God bless you and protect you!” (Agora [2010] 00:36:06 [8]); cf. Syn. Ep. 16 (p.  36,4 – 7 Garzya): Κλινοπετὴς ὑπηγόρευσα τὴν ἐπιστολήν, ἣν ὑγιαίνουσα κομίσαιο, μῆτερ καὶ ἀδελφὴ καὶ διδάσκαλε καὶ διὰ πάντων τούτων εὐεργετικὴ καὶ πᾶν ὅ τι τίμιον καὶ πρᾶγμα καὶ ὄνομα (“Confined to my bed, I had to dictate this letter which, I hope, you will receive in good health, my mother, sister, teacher – in all of this, you are my benefactress and everything which is most honoured in name and deed”); for the textual echo in Agora, see e. g. Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 229; D. W. Viney, “Remembering and Misremembering Hypatia: The Lessons of Agora,” The Midwest Quarterly 54.4 (2013): 363. For Hypatia’s hymnic apostrophe in Synesius’ letter, see Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 76 – 77 ad loc; cf. Hose 2001. 50   For prosopography, see e. g. Denis Roques, Synésios de Cyrène et la Cyrénaïque du Bas-Empire (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1987), 206 – 212. Cf. Dzielska, Hypatia, 27 – 46 and Watts, Hypatia, 65 – 74 on the circle of Hypatia’s disciples.

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your own brothers if it is true that two things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to each other.”51 And in a letter of recommendation addressed to Pylaemenes, Synesius formulates a similar injunction to follow the “most truthful definitions of geometry” in social relations (Ep. 131).52 There is among these definitions the principle that two things, which are equal to the same thing, must be equal to each other. Well, your character has made you my friend, in the case of the wonderful Diogenes it was also his nature: Both of you are friends of one and the same man. You must, then, also form an attachment to each other, with me as your middleman, as it were.

The resonance which Hypatia’s appeal in Agora finds in Synesius’ letters exposes the “preposterousness” of Agora’s representation of history. Of course, the Synesian echo may have been adapted by Agora’s scriptwriters in order to give credence to their dialogues by appealing to “historical material.” But can Synesius’ letters really be taken as a mere parallel? After all, Amenábar’s Hypatia scolds Synesius in the words that, according to the textual tradition, are his own. The chronological sequence of what we see in Agora and what we read in Synesius, of historical fiction and authentic source, are potentially inverted. Does Agora let us in on its fabrication of “history”? Or does it insinuate that Synesius in his letters appropriated a thought which he had first heard from Hypatia?53 In this understanding, Amenábar’s film re-introduces Hypatia into a tradition oblivious of her contribution. But crucially, it does so relying on the very record whose deficiency it seeks to remedy. While we have seen that Agora discusses the sphere of history in opposition to that of science, Agora here gestures toward the constructedness and preposterous circularity of its own representation of history.

Planetary Orbits and Circular Arguments Hypatia successfully reconciles her students by invoking the Euclidean axiom. In the larger context of Agora’s Alexandria, however, no call for tolerance bears fruit. Not only is the conflict of Christians and pagans fought out with blood-curdling violence, but it is seamlessly continued in the Jewish-Christian fights that follow. Indeed, against the backdrop of this failure to resolve the conflicts in Alexandria, the ideas of symmetry and equality appear as deeply ambig51  Syn. Ep. 93 (p.  155,10 – 12 Garzya): Εὐόπτιον γὰρ ἐν ἀδελφοῖς ἔδει τετάχθαι τοῖς σοῖς, εἰ τὰ τῷ αὐτῷ τὰ αὐτὰ καὶ ἀλλήλοις εἶναι δεῖ τὰ αὐτά. 52  Syn. Ep. 131 (p.  225,1 – 6 Garzya): ἔστι δήπου τις ἐν αὐτοῖς λόγος ἀξιῶν τὰ τῷ αὐτῷ τὰ αὐτὰ καὶ ἀλλήλοις εἶναι δεῖν τὰ αὐτά. ἐμοὶ δὲ σὲ μὲν ὁ τρόπος ἐποίησε φίλον, τὸν δὲ θαυμάσιον Διογένη καὶ ἡ φύσις· ἄμφω δὲ ἑνός ἐστε φίλοι. δεῖ δὴ καὶ ἀλλήλων ὑμᾶς ἐξηρτῆσθαι, καθάπερ ἐμοῦ τοῦ μέσου.

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uous. While they are originally invoked in order to overcome religious strife, they arguably emblematise its perpetuity. As we have already seen, the film’s mirroring halves suggest that Christian-Jewish conflict is but a re-run of that between pagans and Christians and that, ultimately, this recurrence is revealing of human nature. In fact, the parallel between the two halves are highlighted in a commentary by Orestes on the expulsion of the Jews in the second half of Agora: “How naive of me . . . How naive of me to think we had finally changed”.54 The universalism of Hypatia’s egalitarian credo gives way to the realisation of man’s ever-burning appetite for conflict. This twofold universalism, of Hypatia’s unwavering humanism and of Orestes’ resigned pessimism, undermines Agora’s historicist conceit to the point where its story turns into a parable and Orestes’ exclamation doubles as an aside to the audience who are challenged to ask themselves: Have we changed? To be sure, it is an inherent feature of the genre of historical epic to negotiate between the audience’s identification with and their alienation from the events it depicts,55 yet Agora pushes this to the extreme. Amenábar’s film is so explicit in its appeal to contemporary experience – and at times obtrusive in its didacticism –56 that it almost cancels out the aesthetic of historical accuracy in which it is otherwise heavily invested. From the reconstruction of the streets of Alexandria in accordance with current archaeological findings to the integration of Hypatia’s (historically attested) studies on Apollonius’ Conic Sections, the film goes to significant lengths to authenticate its portrait of Hypatia and 4th century Alexandria.57 A striking example is the decision to model some of the costumes 53  Arguably, Agora hints at such a possibility when Hypatia’s appeal is twice echoed later in the film, first by Orestes in attempt at mediating between Christians and Jews (Agora 00:59:32 [12]), then by Synesius who, significantly, misrepresents her words. As Orestes announces his conversion to Christianity, Synesius enjoins Hypatia to follow suit (Agora 01:42:48 [20]): “Lady . . . Lady, years ago . . . years ago you taught us something. If . . . if two are equal to a third, they are all equal to each other. Do you remember? The three of us, we are all good people. And you . . . you are as Christian as we are.” Cf. Sharpe, “View from Above,” 40 – 41. 54   Agora 01:14:20 (14). 55   In his classic treatment of the genre, Sorlin claims that ultimately “[h]istory is no more than a useful device to speak of the present time” (Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History. Restaging the Past [Oxford: Blackwell, 1980], 208). Cf. e. g. Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past. Studies in Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1994), esp. 2 – 8 and, most recently, Mia E. M. Treacey, Reframing the Past. History, Film and Television (London / New York: Routledge, 2016), 1 – 12, which offers a concise account of previous scholarship. On the identity / alterity binary in historical films about Greco-Roman antiquity, see e. g. Wyke, Projecting the Past, 1 – 33 and William Fitzgerald, “Oppositions, Anxieties, and Ambiguities in the Toga Movie,” in Imperial Projections. Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (ed. S. R. Joshel, M. Malamud and M. Wyke; Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), 23 – 49. 56   Cf. e. g. Sotinel, “Agora: un peplum intellectuel”, who states: “Alejandro Amenábar n’est pas un cinéaste très subtil”, or Sophie Mayer, “Agora.” Sight & Sound 20.6 (2010): 60 (“. . . a transparent political allegory”). 57  For Agora’s reconstruction of Alexandria, see the materials in Andrade, Agora, 15 – 168 and the discussion in García, “City of Lights,” 115 – 116, 126 – 129. The Apollonian Cone features

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and hairstyles of its cast on the Egyptian mummy portraits from El Fayum.58 What is more, the film crew publicly insisted on their efforts to ensure historical plausibility and described their approach as “naturalist” or “hyper-realistic”.59 Amenábar himself repeatedly declared that his cinematography and mise-enscène was influenced by a specifically documentary aesthetic:60 From the beginning of the project, my goal, formally speaking, was to make the audience feel like they’re following a CNN team documenting something that happened in the 4th century. That sense of urgency, like breaking news, was the basis of my approach.

Indeed, Agora repeatedly balances panoramic long shots with hand-held camera footage evocative of the immediacy of a news broadcast,61 which gives a veristic feel to the film and further authenticates its depiction of the past. But paradoxically it is this alignment with the aesthetic of modern mass media that also undermines the film’s claim to authenticity as it reveals the film’s own historical situatedness. Agora shows its history in accordance with contemporary aesthetic protocols and accommodates contemporary viewing habits. To what degree, then, is its account preconditioned or distorted by them? Agora does not shy away from anachronism; on the contrary, even beyond formal choices, Agora’s Alexandria is ripe with allusions to recent and contemporary events. Above all, it is the idea of religious extremism and violence, as it has crystallised in Western discourse after 9 / 11, that looms large in Amenábar’s Alexandria. As has often been observed, the most overt sign of this presence can again be found in the costume design. Agora’s parabalani are all clad in heavy black cloth, they sport beards, hoods and headbands, and wear broad leather belts that resemble modern-day ammunition belts (Fig. 4): their attire is clearly modelled on the image of Taliban fighters who have had conspicuous presence in American and European television news ever since the beginning prominently in Agora 01:15:49 (14); cf. Andrade, Agora, 170 – 175 and the discussion in Sharpe, “View from Above,” 38 – 39. Hypatia’s commentary on the Conic Sections of Apollonius is attested in the Suda s. v. Ὑπατία (which derives from Hesychius’ Onomatologus) cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 2013 ad loc. (p. 330). 58   In a statement published in the pressbook that accompanied Agora’s premiere at Cannes, Amenábar hailed the evocative power of the portraits (Agora. A Film by / Una película de Alejandro Amenábar [pressbook; Festival de Cannes, 2009], XXIII): “The quality of these portraits is something you can’t imagine until you see it. After seeing how little is conserved of ancient Alexandria, it was quite moving to find these portraits, which were like photographs; it was as if someone had delved back into those 1800 years and brought you the faces of its inhabitants.” Cf. Andrade, Agora, 54 – 55, 76 – 78. 59   Cf. e. g. Mateo Gil (co-writer of the screenplay) in Agora (pressbook; Festival de Cannes), XXVII, XXX; Xavi Giménez (director of photography) in Andrade, Agora, 114 and Félix Bergés (visual effects) in Andrade, Agora, 182. 60   Amenábar in Agora Agora (pressbook; Festival de Cannes), IV, V and in Andrade 2009, 69; cf. Xavi Giménez (director of photography) in Andrade, Agora, 180 f. 61   Cf. Jordan, Amenábar, 253 – 256.

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Fig. 4:  Agora (2009): Hypatia is seized by a group of parabalani. Courtesy of Mod Producciones.

of the US‑led War in Afghanistan in 2001.62 Interestingly, the film crew in their public interventions has been no less forthcoming about these anachronistic interpolations than about the strides they made towards historical accuracy.63 Against this backdrop, it is telling that Amenábar invokes the American broadcaster CNN rather than any European news outlet. Together with its subsidiary CNN International, the network evolved into the dominant global news provider during the 1990s and early 2000s.64 As such it played a crucial role in reforming established journalistic protocols during the Bush-era’s “War on Terror.” It is in this period that “embedded journalists” started to accompany troops 62   Cf. e. g. Giorgio Avezzù, “‘E i mondi ancora si volgono sotto i suoi piedi bianchi.’ Ipazia e Agora di Alejandro Amenábar.” Dionysus ex machina 1 (2010): 335 – 336; Stefano Moschini, “Experiencing Agora,” Y Myfyriwr Ymchwil / The Student Researcher 1.1: 31 – 32. Alex McAuley, “Hypatia’s Hijab: Visual Echoes of 9 / 11 in Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora,” Mouseion 13 (2016): 131 – 152 focuses exclusively on post-9 / 11 imagery in Agora; cf. Filippo Carlà-Uhink, “Thinking through the Ancient World: ‘Late Antique Movies’ as a Mirror of Shifting Attitudes towards Christian Religion,” in A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen, ed. A. J. Pomeroy (Malden: Wiley, 2017), 321 – 322. 63   E. g. Amenábar in Agora (pressbook; Festival de Cannes), XXVIII f. 64   Cf. e. g. Carla B. Johnson, Winning the global TV news game (Boston: Focal Press, 1995). The coverage of the 1991 Gulf War played a pivotal role in CNN’s rise; on this, see e. g. the analysis in Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1992); Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. P. Patton (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995).

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in combat in unprecedented numbers and televised the American war effort in real time, providing the network with quintessentially “breaking news.”65 Agora’s long depiction of the sack of the Serapeum comprises a sequence that almost amounts to a re-enactment of the most iconic moment of the American campaign in Iraq. The Christian masses storm through the temple precinct; eventually, a group of them reach the giant bronze statue of Serapis, tie its neck in the noose of heavy ropes and tear it down.66 As the statue breaks and falls to the ground, the men rush forth to batter its remains. From the iconography of the statue to the choreography of the moving mass, the scene is modelled on the toppling of the giant statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos square and its notorious depiction on TV (see Fig. 5 and 6).67 The toppling of the statue on the morning of 9 April 2003 was broadcast live on CNN, and repeated every 7 ½ minutes during the following news cycle (every 4 ½ minutes on Fox News) and hailed as one of the “indelible moments [of history] like the fall of the Berlin wall.”68 But while the Firdos square footage was first embraced as a symbol of the liberation of Iraq, its authenticity was soon called into question as numbers of the Iraqi civilians had been exaggerated while American troops had intervened and possibly stage-managed the event.69 Is it important that Agora here references a notoriously problematic and contested news item? Do we get the authenticating aesthetics without the authenticity? Surprisingly, perhaps, the stylised TV coverage of the “War on Terror” also offers a striking parallel for Agora’s five long takes on planet Earth from Outer Space, arguably the film’s most salient formal feature (Fig. 7). The cosmic vistas significantly add to the film’s structure as they occur at crucial junctures of the narrative:70 at the beginning, middle and end of each of Agora’s halves.71 While 65   Cf. e. g. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, Television and Terror. Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Basingstoke / NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 74 – 98; Deborah L. Jaramillo, Ugly War, Pretty Package. How CNN and Fox News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy: Terrorism, War and Election Battles, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 45 – 68. 66   Agora 00:48:59 (10). 67   For the parallel, see e. g. McAuley, “Hypatia’s Hijab,” 145. 68   Quoted and discussed in Sean Aday, John Cluverius, and Steven Livingston, “As Goes the Statue, So Goes the War: The Emergence of the Victory Frame in Television Coverage of the Iraq War,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 49.3 (2005): 321 – 327; then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the same comparison in a public statement minutes after the first broadcast (quoted in Peter Maass, “The Toppling. How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war,” The New Yorker (10 January 2011) (accessible on-line at www.newyorker.com / magazine / 2011 / 01 / 10 / the-toppling). 69   On the controversial reception of the footage, see e. g. Jaramillo, Ugly War, 197 – 200 and esp. Maass, “The Toppling.” 70   See e. g. Avezzù, “‘E i mondi’” Sharpe, “View from Above,” 41 – 45; Aldo Viganò, “Ipazia e le formiche nell’agorà di Amenábar,” in Figure di Ipazia, ed. G. Sertoli (Roma: Aracne, 2014), 255 – 263. 71   1) The film starts with the camera moving tangentially from Earth to the moon while Hypatia’s lecture is heard from the off (Agora 00:00:53 [1]). 2) Halfway through the first half,

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Fig. 5 and 6:  The toppling of the statue of Serapis (Agora [2009], courtesy of Mod Producciones) and the toppling of the Firdos square statue of Saddam Hussein on 9 April 2003 (wikimedia commons).

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Fig. 7:  Agora (2009): Planet Earth seen from Outer Space. Courtesy of Mod Producciones.

the first act of Agora relies on cuts and dissolves to transition from the events in Alexandria to the view of the cosmos and vice versa, the second connects the two levels in elaborate zooming shots. At the beginning of Agora’s second half, the camera zooms in one steady movement from a view of planet Earth to the African continent, the Nile delta, the cityscape of Alexandria until it rests on the Serapeum, and at the film’s closure, it reverses this trajectory, continuously zooming out of the Serapeum until it comes to rest on a view of planet Earth.72 Again, this relates to aesthetic regimes first established and popularised during the war in Iraq (2003 ff.) when TV stations started to employ Earthviewer – which was later acquired by Google and developed into Google Earth – and similar applications to visualise the war effort in digitally animated satellite footage: from simulated fly-overs to the “projectile gaze” of the bomb descending on its target.73 Indeed, Agora’s view of the Serapeum from above eerily echoes the satOrestes plays the aulos for Hypatia when the film zooms out of the theatre, briefly rests on the cityscape of Alexandria before it cuts to a partial view of the globe, then back to Orestes in the theatre whose music is heard throughout (Agora 00:20:20 [5]). 3) After Davus’ manumission at the conclusion of the first half, the film shows a long shot of Alexandria’s streets, then fades to black; after a fade-in of the globe, the camera, in one steady movement, zooms in on planet Earth until it reaches the oculus in the roof of the Serapeum; the wailing heard during the entire sequence is then revealed as the mourning for Theophilus (Agora 00:56:29 [12]). 4) At the height of the pogrom, Hypatia unsuccessfully enjoins the city council to act; the film cuts to black and then shows Earth and moon at considerable distance while the cries of Alexandria’s Jews merge with the dramatic oratorio composed by Dario Marianelli (Agora 01:14:23 [15]). 5) After Hypatia’s death, the film cuts to a bird’s-eye view of the oculus in the Serapeum roof; as Davus leaves the building, the camera steadily zooms out of Alexandria until it reaches a total view of the globe. 72   See note above, sub 3) and 4). 73   Cf. Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005), 77 – 107 and Roger Stahl, “Becoming Bombs: 3D Animated Satellite Imagery and the Weaponization of the Civic Eye,” Media Tropes eJournal 2.2 (2010): 83: “One moment the viewer embodied the eye that sees everything from nowhere [. . .]. The next moment the gaze might take

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ellite imagery of military compounds and alleged weapons’ facilities in the desert that featured so prominently in the coverage of the war in Iraq. Arguably, the employment of satellite imagery and the “orbital gaze” in news media serves to “sanitise” warfare by effacing direct human agency and suffering, displacing the war theatre “away from the axis of the body and toward the axis of technology.”74 Divorced from palpable human experience, warfare is re-conceptionalised as a series of precise and calculated interventions. Agora’s cosmic vistas follow a similar logic of distancing human experience. But as Agora juxtaposes them with graphic battle scenes – “plenty of people being Homerically slashed in half,” as one critic put it –75 they assume a fundamentally different value in the film. In Agora, the distancing gesture of the cosmic views do not efface the violence and suffering but put them into perspective: sectarianism and strife are exposed as insignificant and ultimately futile. As has often been observed, Amenábar provides a visual gloss on these distanced views when, immediately before the sack of the Serapeum, he shows a brief close-up of ants.76 Only seconds later, Agora shows the plundering masses from above. As they make their way through the temple precinct, their movements unnaturally accelerated, they appear not only dehumanised and bestial, but also small and irrelevant.77 With its men-as-ants and cosmic vistas of planet Earth, Agora here draws on tropes of relativism that go back to antiquity and dovetail with Hypatia’s clear-cut distinction between the “perfection of the stars” and imperfect human experience.78 In their application to space photography, however, these have, again, highly specific resonances in recent history that potentially undermine the idea of relativism. the form of an aircraft descending, a missile cruising, a bomb dropping, or a bullet speeding. This process accelerated broader trends toward fully identifying the gaze with the twin essences of the war machine, speed and global acquisitiveness. Out of this interplay arose the visual trope of the ‘earth zoom,’ which, as a god might, beheld the entire world before plunging down to claim possession of any one of its details.”. Cf. e. g. Neil Smith, “History and philosophy of geography: real wars, theory wars,” Progress in Human Geography 16.2 (1992): 257 – 271 on related phenomena in the coverage of the Gulf War (1990 – 1991). 74   Stahl, “Becoming Bombs,” 79; cf. e. g. Derek Gregory, “From a View to a Kill. Drones and Late Modern War,” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (2011): 188 – 215 on the “scopic regimes” underlying current drone strike programmes. 75   Mayer, “Agora,” 60. 76   Agora 00:42:50 (9). 77   For the aerial shots during the sack of the Serapeum, see Agora 00:47:36 (10) – the pagan attack on the Christians is shown in a similar perspective (00:28:54 [6]). On Agora’s ants, see esp. Viganò, “Ipazia e le formiche.” 78   The perspective relativism of the “view from above” as well as the ant comparison have significant presence in ancient philosophical and ethical discourse: e. g. Cic. rep. 6.20 – 25; Sen. NQ 1 praef. 7 – 11; Lucian, Icar. 18 – 19. For this tradition, see Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercices from Socrates to Foucault, ed. A. I. Davidson, trans. M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 238 – 250; Gareth D. Williams, The Cosmic Viewpoint. A Study of Seneca’s Natural Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17 – 53. Cf. Sharpe, “View from Above,” 42 – 45 who bases his analysis of Agora on Hadot 1996.

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As an epiphenomenon of the Soviet-American “Space Race,” the origins of space photography are closely connected to the development of the “military-industrial complex” of the superpowers whose claim to power they were seen to substantiate – the God’s eye view of planet Earth is the ultimate embodiment of the imperial gaze. As Denis Cosgrove and others have shown, however, critical discourse similarly drew on space photography, and its ideological value remained deeply contested.79 Especially, the publication of the so called “one world” pictures – the view of Earth in its entirety ‑incited major debates in the 1970’s. While seen as an emblem of the geo-cultural aspirations of the superpowers, the pictures were also re-claimed in pacifist discourse, as the ultimate proof of the fragility of the one, shared planet that has come under threat by the arms race and the logic of “mutual assured destruction.”80 One of the most prominent exponents of this scientific humanism was astrophysicist Carl Sagan whose publications and media presence in the 1970s and 1980s popularised astronomical learning on an unprecedented scale. Sagan introduced an audience of millions to astronomy and, importantly, to the history of astronomical thought, above all, with the thirteen episodes of Sagan’s TV documentary Cosmos (1980)81 which Amenábar has variously cited as a decisive influence on Agora. While the entire series of Cosmos pitted man’s scientific achievements against his capacity for destruction, the last episode, entitled “Who speaks for Earth,” explicitly engaged with the threat of nuclear war and contrasted the bleak vision of nuclear Armageddon with the serene vista of Earth seen from Outer Space: Up there in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.82

With Sagan’s impassioned homily we come, once more, full circle. Not only does Agora’s engagement with astronomy share in the formal repertoire and didactic ethos of Cosmos,83 but Sagan crucially starts and ends his series with references to the astronomical learning in ancient Alexandria and to the exemplary figure of Hypatia. In fact, Cosmos played a crucial role in the popularisation of the 79   Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions. One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84.2 (1994): 270 – 294; cf. e. g. Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth. A Political History of the Space Age, 2nd ed.; (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 80   Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions,” esp. 281 – 289. 81   Full credits can be found on IMDb (http://www.imdb.com / title / tt0081846). I refer to the 2009 DVD release by Cosmos Studios inc. / Freemantle Home Entertainment. 82   Cosmos, ep. 13, 00:08:12 (2). 83   E. g. Jordan, Amenábar, 229 – 231, 255.

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Hypatia myth and, as Nacho García has recently shown, it also set a standard for the depiction of ancient Alexandria in film. In the first episode, Sagan retraces the origins of astronomy to the scholars and scientists of ancient Alexandria. As he explains their work, he is shown walking through the digital reconstruction of the Great Library –84 “the most iconic of all visual representations of the Library.”85 Already here, Hypatia is emphatically invoked as the last scholar to work in the library. Her death, Sagan explains, was “bound up” with the destruction of the library.86 This is explicated when Sagan returns to the Library halfway through the anti-war discourse of the last episode.87 Sitting on a marble bench in the digital Library, Sagan narrates Hypatia’s death in a sombre, elegiac mood:88 Hypatia’s death is set in parallel to the threat of nuclear destruction and symbolises the precariousness of human civilisation.89 Agora openly alludes to Sagan’s Cosmos, and these allusions, of course, further complicate the representation of history in Agora: the post‑9 / 11 peplum aligns itself with Cold War discourse and openly borrows from one of its bestknown instantiations. Indeed, the plot of Amenábar’s Agora can be understood as an expansion and development of the story of Hypatia that Sagan uses at the beginning and end of Cosmos. However, there is a crucial difference between Amenábar’s and Sagan’s presentation of Hypatia. While Sagan invokes Hypatia as one of the many heroes and heroines who have contributed to the history of astronomy, Amenábar focuses on her alone. Unlike her predecessor in Cosmos, Agora’s Hypatia does not form part of the history of science – she embodies it. 84

  Cosmos, ep. 1, 00:38:42 (5).  García, “City of Lights,” 116 – 117. 86   Cosmos, ep. 1, 00:41:39 (6): “And among these great men, there was also a great woman. Her name was Hypatia. She was a mathematician and an astronomer . . . the last light of the library . . . whose martyrdom is bound up with the destruction of this place, seven centuries after it was founded.” 87   Cosmos, ep. 13, 00:25:05 (4). 88   Sagan’s retelling of Hypatia’s fate closely echoes Gibbon’s account (see above, n. 33): “The Alexandria of Hypatia’s time, by then long under Roman rule, was a city in grave conflict. Slavery, the cancer of the ancient world, had sapped classical civilisation of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the focus, at the epicentre, of mighty social forces. Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, despised her, in part because of her close friendship with the Roman governor but also because she symbolised . . . she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, Hypatia continued to teach and to publish – until, in the year 415 AD, on her way to work, she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril’s followers. They dragged her from a chariot, tore of her clothes and flayed her flesh from her bones with abalone shells. Her remains were burnt, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.” 89   See Sagan’s comment on the destruction of the Library: “The glory you see around me is nothing but a memory, it does not exist. The last remains of the library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death. It’s as if an entire civilisation had undergone a sort of self-inflicted, radical brain surgery so that most of its memories, discoveries and passions were irrevocably wiped out.” 85

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Agora presents us with a highly self-conscious form of historical fiction: not the narrative of one episode in history but rather the phantasma of all history collapsed into one episode.90 It is the scientific narrative that holds the key to this peculiar self-reflective twist. Agora’s depiction of how Hypatia discovers fundamental astronomical principles inevitably interacts with the form of the film itself. As we have seen, Agora prominently features types of footage and cinematographic effects that are inextricably intertwined with the technological advances of the “Space Age.” In a film centred on the production of astronomical knowledge, the technical preconditions of these techniques come to the fore. Agora cannot but remind us that the mere existence of such elaborate views from Outer Space implies not only that the astronomical problems addressed by Hypatia have, by now, been resolved but that they must have, in turn, led to numerous other and more complex discoveries. This is more striking as Agora’s narrative of scientific discovery is offset against ideas of destruction, loss, and oblivion. Time and again, Agora gestures toward the precariousness of knowledge, most powerfully, of course, in the drastic scene on the destruction of the library. Its importance is explicated in a scene during the siege when an old man overhears Hypatia and her students and refers to the lost works of Aristarchus:91 “His work was lost in the fire that destroyed the mother library. This is why we have to take great care of this place. Our library is all that remains of the wisdom of man.” What, then, of the knowledge produced by Agora’s Hypatia? Not only does her death at the end of Agora’s second half mirror the pillaging of the library at the end of the first but the film’s end titles remind us of that “none of her works survived.”92 Curiously, the interaction of the film’s narration with its cinematographic form puts the loss of her works into perspective. The scientific work of Agora’s Hypatia, it appears, is not irretrievably lost. On the contrary. If her findings were suppressed and forgotten with her death, Agora suggests, this loss of knowledge has been more than compensated. Amenbar’s film, thus, curiously nullifies the heroic feats of its heroine. To be sure, it is not impossible to reconcile this with the film’s depiction of Hypatia on the vanguard of astronomical research; the history of science could eventually have caught up with what once was a cutting-edge discovery. However, there is an alternative explanation for the fact that Hypatia’s science, in spite of its superficial prominence in the film, ultimately appears under erasure. It was never more (or less!) than the projection of the history of science itself.

90

  Cf. Viganò, “Ipazia e le formiche,” esp. 258, 261 – 262.   Agora 00:40:43 (10). 92   See above, n. 39. 91

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Amenábar’s Hypatia embodies the longue durée of the history of astronomy. On various occasions Amenábar described the creation of Agora as an act of “condensation” that would comprise “two thousand years of astronomy.”93 Indeed, it seems that the experiments and discoveries of later astronomers from Copernicus to Kepler have been deliberately attributed to Hypatia. Interestingly, the very last of Agora’s endtitles points to this origin of the film’s astronomy: “1200 years later, in the 17th century, the astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered that one of these curves, the ellipsis, governs the motion of the planets.”94 The endtitle is unsettling. Has not Agora just shown us that Hypatia made this discovery? Indeed, most viewers seem to have read the endtitle as a sarcastic remark. Of course, Kepler only re-discovered the elliptical orbits, and the attribution to him is the unjust result of Hypatia’s savage murder and the obliteration of her work. Or is it? This ambiguity mirrors the chronological insecurities that we have observed in Hypatia’s quote from Synesius’ letter (or was it the other way around?). Again, Agora’s representation of history, it turns out, is fundamentally preposterous. The endtitle explodes Agora’s veristic conceit and exposes the fictional character of its narrative. At the very end of the film, the director unhinges and undermines the diegetic universe he has so faithfully depicted – an authorial “sleight of hand” not unfamiliar from Amenábar’s explorations into the genre of thriller in Abre los ojos (1997), The Others (2001) or most recently Regression (2015). It has become a truism of reception studies that meaning is only ever realised “at the point of its reception.”95 Meaning is never fully realized but always and necessarily deferred. As William Batstone has recently argued, this implies a complex form of temporality where past, present and future merge as reception strives for an ever-elusive “future perfect of the present.”96 Agora, I would argue, plays precisely with this tropology of reception. It is interesting in this respect 93   Amenábar in Andrade, Agora, 59 – 67, here 67: “Hemos hecho un gran esfuerzo de condensación. Nuestra intención inicial era abarcar un gran período de la historia, dos mil años de astronomía, y hubo que reducirlo” (“It was a great work of condensation. Our initial intention was to incorporate large portion of history, two thousand years of astronomy, and it had to be reduced”); cf. Mateo Gil in Agora (pressbook; Festival de Cannes), X – XI. 94   For the full endtitles, see above, n. 39. 95  Martindale, Redeeming the text, 3. 96   William W. Batstone, “Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. C. Martindale and R. F. Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 9: “This is the point of reception: where words, not my words, not your words, intersected with the past (memory, tradition, even individual history, and, of course, the unconscious) and the future (desire, chance, and ideology) are repeated in the future perfect of the present. The iterability of the text ensures that it always eludes (plays out and out-plays) the maker; but it always eludes the receiver as well. When I have changed – and I will – it will be there and a new ‘I’ will make it flicker with presence and absence or with the fulness of being, a sublime or an abjected object.” Cf. Joanna Paul, “Working with Film: Theories and Methodologies,” in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. L. Hardwick and C. Stray (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 303 – 314 on the notion of Classical reception in cinema.

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that Amenábar in his comments on the movie repeatedly describes his shots from Outer Space as “the view of the Martians”97 – the historical narrative distilled from the present is seen from the vantage point of the imagined future of science fiction.98 In its circular movement, Agora enacts a vision of the “future perfect of the present” inherent in the tropology of reception as it is currently theorised.

Postscripts: Desiring Hypatia Perhaps most conspicuous and yet commonly overlooked is the play on this tropology of reception in the erotics of Agora. As has been observed, the film is greatly invested in Hypatia’s cool intellectualism but nevertheless incorporates the classic subplot of an amorous rivalry between the young aristocrat Orestes and the intelligent slave Davus in which Hypatia is reduced to the passive object of male desire.99 Even if Hypatia ultimately thwarts the advances of both suitors, their perspective nevertheless seems to encroach on the film’s narrative. Interestingly, it is Davus whose infatuation with Hypatia is given special prominence: the powerless slave wants to take possession of his mistress. Indeed, Agora repeatedly confronts us with or rather makes us complicit in the desiring gaze of the slave and later parabalanus. This is of course most pronounced in the final scene where he suffocates Hypatia in his embrace – the one point where Agora most conspicuously departs from the ancient sources. Alan Cameron has noted with some dismay that “Agora throws away the climax of the story: Hypatia is not lynched by fanatics, but discreetly suffocated by an unrequited lover!”, and undoubtedly, many film-goers will have been similarly puzzled by Agora’s ending. While Amenábar sidesteps the gruesome violence of the murder that, from antiquity onwards, has come to dominate accounts on Hypatia, however, it does not dispense with the erotics so often associated with her death. Indeed, the film’s final tableau of Hypatia standing upright and naked at the Church altar clearly references the notorious death scene in Charles Kingsley’s 1853 novel Hypatia and its visual echo in Charles William Mitchell’s painting from 1885.100  97   Amenábar ap. Jordan, Amenábar, 228: “A friend told me that I began making a film about Martians and ended up shooting one about Romans. In the long shots, Agora adopts the point of view of a Martian looking through a telescope.” (“Un amigo dice que empecé haciendo una película de marcianos y acabé rodando una de romanos. Agora tiene en los planos lejanos el punto de vista de un marciano mirando por un telescopio”).  98   Cf. Viaganò, “Ipazia e le formiche,” 263: “Per Amenábar, il passato, il presente e il futuro finiscono col diventare un tutt’uno, il divenire cessa di essere criterio della realtà e la Storia diventa un piccolo punto in movimento.”  99   Cf. e. g. Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 230 – 231. 100   The painting is discussed and reproduced in the contribution by Leonard to this volume. For a detailed discussion of Kingsley and Mitchell, see Goldhill, Victorian Culture, 32 – 33, 203 – 207; cf. e. g. Jaccottet, “Hypatie,” 149; García, “City of Lights,” 117 – 118.

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What is more, Davus’ killing of Hypatia appears fundamentally ambiguous. To be sure, Hypatia’s death in Davus’ arms spares her a long and painful death at the hands of the mob. At the same time, however, Davus’ embrace of the naked Hypatia uneasily echoes his attempted rape at the end of its first half.101 Hypatia’s murder is arguably the consummation of his desire – after all, the first prayer after his conversion to Christianity was a litany of possessive jealousy: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, revered be . . . Don’t let anyone else have her. Please, don’t let anyone else have her. Don’t let anyone else have her, don’t let anyone else have her, don’t let anyone else have her, don’t let anyone else have her, don’t let anyone else have her, don’t let anyone else have her!”102 In the light of these words, Davus’ killing looks distinctly less chivalrous. Interestingly, the scene of Hypatia’s death also formally enacts the fact that Davus now takes possession of Hypatia. The most striking feature of the scene are a sequence of flashbacks to earlier encounters between Davus and Hypatia.103 Joanna Paul has interpreted this as an unambiguously positive ending: “he holds her tight in an embrace strong enough to smother her to death, yet heartbreakingly tender as the film shows flashbacks to earlier, happier times.”104 But do the flashbacks really show happier times? Happy for whom? Agora, it seems to me, makes it quite clear that Davus is the focalizer of these memories. He looks at Hypatia as he smothers her. Hypatia herself, however, fixes her gaze on the oculus in the temple’s ceiling that from her perspective resembles the ellipsis of the planetary orbit. Indeed, her happiness lies there and there alone – not in the earlier encounters. As she has told Orestes in an earlier scene, it is finding a solution for the riddle of the planetary orbits that would make her “go to her grave a happy woman”.105 In her last gaze at the elliptical shape in the temple ceiling, Hypatia’s wish seems to be fulfilled. In the moment of her death, her scientific achievement is thus simultaneously validated and annulled. Her recognition that her hypothesis is true remains hers alone. As she stands there naked and exposed to her pursuers, Davus subjects her to his desire. Structurally, the flashbacks embody the reductionism this involves: All “memories” that we see in the flashbacks are scenes, which we have seen earlier in the film, repeated and recontextualised. But it is a highly selective process of self-recapitulation. Agora in its final scene, then, internally creates and displays its own 101

  Agora 00:53:34 (11).   Agora 00:23:11 (3); cf. Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 230. 103   Agora 01:52:25 (21). On the cinematic tradition semiotics of the flashbacks, see Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film. Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989) and Yannick Mouren, Le flash-back: analyse et histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005). 104   Paul, “Subverting Sex,” 233. 105   Agora 01:21:36 (16): “If I could just . . . just unravel this . . . just a little bit more . . . and just get a little closer to the answer, then . . . then I would – then I would go to my grave a happy woman.” 102

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tradition and shows us how the romantic desire of Davus, the one sub-plot of Agora most conspicuously interpolated into the historical narration,106 takes on a life of its own. It is by no means a coincidence that the death of Hypatia at the end of the second half of the movie recalls the destruction of the library at the end of the first. In her death Hypatia is transformed into a script – or a typeface? – readily re-appropriated and rewritten. Davus’ murder of Hypatia, which is both an act of loving devotion and a crime of passion, is the ultimate emblem of Hypatian reception: like Davus, it acquiesces in the death of Hypatia the woman in order to take possession of Hypatia the symbol.

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  On the introduction of Davus in the screenplay, see Andrade, Agora, 27 – 31, 46 – 47.

Appendix A The Principal Ancient Sources on Hypatia, Translated Alex Petkas and Dawn LaValle Norman I.a  From the Letters of Synesius of Cyrene Synesius’ epistolary corpus is an important source on Hypatia’s school, especially her students. Seven letters are addressed to his teacher, and are included below in full. Several other letters mention her explicitly, and we have excerpted relevant sections of them below. For these, we have followed the editorial choices of Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer in Hypatia: die spätantiken Quellen, eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia 16 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011). The translations are based on the two-volume Budé edition of Garzya and Roques, Synésios de Cyrène, Correspondance (Paris: Collection des universités de France, 2000). More extensive commentary on these letters is available in both. References to Synesius can be found throughout this volume, especially in the essays of Harich-Schwarzbauer, Petkas, and Seng. Synesius’ works are the only sources on Hypatia which predate her death. Letter 10: To the Philosopher Hypatia I greet you, and through you my most happy companions, O lady most blessed. For some time now I could have taken issue with the fact that I have not been deemed worthy of a letter. But now I know I have been overlooked by all of you, not because I have done any wrong, but because I have suffered many misfortunes – as many as a man can suffer. But if I could chance upon a letter of yours, and learn what situation you are dealing with lately (in any case you are in a better situation than me, and are enjoying a better disposed divinity), then I would only be doing half bad, since I would have good fortune in you. As things stand now, this is just one more of the difficulties which have siezed me: I have been deprived of, in addition to my children and friends and the good will of all, also the greatest thing: your most divine soul. I had thought that this of all things would remain constant for me, as something superior to divine interference and the currents of fate.

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Letter 15: To the Philosopher1 I have gotten into such a bad state that I need a hydroscope. Order it to be forged and assembled. It is a cylindrical pipe, the shape and dimensions of a flute. It has, along a straight line, the grooves with which we measure the weight of liquids. A cone caps it on one side, inserted inside it evenly, in such a way that the cone and the pipe share a base (this then is the ballast). Whenever you put the “flute” into the water, it will stand straight and allow you to count the grooves, which are the indicators of the weight. Letter 16: To the Same I dictated this letter to you as I was bedridden; may you receive it in good health, O mother and sister and teacher and, because of all these, benefactress, and every precious name and reality. But as for me, my bodily sickness is conditioned by a psychic cause. Little by little the remembrance of my lost children is expending me. It were better that Synesius live only up until he remained untried by these evils of life. Once they started, like a stream which had been blocked up they surged all at once, and overturned the sweetness of my life. May I cease living, or cease remembering the burial of my sons! But you, may you be well; and embrace our blessed companions, beginning from your father Theotecnus and Athanasius, then all in order. And if anyone new has joined them and become dear to your heart, and I owe him good will too because he is dear to you, then embrace him too on my behalf, as the dearest of friends. If my affairs matter anything to you, then you do me well. Even if they don’t matter to you, that does not bother me. Letter 41: To the Philosopher I seem to be playing the role of Echo. The voices I receive I offer back: I praise before you the marvelous Alexander. Letter 81: To the Philosopher Even if fortune can not take everything from me, she wants to take all that it can – she who has laid to rest my sons many and noble.2 But it will not take away my ability to choose the best things and offer them to those who are wronged. Certainly let fortune not prevail over our good judgment. I hate injustice then, 1

  The article is feminine, as in other such letters in this selection. Hypatia is the only addressee whose name appears in our MSS as simply “the Philosopher.” 2  Homer Il. 22.44.

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for that is something I can do. I would like to prevent it, but this too is among those things taken away – and that left me before my sons did. Once upon a time Milesians were battle-worthy.3 There once was a time when I too was a benefit to my friends and you called me “someone else’s good,” since I spent on others the reverence of those in power, they served as my hands. But now I am left abandoned by all, except if you have some influence. For I count you, together with virtue, as an unassailable good. You then are always influential, and may you always be so, and exercise that influence in the best way, and let it be an issue of interest to everyone who honors you, both private citizens and rulers, that Nicaeus and Philolaus, these beautiful and good youths and relatives of mine, return home in possession of what is theirs. Letter 124: To the Philosopher But if they do forget the dead in Hades,4 nonetheless I will remember my dear Hypatia even there. For my part, even though I am engulfed by the sufferings of my homeland, and grow resentful for her sake at what I see, every day enemy arms, and people being slaughtered like sacrificial victims, while I breathe air foul with the smell of rotting bodies, expecting to suffer similar things myself soon (indeed, who can be hopeful when even the environment is so very dim, overcome with the shadow of carrion birds?), nonetheless, even considering all this, I am glad to be in my country. How should I feel? For I am a Libyan, I was born here and look upon the tombs of my forefathers, which are still honorable. For your sake alone I will overlook my fatherland, and if I get some leisure, change my residence. Letter 154: To the Philosopher This year I have finished two books, the one after being inspired by God, the other by the calumny of men. For some of those in white robes and some of those in grey ones claimed that I was committing a crime against philosophy, by developing expertise in beauty of diction and rhythm, and by considering it worthwhile to make a point about Homer and about the rhetorical features of speeches; they claim that a lover of wisdom ought to be a hater of the word, and only occupy himself with the superhuman realm. As if they themselves have already become contemplators of the truths of Intellect, while such a thing is impossible for me, since I devote some free time out of my life to purify my tongue and to sweeten my thought! What led them to condemn me as being 3

 Arist. Plut. 1002. Cf. CPG 152, 80 (= Zenob. 5,80).  Homer Il. 22.388.

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suited only for play was that my Hunting with Dogs,5 after escaping my household in some unknown manner, has become a serious object of interest for a group of youths who are interested in Hellenism and charm; that, and some pieces of poetry carefully crafted and displaying “something of an archaic touch,” as we often say of statues. But some of them, with ignorance guiding their boldness, are readiest of all to discuss God (if you run into any of them, you will immediately hear something about their unsyllogistic syllogisms) and they drain out their words upon people who aren’t asking. This seems to serve their private interests: for these people are the source of those popular teachers in the cities, who are the Horn of Amalthea which they think they should use. I think you recognize this facile troupe which slanders a noble theme. These people expect me to want to be their student, and claim that they will in a very short time render me a most daring fellow in matters of God, able to hold forth day and night continually. But the other ones, who have finer tastes, are sophists much more godforsaken than the former. And they would like to be congratulated for the same accomplishments but aren’t lucky enough to do even that. And you know of some people who have been despoiled in the tax office, or at any rate convinced by some singular misfortune to turn to philosophy at the noontime of their life, from previously only using the gods’ names to swear in affirmations and denials, Plato-style. Their shadow would say something pertinent sooner than they would. Nevertheless their pretension is forceful. For wow, how high their eyebrow is stretched! and their hand props up their beard, and in other respects they go around more serious-faced than the busts of Xenocrates. These people presume to legislate to us something that rather benefits themselves, i. e. that nobody seem to know anything good in public: for they think that it will impugn their own credibility if someone who is a philosopher knows how to speak. They suppose that they can hide behind this pretension and seem like they are brimming with wisdom inside. Both of these groups have slandered me as someone who has expended serious energy on unworthy subjects: one of them because I do not blather the same things as they do, the other because I do not keep my mouth shut, and place their proverbial bull upon my tongue. These people were the reason the treatise6 was composed, and it answers to the voice of the one group, and the silence of the others. It has been produced as though addressing these latter, the silent maligners (and what a decent figure they cut!), but indeed it found a way to drag in also the former group. And it is intended to be not just a praise of wide learning but a display of it too. For I did not swear denials to the accusations, but rather I have ambitiously developed many passages in order that 5

  No longer extant.   The treatise is his Dio, or Life According to His Model.

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they might all the more accuse me. As it goes on to examine choices of lives, it praises philosophy as the most philosophical choice; and as for what we ought to think philosophy is exactly, you’ll have to ask the book. Finally it has made an apology on behalf my bookcases, since even these have caught some blame for containing uncorrected manuscripts. For the Telchines did not hold back even from these sorts of things. If each thing is in its proper place and all are executed with elegance, and content of the themes undertaken in every place is appropriate, and if it is divided under several headings in the way of that divine text Phaedrus which Plato produced about all the forms of the beautiful at once, but all are constructed so as to unite upon one single purpose, and if perhaps there results a persuasive argument which underlies the lax narration, and if conclusive proof results from this argument (as often happens in these cases) and if, too, a sense of sequence, then these are gifts of art and nature. But if someone does not lack practice in catching a certain divine face hiding beneath a cheaper form, as the Athenian craftsmen fashioned Aphrodite and the Graces, and these sorts of beauties of the gods, clothing them in the statues of Silenuses and Satyrs, then it will not escape that person that this text reveals many of the purest doctrines, hiding under the pretense of being extraneously added to other things, and by being scattered in the discourse quite capriciously and – so it would seem – naively. It is only the sick who experience the fits of chills caused by the moon, and similarly the flashes of concepts of the intellect are only received by those people whose intellective eye is healthy, for whom the God ignites the fire which is akin to Him. This light is the cause of intellective beings’ intellection, and of intelligible objects’ being understood, in the same way that the light in the material world unites vision to color, and if you remove that light, even though color be present the faculty which is fitted to it remains inactive. About all these things we will wait for you to judge. And if you decree that the work should be made public, it will be laid before rhetors together with philosophers. It will delight some, and it will benefit others; at least, that is, if it does not end up withdrawn by you, who are able to judge. But if it does not in your view seem worthy of the audience of the Hellenes, and if you, as I suppose, like Aristotle, place the truth above a friend, a thick and deep darkness will cover it and humans will never know that it was composed. Enough about that text. The other one7 God commanded and approved,8 and it is dedicated as a thank-offering to the faculty of imagination. In it one will find examined the entirety of the image-directed aspect of the soul, and there are also treated therein other dogmas which have never been examined philosophically by Hellenes. Why should one protract discussion of it here? Nonetheless it was com7

  The treatise On Dreams.  reading ἐνέκρινεν

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posed in its entirety during a single night, or rather the remainder of a night, the one which also brought me the vision urging me that it should be written down. There are two or three spots in the treatise where I, as though I were someone else, have become my own audience together with others who were present. Even now, as many times as I go over the text, a strange feeling comes over me, and a certain divine voice engulfs me, as the poetic expression goes. If then this experience is not my own only, and if it might happen for someone else as well, you will let me know. For you are indeed the first of the Hellenes after me to read it. So much for those hitherto unpublished works. In addition, in order that the number be perfect, I have added the speech On the Gift, which was written long ago during the time of the embassy, to a man who was influential with the emperor. And Pentapolis benefitted substantially both from the speech and from the gift. From Epistle 5, To Synesius’ brother Euoptius9 (l.  305 – 317) . . . Greet that most reverend philosopher, most beloved of the gods, and the blessed chorus which enjoys her divine voice, chief among them the most holy father Theoteknos, and our companion Athanasius. And I know that you share my opinion in ranking Gaius as practically a family member, that soul which is most concordant with ours. Together with these, let the wondrous grammarian Theodosius be greeted as well who, even if he is a prophet and has been hiding the fact from us (since he, foreseeing the bad situation I would be in, dropped his eagerness to travel with us), nevertheless I consider him a friend and greet him. As for you, may you never sail! But if it is ever unavoidable, at least don’t do it when the month is waning. From Epistle 133 To Olympius10 (l.  19 – 25) From now on I am changing my method of sending letters, and only trusting Peter. I think that Peter will bring at least this epistle through, taking it directly from that holy hand  – for I am sending it from Pentapolis to our common teacher Hypatia. She will give it to whomever she decides, and I know well that she will give it to the person she knows best. Letter 136: To his Brother (complete) May I gain from Athens as much as you hope, and end up convincing myself that I have become a hand and a finger wiser. But for the time being, I can share  9

  Euoptius probably studied with Hypatia as well.   Olympius, a Syrian, was a student of Hypatia.

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with you a taste of my new wisdom: after all, I am writing to you from Anagyros, and I’ve been to Sphettos, Thria, Kephisia and Phaleron – and damn the captain who brought me here! For the Athens of today holds nothing solemn but the famous names of its sites. Like a slaughtered victim’s hide is left as a token of the erstwhile animal, so, now that philosophy has emigrated, the visitor is left with the Academy, the Lycaeum, and the Painted Stoa to admire. The latter, which gave its name to the philosophy of Chrysippus, is now no longer “painted,” since the proconsul took down the paintings into which Polygnotus of Thasos laid his artistry. And so in our times, Egypt welcomes and rears the progeny of Hypatia; while Athens long ago was an abode of the wise, now it is solemnified by beekepers. Such is the case with that pair of Plutarchians who gather the youth in the theaters not by the repute of their discourses, but with the honeypots of Hymettus. From Epistle 137 To Herculian11 (l.  1 – 9) If Homer stated that the profit of Odysseus’ wandering was to see the cities and know the minds of many people – and his ports of call were not among charming men but Laistrygonians and Cyclopes – then I suppose the poem would have marvelously hymned your and my travel, which allowed us to have experience of things which are distrusted when merely reported. For we have become eyewitnesses of and heard with our own ears that genuine teacher (f.) of the mysteries of philosophy.

I.b  Synesius of Cyrene, On the Gift Synesius wrote On the Gift to accompany a silver stellar map, which he gave as a gift to an apparently important but otherwise unknown courtier at Constantinople name Paeonius. He refers to it at the end of Letter 154 (see above). The text is that of N. Terzaghi, Synesius of Cyrene: Opuscula. Rome: Typis officinae polygraphicae, 1944. From To Paeonius (On the Gift) (Terzaghi 310C – 311B, § 4.1 – 3) Since I found out about you from those who preceded me in getting to know you, and having myself realized after a brief time that there are sparks of astronomical interest in your soul, I want to ignite them and fan them high, building on what you already have. For astronomy is itself an exceedingly elevated subject, but may indeed become path of ascent to something more important: 11

  Herculian was an Egyptian, and also a student of Hypatia.

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I consider it a short ferry’s distance away from the ineffable theology. For the blessed body of heaven has taken matter as a foundation, while its movement is considered by the highest authorities in philosophy to be an imitation of the intelligible realm. And astronomy proceeds from demonstrative arguments in a way that admits of no dispute, and it relies upon geometry and arithmetic as its servants. If one were to call these an unbending rule of truth, he would not be far from the mark. I offer you a gift then, most fitting for me to offer and for you to receive. It is a work of my own design, but of things taught to me by my most august teacher (f.), and from the hand of the finest silversmith in Alexandria. I may add something beneficial to it achieving its goal if I offer some comments as a preface to it. Its goal is to call out the natural impulses to philosophy inside you.

II.  Sources Excerpted from Photius and the Suda Two Byzantine compilations, the Bibliotheca by the scholar-patriarch Photius and the anonymous Suda, preserve several sources on Hypatia. Damascius wrote his Life of his teacher Isidore in the early sixth century, and it contained many references to other relatively contemporary events and people, including Hypatia. It survives in fragments mainly drawn from Photius and the Suda, which were assembled by Clemens Zintzen, Damascii vitae isidori reliquiae (Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), and are also available with accompanying translation in Polymnia Athanassiadi, Damascius. The Philosophical History (Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 1999). The Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius, an Arian Christian from the early fifth century, also survives in fragments preserved in various authors. They were assembled in Joseph Bidez, Philostorgios, Kirchengeschichte. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913). The passage below comes from Photius. Hesychius of Miletus assembled a Dictionary of Learned Men (Onomatologus) in the sixth century, which survives in fragments. The text offered here is Harich-Schwarzbauer’s (Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 323 – 334) proposed reconstruction, drawn directly from the Suda. Karl Müller, Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum. Vol. 4 (Paris: Ambrosius Firmin Didot, 1886), 176, attributes rather less of the Suda entry to Hesychius, but we have chosen to offer the more generous selection here. For detailed commentary on these passages, see Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer in Hypatia: die spätantiken Quellen, eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert. Sapheneia 16 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011).

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Damascius Vita Isidori *102 (Suda IV 644, 1 – 645, 19, s. v. Hypatia) This woman was born and nurtured and educated in Alexandria. She had a more noble nature than her father, and was not satisfied with lessons in mathematics with her father, but took to the rest of philosopy most nobly. This woman would put on a plain robe and make appearances right in the middle of the city, and explain in public Plato, Aristotle, or the works of any other of the philosophers to anyone who wished. In addition to her teaching activity she ascended to the summit of practical virtue, becoming just and prudent, and she remained a virgin, though she was so charming and beautiful that one of her students fell in love with her. He was not able to restrain his desire, but allowed her to sense his feelings. The vulgar reports say that Hypatia freed him from his sickness through music. But the truth is that the state of music was long ago ruined, and instead that she proffered one of her feminine rags. So, tossing it to him and demonstrating the sign of impure material existence she said, “This indeed is what you love, my boy, nothing beautiful.” In shame and shock at the unseemly demonstration, his soul was diverted, and he became more prudent. The rest of the polis, as one might expect, embraced her and revered her especially, since she was who she was: voluble and precise in her discourse, and in her deeds wise and politic. The rulers, too, would always come to her when they were dealing with political matters of the city, as used to happen continually at Athens. For even if the reality of philosophy was lost, at least the name of it still seemed grand and admirable to the people holding the first place in governing the state. It happened one time, for instance, that the bishop of the opposing party, Cyril, was stopping by her house, and saw a great shoving about the doors, men and horses mixed, some coming in, some going out, and some just standing there. When he asked what the multitude was and about whom such a racket filled the house, he heard from the attendants that the philosopher Hypatia was taking visitors at the moment, and that it was her house. When he heard this his soul was so stung that he straightaway began to plot her murder, the most unholy of all murders. For when she went out according to her custom, a great crowd of beastly men, truly wicked and knowing neither the justice of the gods nor the indignation of men, did away with the philosopher, inflicting this greatest defilement and reproach upon our fatherland. Even the king was upset about it [. . . and something would have happened]12 if Aedesius had not accepted bribes. He removed the punishment of the slaughterers but brought it upon himself and upon his descendants thereafter, and his offspring payed the penalty. 12

  There seems to be a lacuna in the text here.

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Damascius Vita Isidori, Epit. Phot 164 Zintzen Isidore was very different from Hypatia, not only in that he was a man and she a woman, but in the way that a true philosopher differs from a geometer. Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History 8.9 (Philostorgius) says that Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, trained with her father in mathematics, and became much greater than her teacher, especially in the art of astronomy, and she was a professor to many in this discipline. The impious one [i. e. Philostorgius] adds that when Theodosius the Younger was emperor the poor woman was ripped apart by those who championed the homoousian faith. Hesychius (Suda IV 644,1 – 11) Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the geometer and Alexandrian philosopher, herself a philosopher well known to many. She was the wife of Isidore the philosopher.13 She was at her peak under the emperor Arcadius. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus, the Astronomical Canon, and a commentary on the Conics of Apollonius. This woman was ripped apart by the Alexandrians, and her body was abused and scattered throughout the city. She suffered this because of jealousy over her exceeding wisdom, and especially concerning her mastery of astronomy. Some say it was Cyril who was responsible, other say it was the instinctive brashness and unruliness of the Alexandrians. For they did the same to many of their own bishops – take for example George and Proterius.

III.  Socrates Scholasticus and his Latin Imitators Socrates’ account of Hypatia has been well-served elsewhere in this volume, specifically in the chapters by Walter Beers and Mareile Haase. Readers are encouraged to consult Appendix B, which features a phrase-by-phrase commentary on the second half of this passage, which covers Hypatia’s death. Socrates’ work became fundamental to much other later historiography, such as the translation of Cassiodorus / Epiphanius. Composed in the sixth century, the Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartita was crafted as a twelve-book Latin composite of the three fifth-century Greek church histories of Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen and Theodoret of Cyrrhus. According to its preface, the hist. eccl. trip. was a joint project 13

  Hypatia was not the wife (Gk. γυνή, “woman”) of Isidore. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 326 discusses how this error might be explained by a misinterpretation of the Damascius passage from Photius (Epit. Phot. 164 Zintzen).

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between Cassiodorus and a certain monk working in the Vivarium scriptorium named Ephiphanius Scholasticus. Underpinning all of Books 11 and 12 if the hist. eccl. trip. is Book 7 of the Hist. eccl. of Socrates. The Cassiodorus / Epiphanius translation tracks Socrates’ text fairly closely, but for some differences, see Appendix B. Editions: Socrates Scholasticus’ Hist. eccl.: Günther C. Hansen and Manja Širinjan, eds., Kirchengeschichte: Sokrates (Berlin: Akademie, 1995) and Pierre Périchon and Pierre Maraval, eds., Socrate de Constantinople, Histoire Ecclésiastique Livre VII, Sources chrétiennes 506 (Paris: Le Cerf, 2007). Cassiodorus / Epiphanius’ hist. eccl. trip.: Walterius Jacob and Rudolphus Hanslik, eds. Historia ecclesiastica tripartita: Historiae ecclesiasticae ex Socrate Sozomeno et Theodorito in unum collectae et nuper de Graeco in Latinum translatae libri numero duodecim. (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1952). Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica 7.14 – 15 But the frightfulness of the quarrel between Cyril and Orestes did not stop there. It was extinguished rather by another event which happened shortly after those we just described. There was a woman in Alexandria named Hypatia. She was the daughter of Theon the philosopher, and advanced so far in education that she exceeded the philosophers of her day. She derived her Platonic teaching from the tradition of Plotinus, and offered lessons in all philosophical subjects to those interested. For this reason people from all over who wanted to study philosophy flocked to her side. For the additional fact of her dignified confidence in speaking, which came from her cultured background, she began to have respectable face-to-face interactions with the political authorities, and there was no shame when she would be present in the middle of men. For because of her superlative temperance everyone revered her all the more, and all were captivated. It was against this woman then that envy armed itself. For when she was meeting more frequently with Orestes, this fact stirred up slander against her among the common folk in the church, to the effect that she was the one not allowing Orestes to re-establish friendship with Cyril. And thus some hot-headed men plotted together, their leader was Peter the Reader, and they waited for the woman returning home from somewhere. They threw her out of her carriage and dragged her to the church which is called the Caesareum, and stripping her clothes off, they killed her with potsherds, then ripped her limb from limb, gathered her limbs together to the so-called Kinaron, and cremated them. This brought great opprobrium upon Cyril and to the Alexandrian church. For murders and fights and things like that are entirely foreign to those who are followers of Christ. And these things were carried out in the fourth year

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of Cyril’s episcopacy, during the tenth consulship of Honorius and the sixth of Theodosius, in the month of March during the fasting period. Cassiodorus / Epiphanius, Historia Ecclesiastica Tripartia 11.12 There was in Alexandria a certain woman named Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the philosopher, who was so erudite that she outshone all the philosophers of her time, and she herself took up the leadership of the Platonic school that followed in the footsteps of Plotinus and taught all philosophical lectures. Because of this, all were running to her on account of her clear fidelity of teaching. She was also frequenting the judges and was without shame as she modestly mixed with men, while everyone honoured her for her chastity. Therefore, jealousy then rose up against this woman. While she was going through a crowd to Orestes, the Church’s people were set in motion against her, as if she had kept him from friendship with the bishop. Wherefore, some conspirators, the leader of whom was a certain lector named Peter, were struck with the harshest fever. They watched the woman returning to her own home, and taking her down from her transport, they dragged her to the church which is called Caesar’s, and once they had stripped her of her clothes, they killed her with stones. Afterwards, having torn her to pieces, limb-by-limb in that place which is called Cinarus, they burned her body with fire. This affair caused serious resentment towards Cyril and the Alexandrian church, for murders and fights are foreign to Christians. These deeds were done in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate, the tenth year of Honorius’ consulate, the sixth year of Theodosius’ consulate, in the month of March, when the Lenten fasts were underway.

IV.  John Malalas John Malalas was a Greek world chronicler from Antioch in the mid-sixth century. He preserves a brief notice about Hypatia in his Chronographia. The translation is based on the text of I. Thurn, Ioannis Malalae chronographia, (Berlin / New York: De Gruyter, 2000). John Malalas, Chronographia 14.12 At that time, having been emboldened by their bishop (Cyril), the Alexandrians murdered and burned with firewood Hypatia, the famous philosopher, who was greatly esteemed. She was an old woman.

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V. John of Nikiu John of Nikiu’s Chronicle is a universal history beginning with Adam and Eve and ending with the period immediately after the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century. John himself was a Coptic bishop of the city of Nikiu in Upper Egypt during the invasions, and his account is the earliest and best for this period. Written originally either in Greek or Coptic,14 the Chronicle was translated into a (lost) Arabic version from which an Ethiopic translation was made in the seventeenth century, which is the only version that survives. It is upon this very late Ethiopic version that the following translation was made by R. H. Charles. The chapter summaries in the preface to the work in some places do not correspond to the current content of the text, and so we have included both here. Chronicle Preface, summary of chapters. Trans. R. H. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, translated form Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text (London: Williams and Northgate, 1916), 10. Chapter LXXXIV. . . . And concerning the anathema of Nestorius and the victory of Cyril. And further concerning a heathen woman of Alexandria and the tumults which she caused between the Jews and Christians in Alexandria. And how the holy Cyril took the Synagogue of the Jews and made it a church in consequence of his controversy with the Jews. And how they dragged the heathen woman through the streets until she died. And how they burned her body with fire by the command of the patriarch, Abba Cyril. Chronicle 84.87 – 103. Trans. R.  H.  Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text (London: Williams and Northgate, 1916), 100 – 102. The footnotes to this passage are likewise drawn from Charles. 87.  And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles. 88. And the governor of the city honoured her exceedingly; for she had beguiled him through her magic. And he ceased attending church as had been his custom. But he went once under circumstances of danger. And he not only did this, but he drew many believers to her, and he himself received the unbelievers at his house. 89. And on a certain day when they were making merry 14   Phil Booth, “Shades of Blues and Greens in the Chronicle of John of Nikiou,” ByzZ 104 (2011), 556 – 557 outlines the views on either side.

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over a theatrical exhibition connected with dancers, the governor of the city15 published (an edict) regarding the public exhibitions in the city of Alexandria: and all the inhabitants of the city had assembled there (in the theatre). 90. Now Cyril, who had been appointed patriarch after Theophilus, was eager to gain exact intelligence regarding this edict. 91. And there was a man named Hierax, a Christian possessing understanding and intelligence, who used to mock the pagans but was a devoted adherent of the illustrious Father the patriarch and was obedient to his monitions. He was also well versed in the Christian faith. 92. (Now this man attended the theatre to learn the nature of this edict.) But when the Jews saw him in the theatre they cried out and said: ‘This man has not come with any good purpose, but only to provoke an uproar.’ 93. And Orestes the prefect was displeased with the children of the holy church, and had Hierax seized and subjected to punishment publicly in the theatre, although he was wholly guiltless. 94. And Cyril was wroth with the governor of the city for so doing, and likewise for his putting to death an illustrious monk of the convent of Pernôdj16 named Ammonius, and other monks (also). And when the chief magistrate17 of the city heard this, he sent word to the Jews as follows: ‘Cease your hostilities against the Christians.’ 95. But they refused to hearken to what they heard; for they gloried in the support of the prefect who was with them, and so they added outrage to outrage and plotted a massacre through a treacherous device. 96. And they posted beside them at night in all the streets of the city certain men, while others cried out and said: ‘The church of the apostolic Athanasius is on fire: come to its succour, all ye Christians.’ 97. And the Christians on hearing their cry came forth quite ignorant of the treachery of the Jews. And when the Christians came forth, the Jews arose and wickedly massacred the Christians and shed the blood of many, guiltless though they were. 98. And in the morning, when the surviving Christians heard of the wicked deed which the Jews had wrought, they betook themselves to the patriarch. And the Christians mustered all together and went and marched in wrath to the synagogues of the Jews and took possession of them, and purified them and converted them into churches. And one of them they named after the name of St. George. 99. And as for the Jewish assassins they expelled them from the city, and pillaged all their possessions and drove them forth wholly despoiled, and Orestes the prefect was unable to render them any help. 100. And thereafter a multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate – now this Peter was a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ – and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect 15

  The text adds ‘and he’.   The Coptic word for the desert of Nitria, according to Zotenberg. Cf. Socrates, Hist. Eccles. vii.14. 17   This is apparently wrong. It should be ‘Cyril’. 16

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through her enchantments. 101. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her seated on a (lofty) chair; and having made her descend they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesarion. Now this was in the days of the fast. 102. And they tare off her clothing and dragged her [till they brought her] through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire. 103. And all the people surrounded the patriarch Cyril and named him ‘the new Theophilus’; for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.

Appendix B Hypatia’s Death According to Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15:  A Textual Commentary Mareile Haase Socrates’ brief account of Hypatia’s death has met with a variety of interpretations, many of them predicated upon contradictory views about the actual meaning of the Greek text of Hist. eccl. 7.15. The following commentary, which focuses on select phrases and words, aims to resolve some of these contradictions.*

Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15.5 – 7 5. Καὶ δὴ συμφρονήσαντες ἄνδρες τὸ φρόνημα ἔνθερμοι, ὧν ἡγεῖτο Πέτρος τις ἀναγνώστης, ἐπιτηροῦσι τὴν ἄνθρωπον ἐπανιοῦσαν ἐπὶ οἰκίαν ποθέν, καὶ ἐκ τοῦ δίφρου ἐκβαλόντες ἐπὶ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, ᾗ ἐπώνυμον Καισάριον, συνέλκουσιν, ἀποδύσαντές τε τὴν ἐσθῆτα ὀστράκοις ἀνεῖλον, καὶ μεληδὸν διασπάσαντες ἐπὶ τὸν καλούμενον Κιναρῶνα τὰ μέλη συνάραντες πυρὶ κατανήλωσαν. 6. Τοῦτο οὐ μικρὸν μῶμον Κυρίλλῳ καὶ τῇ Ἀλεξανδρέων ἐκκλησίᾳ εἰργάσατο· ἀλλότριον γὰρ παντελῶς τῶν φρονούντων τὰ Χριστοῦ φόνοι καὶ μάχαι καὶ τὰ τούτοις παραπλήσια. 7. Καὶ ταῦτα πέπρακται τῷ τετάρτῳ ἔτει τῆς Κυρίλλου ἐπισκοπῆς ἐν ὑπατείᾳ Ὁνωρίου τὸ δέκατον καὶ Θεοδοσίου τὸ ἕκτον ἐν μηνὶ Μαρτίῳ νηστειῶν οὐσῶν. 1. συμφρονήσαντες ἄνδρες As Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer points out, Socrates’ wording implies that Hypatia’s public assassination was not a spontaneous lynching but had been planned.1 In further support of her argument, I adduce the sixth-century Latin translation of Socrates’ text that Epiphanius prepared for Cassiodorus’ Historia *  All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. For Socrates’ account of Hypatia’s death and my translation of the above passage, see Haase, this volume, Chapter 5. 1   Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia: Die spätantiken Quellen, eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia 16 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 204 – 205, 215.

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ecclesiastica tripartita, where conspirantes (11.12.4, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 644) leaves no room for a different understanding. Some modern readers assume that things spiralled out of control after an initial attack intended merely to intimidate or harass Hypatia,2 but neither Socrates nor any other source supports such an interpretation. On the contrary, Damascius likewise depicts Hypatia’s killing as pre-meditated, and planned by Cyril.3 There is no information in Socrates on the lead time of the conspiracy; after all, the attack on Hypatia could still have been regarded as the result of an ad hoc decision on the conspirators’ part. Yet the respective wording in Socrates and Cassiodorus / Epiphanius excludes the possibility that the former viewed the assault on Hypatia as purely spontaneous or accidental. Of course, this represents Socrates’ viewpoint, rather than any “factual” course of events. 2. Πέτρος τις ἀναγνώστης In late antique Egypt and elsewhere, the ἀναγνώστης4, “lector,”5 was a low-ranking member of the clergy, whose task it was to recite and interpret lections from a pulpit.6 Although minor, the office entailed the important function of communicating biblical and devotional texts to an assembly that must have been largely illiterate, even in a major urban setting like Alexandria. One of the lower ranks within the clerical cursus honorum, the office in some cases led all the way up 2   E. g. Christian Lacombrade, “Hypatia,” RAC 16 (1994): 956 – 967, here 959; Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher, Women in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 115. 3  Damascius, Vita Isidori F *102,32 Zintzen: ἐπιβουλεῦσαι; cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 279. 4  The ἀναγνώστης / lector and his office: Henri Leclercq, “Lecteur,” DACL 8.1 (1929): 2242 – 69 and John G. Davies, “Deacons, Deaconesses and the Minor Orders in the Patristic Period,” JEH 14 (1963): 1 – 15, esp. 10 – 14 (sources); Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 218 – 24 (overview); Valeriy A. Alikin, The Earliest History of the Christian Gathering: Origin, Development and Content of the Christian Gathering in the First to Third Centuries, VC Supplement 102 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 178 – 81 and Dan Nässelqvist, Public Reading in Early Christianity: Lectors, Manuscripts, and Sound in the Oral Delivery of John 1 – 4, NovTSup 163 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 110 – 16 (in early Christianity); Ewa Wipszycka, Études sur le christianisme dans l’Égypte de l’antiquité tardive, SEAug 52 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1996), 238 – 48 (local specifics in late antique Egypt); Georg Schmelz, Kirchliche Amtsträger im spätantiken Ägypten nach den Aussagen der griechischen und koptischen Papyri und Ostraka, APF Beiheft 13 (Munich: Saur, 2002), 38 n. 248 (documentary texts). 5   The translation “maestro,” “teacher” (Clelia Martínez Maza, Hipatia: la estremecedora historia de la última gran filósofa de la antigüedad y la fascinante ciudad de Alejandría [Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2009], 316), is misleading. 6   Performative aspects of the lectors’ occupation: William D. Shiell, Reading Acts: The Lector and the Early Christian Audience, BibInt 70 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), who assumes continuity between Greek and Roman rhetorical conventions and an early Christian lector’s performance, which is debatable.

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to the mitre: Athanasius, Theophilus, and Cyril, for instance, began their ecclesiastical careers as lectors. The ἀναγνώστης was appointed and ordained by the bishop; hence it seems safe to say that Peter was the bishop’s man. Since this was a low-ranking position that could lead to higher office, it is an intriguing possibility (though not an irrevocable conclusion, because some people became lectors as adults only, and others remained in the low clerical ranks for all their lives) to think of Peter as a rather young man. The same may apply to his co-conspirators, which sheds new light on the “hot spirit” attributed to the group by Socrates. According to John of Nikiu (Chron. 79.13), Athanasius appointed Theophilus lector when the latter was a mere child, and the child lector is found in the Lives of other saints as well. Moving beyond such hagiographic tropes, papal decrees of the fourth and fifth centuries stipulate that individuals who had been vowed to an ecclesiastical career from childhood be baptised and become lectors immediately, at a preadolescent age, and not remain in that order beyond the age of twenty.7 It could be argued that such decrees are normative in character since epitaphs from late antique Egypt mention not only lectors who died in their teens but also some who died in their twenties: to the tomb inscriptions for lectors from Hermonthis (14 years), Aswan (21 years) and Akhmim (26 years) recorded by Ewa Wipszycka8 I add another one of unspecified Egyptian provenance, which commemorates a lector who died at age 22 (SB I 2648). Scholars think that Cyril had been ordained reader of the Church of Alexandria by 403, when he would have been approximately 25 years of age.9 Outside Egypt, more than fifty percent of the epitaphs of lectors assembled by Henri Leclercq commemorate individuals who died between 13 and 26 years of age.10 In the sixth century, Justinian’s Novels (123.13) prescribe 18 years as the minimum age for lectors, which opens up the possibility that lectors younger than 18 were an (undesirable) historical reality. The evidence demonstrates that adolescents and young adults often became lectors. It is thus plausible, even if it must remain conjectural, that Socrates describes a scenario where Hypatia was assassinated by an unruly group of young clerical hotspurs eager to gain deeper favour with their bishop. This  7

  Papal decrees: Paul H. Lafontaine, Les conditions positives de l’accession aux ordres dans la première législation ecclésiastique, 300 – 492, Publications Sériées de l’Université d’Ottawa 71 (Ottawa: Éditions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1963), 125 – 33; Wipszycka, Études sur le christianisme, 242. Further sources mentioning child lectors: Leclercq, “Lecteur”; Lafontaine, Les conditions positives, 148 – 49; Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 224.  8  Wipszycka, Études sur le christianisme, 243.  9   John A. McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Its History, Theology, and Texts, VC Supplement 23 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 5; Norman Russell, Cyril of Alexandria (London: Routledge, 2000), 6. Julian the Apostate and Theodoret became lectors at about 14 to 20 years of age: Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 328 n. 61. 10   Leclercq, “Lecteur,” 2247 – 48.

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assumption is further supported by the fact that juvenile delinquents, often from well-to-do families, formed cliques that constituted a prominent group among urban perpetrators in late antiquity.11 Many scholars hold that Hypatia was a victim of “mob violence”;12 it is therefore worth noting that there is no explicit evidence in Socrates’ text that the assailants belonged to a Christian “mob”.13 Nor does Socrates mention any involvement of monks or of Cyril’s strongmen, the parabalani.14 As a lector able to perform publicly, the leader of the perpetrators in Socrates is more likely than not to have been part of those literate – though not necessarily highly educated – echelons of society that were as rare among Christian communities as they were in contemporary society at large.15 11   Numerous attestations: Jens-Uwe Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität in der Spätantike (Munich: Beck, 2014), 156 – 65. 12   E. g. McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria, 13 – 14; Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 208 n. 45; John J. O’Keefe, “Introduction,” in St. Cyril of Alexandria, Festal Letters 1 – 12, trans. Philip R. Amidon and John J. O’Keefe, FC 118 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 3 – 32, here 17; Glen W. Bowersock, “Parabalani: A Terrorist Charity in Late Antiquity,” Anabases 12 (2010): 45 – 54, here 45; Johannes Hahn, “Parabalani,” RAC 26 (2014): 924 – 32, here 928; Watts, Hypatia, 3, 115 – 16, 123 – 25, 154, 183 n. 40. Gemma Beretta, Ipazia d’Alessandria (Rome: Editori Riuniti / University Press, 22014), 178, 285 opines that Orestes’ and Hypatia’s attackers were identical. But neither Socrates nor any other sources state that Hypatia was attacked by monks. Besides, Orestes’ main assailant Ammonius was dead at the time of Hypatia’s killing. 13   Later accounts by Damascius (Vita Isidori F *102,33 – 34 Zintzen: ἐπιθέμενοι πολλοὶ ἀθρόοι θηριώδεις ἄνθρωποι, “many men in one, beast-like, set upon her”) and John of Nikiu (Chron. 84.100, Robert H. Charles, trans., The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, Translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text [London: Williams and Norgate, 1916], 102: “And thereafter a multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter . . .”) mention a group or crowd of attackers, though no mob and no monks. However, the “crowd” may be a rhetorical device to emphasise Hypatia’s victimisation in Damascius and underline the attackers’ righteousness in John of Nikiu. 14   Overview over the recent debate: Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 209 – 10, 281 (with bibliography); Hahn, “Parabalani.” Harich-Schwarzbauer is rightly hesitant to link Hypatia’s killing and the parabalani. Contra: e. g. Lacombrade, “Hypatia,” 959; Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 95 – 96; Richard Klein, “Die Ermordung der Philosophin Hypatia: Zum Kampf um die politische Macht in Alexandria,” in Roma versa per aevum: Ausgewählte Schriften zur heidnischen und christlichen Spätantike, ed. Raban von Haehling and Klaus Scherberich, Spudasmata 74 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1999), 72 – 90, here 82 – 83 and n. 31; Bowersock, “Parabalani.” The fact that the imperial court reduced the number of the parabalani and eliminated episcopal control over them in 416, only to reintroduce them with increased numbers in 418, seems to reflect a waxing and waning of the relationship between the imperial court and Cyril, but there is no explicit evidence that it was linked to the killing of Hypatia. 15   Evidence from late antique Egypt for literate and educated clerics vastly outweighs evidence for illiteracy in ecclesiastical circles; the occasional illiterate cleric should therefore be considered the exception that proves the rule. Extent of literacy among early Christians: Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church, 2 – 10. Literacy, education and bilingualism among clerics in late antique Egypt: Annick Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie et l’Église d’Égypte au IVe siècle (328 – 373), CÉFR 216 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1996), 662 – 70 (fourth century); Wipszycka, Études sur le christianisme, 107 – 35, esp. 117 – 21 (clerics in general) and 415 – 26 (lectors); Schmelz, Kirchliche Amtsträger im spätantiken Ägypten, 70 – 75, 250 – 54 with nn. 300 and 305 (lectors and other clerics in the papyri who served as scribes and notaries).

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3. τὴν ἄνθρωπον Commentators have not usually highlighted or explained the use of the female article. It is true that ἡ ἄνθρωπος is sometimes employed in a neutral sense, both in classical Greek and in church historians contemporary with Socrates.16 But I suggest that in the present context, Socrates uses the expression “with a sense of pity”:17 “the poor creature.” A similar commiserative use of ἡ ἄνθρωπος can be found in Demosthenes’ On the False Embassy. There, an Olynthian captive is stripped of her dress and whipped at the behest of drunken banqueters when she refuses to recline and sing – that is, as I interpret the scene, when she refuses to comply with the role of hetaira, which is forced on her by the banqueters in their humiliating assault on her sexual respectability. Demosthenes highlights the depravity of his opponent Aischines by evoking sympathy for the victimised woman. His presentation of the Olynthian captive as “free and chaste” is positive, which precludes a depreciatory connotation of ἡ ἄνθρωπος in the oration.18 The rather similar context of excessive violence against a defenceless woman suggests a similar understanding in Socrates. Like Demosthenes, Socrates accentuates the perpetrators’ ruthlessness by evoking empathy for their victim. At the very outset of the killing episode, the commiserative use of the female article reveals Socrates’ distant but sympathetic attitude towards Hypatia. 4. ἐκ τοῦ δίφρου ἐκβαλόντες It is not immediately clear which meaning of δίφρος should apply – “litter /  sedan”, “carriage,” or “seat”?19 Harich-Schwarzbauer translates “Sänfte, pointing out that Socrates uses a different word, ὄχημα, for Orestes’ carriage in Hist. eccl. 7.14.2.20 Dzielska has revived the view that Hypatia was attacked on the speaker’s chair in her lecture-room. But that interpretation forces Dzielska to 16  Sozomenus, HE 2.7.4; Theodoret, Hist. E. 1.18.4; further examples: PGL 141 s. v. ἄνθρωπος B.3. A neutral meaning is also chosen in Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ Latin translation of Socrates (11.12.4, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 644), where ἡ ἄνθρωπος is rendered as Latin mulier. 17   LSJ 141 – 42 s. v. ἄνθρωπος II, with examples of the neutral, pejorative, and commiserative use in classical Greek literature. Cf. German “das Mensch” (in contrast to the usual “der Mensch”), used regionally, with reference to women, commiseratively or with contempt: Günther Drosdowski, ed., Duden: Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache in acht Bänden (Mannheim: Duden Verlag, 21994), 5:2241 s. v. Mensch 2. 18  Demosthenes, Fals. leg. 197 and 198. Douglas M. MacDowell, ed., Demosthenes, On the False Embassy (Oration 19): Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 141 and Harvey Yunis, ed., Demosthenes, Speeches 18 and 19, Translated with Introduction and Notes, The Oratory of Classical Greece 9 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 174 translate neutrally “the woman.” In his commentary, MacDowell, Demosthenes, On the False Embassy, 288 altogether ignores the commiserative connotation of the phrase. 19   LSJ 438 s. v. δίφρος. 20  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 190, 205.

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discount Socrates’ reliability21 when he says that Hypatia was attacked while returning home. Dzielska’s argument is inspired by the recent archaeological discoveries of an architectural complex at Kom el-Dikka, which the excavators have interpreted as lecture halls.22 Dzielska also follows the translations of John of Nikiu (Chron. 84.101) by Charles and Zotenberg, whose French rendering “chaire” implies a (professor’s) chair.23 But the usual Greek word for a teacher’s chair is θρόνος.24 Besides, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that the notion of a non-movable seat or speaker’s chair, of the kind found at Kom el-Dikka, is at odds with Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ translation of Socrates (vehiculum, “means of transportation”: Hist. eccl. tripart. 11.12.4, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 644). A litter or sedan chair would have been appropriate for women, and in either case Hypatia is depicted using a means of transportation that was a privilege of the elite. 21

  Maria Dzielska, “Once More on Hypatia’s Death,” in Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism, ed. Maria Dzielska and Kamilla Twardowska, Byzantina et Slavica Cracoviensia 7 (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2013), 65 – 74, here 71 – 72: “Socrates’ account . . . proves that he did not have exact knowledge about the event.” Cf. Maria Dzielska, “Learned Women in the Alexandrian Scholarship and Society of Late Hellenism,” in What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria?, ed. Mostafa El-Abbadi, Omnia Fathallah and Ismail Serageldin, Library of the Written Word 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 129 – 47, here 140 – 41. By contrast, Lacombrade, “Hypatia,” 959 and Martin Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates: Untersuchungen zu Geschichtsdarstellung, Methode und Person, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmenge­ schichte 68 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997) 248 emphasise Socrates’ reliability. 22   Tomasz Derda, Tomasz Markiewicz and Ewa Wipszycka, eds., Alexandria: Auditoria of Kom el-Dikka and Late Antique Education, JJP Supplement 8 (Warsaw: Taubenschlag Foundation, 2007). It is chronologically difficult to establish a direct link between the Kom el-Dikka excavations and Hypatia’s death: Adam Łukaszewicz, “Lecture Halls at Kom el-Dikka in Alexandria,” in Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism, ed. Maria Dzielska and Kamilla Twardowska, Byzantina et Slavica Cracoviensia 7 (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2013), 101 – 12, esp. 110 – 11. 23   Hermann Zotenberg, ed., Chronique de Jean, évêque de Nikiou: texte éthiopien publié et traduit (Paris: Imprimérie Nationale, 1883), 346: “la trouvèrent assise en chaire.” In Charles’ translation (The Chronicle of John, 102), the philosopher descends from a “(lofty) chair” before she is dragged through the streets of Alexandria. Watts, Hypatia, 3, 115 – 16 is undecided as to whether Hypatia was seized by her killers while teaching or on her way home. 24   LSJ 807 s. v. θρόνος I 4. The (episcopal) θρόνος is connected with teaching in (Pseudo-?) Chrysostomus, In SS. Petrum apostolum et in Eliam prophetam 2.732 B (PG 50:728). The θρόνος in late antique educational settings: Grzegorz Majcherek, “The Late Roman Auditoria of Alexandria: An Archaeological Overview,” in Alexandria: Auditoria of Kom el-Dikka and Late Antique Education, ed. Tomasz Derda, Tomasz Markiewicz and Ewa Wipszycka, JJP Supplement 8 (Warsaw: Taubenschlag Foundation, 2007), 11 – 50, here 38 – 39; Raffaella Cribiore, “Spaces for Teaching in Late Antiquity,” in ibid., 143 – 50, here 146, 150; Grzegorz Majcherek, “Discovering Alexandria: Archaeological Update on the Finds from Kom el-Dikka,” in Alexandria and the North-Western Delta (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology, 2010), 75 – 89, here 85 with nn. 47 – 53; Grzegorz Majcherek, “The Auditoria on Kom el-Dikka: A Glimpse of Late Antique Education in Alexandria,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Congress of Papyrology, Ann Arbor 2007, American Studies in Papyrology (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2010), 471 – 84, here 474 with nn. 16 – 18.

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5. ἐπὶ τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, ᾗ ἐπώνυμον Καισάριον Hypatia is killed near the church that takes its name from the Caesareum.25 The first Christian building project in the city promoted by the emperor, the church came into use under Athanasius in the mid-fourth century;26 by Cyril’s time it was the city’s main church.27 The majority of scholars locate that church in the Caesareum enclosure, formerly Alexandria’s centre of the imperial cult.28 The Caesareum’s location in the city centre, the convenience of pre-existing structures, and its splendour and size must have made the complex an appropriate site for the new church. At the same time, the church’s embeddedness within the visible remains of a traditional cult complex set it apart. Begun under Cleopatra VII, the Caesareum was one of the Roman city’s foremost sanctuaries and its enclosure included an array of porticoes, gardens and libraries.29 It served not only as the main centre of the imperial cult in the city 25

  Great Church in the Caesareum: Aristide Calderini, “Alexandreia,” in Dizionario dei nomi geografici e topografici dell’Egitto greco-romano I,1, ed. Aristide Calderini (Cairo: Società reale di geografia d’Egitto, 1935), 55 – 205, here 171 – 72; Annick Martin, “Les premiers siècles du christianisme à Alexandrie: essai de topographie religieuse (IIIe – IVe siècles),” RÉAug  30 (1984): 211 – 25, here 217 – 18; Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie, 148 – 49; Annick Martin, “Alexandrie à l’époque romaine tardive: l’impact du christianisme sur la topographie et les institutions,” in Alexandrie médiévale 1, ed. Jean-Yves Empereur and Christian Décobert, Études alexandrines 3 (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1998), 9 – 21, here 12 – 15; Annick Martin, “Alex­ andrie: l’investissement chrétien de la ville,” in Les chrétiens dans la ville, ed. Jacques-Olivier Boudon and Françoise Thélamon (Mont-Saint-Aignan: Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2006), 47 – 63, here 53 – 54; Judith S. McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300  B. C. to A. D. 700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 231 – 32, 242, 250, 257 – 58, 406 – 07 n.  25. 26   When the city’s Christian community first demanded permission to convene there for Easter in 352, they claimed to do so for the purpose of praying for the emperor’s well-being (ἀξιούντων ἐν τῇ μεγάλῃ ἐκκλησίᾳ συνελθεῖν κἀκεῖ πάντας εὔχεσθαι καὶ ὑπὲρ τῆς σῆς σωτηρίας: Athanasius, Apol. Const. 14.5) and thus continued, advertently or not, one of the Hellenic site’s former functions. 27   Bernd Isele, Kampf um Kirchen: Religiöse Gewalt, heiliger Raum und christliche Topographie in Alexandria und Konstantinopel (4. Jahrhundert), JAC Ergänzungsband, Kleine Reihe 4 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2010), 192 and n. 418. 28   Jean Gascou, “Les églises d’Alexandrie: questions de méthode,” in Alexandrie médiévale 1, ed. Jean-Yves Empereur and Christian Décobert, Études alexandrines 3 (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1998), 23 – 44, here 32 – 33 is alone in suggesting that the Caesareum church was in the city’s south, basing this hypothesis on a Coptic homily and on Epiphanius, Pan. 69.2.2 – 3, ed. Holl, 3:153. Contra: Martin, “Alexandrie: l’investissement chrétien de la ville,” 53 – 54 and n. 34, who interprets Epiphanius as referring to a building within the Caesareum complex; McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 242 and n. 34, who distinguishes between the church mentioned by Epiphanius and the Great Church in the Caesareum. 29   Roman Caesareum: Calderini, “Alexandreia,” 118 – 19; Christopher J. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 26 and Fig. 4; Friederike Herklotz, Prinzeps und Pharao: Der Kult des Augustus in Ägypten, Oikumene 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Antike, 2007), 267 – 72; McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 149, 177 – 78 and fig. 304 (plan); Stefan Pfeiffer, Der römische Kaiser und das Land am Nil: Kaiserverehrung und Kaiserkult in Alexandria und Ägypten von Augustus bis

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but also as a visual marker in the cityscape: as one advanced from the intersection of Alexandria’s two main streets to the Great Harbour, the Caesareum would have been the first and most highly visible religious building one encountered. Similarly, its towering structures must have caught the attention of travelers approaching the harbour by ship. This eye-catching effect was enhanced by the precinct’s location on an elevation, by its formidable walls, and by the erection under Augustus of two obelisks from Heliopolis (where they had originally been erected by Thutmose III), which flanked the sanctuary’s entrance on its seaward side.30 Their positions show that the orientation of the Caesareum did not correspond with the Roman street grid but was directed towards the sea. While the memories of those belonging to Hypatia’s generation or that of her torturers are not likely to have extended to the time before the building of a church within the Caesareum enclosure, the name of the church in the fourth century still evoked the site’s previous function: Athanasius calls it “Great Church in the Caesareum” (H. Ar. 74.2: ἐν τῇ μεγάλῃ ἐκκλησίᾳ τῇ ἐν τῷ Καισαρείῳ), which is evidence that the building took its designation from its location within the Caesareum complex.31 In the fifth century, Socrates refers to the Caesareum site with the phrase “the church named Καισάριον”. In the sixth century Cassiodorus / Epiphanius links the church’s designation to the title or name of Caesar (ad ecclesiam, quae vocatur Caesaris: Hist. eccl. tripart. 11.12.4, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 644). The “Great Church named Caesarion / of Caesarion” was still known to John of Nikiu, who in the second half of the seventh century linked it to Julius Caesar and “Little Caesar” or Caesarion, Caesar’s son with Cleopatra VII (Chron. 64.10, 84.101, 119.14, 120.12, trans. Charles, The Chronicle of John, 49, 102, 190, 192). I argue that the nomenclature is significant because it preserves traces of Alexandria’s pre-Christian mental map, which continued to conjure the buildCaracalla (30 v. Chr. – 217 n. Chr.), Historia Einzelschriften 212 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010), 237 – 41. Possible small-scale representations: Hélène Fragaki, Images antiques d’Alexandrie, Ier s.  av. J.‑C. – VIIIe s. apr. J.‑C., Études alexandrines 20 (Cairo: Institut français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2011), 26 – 27, 83, 88. Excavation in the area: Jean-Yves Empereur, ed., Alexandrie, Césaréum: les fouilles du Cinéma Majestic, Études alexandrines 38 (Alexandria: Centre d’Études alexandrines, 2017). 30   Twin obelisks: Herklotz, Prinzeps, 223; McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 399 nn. 14 – 17 (with bibliography). The church was damaged and rebuilt various times before its eventual destruction by fire in 912, but the obelisks survived on site, thereby marking the Caesareum’s position within the city, until they were uprooted again in the 1870s, to be reerected in London and New York. 31   The church also went by the name of Κυριακόν (“Belonging to the Lord”) and by the short form Μεγάλη Ἐκκλησία (“Great Church”: Athanasius, H. Ar. 55.2). Nomenclature of the church: Calderini, “Alexandreia,” 171 – 72; Martin, “Les premiers siècles du christianisme,” 218 nn. 43 and 45; Isele, Kampf um Kirchen, 122 n. 30. Κυριακόν: Martin, “Les premiers siècles du christianisme,” 213 – 14 nn. 16 and 19. McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 240, 242, 406 – 07 n. 25, 449 identifies the Church in the Caesareum with St. Michael’s.

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ing’s former use at least into the fifth century, when its original function was a distant memory. For Judith McKenzie, a turning point in the Christianisation of Alexandria’s topography was the attack on the Serapeum site and subsequent Christian building activity there, which constituted “the end of the presence of paganism in the cityscape.”32 I hold that even beyond that turning point the former function of the church shone through the remapped cityscape by way of its old name, as in a palimpsest. The nomenclature of the church thus reflects the partial rebuilding and Christian reuse of structures within the Caesareum complex. Using as one example the entrance to the cella of the temple of Bel at Palmyra, left standing after the attack by the “Islamic State,” Horst Bredekamp highlights the psychological and emotional impact of the partial destruction of buildings and sites (as opposed to their radical erasure).33 The ruins of a partially destroyed building permanently conjure the former integrity of the structure and keep the event of its demolition alive for the beholder, who may be forced to replay mentally, over and again, the moment of the attack. Such “calculated partial destruction”34 of a building or building complex, especially if it is an iconic one, is a strategy to horrify and humiliate those who the attackers identify with the demolished structure (and who, I would add, may themselves identify with it). The partial destruction of Alexandria’s Serapeum complex further illustrates this strategy. Christian claims notwithstanding, the archaeological evidence suggests that the Serapeum complex was not razed to the ground in 391 / 92.35 Regarding the much-used notion of the “destruction of the Serapeum,” Judith McKenzie rightly underlines the need to consider and analyse each of the component structures within the Serapeum enclosure individually; its colonnaded court, for instance, appears to have remained standing into the twelfth century, and in the excavated area there is no trace of later building activity inside that court, although the court may have been re-adapted as an atrium for the churches built west of it. After the attack, the columns, which remained (partly) standing and perhaps still sustained sections of the roof, would have made a visual and emotional impact that we may compare to the impact of the ruins of Bel’s temple at Palmyra. 32

  Judith S. McKenzie, Sheila Gibson and Andres T. Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum in Alexandria from the Archaeological Evidence,” JRS 94 (2004): 73 – 121, here 113. 33   Horst Bredekamp, Das Beispiel Palmyra (Köln: König, 2016), 4 – 6 and fig. 2. One could also adduce the Bamiyan Buddhas in their rock-cut niches: the empty niches outline the Buddhas’ silhouettes and thereby powerfully evoke their presence through conspicuous absence. 34   My expression (in German: “kalkulierte Teildestruktion”), which draws on Bredekamp, Das Beispiel Palmyra, 6: “Diese Art der Teildestruktion könnte einem bewusst eingesetzten Kalkül folgen.” 35   McKenzie, Gibson and Reyes, “Reconstructing the Serapeum,” 107 – 10; Judith S. McKenzie, “The Serapeum of Alexandria: Its Destruction and Reconstruction,” JRA 22 (2009): 772 – 82, here 779 – 82; cf. Haase, this volume, Chapter 5.

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I contend that the reuse of (religious and other) buildings has an effect similar to that of partial destruction, if that reuse is perceived as part of a group’s strategy to assert their predominance and to intimidate, and if the memory of the site’s previous significance is kept alive. In the case of the Caesareum such memory is upheld by way of placing a major church within a much vaster sacred compound that might have maintained many of its pre-Christian features. In addition, the church’s name, which encapsulates the site’s pre-Christian significance, becomes another device to maintain the memory of former cultural and religious valences, albeit for an ever-diminishing knowledgeable audience. Such memory cultivation by way of nomenclature would have been effective regardless of whether it was a calculated result of deliberate naming or a side effect of ad hoc nomenclature. The nomenclature of the Great Church in the Caesareum can thus be understood as a technique to permanently and insistently evoke the Christian appropriation of one of Alexandria’s main centres of traditional religion. At the same time, the designation kept the site’s pre-Christian past alive. At the time of its construction, the Great Church in the Caesareum was the only Alexandrian church built on the site of a former sanctuary of the traditional deities.36 This aspect may have contributed to its becoming a focal point of interreligious and intra-religious conflict. In the mid-fourth century, possession of the site was hotly contested, with supporters of bishops Athanasius and George and followers of the traditional cults wrestling for predominance.37 Followers of the traditional cults looted the church’s furniture including its wooden altar-table (τράπεζα) in 356 and burnt them “in front of the porch in the Great Plateia” according to Athanasius.38 In 366, followers of the traditional cults set flames to the Great Church in the Caesareum, possibly in an attempt to reinstate the former cult.39 Such associations of conflict and violence must have resonated with readers of Socrates’ account of Hypatia’s killing and intensified their emotions. Regardless of the actual motives of Hypatia’s attackers, her murder could be perceived as a further link in a long chain of eruptions of interreligious strife. “Great Plateia” in Athanasius possibly designates the Roman Forum according to McKenzie, who suggests that “the precinct in front of the church extended to the main east-west street.”40 Attempts at reconstructing the sanctuary’s floor 36

 Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 210 – 11; McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 240, 244. 37  Athanasius, H. Ar. 55 – 6; Festal Letter Index XXXVII, 365, XXXVIII, 366, XL, 368 (ed. Martin and Albert, 269 and 271 – 73); Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 281 – 86; Isele, Kampf um Kirchen, 13, 122, 124, 164, 167 – 76, 180, 185 – 92. 38   H. Ar. 56.1: ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ πυλῶνος ἐν τῇ πλατείᾳ τῇ μεγάλῃ. 39   Thus Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt, 75. 40  McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 48, 177, 242, 407 n. 36, and figs. 304 and 400 (maps). Géza Alföldy, Der Obelisk auf dem Petersplatz in Rom: Ein historisches Monument der Antike, SHAW, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 1990, no. 2 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), 38 – 49, and figs. 11 and 12 (followed by Herklotz, Prinzeps, 221 – 23, 270 – 71; Pfeiffer, Der römische

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area must remain tentative at present.41 But if we accept McKenzie’s view, I contend that it is possible to imagine Hypatia’s killing, according to the scenario evoked by Socrates, to have happened in the same place where the church’s furniture was burnt: in the open space in front of the porch of the Great Church in the Caesareum, a site which afforded both sufficient room and publicity, and seems to overlap with the former Roman forum. In section 6 below, Christopher Haas’ reading of Hypatia’s death against an alleged fixed pattern in Roman Alexandria of “ritualistic” executions of “outcasts and criminals” is refuted. However, I accept his topographical argument that Hypatia was paraded along the city’s main east-west artery, which corresponds with the decumanus maximus of Roman city planning and is sometimes dubbed “Via Canopica” in scholarly literature. A conjectural location of her killing between the Caesareum site and Alexandria’s main east-west street fits well with Hypatia’s trajectory as suggested by Haas. The main east-west street42 was part of the original city design and survived into late antiquity. According to Strabo (17.1.8) and Diodorus Siculus (17.52.3), it was one plethron or c. 30 m or more wide and c. 7.2 km long and ran from the Nekropolis to the Canopic Gate. In the Roman period, it was adorned with colonnades, porticoes, fountain houses, and tetrastyla that marked the main intersections. The street’s ancient trajectory corresponds to modern Shariya el-Horreya. If one accepts my conjecture, Socrates’ Hypatia would eventually have been dragged northward off the main street’s course in the direction of the nearby Caesareum complex, to be killed in front of the porch of the Great Church. There is yet a further aspect worth considering in connection with the Caesareum as the site of Hypatia’s death, although little attention has been paid to it in scholarship. While there does not seem to be clear information on the location within Alexandria of the fifth-century patriarchal residence,43 it has been suggested that the bishop resided in proximity of the Great Church in the Kaiser, 239 – 40) believes the Forum Iulium, the Forum Augusti, and the Σεβαστὴ ἀγορά mentioned in the written sources to be identical. Doubts: McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 177 and nn. 21 – 22. 41  Empereur, Alexandrie, Césaréum, 6 – 9. 42   Main east-west street: Calderini, “Alexandreia,” 83 – 84; McKenzie, The Architecture of Alex­ andria and Egypt, 15, 38 and n. 12, 66 – 67, 75, 174 – 75, 242, 407 n. 36, and figs. 13, 14, 32, 33. Artist’s reconstruction: Jean-Claude Golvin and Aude Gros de Beler, Voyage en Égypte ancienne (Arles and Paris: Actes Sud and Errance, 1999), 172. Alexandria’s street grid: McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, 20 – 24 and fig. 23 (late antique period). 43   Discussion: Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 222 – 23. In the second half of the fourth century, Alexandria’s bishop resided at the Church of St. Dionysius: Martin, “Les premiers siècles du christianisme,” 213 – 14, 221; Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie, 144 – 45; Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 208, 222 and n. 19; Martin, “Alexandrie: l’investissement chrétien de la ville,” 54; before that period, at the Church of St. Theonas: Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 209 and n. 64. Episcopal residences from the tenth century onward: René-Georges Coquin, “Patriarchal Residences,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, vol. 6, ed. Aziz S. Atiya (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 1912 – 13.

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Caesareum.44 If one accepts this suggestion, then according to Socrates’ account Hypatia was practically laid on Cyril’s doorstep, an aspect that would fit with the interpretation advanced in section 2 above regarding Peter’s group, their ties to bishop Cyril, and their potential motives for killing Hypatia. 6. συνέλκουσιν Christopher Haas, followed by other scholars, interprets the dragging and subsequent maltreatment of Hypatia’s body by her assailants against the background of a fixed pattern in Roman Alexandria of “ritualistic” executions of “outcasts and criminals” or a “public enemy.”45 This procedure included the parading and / or dragging of bodies though the streets and their burning outside the city and supposedly served as a means of ritual purification or expiation. While Haas references Mary Douglas’ classic study Purity and Danger,46 the application of anthropological model-building seems less persuasive and even potentially misleading when we consider that the ancient sources (about Alexandrian executions)47 on which Haas bases his model are entirely silent regarding the matter of “purity.” While I do not wish to deny that there are similarities among the public executions listed by Haas, there are also differences significant enough to raise the question as to how fixed a pattern actually existed. In some of the cases cited by Haas, dragging is a forced and torturous transportation mode;48 in others, it is

44  Russell, Cyril of Alexandria, 10, 208 n. 45 remarks on the potential significance of the location for Hypatia’s killing. Cf. also Stephen J. Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity, 1: The Popes of Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 71. 45  Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 87 – 90; followed by Edward J. Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia: Acceptable or Unacceptable Violence?” in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. Harold A. Drake (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 333 – 42, here 341; Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 199; Watts, Hypatia, 116; Luke Lavan, “The End of the Temples: Towards a New Narrative,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique ‘Paganism,’ ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan (Leiden: Brill, 2011), xv – lxv, here xvi with n. 6. 46   Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); cf. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 397 n. 93. When Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 116 refers to Hypatia’s killing as “a ‘cleansing’ of the land,” he does not say whether this idea is based on Douglas too, although elsewhere Brown discusses her as a major influence: cf. Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971 – 1997,” JECS 6 (1998): 353 – 76, esp. 359 – 63. 47   Collected in Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 397 – 99 nn. 93 – 99. To Haas’ examples I add St. Mark’s death by dragging according to Acta Marci 7 – 10 (PG  115:167 – 70). 48   Jewish inhabitants of Alexandria: Philo, Flacc. 85; the Christians Metras and Quinta: Eusebius, H. E. 6.41.3 – 4; Christian women: Theodoret, Hist. E. 4.19.

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a killing method;49 in still others, a derogatory maltreatment of the corpse.50 In some instances, the victims are led in procession to their execution;51 in others, they are paraded on camels;52 in still others, the lifeless body, loaded onto or “riding” a mount, is exposed to the public in a macabre post-mortem parade.53 These techniques of torturing and parading are combined with a variety of gruesome killing methods so diverse that it is difficult to establish any single “pattern”: stoning, slaying by sword, vivicombustion, flogging or clubbing to death, crucifixion, beheading, and dispatching to the mines. A formal link between some (but not all) of the accounts collected by Haas is provided by expressions, signal phrases of sorts, that connote the city-wide and public character of the respective spectacles: for instance, “right through the middle of the agora” (διὰ μέσης ἀγορᾶς: Philo, Flacc. 74) or “through the whole city” (διὰ πάσης τῆς πόλεως: Eusebius, H. E. 6.41.4; Evagrius, Hist. eccl. 2.8). However, these and similar expressions also occur widely outside of Haas’ Roman-period Alexandrian examples (some Ptolemaic instances are discussed in section 7 below). And while I do not wish to exclude Haas’ attractive suggestion that the mental maps that inform literary accounts of Hypatia’s death feature Alexandria’s main east-west street,54 I find it significant that none of the signal phrases just mentioned occur in any of these accounts. Considering that the formal link is missing, and once a serious doubt is cast on the hypothesis that Hypatia’s death should be read as a ritual purification, we may ask to what extent the alleged pattern is at all helpful in shedding light on her death. The fact that Hypatia may have been politically inconvenient to some does not make her a criminal or a public enemy. 7. ἀποδύσαντές τε τὴν ἐσθῆτα While the stripping of Hypatia’s clothes in and by itself is not a sexual assault, it adds sexual and voyeuristic overtones to her humiliation.55 For a pertinent parallel, one may compare the stripping and beating of the Olynthian captive woman described by Demosthenes and discussed in section 3 above, where a sexualised component is evident. 49

 Philo, Flacc. 65, 174.  Philo, Flacc. 71; bishop Proterius: Evagrius, Hist. eccl. 2.8; Zachariah of Mytilene, Hist. eccl. 4.2. 51  Philo, Flacc. 74; Philostratus, Vit. Apoll. 5.24; a Roman deacon: Theodoret, Hist. E. 4.19. 52  Evagrius, Hist. eccl. 2.5. 53   Bishop George and officials killed together with the bishop: Ammianus Marcellinus 22.11.9 – 10; Historia Acephala 2.8 – 10; see also section 10 below. 54  Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 29 – 31, 81 – 90. 55  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 206 points out that the divesting of the body also has a pragmatic aspect. That said, the degrading effect of the gesture is probably prevalent here, particularly if one holds that Hypatia died by stoning (section 9.b below). 50

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Dominic Rathbone and Dorothy Thompson suggest that Socrates’ account is analogous to narratives of the public shaming of prominent females in Ptolemaic Alexandria.56 These texts merit a closer look, to understand whether they establish a pertinent comparison. Polybius (15.27 – 30, 15.33) recounts how in the course of court rivalries and urban unrest following the death of Ptolemy IV Philopator in 204 BCE, Danae, a relative of one of the opponents, is “dragged through the middle of the city” (διὰ μέσου τῆς πόλεως), “unveiled,” and “imprisoned.” Later on, Oinanthe, mother of the leader of the opposing faction, is stripped naked and paraded to the stadium on a horse. She, her daughters, and other relatives are handed over to the mob, who “bit them” (ἔδακνον), “stabbed them” (ἐκέντουν), “cut out their eyes” (τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς ἐξέκοπτον), and “ripped their limbs apart” (τὰ μέλη διέσπων). Both Danae and Oinanthe are hauled out of the Thesmophorion, which adds an aspect of sacrilege to the scene: Oinanthe had been “seated against the altar” (καθίσασα πρὸς τὸν βωμὸν), that is, on my interpretation, she was seeking asylum there. A group of young women who had been reared together with Arsinoe III, Ptolemy IV’s assassinated queen, assume the role not of victims but of perpetrators as they penetrate the house of the queen’s murderer Philammon. There, they “killed him as they struck him with the stones and the cudgels” (τύπτουσαι τοῖς λίθοις καὶ τοῖς ξύλοις ἀπέκτειναν), and “dragging out Philammon’s wife naked into the street they made away with her” (τὴν γυναῖκα τοῦ Φιλάμμωνος γυμνὴν εἰς τὴν πλατεῖαν ἐξέλκουσαι διέφθειραν). But to what extent are the Polybian narratives really comparable with Socrates’ account of Hypatia’s killing? Stripping, dragging, ripping apart, and stoning are motifs that also occur in Socrates. Parading on a mount, imprisoning, biting, cudgelling, and stabbing are motifs that do not. Conversely, there are close resemblances (not noted by Rathbone and Thompson) between Polybius and some Roman-period Alexandrian punishment processions listed by Christopher Haas (for a discussion of which see section 6 above), namely the dragging, parading on a mount, stoning, and cudgelling of the victim, as well as the emphasis on public location (“through the middle of the city”; “into the street”). A hitherto unnoted papyrological parallel for female victimisation from Hypatia’s time that includes beating, stripping, and burning can be found in P. Oxy. VI 903 (= C. Pap. Jud. III 457d).57 In this document from late fourth-cen-

56   Dominic Rathbone and Dorothy Thompson, “The Killing of Hypatia,” in Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt, ed. Jane Rowlandson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 74 – 75. 57   P. Oxy. VI 903: Roger S. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 195, 210 – 11, 224 – 25; Dominic Montserrat, Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt (London: Routledge, 1996), 99 – 100; Ari Z. Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 180 – 81, 273 – 74 no. 123.

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tury Egypt,58 an abusive husband is accused of detaining some of the couple’s slaves, his own son, and his wife’s foster-daughters in the house’s basement for a whole week, beating them severely and torturing the foster-daughters with fire after having stripped them naked. While the incident described in P. Oxy. VI 903 deals with an intra-household dispute rather than with the public killing of a high-profile individual, examples of (oftentimes public) stripping of women are frequent in the papyri.59 However, stripping “is not exclusively a form of violence directed against women, nor against women by men.”60 Public stripping of men is recorded, for instance, in fourth-century Kellis and Hermopolis.61 As for the stripping of prominent males, Cassius Dio (78.4.4) describes a public attack on Caracalla’s tutor Kilo: “(The soldiers) tore his clothing off and maltreated his face.” 8. μεληδὸν διασπάσαντες Silvia Ronchey has interpreted διασπᾶν, which is used by Socrates, Philostorgius and Hesychius in the context of Hypatia’s death,62 in a sacrificial sense,63 while Harich-Schwarzbauer has also stressed the mythological connotations of the σπαραγμός.64 Ronchey and Harich-Schwarzbauer have also pointed out that the word Damascius employs for Hypatia’s killers (σφαγεῖς, “slayers, butchers”)65 is sometimes used as a technical term to denote the ritual slaughter of animals. To this discussion I would add ἀναιρεῖν, introduced by both Socrates 58   Date: Jakub Urbanik, “Divorce,” in Law and Legal Practice in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest: A Selection of Papyrological Sources in Translation, With Introductions and Commentary, ed. James G. Keenan, Joseph G. Manning and Uri Yiftach-Firanko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 154 – 75, here 162, 169 – 70. 59   P. Oxy. XXXVI 2758 (Oxyrhynchus, 110 / 12); SB VI 9458 (Tebtynis, second century); P. Flor. I 59 (225 / 79). Cf. also P. Ryl. II 151.13 – 15 (Euhemeria, 40); SB XVI 12470.15 – 16 (first / second century); P. Cair. Isid. 63 (Karanis, 297 or later); P. Freib. II 11 (Oxyrhynchus, 336); P. Erl. 36.4 (fifth cent.). Cf. Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt, nos. 19, 34 – 35, 72, 79, 89, 102, and 129. 60  Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt, 113. 61   P. Kell. I 23.1 – 15 (353); P. Lips. I 37 (389): Bryen, Violence in Roman Egypt, 97 – 98, 104, 123 – 24, nos.  110, 116. 62  Philostorgius, Hist. eccl. 8.9: διασπασθῆναι; Hesychius (Suda IV 644,5 – 6) s. v. ῾Υπατία: διεσπάσθη. 63  Ronchey, Ipazia, 179. 64  Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 208, 215 – 16, 330, 333. Discussion of the motif of σπαραγμός: Haase, this volume, Chapter 5. 65   Σφάζειν and related words as sacrificial terms: LSJ 1737 s. v. σφαγεύς, 1738 s. v. σφάζω II 1; Jean Casabona, Recherches sur le vocabulaire des sacrifices en grec: des origines à la fin de l’époque Classique, Publications des Annales de la Faculté des Lettres, Aix-en-Provence n. s. 56 (Aixen-Provence: Ophrys, 1966), 155 – 96, 317 – 21. Cf. Folkert T. van Straten, Hierà kalá: Images of Animal Sacrifice in Archaic and Classical Greece, RGRW 127 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 103 – 14; Fred S. Naiden, Smoke Signals for the Gods: Ancient Greek Sacrifice from the Archaic through Roman Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 233, 279 – 80.

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and Damascius in the context of Hypatia’s killing,66 which term is most often used generically but can also be employed in a technical sense for the sacrificial victim’s being lifted from the ground before it is killed.67 Section 9 below critiques the view that the ὄστρακα form sharp blades that could be used like knives to cut Hypatia’s throat.68 However, the suggestion that animal sacrifice serves as one subtext for some ancient narratives about Hypatia’s killing is pertinent. The use of sacrificial terminology (which, contrary to what Ronchey suggests, was not limited to “pagan” authors) introduces a semantic layer of ritual slaughter that would have been familiar to most ancient readers, be they followers of the traditional cults or Christians.69 One should not, however, utilise that semantic layer in order to (mis‑)understand Socrates’ depiction of Hypatia’s death literally as a “human sacrifice,” “performed on the altar of the Christian god, in one of his churches.”70 One reader who perceived and exploited the potential of the image of “virgin sacrifice” was Edward Gibbon: . . .  [Thaumasius’] tomb was decorated with the trophies of martyrdom, and [Cyril] ascended the pulpit to celebrate the magnanimity of an assassin and a rebel. Such honours might incite the faithful to combat and die under the banners of the saint; and he soon prompted, or accepted, the sacrifice of a virgin, who professed the religion of the Greeks.71

The motif of virgin sacrifice also implicitly underlies Gibbon’s account of Hypatia’s killing (for which, see section 9a below),72 and it must have contributed considerably to the allure of his portrait of the philosopher. At the same time, Gibbon’s text not only conjures up the image of Hypatia’s sacrifice but also implies that of her martyrdom when he has her die as someone “who professed the religion of the Greeks.” The perspective that there exists an analogy between her killing and the death of Christian martyrs has proven influential: it underlies, for instance, the title of Michael Deakin’s Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr and can be found in other studies on 66  Socrates, Hist. eccl. 7.15.5: ἀνεῖλον; Damascius, Vita Isidori F *102,35 Zintzen: ἀναιροῦσι τὴν φιλόσοφον. 67  Homer, Od. 3.453; cf. LSJ 106 s. v. ἀναιρέω. 68   As Ronchey, Ipazia, 179, 283, for instance, holds. 69   An explicit analogy of violence against humans and ritual animal slaughter is evoked by Synesius of Cyrene, Ep. 124, where he laments the sufferings of his native Libya from barbarian attacks: “daily I see armed enemies and people butchered like sacrificial victims” (ἀποσφαττομένους ἀνθρώπους ὥσπερ ἱερεῖα). 70   Thus Luciano Canfora, Un mestiere pericoloso: la vita quotidiana dei filosofi greci (Palermo: Sellerio, 2000), 198: “La scena è quella di un sacrificio umano compiuto per il dio dei Cristiani in una sua Chiesa”; cf. Beretta, Ipazia, 286. 71   Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London 1788), vol. 4, ch. 47, ed. David P. Womersley (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 2:945. 72   Richard Hamilton, “Gibbon’s Use of Sources in the Portrait of Hypatia,” English Language Notes 28.2 (1990): 6 – 16.

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Hypatia.73 This interpretation is problematic: it often remains unclear whether scholars use the image of martyrdom merely metaphorically, as a stylistic device to denote a sense of “noble death,” or whether they contend that late antique accounts of Hypatia’s death and Christian martyrologies share quite specific motifs. The latter is the case with Rathbone and Thompson, who interpret Socrates’ passage within a literary tradition of Christian martyrologies,74 and with Ronchey, who wishes to identify in Hypatia’s story a power triangle (the Christian church – the Roman government – the Jewish communities)75 that in her opinion usually underlies martyr acts.76 But Hypatia does not die because she refuses to “stray from her religious conviction” (deviare a religione) and chooses “excruciating torture” (cruciabiles poenas) and a “death full of glory” (gloriosam mortem), which are the criteria of Christian martyrdom in Ammianus Marcellinus (22.11.10). Hypatia, in other words, does not die because she “professed the religion of the Greeks.” Furthermore, while according to Ammianus the cult of martyrs requires bodily r­ elics (suprema) that can be worshiped, Hypatia’s complete physical elimination effectively forestalls the possibility of her remains posthumously acquiring any symbolic significance. The attribution of martyrdom in a literal sense to Hypatia is thus the result of modern revisions, interpretations and enhancements of her story, but even the application of “martyrdom” in a metaphorical sense to Hypatia’s death is misleading. 9. ὀστράκοις ἀνεῖλον a. Socrates’ ὄστρακα and Gibbon’s Oyster Shells Since the use of ὄστρακα in Socrates bears on the question of how Hypatia died, and how Socrates’ description of her death is informed by motifs of statue destruction,77 the word’s meaning in the rather unusual context of a killing mer73   Michael A. B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007). The same idea informs e. g. Antonio Carile, “Giovanni di Nikiu, cronista bizantino-copto del VII secolo,” in Βυζάντιον: Αφιέρωμα στον Ανδρέα Ν. Στράτο (Athens: Stratos, 1986), 376; Polymnia Athanassiadi, ed., Damascius: The Philosophical History (Athens: Apamea Cultural Association, 1999), 133 n. 96; Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 3 2005), 331 no. 451. Others opine that “there were no pagan martyrs”: Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13; cf. also Jan W. van Henten, “Martyrium II,” RAC 24 (2012): 300 – 25, here 304. 74   Rathbone and Thompson, “The Killing of Hypatia,” 74. 75  Ronchey, Ipazia, 181 – 83. 76   Contra: Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counter-Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 496 – 502, with n. 39 (bibliography of the debate). 77   A question explored in Haase, this volume, Chapter 5.

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its a more detailed discussion. According to Liddell, Scott and Jones, ὄστρακον designates (1) an object made of fired clay such as an earthen vessel or potsherd, or (2) a shell, particularly “of snails, mussels, cuttle-fishes, tortoises,” but also an eggshell.78 Robert Beekes has recently refuted the traditional view79 of an analogous formation of ὄστρακον and ὄστρε(ι)ον “oyster, oyster-shell” which traces both to a stem ὀστρ‑, “bone.” Instead, Beekes suggests that both words are preGreek.80 Socrates’ use of ὄστρακα is unusual. The majority of scholars understand the ὄστρακα to mean pottery sherds, but many of these scholars leave the method of killing unspecified.81 Those who are more specific hold that the pottery sherds were used for cutting the victim’s throat82 or for dismembering or flaying her.83 However, parallels for ὄστρακα as cutting or flaying devices in contexts of torture and killing are difficult to find. An exception comes from the ninth-century encomium of Saint Agatha:84 78

  LSJ 1264 s. v. ὄστρακον I 1, 2, and 4; II 1 and 2.   Cf. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, Fasc. 3 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), 833 s. v. “ὄστρακον et ὄστρειον.” 80   Robert Beekes, ed., Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 2:1119 – 20 ss.vv. ὄστρακον and ὄστρεον, ‑ειον. 81   Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, Revealing Antiquity  8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 93; Richard Klein, “Die Ermordung der Philosophin Hypatia: Zum Kampf um die politische Macht in Alexandria,” in Roma versa per aevum: Ausgewählte Schriften zur heidnischen und christlichen Spätantike, ed. Raban von Haehling and Klaus Scherberich, Spudasmata 74 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1999), 72 – 90, here 84; Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy, 71; Pierre Périchon and Pierre Maraval, eds., Socrate de Constantinople, Histoire Ecclésiastique Livre VII, Sources chrétiennes 506 (Paris: Le Cerf, 2007), 61; Clelia Martínez Maza, Hipatia: la estremecedora historia de la última gran filósofa de la antigüedad y la fascinante ciudad de Alejandría (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2009), 316; Ronchey, Ipazia, 59; Silvia Ronchey, “Perché Cirillo assassinò Ipazia?” in Tolleranza religiosa in età tardoantica, IV – V secolo: atti delle Giornate di studio sull’età tardoantica, Roma, 26 – 27 maggio 2013, ed. Arnaldo Marcone, Umberto Roberto and Ignazio Tantillo, Collana di studi umanistici 7 (Cassino: Edizioni Università di Cassino, 2014), 135 – 77, here 150; Hans van Loon, “Violence in the Early Years of Cyril of Alexandria’s Episcopate,” in Violence in Ancient Christianity: Victims and Perpetrators, ed. Albert Geljon and Riemer Roukema, VC Supplement 125 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 108 – 31, here 124. 82   Cf. already John B. Bury, ed., Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Methuen, 21911), 5:117 n. 26: “ἀνεῖλον means simply killed (by cutting her throat?), not scraped.” 83   “Pottery fragments” served to “shred” her body: Watts, Hypatia, 3; contrast Watts, Hypatia, 116: “broken roof tiles” were used to dismember Hypatia; further contrast Watts, “The Murder of Hypatia,” 334 – 35: “her body was torn up, possibly by being dragged through the streets.” 84   Methodius of Constantinople, Encomium in Sanctam Agatham  26, ed. Elpidio Mioni, “L’encomio di S. Agata di Metodio patriarca di Costantinopoli,” Analecta Bollandiana 68 (1950): 58 – 93, here 89: Ὁ τύραννος εἶπεν· “Ὀστράκοις ὀξέσι στρωθεῖσι ἐπ’ἐδάφους, πλῆθός τε ἀνθράκων ἀνάμιξ αὐτοῖς ἐμβάλλοντες, καὶ γυμνῷ τῷ σώματι ἐπὶ τούτων αὐτὴν περισύροντες, ἴδωμεν εἰ σῴζει αὐτὴν ὁ Χριστὸς αὐτῆς”. I could not find this passage, or any examples of sherds or tiles used as torture instruments, in the index to Éric Rebillard’s collection of martyr narratives (Éric Rebillard, ed., Greek and Latin Narratives about the Ancient Martyrs, OECT [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017], 385 – 98). 79

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The ruler said: “When keen sherds (ὄστρακα) have been strewn upon the ground, and we throw into them a mass of coals pell-mell and drag her about upon these with her naked body, we may see whether her Christ saves her.

However, this text postdates Socrates’ account by several centuries. It is difficult to fathom how pottery sherds, let alone mollusc shells, could be used as a lethal cutting device on the human body, and literature on shellfish does not suggest that they were used for that purpose.85 How then could the idea that Hypatia was cut to death become so successful? The above Byzantine text has been overlooked by scholarship on Hypatia’s killing and was surely not instrumental in that process. By contrast, one likely explanation is that this scholarly view derives at least in part from Edward Gibbon’s potent rendering of the scene, which draws on Socrates among other ancient sources:86 On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader, and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster shells, (26) and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts; but the murder of Hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Cyril of Alexandria.87

In his note 26 Gibbon specifies: Oyster shells were plentifully strewed on the sea-beach before the Caesareum. I may therefore prefer the literal sense, without rejecting the metaphorical version of tegulae, tiles, which is used by M. de Valois. I am ignorant, and the assassins were probably regardless, whether their victim was yet alive.

In his note Gibbon ponders two meanings of ὄστρακα and rather cautiously decides in favour of “oyster shells,” without excluding “tiles.” This can be taken as a clue that he, as readers before and after him, struggled to make sense of 85   August Marx, “Austern,” PW II 2 (1896): 2589 – 92; Robert W. Th. Günther, “The Oyster Culture of the Ancient Romans,” Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom n. s. 4 (1897): 360 – 65; August Steier, “Muschel,” PW XVI (1933): 773 – 96; Alfred C. Andrews, “Oysters as a Food in Greece and Rome,” CJ 43 (1948): 299 – 303; Erika Feucht, “Muschelschalen,” LÄ 4 (1982): 228 – 30; Annalisa Marzano, Harvesting the Sea: The Exploitation of Marine Resources in the Roman Mediterranean, Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 173 – 97; Jacopo De Grossi Mazzorin, “Consumo e allevamento di ostriche e mitili in epoca classica e medievale,” in Appunti di archeomalacologia, ed. Alberto Girod (Sesto Fiorentino: All’Insegna del Giglio, 2015), 153 – 58. 86   Gibbon’s primary sources for the Hypatia episode according to his notes 25 – 27: the Suda, Hesychius, the Greek Anthology, the letters of Synesius of Cyrene, and Socrates of Constantinople. These are largely identical with the sources named in de Valois’ / Valesius’ commentary in his 1668 edition of Socrates’ Church History (see n. 89 below). Editions of the Greek Anthology, the Suda and Synesius in Gibbon’s library: Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Library of Edward Gibbon: A Catalogue (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 21980), 138, 260 – 61. 87  Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall, vol. 4, ch. 47, ed. Womersley, 2:945 – 46.

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Socrates’ text. As sometimes happens in the course of the reception of an author, a statement that Gibbon originally presented with some caution later became codified and more rigid than he originally intended. Notwithstanding the testimony of first-century author Xenocrates of Aphrodisias, who lists the mouths of the Nile among the best grounds for oysters,88 one has to ask whether it is true that oysters “were plentifully strewed on the seabeach” of late antique Alexandria. And there are further problems with Gibbon’s note. Gibbon refers to Henri de Valois’ 1668 edition of Socrates’ Church History89 and indicates that de Valois rendered ὄστρακα as tegulae, “tiles.” In fact, however, de Valois, who otherwise does not comment on this particular phrase, renders ὄστρακον as testa,90 which means “object of burnt clay” (including a vessel and a brick or tile) but also “fragment of earthenware, shard” or “shell” (of a crustacean).91 Gibbon’s error of remembering tegula (which has the rather more restricted meaning “roof-tile, tile”92) instead of testa can perhaps be explained by his reliance on memory when composing his paragraphs.93 Gibbon’s error can also be taken as further evidence that he wavered with regard to the meaning of ὄστρακα. The confusion that is already apparent in Gibbon has been augmented by more recent misinterpretations of his view on the matter. Some scholars think that Gibbon describes a flaying, a removal of the skin.94 But he in fact depicts an excarnation, a removal of the flesh from the bones. Gibbon further wonders whether this procedure was performed on Hypatia’s body while she was still alive. However, either method of torture or execution requires special instruments and specialists able to use them.95 The idea that unqualified aggressors armed with inadequate tools such as mollusc shells could have successfully performed such an operation is hardly persuasive, to say the least.

88   De Alimento ex Aquatilibus 27 ap. Oribas., Collectiones medicae 2.58.96 (CMG VI.1, ed. Raeder, 53). 89   Henricus Valesius, ed., Socratis Scholastici et Hermiae Sozomeni historia ecclesiastica (Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1668). William Reading’s augmented edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1720) of de Valois’ work was part of Gibbon’s library: Keynes, The Library of Edward Gibbon, 121. The notes from other commentators that Reading included in his translation of de Valois’ commentary do not bear on Hypatia’s killing. 90   Henricus Valesius, ibid., 352: “. . . et vestibus exutam, testis interemerunt.” 91   OLD 1931 s. v. testa 1a, b; 2a; 3a. 92   OLD 1910 s. v. tegula. 93   For this peculiarity of Gibbon’s compositional technique, see Paul Cartledge, “The Enlightened Historiography of Edward Gibbon, Esq.: A Bicentennial Celebration,” The Maynooth Review / Revieú Mhá Nuad 3.2 (1977): 67 – 93, here 85. 94   Note the erroneous translation of Gibbon’s “flesh” as “pelle,” “skin”: Ronchey, Ipazia, 84: “. . . la pelle le fu strappata dalle ossa con gusci aguzzi di conchiglie . . .” She holds that Hypatia died by flaying or dismemberment (ibid., 86). 95   Niels Hyldahl and Borge Salomonsen, “Hinrichtung,” RAC 15 (1991): 342 – 65, here 351.

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It must have suited the purpose of Gibbon’s Enlightenment historiography and his anti-clerical tendencies96 to depict Hypatia’s aggressors as uncivilised fanatics conspicuously lacking in the Christian virtue of mercy. Gibbon’s attitude might explain why the Christian perpetrators in his account use exotic weapons to inflict a type of corporal punishment that was considered archaic and inhumane in his time. That later scholars adopted Gibbon’s version is proof of his influence.97 b. An Alternative: Socrates’ ὄστρακα and Stoning While it is very hard indeed, if not impossible, to find ancient parallels for the use of ὄστρακα as lethal cutting weapons, parallels for their use as projectiles in Greek literature exist. This opens up an easier, if less spectacular, solution: I hold that Socrates describes a stoning.98 My analysis will show that Socrates’ ὄστρακα are ad hoc weapons typical of urban violence,99 e. g. large sherds of voluminous and heavy vessels such as storage containers or transport amphorae. Such heavy sherds would have been suitable for pelting and crushing, but not for cutting someone to death. If we take into account the basic meaning of ὄστρακον, “an object made of fired clay,” and if we also consider the cognate words in Patris-

96   Cartledge, “The Enlightened Historiography of Edward Gibbon,” 85 holds that Gibbon’s examination of Christianity is perhaps the unifying theme of the Decline and Fall. Gibbon’s views on religion and on Catholic and Protestant Christianities: Cartledge, “The Enlightened Historiography of Edward Gibbon,” esp. 76, 89 – 92; Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise of Christianity through the Eyes of Gibbon, Harnack, and Rodney Stark (Groningen: Barkhuis, 22010), 1 – 24 (with bibliography). Wilfried Nippel, “Edward Gibbon, das antike Christentum und die anglikanische Kirche,” in Wege der Neuzeit: Festschrift für Heinz Schilling, ed. Stefan Ehrenpreis, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Olaf Mörke and Luise Schorn-Schütte (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007), 241 – 67 portrays a Gibbon who was less one-dimensionally hostile (but nevertheless occasionally caustic) towards Christianity and the Church as an institution. 97   E. g. Richard Hoche, “Hypatia, die Tochter Theons,” Philologus 15 (1860): 435 – 74, here 462 n. 105, who thinks that the ὄστρακα were mussel shells. 98   Some have considered a stoning, without proffering a more detailed discussion: Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, 116; Lacombrade, “Hypatia,” 959; Rathbone and Thompson, “The Killing of Hypatia,” 75. See already John W. Donaldson, A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece: From the Foundation of the Socratic Schools to the Taking of Constantinople by the Turks. Being a Continuation of K. O. Müller’s Work (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1858), 3:351, 352 n. 1. 99   Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, 50 BC to AD 284 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 66 with n. 30 discusses stoning (λιθοβολία, lapidatio) in the context of urban violence in the Roman world and assembles some evidence for many major centres. Stoning in the context of popular justice and interpersonal violence: Garrett G. Fagan, “Violence in Roman Social Relations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World, ed. Michael Peachin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 467 – 95, here 468, 479 – 80, 484 – 85. Stoning in late antiquity: Hyldahl and Salomonsen, “Hinrichtung,” 344; Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität, 70 – 71, 88, 146, 152, 214, 265. Dynamics of urban unrest in late antiquity: ibid., 79 – 93.

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tic literature,100 it is legitimate to include bricks and roof tiles (or fragments thereof), used as improvised missiles, in the discussion.101 Whether Socrates’ ὄστρακα are understood as (large) potsherds or as roof tiles is ultimately of little consequence. Crucially, however, there is evidence for the use of ὄστρακα as effective missiles. Herodian’s testimony (7.12.5) is particularly revealing: in the civil war at Rome in 238, street-fighters armed with pottery, stones and tiles (κέραμος, λίθοι, ὄστρακα) manage to severely injure praetorians. The Historia Augusta mentions tiles and vessels (tegulae; vasa) in the same context (SHA, Maximus et Balbinus 10). In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Hetaerae, the ὄστρακα appear together with stones and other ad hoc weapons used by the untrained but determined aggressor, in humorous contrast with the real warrior equipment of the trained military: Philostratus the wealthy merchant threatens to throw stones and ὄστρακα at his rival Polemon, a military man, and his soldiers (Dial. meretr. 9.5). In the memorable opening scene to Piscator, Lucian has Socrates incite his philosopher colleagues to go after and pelt Parrhesiades, the author’s satiric alter ego whose name evokes Free Speech; the missiles include stones, earth clods (λίθοι, βῶλοι) and ὄστρακα (Pisc. 1). Bricks, tiles, or weighty potsherds were easily available in an urban context. In scenarios of urban unrest, otherwise unarmed people such as slaves or women are often depicted using improvised weapons such as stones or cudgels.102 In literature,103 stoning is associated with civil unrest and rioting mobs (which does not permit the reverse conclusion that stoning was exclusively performed by mobs and that Hypatia’s attackers were therefore a “mob”, a view refuted in section 2 above). The use of roof tiles as weapons in street-fighting, often by otherwise unarmed civilians, is attested throughout classical antiquity, as William Barry’s study demonstrates.104 Tiles from ancient Greece and Italy examined by 100

  PGL 976: ὀστρακάριος (“tile-maker”); ὀστράκινος “of earthenware”; ὀστρακώδης (“testaceous”). Cf. Andrew C. Zenos, trans., The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus, NPNF2 2 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890), 160 (“murdered her with tiles”) and n. 2: “ὀστράκοις, lit. ‘oystershells,’ but the word was also applied to brick tiles used on the roofs of houses.” In classical Greek, κέραμος and κεραμίς are frequently used for “tile” and “tiling”: LSJ 940 s. v. 101   Some regard tiles as the killing weapons, albeit often without clarifying how they were deployed: e. g. Susan Wessel, Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 47; Alan Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works,” in Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185 – 203, here 186. The idea is already present in de Valois’ “testis interemerunt.” 102   Tradition has Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, being knocked unconscious by a tile (κεραμίς) that an older woman hurls from a rooftop during the siege of Argos in 272 BCE: Plutarch, Pyrrh. 34.2 – 3. 103   E. g. Vergil, Aen. 1.148 – 50. 104   William D. Barry, “Roof Tiles and Urban Violence in the Ancient World,” GRBS 37 (1996): 55 – 74. His rich source collection is based on the search terms κεραμ- and tegul- and omits the Hypatia episode. Another passage that can be added to Barry’s list is Optatus of Milevis, Contra

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Barry weigh between 14 and 30 kilograms, enough to seriously harm, cripple, or kill someone. Barry’s data and calculations refer to terracotta tiles. Tiles made of stone or marble would have been even deadlier. Jagged edges and keen corners added to the violent impact of the tiles. They were often held in place on the roof by their weight alone, which also means that they could, under certain circumstances, slip or be removed by hand.105 In the instances assembled by Barry, the tiles are always thrown, but there are no examples of tile fragments being used as fatal cutting devices. Most of the scenarios Barry examines involve combatants throwing tiles from some height, usually from a roof. But there are literary examples of tiles used with deadly impact on the ground.106 Alexandrian archaeology, too, illustrates a variety of ground-level sources for building materials: terracotta tiles covering not only roofs but also ground structures such as sewage canals; building materials lying on the ground unused; and depots of various kinds of building materials apparently assembled for reuse.107 With a view to other potential meanings of ὄστρακον, in Roman Alexandria, as elsewhere in the Roman world, fired brick was a common building material, particularly for baths and cisterns but also for other structures. These included the so-called theatre at Kom el-Dikka and diverse structures in the general area of the Caesareum complex,108 where Hypatia was killed according to Socrates. The city’s refuse heaps abounded with potsherds.109 All of these materials would have been readily accessible in late Roman Alexandria. Furthermore, literary representations of urban unrest set in Roman Alexandria involve stoning. Philo recounts how during the riots of 38 victims were stoned to death (καταλεύειν) and injured with a tile or (heavy) vessel (κέραμος) and with branches (κλάδοι).110 Eusebius (H. E. 6.41.3 – 4) relates the stoning of Parmenianum Donatistam 2.18.1 (written in the 360s), where several deacons are wounded, and two die, through roof tiles (tegulae) torn from the very basilica of Lemella / Mauritania that the victims are defending against the Donatist aggressors. 105   Roof tiles “broken or thrown down by the winds”: Vitruvius, De architectura 2.8.18. 106  Plutarch, Apoph. lac. 241 B5. 107   Tile-covered sewage canal: Barbara Tkaczow, Topography of Ancient Alexandria: An Archaeological Map, Travaux du Centre d’Archéologie Méditerranéenne de l’Académie Polonaise des Sciences 32 (Warsaw: Zakład Archeologii Śródziemnomorskiej Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1993), 84 with n. 75. Unused floor slabs and depots of building material: Barbara Tkaczow, Architectural Styles of Ancient Alexandria: Elements of Architectural Decoration from Polish Excavations at Kom el-Dikka (1960 – 1993), Alexandrie 8 (Warsaw: Zakład Archeologii Śródziemnomorskiej Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2010), 90 – 91 with n. 29. 108   Kom el-Dikka: Tkaczow, Topography of Ancient Alexandria, 85. Caesareum area: ibid., 131, 136. 109   Archaeological evidence of refuse heaps in late antique Alexandria: Tkaczow, Topography of Ancient Alexandria, 111 with n. 130, 167 with n. 228; Majcherek, “The Auditoria on Kom elDikka,” 472 with n. 11 (with bibliography). 110   Legatio 127 – 28. In Flacc. 66 and 174, Philo mentions stoning (καταλεύειν), cudgelling, burning alive, and dragging to death. Discussion of these events: Sandra Gambetti, The Alexan-

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the Christians Metras and Quinta in Alexandria in 249 / 50. In both cases, a series of previous tortures (beating, tearing, scourging, dragging) culminates in lethal stoning (καταλιθοβολεῖν; καταλεύειν). According to Theodoret (Hist. E. 4.19), the envoy sent by Damasus of Rome to Alexandria was maltreated in various ways and pelted with stones. And for Constantinople Marcellinus Comes notes “stone throwers” (lapidatores) among the urban troublemakers executed in 523.111 Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ Latin translation of Socrates of Constantinople provides further support for the assumption that the latter depicted a stoning. Cassiodorus treats Hypatia’s death in Book 11 of his Historia ecclesiastica tripartita, which book relies exclusively on Socrates. The translation was penned by the scholar Epiphanius, but the overall composition and final revision of the Historia ecclesiastica tripartita may have been the responsibility of Cassiodorus.112 Regarding the account of Hypatia’s death, Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ text is so close to Socrates that it should be reckoned a translation rather than a re-working with any claim to originality. However, small deviations from Socrates’ original provide valuable insight into how Cassiodorus / Epiphanius dealt with ambiguities in Socrates; the example of δίφρος rendered as vehiculum was discussed in section 4 above. Such deviations reveal the interpretational process that underlies Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ translation and that is indeed inherent in any translation. The importance which Cassiodorus, author of a work De orthographia, attached to correct transcription and precise written communication, his predilection for Greek language and culture,113 and his commitment to translations from the Greek, which he commissioned and supervised, seem to

drian Riots of 38 C. E. and the Persecution of the Jews: A Historical Reconstruction, JSJ Supplement 135 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), esp. 167 – 93. 111   Cf. Brian Croke, trans., The Chronicle of Marcellinus: A Translation with Commentary, Byzantina Australiensia 7 (Sydney: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1995), 42. 112   Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ translation of Socrates: Günther C. Hansen, ed., Sokrates, Kir­ chen­geschichte, GCS, N. F. 1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995), xxiv – xxv; Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 217 – 30. On Cassiodorus / Epiphanius as translator more generally, see Ladislas Szymanski, The Translation Procedure of Epiphanius-Cassiodorus in the Historia tripartita, Books 1 and 2 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1963); Franz Weissengruber, Epiphanius Scholasticus als Übersetzer: Zu Cassiodorus-Epiphanius Historia ecclesiastica tripartita, Veröffent­ lichungen der Kommission zur Herausgabe des Corpus der lateinischen Kirchenväter 5, SÖAW, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 283 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1972). Division of work between Cassiodorus and Epiphanius: Mario Mazza, “La Historia Tripartita di Flavio Magno Aurelio Cassiodoro Senatore: metodi e scopo,” in Flavio Aurelio Magno Cassiodoro: atti della settimana di studi, Cosenza-Squillace, 19 – 24 settembre 1983, ed. Sandro Leanza (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 1986), 210 – 44, esp. 210 – 16; but cf. Franco Cardini, Cassiodoro il Grande: Roma, i barbari e il monachesimo, Biblioteca di cultura medievale (Milan: Jaca, 2 2017), 94, 149. 113   For which, see Antonio Garzya, “Cassiodoro e la grecità,” in Flavio Aurelio Magno Cassiodoro: atti della settimana di studi, Cosenza-Squillace, 19 – 24 settembre 1983, ed. Sandro Leanza (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 1986), 118 – 34.

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preclude that such deviations result from mere accident or carelessness. This is the account of Hypatia’s death in Cassiodorus / Epiphanius:114 For which reason, men driven by a most violent passion, whose leader was a certain Peter, a reader, conspired and ambushed the woman as she returned to her place, and, pulling her down from her vehicle, dragged her to the Church which is called that of Caesar, and, after they had stripped her of her clothes, killed her with stones (lapidibus peremerunt). Afterwards, tearing her asunder limb by limb, they completely burned her by fire in a place that is called Cinarus. This affair stirred up no moderate amount of spite for Cyril and the Alexandrian Church, for murder and fighting are foreign to Christians. Now this happened in the fourth year of Cyril’s episcopate, in the tenth consulate of Honorius and the sixth of Theodosius, in the month of March, while it was Lent.

It is surely significant that Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ text renders Socrates’ ὀστράκοις ἀνεῖλον by way of Latin lapidibus peremerunt. In the mid-sixth century,115 a mere century after Socrates’ text, his Latin translation considers him to have referred to stoning. As we have seen, this understanding is easily reconcilable with the semantics of Socrates’ ὄστρακα and with the literary and archaeological evidence for stoning. Yet the decision not to provide a more literal translation of ὄστρακα may point to some puzzlement on Cassiodorus’ / Epiphanius’ part.116 By offering a free but unequivocal rendering of Socrates’ phrase, the translation disambiguates the meaning of ὄστρακα while retaining the bipartite structure of the Greek phrase. Stoning is associated with the primitive and with the forces of Chaos in Greek cosmogonic myth, where creatures like the Gigantes wield boulders as weapons against the Olympians. The Neoplatonic writer Eunapius of Sardis, a contemporary of Hypatia’s, compares the elimination of the cult of Serapis in Alexandria and Canopus to the Gigantomachy and equates Theophilus’ faction with the monsters. The implicit allegation is about the disruption of civil and religious order but also about the attack on the traditional gods (in the form of 114  Cassiodorus, Hist. eccl. tripart. 11.12.4 – 5, ed. Jacob and Hanslik, 644: Quamobrem conspirantes viri acerrimo fervore pulsati, quorum dux erat quidam Petrus lector, observaverunt mulierem ad propria remeantem eamque de vehiculo deponentes ad ecclesiam, quae vocatur Caesaris, traxerunt et vestibus exutam lapidibus peremerunt. Quam postea membratim dilacerantes in loco, qui dicitur Cinarus, igne concremaverunt. Haec res non mediocrem livorem Cyrillo et Alexandrinae concussit ecclesiae; alienae namque sunt a Christianis caedes et pugnae. Haec igitur acta sunt quarto anno episcopatus Cyrilli, consulatu Honorii decimo et Theodosii sexto, mense Martio, ieiuniis existentibus. 115   Date in the 540s: Garry W. Trompf, Early Christian Historiography: Narratives of Retribution (London: Equinox Publishing, 22007), 323; Désirée Scholten, “Cassiodorus’ Historia tripartita before the Earliest Extant Manuscripts,” in The Resources of the Past in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Clemens Gantner, Rosamond McKitterick and Sven Meeder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 34 – 50, here 34. 116   This holds particularly true if one considers Cassiodorus / Epiphanius to be a rather literal translator; cf. Sebastian P. Brock, “Aspects of Translation Technique in Antiquity,” GRBS 20 (1979): 69 – 87, here 80 with n. 25.

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their images). In an ironic subversion of conventional historiographic dating by eponymy, Theophilus himself is pictured “lording it over the Cursed Ones, some Eurymedon type ‘who once was king over the insolent Gigantes’,”117 with a quotation from Homer (Od. 7.59). The casting of Theophilus as the Giant king Eurymedon (“Widely-Ruling”) reveals the juxtaposition of awe and contempt in which the bishop was held by some of his contemporaries, but it likewise highlights the associations stoning evoked in some ancient onlookers and readers. The stoning of Hypatia – a woman, a divulger of “idololatrous” teachings, and an alleged magician according to John of Nikiu (Chron. 84.87 – 88) – would have evoked passages from the Scriptures as well. In the Old Testament, stoning is stipulated as a punishment for various types of sexual misconduct; for blasphemy (Lev. 24:10 – 23); breaking the Sabbath (Num. 15:32 – 36); being a medium or an enchanter (ἐγγαστρίμυθος ἢ ἐπαοιδός: Lev. 20:27); and for idololatry (Lev. 20: 1 – 2; Deut. 13:2 – 12 and 17:2 – 7). In the New Testament, Jesus prevents the stoning of an adulteress (Jo. 8:3 – 11) and escapes a stoning for blasphemy (Jo. 10: 31 – 33; cf. 8:59). The Apostle Paul escapes a stoning at Iconium and survives another at Lystra (Acts 14: 5 – 7, 19 – 20); Stephen, first martyr of Christianity, is stoned for alleged blasphemy (Acts 7:58 – 60).118 For Christoph Stenschke, the stoning motif in Luke is a means of characterising an undisciplined and fickle non-Christian crowd; for Shelly Matthews, the stoning of Stephen is linked to a barbarous, un-Roman rabble.119 These semantics are reminiscent of the interpretation proposed here for Eunapius’ depiction of Theophilus as Eurymedon: in very different contexts, stoning is used to characterise an uncultivated and uncontrolled opponent. These semantic backgrounds may shed telling light on how Socrates viewed Cyril and his regime.

117  Eunapius, VS 6.11.1 – 2, ed. Giangrande, 38 = 6.107 – 08, ed. Goulet, 39 – 40: . . . Θεοφίλου δὲ προστατοῦντος τῶν ἐναγῶν, ἀνθρώπου τινὸς Εὐρυμέδοντος “ὅς ποθ’ ὑπερθύμοισι Γιγάντεσσιν βασίλευεν.” The phrase “Θεοφίλου προστατοῦντος” is part of a list of eponymous dignitaries entailing an extensive time specification: “under the rule of Theodosius, under the episcopate (PGL 1182 s. v. προστασία 2, προστάτης 4) of Theophilus . . ., under the prefecture of Evagrius, under the military command of Romanus.” 118   Rich comparative evidence for the stoning of Stephen and Paul: Craig S. Keener, ed., Acts: An Exegetical Commentary 2. 3:1 – 14:28 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 1453 – 63, 2126 – 29, 2172 – 77. 119   Christoph W. Stenschke, Luke’s Portrait of Gentiles Prior to Their Coming to Faith, WUNT II 108 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), 175 – 77 with n. 342; Shelly Matthews, Perfect Martyr: The Stoning of Stephen and the Construction of Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 3 – 4, 73, 75 – 77, 169 n. 65, 173 n. 25.

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10.  τοῦτο οὐ μικρὸν μῶμον Κυρίλλῳ καὶ τῇ Ἀλεξανδρέων ἐκκλησίᾳ εἰργάσατο· . . . ἐν μηνὶ Μαρτίῳ νηστειῶν οὐσῶν Socrates dates Hypatia’s killing to March 415, shortly before Easter.120 In 415, Cyril announced Easter for April 11.121 That the assault took place during Lent further increases its gravity, a fact that Socrates emphasises from the standpoint of Christian ethics. Violent behaviour is inappropriate for Christians, a view paralleled in a fifth-century sermon by abbot Besa of Athripe.122 Unsurprisingly, the assault on Hypatia contrasts strongly with the (commonplace) moral agenda of Cyril’s Easter Letters; for the Lenten period in 415, the patriarch recommends, amongst other things, charity (τῆς εἰς ἀλλήλους ἀγάπης), remembrance of the maltreated (μνημονεύοντες . . . τῶν κακουχουμένων), “and in general esteem of all virtues” (καὶ πᾶσαν ἁπαξαπλῶς τιμῶντες ἀρετήν) (Cyril of Alexandria, Epist. pasch. 2.9). 120

  Dating by consulship in Socrates: Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates, 156 – 58. Mathematician Ari Belenkiy (“The Novatian ‘Indifferent Canon’ and Pascha in Alexandria in 414: Hypatia’s Murder Case Reopened,” VChr 70 [2016]: 373 – 400) has recently reconsidered an earlier argument of his, in which he dated Hypatia’s death to 416. He now agrees with the established scholarly consensus regarding 415 as the date of her death but continues to hypothesise that Hypatia was killed because she became involved in Christian controversies about the Easter computus. However, Cameron, “Hypatia: Life, Death, and Works,” 190, followed by Watts, Hypatia, 157 n. 5, rightly observes that there is no primary evidence that Hypatia ever concerned herself with that question. The Easter computus in the early church: Andreas Külzer, “Die Festbriefe (ἐπιστολαὶ ἑορταστικαί) – eine wenig beachtete Untergattung der byzantinischen Briefliteratur,” ByzZ 91 (1998): 379 – 90, here 380 – 82; O’Keefe, “Introduction,” esp. 6 – 7; Harald Buchinger, “Pascha,” RAC 26 (2015): 1033 – 77, esp. 1048 – 50, 1060 – 62 (with bibliography). Socrates’ excursus about the Easter controversy (Hist. eccl. 5.22): Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates, 47 – 48 and n. 109; 222 – 23, 248 – 50, 377 s. v. Ostertermin. Cyril’s calendrical endeavour: Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 65 – 67, 193 – 94. 121   Easter date in 415: Cyril of Alexandria, Epist. pasch. 2.9; cf. Philip R. Amidon and John J. O’Keefe, trans., St. Cyril of Alexandria, Festal Letters 1 – 12, FC 118 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 67 n. 72; 237 – 38 (table of Easter dates announced by Cyril’s Festal Letters). Early history of the Lenten season: Alberto Camplani, “Sull’origine della quaresima in Egitto,” in Acts of the 5th International Congress of Coptic Studies, Washington, 12 – 15 August 1992, ed. David W. Johnson and Tito Orlandi (Rome: C. I. M., 1993), 2:105 – 21; Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie, 156 – 70; Külzer, “Die Festbriefe,” 388 and n. 42; Buchinger, “Pascha,” 1060 – 61. 122   The ethical notion advanced by Socrates (ἀλλότριον γὰρ παντελῶς τῶν φρονούντων τὰ Χριστοῦ φόνοι καὶ μάχαι καὶ τὰ τούτοις παραπλήσια) is expressed in strikingly similar terms in Besa’s sermon; cf. Besa, F 41: “To the Dignitaries and People of the Village,” ed. and trans. Karl Heinz Kuhn, Letters and Sermons of Besa, CSCO 157 – 158 Scriptores Coptici 21 – 22 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste L. Durbecq, 1956), 21:129 – 30, 22:123 – 24: “. . . such a thing [i. e. fighting] is not fitting for us, we being Christians, nor again is it pleasing to God, nor is it pleasing to men . . . For also it is thus written, ‘It is not right for a servant of the Lord to fight.’ For such things are not for men who say, ‘We are Christians.’” – Τῶν φρονούντων τὰ Χριστοῦ, the “party of Christ”, is synonymous with οἱ Χριστιανοί, and the expression “οἱ τὰ . . . φρονοῦντες” is frequent in Socrates according to Wallraff, Der Kirchenhistoriker Sokrates, 38 – 39, who however translates more literally (113): “Morde und Kämpfe und dergleichen stehen nämlich denen, die Christus im Sinn haben, nicht gut an.”

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With a view to the date of Hypatia’s death, “the time of the preparation of catechumens,” John McGuckin has cautiously suggested that her murder started as an attempt to force her into conversion; he reads her death as “a grim parody of the baptismal rite.”123 But this conjecture rests partly on how we interpret the purpose of stripping Hypatia of her clothes, which can be read differently (as we have seen in section 7 above) from how McGuckin wishes to understand the relevant passage, and partly on the assumption that Hypatia was killed “within the very church building.” But neither Socrates’ text nor other late antique sources verify that Hypatia was dispatched inside the church (for my suggestion regarding the location of her death as implied by Socrates’ account, see section 5 above). Edward Watts proposes that the slackening of port operations in March bound the underemployed dockers to Alexandria’s bishop, whose donations helped support them and provided an incentive for them to participate in the attack on Hypatia.124 The socio-economic perspective is appealing, but none of the sources suggests that the desperate unemployed had anything to do with Hypatia’s death. I hold it as at least as likely that increased visitor influx to the city on the occasion of the Easter holidays and the heightened excitement (and excitability) that comes with the celebration of major holidays,125 while possibly converging with undercurrents of social strain, were decisive in unleashing the hooliganism described by Socrates. The phenomenon of major religious festivals attracting violence transcends cultural and chronological boundaries. David Nirenberg, for example, has studied instances of Holy Week riots in various cities in fourteenth-century Spain, where Easter conjured up Christian allegations of deicide against the Jewish population.126 With due consideration given to the obvious differences, the riots studied by Nirenberg yield features that are comparable to certain components of the Hypatia narratives: the tendency for attacks to take place near important religious buildings; the prevalent and sometimes lethal stone throwing in which clerics as well as children and adolescents participated; and a connection between the victims and the civic authorities, which could result in fights between local Christian clerics and civic elites. For Roman culture, Jerry Toner proffers examples of how the exuberant mood of festivals sometimes resulted in rioting and hooliganism, which in itself could acquire a celebratory air.127 For Roman and late Roman Alexandria 123

 McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria, 14.  Watts, Hypatia, 16 – 17, 114 – 15 with nn.  33 – 35. 125   Cf. Marc Juergensmeyer, “Religious Terrorism as Performance Violence,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Michael Jerryson, Mark Juergensmeyer and Margo Kitts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 280 – 92, here 288 – 89. 126   David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 21998), 200 – 30. 127   Jerry P. Toner, Popular Culture in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 118. 124

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and other urban centres, further examples of rioting and killing in the wake of major Christian festivals support my view that a similar scenario was underlying Socrates’ rendering of Hypatia’s death: According to the fourth-century Acts of Mark, followers of the traditional cults seized St. Mark, whom the Egyptian Christian tradition claimed as founder and first bishop of the Alexandrian church, on the occasion of a paschal celebration (which coincided with a festival of Serapis).128 They dragged him by a rope around his neck through Alexandria’s streets until he died and attempted to burn his body. In Constantinople in 379, a group of monastics supported by the urban poor threw stones at Gregory of Nazianzus and his candidates for baptism when he was about to celebrate Easter vigil.129 Bishop Proterius was murdered in Alexandria on Maundy Thursday in March 457. Starting with the Hesychian notice handed down in the Suda,130 his killing (as well as that of George of Cappadocia in 361 on what today would be Christmas Eve) has been compared to Hypatia’s death,131 but little attention has been given to the date. The fact that imperial amnesties were typically granted at Easter further underlines the symbolic significance of these holidays. In his study on the socio-historical and legal aspects of violence and crime in late antiquity, JensUwe Krause points out that amnesties became institutionalised and in certain instances covered even serious offences.132 At the juridical level, the State used 128   Acta Marci 7 – 10 (PG 115: 167 – 70); discussion: Birger A. Pearson, “Earliest Christianity in Egypt: Some Observations,” in Roots of Egyptian Christianity, ed. James E. Goehring and Birger A. Pearson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 132 – 59, here 137 – 45. 129   Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 77; discussion: Isele, Kampf um Kirchen, 82 – 90. 130   Hesychius (Suda IV 644,9 – 11) s. v. Ὑπατία. 131   George of Cappadocia’s death: Historia Acephala 2.8 – 10; see also Ammianus Marcellinus 22.11.8 – 10; Epiphanius, Pan. 76.1.1 – 2; Sozomenus, HE 5.7; Socrates, Hist. eccl. 3.2; Philostorgius, Hist. eccl. 7.2; Chronicon Paschale p. 546 Dindorf. Cf. Matilde Caltabiano, “L’assassinio di Giorgio di Cappadocia (Alessandria, 361 d. C.),” Quaderni catanesi di studi classici e medievali 7 (1985): 17 – 59; Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie, 536 – 40, 565 – 66; Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity, 280 – 95; Johannes Hahn, Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theo­ dosius II.), Klio Beihefte N. F. 8 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 66 – 74; Harold A. Drake, “The Curious Case of George and the Camel,” in Studies of Religion and Politics in the Early Christian Centuries, ed. Pauline Allen and David Luckensmeyer, Early Christian Studies 13 (Virginia, QLD: Centre for Early Christian Studies, 2010), 173 – 93. – Death of Proterius: Liberatus of Carthage, Breviarium 15; Evagrius, Hist. eccl. 2.8; also Zachariah of Mytilene, Hist. eccl. 4.1 – 2, Theodore Lector, Hist. eccl. 1.8. Cf. William H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 154 – 55; Cornelia Horn, Asceticism and Christological Controversy in Fifth-Century Palestine: The Career of Peter the Iberian, OECS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 31 – 32 n. 104, 93 n. 209, 95; Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 332. 132  Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität, 275 – 79; also Jens-Uwe Krause, “Staatliche Gewalt in der Spätantike: Hinrichtungen,” in Extreme Formen von Gewalt in Bild und Text des Altertums, ed. Martin Zimmermann, Münchner Studien zur Alten Welt 5 (Munich: Utz, 2009), 321 – 50, here 332 – 34, 344 – 45.

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Easter as an opportunity to interrupt the cycle of violence and counter-violence. It is conceivable, although not explicitly stated, that Socrates depicts a scenario where the perpetrators felt safe, hoping for a likely amnesty even for murderers, and that such an amnesty contributed to the covering up of Hypatia’s murder. Most scholars agree that the assassins remained exempt from punishment.133 Krause’s study, while it does not discuss Hypatia’s case in any detail,134 may nevertheless furnish useful information regarding the administrative and juridical mechanisms that would have facilitated such an outcome:135 Krause points out that there commonly existed a marked discrepancy between the penalty prescribed by late antique law and the actual punishment. Partly owing to an unwieldy administrative apparatus but also because of an imperial propensity for amnesties, failure to punish even grave crimes was a common occurrence. Besides, it was easy for perpetrators to go into hiding in larger cities. Corrupt governors further impeded dispensation of imperial justice. This is the very scenario Damascius seems to allude to: “And the Emperor would have been vexed about this . . ., had not Aedesius been corrupted by bribes.”136 Against the background of late antique criminal law and jurisdiction the cover-up of Hypatia’s case, while uncondonable, was in all likelihood far from exceptional.

133   E. g. Ronchey, Ipazia, 63 – 65; Clelia Martínez Maza, “Une victime sans importance? La mort de la philosophe Hypatie,” in Chrétiens persécuteurs: destructions, exclusions, violences religieuses au IVe siècle, ed. Marie-Françoise Baslez, Bibliothèque Histoire 460 (Paris: Albin-Michel, 2014), 285 – 310, here 287. 134   Only a brief remark in Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität, 81. 135   For the following: Krause, Gewalt und Kriminalität, 90 – 93, 206 – 11. 136  Damascius, Vita Isidori F *102,36 – 37 Zintzen: καὶ ὁ βασιλεὺς ἠγανάκτησεν ἐπὶ τούτῳ  εἰ μὴ Αἰδέσιος ἐδωροδοκήθη. No official by the name of Aedesius has been identified in fifth-century Constantinople, but Damascius seems to imply that the imperial measures were baulked by administrative corruption; cf. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia, 280.

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Contributors Walter F. Beers is currently completing his Ph. D. in History at Princeton University, under the direction of Jack Tannous. His dissertation is concerned with the works of John of Ephesus (c. 507 – 88) and the early Miaphysite churches. Previously, he completed a M. St. in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at Oxford as an Ertegun Scholar. Joshua Fincher is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College and is the author of several articles on Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and the concept of harmonia. His current project is a study of the evolution, characteristics, and presentation of the hero in Second Sophistic and Late Antique literature. David Frankfurter is Professor of Religion at Boston University and a specialist in ancient magical texts, demonology, popular religion, Christianization, and Egypt in the Roman and Late Antique periods. Frankfurter is the author of Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance (Princeton, 1998) and Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds (Princeton, 2017), as well as articles in Journal of Early Christian Studies, Harvard Theological Review, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies and others. Sebastian Gertz is an independent researcher. He has worked as Supernumerary Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at St John’s College (2012 – 2017) and as Assistant Editor with the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project at King’s College London (2010 – 2012). His main area of research is Ancient Philosophy, particularly Neoplatonism. Mareile Haase researches and publishes on Etruscan religion and on Roman Egypt. She has taught in Erfurt and Toronto and was a visiting research fellow at the University of Bochum and the Collège de France in Paris. She is the co-editor of a survey-article on Roman religion, which appears regularly in the Archiv für Religionsgeschichte. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer is Ordinaria of Latin Philology at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the literature of Late Antiquity, Gender Studies, Neolatin, the History of Classical Scholarship and Reception Studies. She is the author of Hypatia. Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert, Sapheneia (Bern 2011), as well as more recent publications such as Texts and Textiles in the Ancient World (Oxford 2016), Alma Johanna Koenig’s ‘Der heilige Palast’. The Rise and Fall of Theodora in the Belletrist of the

324

Contributors

‘Wiener Moderns’ (ed. S. Cullhed and M. Malm, Heidelberg 2018); and “Hypatia” in Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie 5 (ed. C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa, Basel 2018). Dawn LaValle Norman is a Research Fellow in Biblical and Early Christian Studies at Australian Catholic University’s Institute of Religion and Critical Inquiry in Melbourne. Previously, she completed her Ph. D. at Princeton University and held a Junior Research Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. Her research focuses on literary transformations of the Imperial period, especially in the genre of the philosophical dialogue. Victoria Leonard is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Postdoctoral Researcher for the ERC-funded project ‘Connected Clerics. Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380 – 604 CE)’, at Royal Holloway, University London, and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Victoria is a Research Associate at the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is a founding member, former co-chair, and steering committee member of the Women’s Classical Committee (UK). She specialises in late ancient historiography and religion, gender and violence, and digital humanities. Alex Petkas is Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities at California State University, Fresno. He has published several articles on classical and Late Antique Greek rhetoric and philosophy, and is currently working on a monograph on the philosophical letters of Synesius of Cyrene. Cédric Scheidegger Laemmle is Lecturer in Latin literature at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and Affiliated Researcher at the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge (UK). After a first book on notions of the literary œuvre in Latin poetry (Werkpolitik in der Antike, Munich 2016) his current research interests include Ciceronian oratory, Late Antique poetry and classical receptions. Helmut Seng is Associate Professor at the Universities of Konstanz and Frankfurt am Main; in 2010, he was Directeur d’études invité at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. His publications include the monograph Untersuchungen zum Vokabular und zur Metrik in den Hymnen des Synesios (Frankfurt am Main 1996) and the collected volume, coedited with L. M. Hoffmann, Synesios von Kyrene: Politik – Literatur – Philosophie (Turnhout 2012). Edward Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Chair and Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five books including Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford 2017) and a number of articles relating to Hypatia’s life, teaching, and the Alexandrian context in which she lived.

Index Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Titles of works will generally be found under the name of the author. The “Ancient Authors and Works” section gives an overview of works and authors referenced, while the “Subjects” section contains a more detailed topic-by-topic index.

Ancient Authors and Works Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon  173n20 Acta Marci  266n47, 283 Alexander Romance  63 “Alexandrian World Chronicle”  105, 110 Ammianus Marcellinus  108, 121 – 122, 267n53, 271, 283n131 Apollonius – Conics, Hypatia’s (lost) commentary on  4, 133n2, 224 – Palladius on  21n57 – Philostratus, Life of Apollonius  10n14, 267n51 Apophthegmata Patrum  26n76, 109n96, 110, 114n113 Apuleius of Madaura – Apology  125 – 126 – de Deo Socratis  149 Aristophanes  10, 26 – Clouds  12n21, 14 Aristotle  133, 142, 144 – 147, 161 – De philosophia  32 – On Interpretation  146 – On the Soul  144 Athanasius of Alexandria  16n38, 97n36, 257 – Apologia ad Constantium  261n26 – Historia Arianorum Epistula  262, 264 Augustine of Hippo  142 – Civitas Dei  107, 139n29 Augustus Caesar  167, 262 – Res Gestae Divi Augusti  167n66

Breve directorum  85 Callimachus – Aetia  18 – Pinakes  165, 167 Cassiodorus – De orthographia  278 – 279 – Historia ecclesiastica tripartita (with Epiphanius)  91n18, 93, 94, 111, 248 – 249, 250, 255 – 256, 259n16, 260, 262, 278 – 279 Cassius Dio  269 Cicero, rep.  230n78 Clement of Alexandria – Paedagogue  162n40 – Protrepticus  156n18 – Stromateis  107n85 Codex Theodosianus  15n31, 80, 83n74, 129, 139n26, 141n37 Cyril of Alexandria – Contra Iulianum  107n86, 117 – Festal Letters  281 – Sixth Miracle of the Three Youths (attrib.)  131n45 Damascius, Philosophical History / Life of Isidore  174 – 178, 246. See also Subject index. Demosthenes  22n62 – Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Demosthenes  10n14 – On the False Embassy  259, 267

326

Index of Ancient Authors and Works

Dio of Prusa (Dio Chrysostom) – Euboicus / Kynegos  12, 39 Diodorus Siculus  107n84, 265 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Demosthenes  10n14 Epiphanius of Salamis  19 – Panarion  261n28, 283n131 Epiphanius / Cassiodorus, Historia ecclesiastica tripartita  91n18, 93, 94, 111, 248 – 249, 250, 255 – 256, 259n16, 260, 262, 278 – 279 Eunapius of Sardis, Vitae Sophistarum  97n37, 108n91, 120, 136n15, 174n14, 279 – 280 Euripides  111n101 – Bacchae  155 – Ino  45 Eunapius of Sardis, Vitae Sophistarum  97n37, 108n91, 120, 136n15, 174n14, 279 – 280 Eusebius of Caesarea – Commentary on Isaiah  31n14 – Demonstratio evangelica  31n14 – Ecclesiastical Theology  31n14 – Historia ecclesiastica  31n14, 88, 266n48, 267, 277 – 278 – Praeparatio evangelica  112n106 Evagrius Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica  52, 267 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks  174n20 Hesychius of Miletus  3, 91n18, 112, 199, 248, 269 – Onomatologus (Dictionary of Learned Men)  246 Hesiodus Epicus, Theogonia  147n56 Hierocles of Alexandria  140 – 141, 143, 150 – Golden Verses, commentary on  140 – on Providence  140 Hephaestio Thebanus, Apotelesmatica  44n66 Historia Acephala  267n53, 283n131 Historia Augusta  276 Historia Monachorum  21n57, 25

Homer  10, 11, 58, 60, 206 – 207 – Iliad  103 – 104, 155, 206 – Odyssey  10n13, 41, 162, 280 Iamblichus  136, 138, 140, 141, 166n62 – de Anima  138n25 Jerome – ad Eustochium  13 – De Viris Illustribus, on Sophronius  89 – Epistolae  21n58, 22nn61 – 62 John Cassian, Collationes  13 John Chrysostom  21, 69, 73 – In transfigurationem  31n14 John Malalas, Chronographia / Chronicle  82n60, 117, 181n46, 250 John Moschus, Pratum spirituale  173 – 174n20 John of Nikiu (Yuḥannā al‑Mudabbir), Chronicle  151 – 152, 156, 160 – 163, 174 – 175, 251 – 253. See also Subject index. John Philoponus, de aeternitate  145n49 Justinian, Novels  257 Lactantius, Divine Institutes  156n18 letters of Synesius  3 – 4, 29 – 65. See also Subject index. – to Euoptius (brother of Synesius)  18n43, 41, 56, 244 – 245 – to Herculian  10, 30 – 35, 42n59, 245 – to Hesychius  222 – 223 – on hydroscope  43 – 44 – to Hypatia  51 – 53, 239 – 244 – letter  154, 56 – 59, 64 (See also Dio (Synesius) and late antique defense of classicism) – to Olympius  41 – 43, 244 – to Proclus  44 – 45, 46 – to Pylaemenes  223 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita  167n68 Lucan, Bellum civile  103 Lucian – Dialogues of the Hetaerae  276 – Icaromenippus  230n78 – Piscator  276 – True Stories  63

Index of Ancient Authors and Works

Martial, Liber Spectaculorum  113 Methodius of Constantinople, Encomium in Sanctam Agatham  272n84 Menander Rhetor  45n74 Nonnus of Panopolis – Dionysiaca  2, 5, 151 – 169 – Paraphrase  162 Olympiodorus  147 – 149 – in Platonis Alcbiadem commentarii  148 – 149 – in Platonis Gorgiam commentaria  149n60 – Prolegomena  147n57 Optatus of Milevis, Contra Parmenianum Donastistam  276 – 277n104 Origen – Contra Celsum  23n67 – On First Principles  21n56 – scholia in Lucam  31n14 Philo of Alexandria – Flaccus  266n48, 267, 277n110 – Legatio  277 Philostorgius, Historia ecclesiastica  91n18, 112, 203, 246, 248, 269, 283n131 Philostratus  10 – Life of Apollonius  10n14, 267n51 – Vitae Sophistarum  13n24, 14nn27 – 28, 18n41, 18n46 Photius, Bibliotheca  135, 143n42, 175, 180n40, 196, 199, 246 Plato – Alcibiades  148 – 149 – Cratylus  146n51 – Euthydemus  10n14 – Phaedo  10, 25 – Phaedrus  2, 10, 16 – 17, 59, 61 – Republic  10, 135n9, 136, 147 – Sophist  116 – Symposium  2, 16n35, 34n25 – Theaetetus  10 – Timaeus  127 Pliny the Elder, Natural History  173n9 Plotinus – Enneads  138n25, 142n38

327

Plutarch – Apophthegmata Laconica  277n106 – Isis and Osiris  107n86 – Life of Pyrrhus  276n102 Porphyry – de Abstinentia  126n26 – Letter to Anebo  112n106 – Letter to Marcellus  56n24 – Vita Plotini  142n40 P. Oxy.  VI  903, 268 – 269 Proclus – The Elements of Theology  177n26 – in Platonis Cratylum commentaria  146n51 – in Platonis Timaeum commentarii  143n45 Procopius of Gaza, Commentary on ­Isaiah  31n14 Prudentius, Contra Symmachum  156n18 Pseudo-Clementine, Recognitiones  108 Pseudo-Demetrius, Epistolary types  33n22, 45n74 Ptolemy – Almagest  3, 44n66 – Astronomical Canon, Hypatia’s (lost) commentary on  4, 133n2, 165, 248 – Handy Tables  37n39 Sayings of the Desert Fathers  109 – 110 Seneca, Naturales Quaestiones  230n78 Socrates Scholasticus (Socrates of Constantinople), Historia Ecclesiastica  2, 4, 67 – 86. See also Subject index; ­textual commentary on Socrates ­Scholasticus’ account of Hypatia’s death Soranus, Gynaecology  172n6 Sozomen, Historia ecclesiastica  23, 82, 97n37, 102, 248, 259n16, 283n131 Supplementa quaestionum ad Marinum  31n14 Synesius of Cyrene. See also Subject index. – Cynegetics (Hunting with Dogs)  12, 39 – 40 – De dono / Ad Paeonium (On the Gift /  To Paeonius)  11, 28, 29n2, 35, 36, 55, 57, 138nn23 – 24, 164n53, 245 – 246

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Index of Ancient Authors and Works

– De Insomniis (On Dreams)  11, 19n49, 28, 55, 138 – 140, 141nn35 – 36 – De Providentia  17, 31n14 – De regno (On Kingship)  18n43, 37n36, 55 – Dion: Or, On Living by his Example  55 – The Egyptian Tales  37 – 38, 55 – Hymns  12, 20n54, 55, 62 – Oration on Kingship  37 – In Praise of Baldness  55

Themistius, Orationes  17n39, 31n14 Theodoret of Cyrrhus – Historia ecclesiastica  90n15, 97n37, 100n51, 102, 106, 109, 248, 266n48, 267n51, 278 Varro, De gente populi Romani  107 Vergil, Aeneid  103, 104n67 Zacharias of Mytilene – Ammonius  146 – Historia ecclesiastica  267n50

Subjects Abre los ojos (film)  234 Abundantius (comes Aegypti)  73 – 74 Abydos, purge of Bes-oracle cult in  121 – 122 Actium, Battle of  167 – 168 Adamantius (Alexandrian Jew)  79n52 Aelia Pulcheria (Pulcheria Augusta)  4, 68. See also Socrates Scholasticus Afghanistan War (2001 – )  226 St. Agatha, encomium of  272 – 273 Agora (Alejandro Amenábar film)  5, 209 – 237 – cosmic vistas and earthly warfare in  227 – 235, 229 – Davus (fictional slave in love with Hypatia) in  5, 190, 216 – 220, 222n48, 229n71, 235 – 237 – death of Hypatia in  219, 220, 233, 235 – 237 – erotics of  235 – 237 – financial success, lack of  215 – gender in  216n29, 235 – 237 – genre, style, and narrative of  216 – 223 – historical accuracy and anachronism in  223 – 227, 226, 228 – hypertrophy of reception of Hypatia, engagement with  209 – 215, 221 – 222, 234 – 235 – Library of Alexandria conflated with Serapeum in  217 – menstrual blood scene in  189 – 190, 217 – 218 – proto-Copernican theories attributed to Hypatia in  195, 219 – 223, 221 – science versus history in  219 – 223, 233 – 234 Alexander, Church of, Alexandria  76, 77 Alexander, Synesius’s letter of recommendation to Hypatia for  43 Alexandria. See also Library of Alexandria; Serapeum, Alexandria, destruction of – in Agora (film)  217 – 218, 224 – 225

– Alexander, Church of  76, 77 – anti-pagan riots in  67, 78 – 79, 83 – 84, 217n33, 218, 220. See also death of Hypatia – Athens and  135 – 136n7, 142 – 143 – Caesareum  78 – 79, 92, 93, 95, 110, 186, 191, 219n38, 249, 250, 261 – 266 – Constantinople, rivalry with  68 – 71 – Forum  93, 110 – ivory-carving industry in  106 – Jewish-Christian strife in  67, 74 – 77, 78, 79, 80, 83 – 84, 200, 217n33, 218 – 219, 220, 223 – 224, 252, 282 – Kinaron  92, 95, 249, 253 – Mouseion  17, 18n41 – Neoplatonism in  142 – 149 – Novatians in  72, 74 – parabalani  79 – 81, 86, 196, 218 – 219, 225 – 226, 226, 235, 258 – philosophy in  134 – Serapis, destruction of cult statue of  89 – 90, 97 – 110, 115, 227, 228, 279 – 280 – shrines in  126n28 – stonings and urban unrest in  277 – 278 – Thesmophorion  268 allegory and allegorical exegesis  10, 16 – 17, 55, 153 – 154, 156, 168 – 169, 211, 220 – 222 Amenábar, Alejandro. See Agora, and other specific films Ammonius (grammarian / teacher)  97n37, 143, 145 – 147 Ammonius (monk), assaulting Orestes  77, 79, 86, 91 – 93, 258n12 Ammonius (monk), in Origenist controversy  19 – 20, 23, 24n69, 28 Abba Amoun  27 Andronicus (governor)  48 animation of statues  100 – 101, 119, 127 Anoub (monk)  114 – 115 Anthemius (praetorian prefect of the east)  82 – 83

330

Index of Subjects

Anthropomorphite controversy  22n65, 74 Antioch riots (387, 579)  102, 131 Antiochus (court eunuch)  82, 83 Antoninus  120, 136 Abba Antony  27 apatheia  23 – 24, 26, 162 Aphrodisias, portrait gallery at  102 – 103 Aphrodite (deity)  16, 154, 156 – 169 Apis (deity)  107, 112 Arcadius (emperor)  21, 35n28, 81, 82, 248 Arians and Arianism  69, 174n10, 197, 201, 246 Aristarchus  17 – 18, 233 Aristides  10 Arsenios  26n76 Arsinoe III (queen of Egypt)  268 Artemis (deity)  160 al‑Asaad, Khaled  87 Asclepiodotus, letter of Synesius to  45 – 46 Asclepius (deity)  103, 127, 132 Asmus, Johann Rudolf  176 astrolabes  28, 138, 142, 164, 165, 185, 251 Athanasius (in letter from Synesius to Hypatia)  47n82 Athanassiadi, Polymnia, Damascius. The Philosophical History  175n18, 176, 177, 246 Athena (deity)  129 Athenodorus son of Sandon  105 Athens – Alexandria and  135 – 136n7, 142 – 143 – House of Proclus  121, 127 – 130, 131 – Hypatia and  136 – Synesius on  36, 56, 135 – 136n7 Atticus of Constantinople  78, 143n45 Aurelianus (praetorian prefect of the east)  83 Autricum-Chartres  131 Awartani, Jehad  88 Bagenal, Fran, 213, 213 – 214 Bamiyan Buddhas, Afghanistan  88, 263n33 Barry, William D.  276 – 277 Batstone, William  234

Beekes, Robert  272 Beers, Walter F.  4, 5, 67, 248, 323 Belenkiy, Ari  281n120 Beretta, Gemma  258n12 Bernard, Alain  133, 136, 137 Beroe (daughter of Aphrodite / personi­ fication of Beirut)  154, 156 – 169 Besa of Atripe  100n52, 281 Bes-oracle cult, purge of  121 – 122 Bidez, Joseph, Philostorgios, Kirchen­ geschichte  246 Bodel, John  128 Bowersock, Glen  80 Bowes, Kim  126n28, 130 Brakke, David  183n50 Brancacci, Aldo  12n17 Bredekamp, Horst  116, 263n34 Brown, Peter  19n49, 81, 84, 90n14 Brucker, J.  206n52 Burgess, Richard W.  88n7 Butheric (magister militum per Illyricum)  78 Caesareum, Alexandria  78 – 79, 92, 93, 95, 110, 186, 191, 219n38, 249, 250, 261 – 266 Caesarion (son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra VII)  262 Cameron, Alan  82, 83, 125n23, 136, 165, 178, 209 – 210, 211n7, 235, 271n73 Cameron, Julia Margaret, Hypatia (1867)  187, 188, 195 Canfora, Luciano  96n31, 270n70 Canopus, martyr cult at  108n91 Caracalla (emperor)  269 Carile, Antonio  271n73 Cartledge, Paul  184n59, 275n96 Celestine I (bishop of Rome)  72 – 73 Chalcedon, Council of (451)  68 – 71 Chaldean Oracles  138n27, 141 – 142 Chartres-Autricum  131 Chitty, Susan  186n66 Christianity. See also specific Christians and Christian topics, e. g. Origenist controversy – allegory and allegorical exegesis in  16 – anti-pagan riots  67, 78 – 79, 83 – 84, 130 – 131, 217n33, 218, 220

Index of Subjects

– crypto-devotion and rise of  130 – 132 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  196 – 198, 202 – 203, 204 – Gesios of Atripe on  122 – of grey robes and white robes in Synesius’s Letter  154, 13 – 14 – Jewish-Christian strife in Alexandria  67, 74 – 77, 78, 79, 80, 83 – 84, 200, 217n33, 218 – 219, 220, 223 – 224, 252, 282 – Neoplatonism in Alexandria and  142 – 143, 145 – 149 – ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’, nonexclusivity of  130, 132 – public culture and need to engage with  8 – 9 – religious festivals and violence  282 – 284 – stoning, in Old and New Testaments  280 – Synesius, as Christian  13 Chuvin, Pierre  179n35 claquers  75 – 76 Clark, Elizabeth A.  20, 21, 182n49 Clark, Gillian  178 classicism, defense of. See Dio (Synesius) and late antique defense of classicism Claudian  54 Claudius Claudianus  51n5 Cleopatra (film)  216 Cleopatra VII (pharaoh)  79, 261, 262 Cohen, Jeremy  83n75 Colbert, Claudette  216 Constantinople – Alexandria, rivalry with  68 – 71 – Hagia Sophia  82 – stone-throwing in  278, 283 – Synesius’s embassy to  35 – 38, 39n45, 49 Constantius (emperor)  121 Continuation des Mémoires de Littérature et d’Histoire  202, 205 Cosgrove, Denis  231 Cosmos (TV documentary series)  231 – 233 creation ex nihilo  143 Cronus / Kronos (deity)  124, 147, 148 crypto-devotion  121, 130 – 132

331

Cynics – ‘grey robes’ in letter 154 of Synesius  12 – Hypatia interpreted as Cynic  144, 171n3, 178 Cyril of Alexandria  4, 5, 28, 67. See also under Socrates Scholasticus – in Agora (film)  218 – 219 – Caesareum as locus of Hypatia’s death and  265 – 266 – Easter date in 415, announcement of  281 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  198, 200 – 204, 206 – 207 – image destruction, death of Hypatia as, and  95, 96 – 97 – as lector  257 – Nonnus, Dionysiaca and  153 – in original texts  247, 248, 250 – 253 – planning of Hypatia’s death by  256 – spurious letter from Hypatia to  196, 203 Cyrus of Panopolis  152n6 Dacier, Anne  206 – 207 daemons / daimones  148 – 149 Damascius, Philosophical History / Life of Isidore  174 – 178, 246. See also menstrual blood scene in Damascius – Alexandria, philosophical training in  143 – on death of Hypatia  111, 256, 258n13, 270, 284 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  199, 201, 203, 204 – female dedicatee of work  179n36 – image destruction, death of Hypatia as  91n18, 111n100 – on intellectual accomplishments of Hypatia  134 – 135 – John of Nikiu compared  96 – menstrual blood scene not used in  174 – music, as Hypatia’s cure for love  161n37, 175, 176 – 177, 218n35 – Neoplatonism and  134 – 135, 137n21, 143n43, 144, 145 – 146, 149n64 – philosophical exemplars, Isidore versus Hypatia as  179 – 182, 199, 203, 248 – on public aspects of Hypatia’s career  8n6

332

Index of Subjects

– religious culture of intellectual Hellenes in works of  120 – as source of information about Hypatia  67 – text of  247 – 248 Damasus (bishop of Rome)  278 damnatio memoriae  52 Danae (Alexandrian)  268 Deakin, Michael A. B., Hypatia of Alexandria  43n66, 44n70, 192n84, 270 death of Hypatia  1 – 2, 4. See also image destruction, death of Hypatia as; ­textual commentary on Socrates Scholasticus’ account of Hypatia’s death – age at  181 – in Agora (film)  219, 220, 233, 235 – 237 – dating of  281 – different views of  90 – 91 – gender stereotypes, persistence of  190 – 191 – ὄστρακα, means of death by  270, 271 – 280 – parabalani and  79 – 81, 86, 196, 218 – 219, 225 – 226, 226, 235, 258 – Peter the lector / Peter the magistrate (murderer of Hypatia)  94 – 96, 203, 206, 242, 249, 250, 256 – 258 – Sagan in Cosmos narrating  232 – Socrates Scholasticus, on civil strife in Alexandria leading up to  67, 68, 74 – 79, 83 – Socrates Scholasticus, significance for  67 – 68, 85 – 86, 193 – 195 – as stoning  93, 114 – 115, 275 – 280 – Synesius’ Dio and  28 Decian persecution  71 Demetrius (of Bes-oracle cult)  121 – 122, 126 Demetrius Phalereus Rhetor, On Style  29n3, 37n38 Demosthenes  22n62 – Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Demosthenes  10n14 – On the False Embassy  259, 267 Deriades  156 Desmolets, Pierre-Nicholas  202 Diderot, Denis  206n52, 207 Didymus the Blind  16

Dijkstra, Jitse H.  88n7 Dio (Synesius) and late antique defense of classicism  3, 7 – 28 – accompanying letter compared to text  38 – 41 – barbaroi in  24 – 26 – Christianity, need to engage with  8 – 9 – content and purpose of Dio  9 – 11 – De Insomniis / De dono and  11, 28 – death of Hypatia and  28 – defining classicism  7 – 8 – Evagrian doctrines and  23 – 24 – mystery expressions in  32 – opponents (grey robes / white robes) and audience for  11 – 18, 24 – 28 – Origenist controversy and  9, 18 – 24, 27 – paideia and  3, 8, 10, 15, 18, 24 – public culture, Hypatia’s involvement in  7 – 9, 10 – 11, 17 – 18, 27 – 28 – seeking publication by Hypatia for  9, 17 – 18 Dio of Prusa (Dio Chrysostom) – Philostratus on  13n24 – Synesius’s Dio and  9, 26 Dionysiac contexts  111 Dionysius of Miletus  18n41 Dionysus (deity)  155 – 156, 161 Diophantus, Hypatia’s commentary on  4, 133n2, 248 Dioscorus (bishop of Alexandria)  70 Dioscorus (bishop of Hermopolis)  20 Dioscorus (nephew of Synesius)  41 δίφρος as lecturer’s chair or litter, interpretation of  92 – 93, 255 – 284 disciplina arcani  32 Dometianus / scholasticus, letters of Synesius to  59 – 61 Donatists  69, 277n104 Douglas, Mary  266n46 Dzielska, Maria  44n70, 178, 259 – 260 Earthviewer  229 Eco, Umberto, Baudolino (2000)  53, 61, 63 – 65 eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia  5, 193 – 207 – anticlericalism and  199 – 200, 275

Index of Subjects

– Christian politics and  196 – 198, 202 – 203, 204 – Cyril of Alexandria and  198, 200 – 204, 206 – 207 – Encyclopédie, Éclecticisme article  206nn52 – 53, 207 – gender norms, refutation of  199 – 203, 204 – 205 – Gibbon  93, 117, 182, 206, 207, 217n33, 232n88, 270, 273 – 275 – historical reimaginings of Hypatia ­generally and  193 – 196 – knowledge of Hypatia  196 – M. G. and Mademoiselle B. in France  202 – 205, 207 – menstrual blood scene and  201 – reversion to focus on death, in later eighteenth century  205 – 207 – Voltaire  206 – 207 – Whiston-Sacheverell conflict and Toland’s Tetradymus (1720)  2, 196 – 205 Elizabeth (queen of England)  200 Elsner, Jaś  125 Encyclopédie, Éclecticisme article  206nn52 – 53, 207 Enlightenment symbol, Hypatia as  210, 275 Ephesus, First Council of (431)  68 – 71, 73n27 Ephesus, Second Council of (449)  70 Epiphanius archidiaconus  70n14, 85 Errington, R. Malcolm  88n7 Euclid  222 – 223 Eudokia Palaeologus (empress)  195 Eudoxia Augusta  82 euhemeristic theories  106 – 107 Euoptius (brother of Synesius)  18n43, 41, 56, 222 – 223, 244 – 245 Eurymedon (king of Gigantes)  280 Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebians  197 Evagrius of Pontus  21n56, 23 – 24, 27 Évrard, Étienne  137n19 El Fayum – mummy portraits  225 – Theadelphia / Fayum wooden Serapis  103n64

333

Fincher, Joshua  2, 5, 151, 323 Firuz Shah Tughluq  109 Flacilla Augusta  82 Flood, Finbarr Barry  109 Forum, Alexandria  93, 110 Fowler, Don P.  54 Foxhall, Lin, Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity  171 Frankfurter, David  4, 100n52, 119, 323 Freedburg, David  114, 125 Friedrich Barbarossa (emperor)  63 Fritz, Wilhelm  51n4 Gamaliel (patriarch of the Jews)  83 García, Nacho  232 Garzya, Antonio  43n65 Gascou, Jean  261n28 Gaspard, Jules Maurice  215n22 Gelasius of Caesarea  89n10 Gély, Véronique  210 gender. See also menstrual blood scene in Damascius; Nonnus of Panopolis; sex / sexuality – in Agora (film)  216n29, 235 – 237 – as aspect of classical studies  171 – 172 – critiques of Dionysus and Hypatia compared  155 – 156 – Damascius on Isidore versus Hypatia as philosophical exemplars and  179 – 182 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  199 – 203, 204 – 205 – Hypatia (feminist journal)  1, 190, 207 – Hypatia Sans (font) and, 212, 212 – 213, 214 – Jerome on  180n43 – literary endings, masculine versus ­feminine  54 – 55 – male role-model, Hypatia as  2 – narrative conventions of, difficulty escaping  190 – 191 – Socrates Scholasticus, gender and ­status dominating account of Hypatia by  182 – 185 – stripping of Hypatia  267 – 269, 282 – sympathetic versus hostile accounts of Hypatia and  151 – 152, 168 – 169 – Synesius’s use of clichés of  35

334

Index of Subjects

– weakness and victim status attributed to Hypatia and  172 – wisdom, as female quality  182n49 George of Cappadocia  108, 248, 283 Gertz, Sebastian  4, 16n38, 133, 323 Gesios of Atripe (Flavius Aelius Gesios)  122 – 124, 127, 131 Gibbon, Edward  93, 117, 182, 206, 207, 217n33, 232n88, 270, 273 – 275 Gladiator (film)  216 Golden Verses  140 Goldhill, Simon  211n10 Google Earth  229 Graces  16 Greek Magical Papyri  120 Gregory of Nazianzus  283 Haas, Christopher  77n43, 79, 81n59, 265 – 268 Haase, Mareile  4, 87, 248, 255, 323 Hades (deity)  103 Hagia Sophia, Constantinople  82 Hahn, Johannes  88n7 Hansen, Günther C.  72n22, 74n29 Harich-Schwarzbauer, Henriette, Hypatia  4, 42n62, 43n65, 44n70, 51, 111n102, 158n14, 183n50, 246, 248n13, 259, 267n55, 269, 323 – 324 Harmanşah, Ömür  116 Harmonia (deity), in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca  16, 154, 156 – 169 Harpocrates (deity)  119 Harries, Jill  71n15 Helena (mother of Constantine)  183 Helios (deity)  164 Helladius (grammarian)  97n37 Hephaestio Thebanus, Apotelesmatica  44n66 Hera (deity)  10 Herculian, Synesius’s letters to  10, 30 – 35, 42n59, 245 Hermes Trismegistus  27 Hermes / Mercury (deity)  126, 158 Herodian  276 Heron  44n66 Hesychius (firstborn son of Synesius)  43 Hesychius (recipient of letter from Synesius)  222 – 223

Hierax, Orestes’ arrest and torture of  75 – 77, 86, 252 Hippius, Zinaida Nikolatevna  189 Histoire Critique de l’Éclectisme, ou des Nouveaux Platoniciens (1766)  206n53 Hoche, Richard  275n96 Hoffmeister, Johannes  49n89 Holum, Kenneth  83 Honorius (consul)  73, 92, 250, 279 Hose, Martin  34n25, 51n2 House of Proclus, Athens  121, 127 – 130, 131 Hubbard, Ben  87n3 Hubbart, Elbert  214 – 215 Hunter, Charles R.  43n66, 44n70 Hydaspes (deity)  156 hydromancy  44n70 hydroscope  43 – 44, 164 Hypatia (feminist journal)  1, 190, 207 Hypatia: Behind the Symbol (conference 2015)  2 Hypatia of Alexandria  1 – 6 – age at death  181 – ancient and modern reception of  4 – 5, 61 – 64, 209 – 214 (See also Agora (film); eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia) – contemporary female scholars comparable to  151n2 – death of  1 – 2, 4 (See also death of Hypatia; image destruction, death of Hypatia as; textual commentary on Socrates Scholasticus’ account of Hypatia’s death) – as male role-model  2 – menstrual blood episode  5 (See also menstrual blood scene in Damascius) – Neoplatonism and  4, 133 – 150 (See also Neoplatonism) – Nonnus and  2, 5, 151 – 169 (See also Nonnus of Panopolis) – paideia and  3 (See also paideia) – public culture, involvement in  7 – 9, 10 – 11, 17 – 18, 27 – 28 – quotations attributed to  214 – 215 – religious life of  4, 119 – 132 (See also religious life of intellectual Hellenes in late antiquity)

Index of Subjects

– rhetorical skill of  11 – scarcity of sources of information about  1, 3, 209 – 212 – Socrates Scholasticus and  2, 4, 67 – 86 (See also Socrates Scholasticus) – sorcery attributed to  28, 120, 142, 151, 156, 162, 185, 195, 219, 251, 280 – Synesius and  3 – 4 (See also Synesius of Cyrene) – timeliness of studying  1 – 2 Hypatia Sans (font), 212, 212 – 213, 214 image destruction, death of Hypatia as  87 – 117 – alternative interpretations compared  90 – 91, 92 – 93 – animation of statues  100 – 101 – dismemberment  111 – 113 – euhemeristic theories, corpse veneration accusations, and descriptions of cult sites as tombs  106 – 110, 114 – fire, destruction by / denial of burial  113 – 114 – headless torso and death of traditional religion  103 – 104 – iconography of Serapis, Rufinus’s re-reading of  104 – 106 – idolatry, death of Hypatia tied to crusade against  94, 97, 99 – in John of Nikiu  88, 89, 90n16, 94 – 97, 115, 117 – modern instances of image destruction  87 – 88, 111, 116 – Orpheus, Pentheus, and Osiris myths  111 – 113 – Plato on power of images and  116 – 117 – public event, destruction / death as  110 – 111 – in Rufinus  88 – 89, 90, 97 – 110 – Serapis, destruction of cult statue of  89 – 90, 97 – 110, 115 – in Socrates Scholasticus (Socrates of Constantinople)  88 – 94, 115 – 117 – stoning  93, 114 – 115 – substitutability of statue and human / body and image  88, 89, 100 – 103, 110 – 115

335

– substitutive image act, literary construction of Hypatia’s death as  115 – 117 – wooden object and anthropomorphic form  100 – 103 imageless prayer  20 images in late antiquity, power of  125 – 127. See also religious life in late antiquity imagination (phantasia), Neoplatonic views on  23, 139n29 Innocent I (bishop of Rome)  72 Iraq War  227, 229 Irene (daughter of Spyridon)  183 Isidore (envoy of Theophilus)  19, 20 Isidore of Alexandria  134 – 135, 143, 175, 179 – 181, 199, 203, 246, 248 Isidore of Pelusium  174n20 ‘Islamic State,’ destruction of images by  87 – 88, 111, 116, 263 Ixion (king of the Lapiths)  10 Jaccottet, Anne-Françoise  191n81 James, Liz  184 James I and VI (king of England and Scotland)  200 Jauss, Hans Robert  49n89 Jensen, Anne  183n53 Jerome – on gender  180n43 – Origenist controversy and  19, 21, 22 – Vergil taught by  104n67 Jews – Alexandria, Jewish-Christian strife in  67, 74 – 77, 78, 79, 80, 83 – 84, 200, 217n33, 218 – 219, 220, 223 – 224, 252, 282 – Pulcheria’s rise to power and  83 – 84 John (bishop of Jerusalem)  19, 23 John of Ephesus  131 John of Nikiu (Yuḥannā al‑Mudabbir), Chronicle – on Caesareum  262 – chapter summaries in  96 – concept of history in  95 – 96 – on Cyril of Alexandria  95, 96 – 97, 251 – 253 – Damascius’ account of Hypatia compared  185 – on destruction of Serapeum  98n41

336

Index of Subjects

– δίφρος as lecturer’s chair in  260 – hostile account of Hypatia  151, 152, 156, 160, 161 – 162, 174 – 175, 185 – image destruction, death of Hypatia as  88, 89, 90n16, 94 – 97, 115, 117 – ‘mob’ attack, lack of evidence for  258n13 – Socrates Scholasticus and  78, 94 – 96 – ‘sorcery’ of Hypatia, special interest in  28, 120, 142, 151, 156, 162, 185, 195, 251, 280 – Synesius’ Dio and  28 – text of  251 – 253 – on Theophilus  109, 257 – Toland not familiar with  200n28 Johnson, William  16n37 Jones, Arnold H. M.  272 Julian (emperor)  27n77, 62, 63, 258n9 Julius Caesar  262 Karivieri, Arja  127 Kelly, Megyn  192n83 Kepler, Johannes  219n39, 234 Kilo (tutor of Caracalla)  269 Kinaron, Alexandria  92, 95, 249, 253 King, Helen  184 Kingsley, Charles, Hypatia (1853)  186 – 189, 187, 195, 235 Kinzig, Wolfram  117 Kom el‑Dikka  92, 106, 260, 277 Krause, Jens Uwe  283 – 284 Kristensen, Troels Myrup  90 Kronos / Cronus (deity)  124, 147, 148 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de  206 – 207 Lacombrade, Christian  211n7, 260n21 lararia  128, 131 LaValle Norman, Dawn  1, 239, 324 Leclerq, Henri  257 lectorship of Peter (murderer of Hypatia)  256 – 258 Legman, Gershon  178n29 Lent, occurrence of Hypatia’s death during  281 – 284 Leonard, Victoria  5, 171, 324 Leone, Anna  134 letters of Synesius  3 – 4, 29 – 65 – in Agora (film)  222 – 223

– Alexander, letter of recommendation to Hypatia for  43 – to Asclepiodotus  45 – 46 – Constantinople, embassy to  35 – 38, 39n45, 49 – despairing letters on loss of sons  43 – 49 – to Dometianus / scholasticus  59 – 61 – Eco’s Baudolino (2000) and  53, 61, 63 – 65 – end of philosophical friendship with Hypatia in  56 – 61 – ‘epistolary I’ in  51, 53, 54, 56 – 60, 64 – to Hypatia  51 – 53, 239 – 244 – Hypatia as main point of reference in  29 – 30, 41 – 43, 47, 56 – 67 – letter  154, 56 – 59, 64 (See also Dio (Synesius) and late antique defense of classicism) – as literary corpus  51 – 55, 61, 64 – Mauthner’s Hypatia (1892) and  53, 61 – 62, 64 – networking aims of  41 – 43 – Nicaeus and Philolaus, letter to Hypatia seeking assistance for  47 – 49 – number of  51n4 – Platonic usage in  60 – 61, 64 – relationship with Hypatia in  48 – 49, 55 – 61 – sacrifice, using language of  260n69 – sexless nature of relationship to Hypatia in  34n25, 48 – 49 – Toland, as source for  199 Levick, Barbara  171 – 172n3 Lewis, Thomas – The History of Hypatia (1721)  201 – 202 – The Scourge (periodical)  201 Libanius  102, 126 Library of Alexandria – conflated with Serapeum in Agora (film)  217 – in Cosmos (TV documentary series)  232 – destruction of, in Agora (film)  233 – house of Harmonia in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca invoking  164 – 165 Liddell, Henry G.  272 Life of Antony  25

Index of Subjects

Long, Jacqueline  178 Luchner, Katharine  29n4, 52n9 luminous body, Neoplatonic concept of  140 – 141 Lupus, Christian  196 Macarius (associate of Jerome)  21n56 MacMullen, Ramsay  130, 275n99 Magna Mater  119 Malitz, J.  62n43 Mankiewicz, David  216 Marcella, Porphyry’s letter to  55 – 56 Marcellinus Comes  278 Marcian (husband of Pulcheria)  69, 70 Marcus of Ephesus  14n27 Marianelli, Dario  229n71 St. Mark, death of  266n47, 283 Martin, Annick  109, 261n28 martyrs – Canopus, martyr cult at  108n91 – Hypatia viewed as martyr  269 – 271, 282 Matthews, Shelly  280 Mauthner, Fritz, Hypatia (1892)  53, 61 – 62, 64 McClymond, Kathryn  129 McGuckin, John  282 McKenzie, Judith  105, 263, 265 McLaughlin, Gráinne  171n3 Melania the Elder  13n25, 21n56 Menouthis, domestic shrine in  125n23 menstrual blood scene in Damascius  5, 171 – 192 – account of Hypatia in Philosophical History / Life of Isidore  174 – 178 – in Agora (film)  189 – 190, 217 – 218 – challenging stereotypical perception of  192 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  201 – ‘impurity of birth’ in  177 – modern reception of  178 – 179, 186 – 190, 187, 188 – narrative conventions, difficulty escaping  190 – 191 – Neoplatonic scale of virtues and  134n3 – philosophical exemplars, Isidore versus Hypatia as  179 – 182, 248

337

– shocking and revolting, anecdote intended to be  176 – 178, 191 – 192 – text of  247 – Trump’s Megyn Kelly remark compared  191 – 192n83 – visibility of menstruation in antiquity and  172 – 174 Mercury / Hermes (deity)  126, 158 Middle Platonism  140, 141, 143n45, 149 Miguélez-Cavero, Laura  152n6, 155n14 Mitchell, Charles William, Hypatia (1885)  188, 189, 235 Mithras (deity)  119 Molè Ventura, Concetta  88 – 89n9 Molinaro, Ursula  195 Mommsen, Theodor  62n43, 80n54 Monaxius (praetorian prefect of the east)  80, 81, 83 Moran, Maureen  189n72 Mouseion, Alexandria  17, 18n41 Müller, Karl, Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum  246 Musaeus  162n40 Muses  28 music, as Hypatia’s cure for love  161n37, 175, 176 – 177, 218n35 mystery expressions, Synesius’s use of  30 – 32 Neoplatonism  4, 133 – 150 – Alexandrian  142 – 149 – Christianity and  142 – 143, 145 – 149 – classical paideia and  9, 16 – identity of Hypatia as Platonist  136 – 142 – on luminous body  140 – 141 – in Mauthner’s Hypatia (1892)  62 – Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and  166 – 167 – Osiris myth  112 – philosophical activity of Hypatia beyond exact sciences  133 – 136 – philosophical training of Hypatia in  135 – 136 – scale of virtues in  134 – theurgy and  138 – 139, 141 – 142 – white robes in Synesius’s Letter  154 and  14n29 – world-soul in  111n102

338

Index of Subjects

Nestorius and Nestorians  69 – 71, 72, 73n27, 85, 201, 251 Newton, Isaac  196 – 197 Nicaeus and Philolaus, Synesius’ letter to Hypatia seeking assistance for  47 – 49 Nicephorus Callistus  199 Nicephorus Gregoras  195, 199 9 / 11  225, 232 Nippel, Wilfred  275n96 Nirenberg, David  282 Nitria (monastic community)  19 – 21, 77, 78 Nonnus of Panopolis, Dionysiaca  2, 5, 151 – 169 – Battle of Actium, Beroe as hero of  167 – 168 – Beroe, Aphrodite, and Harmonia in Book  41, 154, 156 – 169 – birth and youth of Beroe, gender expectations and reversals of  158 – 163 – dating and composition  152 – 153 – Dionysus in  155 – 156, 161 – house of Harmonia, invoking Library of Alexandria  164 – 165 – ideological aims, ambiguity of  154 – intelligence and cultural power of female operatives in  155, 156 – 157, 162 – 163 – personification, use of  157 – 158, 160 – prophetic tablets, Aphrodite’s consultation of  157, 158, 163 – 168 – resonances of female characters with story of Hypatia  153, 161 – 163 – sympathetic / hostile gendered accounts of Hypatia and  151 – 152, 168 – 169 Novatians  69, 71 – 73, 74, 86, 194 Oinanthe (Alexandrian)  268 Olympius, letter of Synesius to  41 – 43, 244 O’Meara, Dominic J.  134n3 Op de Coul, Michiel  12n17 Orestes (governor of Alexandria)  7, 8, 28, 67. See also under Socrates Scholasticus – in Agora (film)  217 – 219, 220 – 222, 224, 229n71, 235 – Ammonius (monk) assaulting  77, 79, 86, 91 – 93, 258n12

– menstrual blood scene and  185, 190 – Toland and  200 Origenist controversy  9, 18 – 24, 27, 74 Orpheus, myth of  111, 113 Osiris myth  112 – 113 ὄστρακα used to kill Hypatia, means of death by  270, 271 – 280 The Others (film)  234 Overback, Ella ‘Jimmy’  189 Paeonius  28, 29n2, 55, 245 ‘pagan,’ as term  119n2. See also religious life of intellectual Hellenes in late antiquity paideia  3, 8, 10, 15, 18, 24, 122, 160, 162 Palladius, Lausiac History  21nn56 – 57, 23, 24n69, 25 Palmyra  87, 111, 263 Pambo  13n25 Pammachius (senator)  21n56 Panopolis, shrines in  126n28 Pappus  44, 193 parabalani  79 – 81, 86, 196, 218 – 219, 225 – 226, 226, 235, 258 Paul, Joanna  189, 236 Paula (associate of Jerome)  21n56 Pegasius  27n77 Peitho (deity)  160 Penella, Robert J.  184n58 Pentheus, myth of  111 personification, Nonnus’ use of  157 – 158, 160 Peter the lector / Peter the magistrate (murderer of Hypatia)  94 – 96, 203, 206, 242, 249, 250, 256 – 258 Petersen, Wolfgang  216 Petkas, Alex  1, 3, 7, 239, 324 Philolaus and Nicaeus, Synesius’ letter to Hypatia seeking assistance for  47 – 49 philosophy. See also Cynics; Neoplatonism; Platonism; specific philosophers – Damascius on Isidore versus Hypatia as philosophical exemplars  179 – 182, 199, 203, 248 – Middle Platonism  140, 141, 143n45, 149 – Ptolemist, Hypatia as  136, 142 – Stoics and Stoicisim  23, 105

Index of Subjects

Phinney, Thomas  212 pinax / pinakes  165 – 166 Pizzone, Aglae  19n49, 22n61, 34 planisphaerium designed by Synesius  36 – 37 Plato – on apatheia  23 – Dio (Synesius) drawing on  10 – on power of images  116 – 117 – Theophilus compared by Jerome to  22n62 – on Xenocrates  14n27 Platonic love  34 Platonism. See also Neoplatonism – Beroe and  161 – evidence for Hypatia’s scholarly engagement with  133 – Hypatia teaching / lecturing on  144 – 145, 161 – identity of Hypatia as Platonist  136 – 142, 178 – letters of Synesius, Platonic usage in  60 – 61, 64 – Middle Platonism  140, 141, 143n45, 149 Plotinus  4, 58, 137, 138, 140 – 142, 149, 161, 166, 178, 250 – Porphyry, Vita Plotini  142n40 Plutarch of Athens  136 Polemo  18n41 Polybius  268 Pomeroy, Sarah B.  184 Pompey  103 Porphyry  4, 24, 55 – 56, 138n29, 140, 142, 143, 149, 162, 166n62 Porter, James  7 – 8n3 Poseidon (deity)  161 Praechter, Karl  142 – 143 Priam’s trunk, motif of  103 – 104, 113 Proclus – dream of Athena  129 – House of Proclus, Athens  121, 127 – 130, 131 – letter of Synesius to  44 – 45, 46 – as Platonist  146, 148 Proterius (bishop of Alexandria)  248, 267n50, 283 Proteus (deity)  10

339

Pseudo-Aristeas  164n51 Pseudo-Chrysostom  31 Pseudo(?)-Chrysostomos  260n24 Ptah (deity)  112 Ptolemist, Hypatia as  136, 142 Ptolemy – Astronomical Canon, Hypatia’s (lost) commentary on  4, 133n2, 165, 248 – Hypatia trained in tradition of  193 Ptolemy IV Philopator (pharaoh)  268 public culture, Hypatia’s involvement in  7 – 9, 10 – 11, 17 – 18, 27 – 28 public event, destruction / death of images / Hypatia as  110 – 111 Pulcheria Augusta (Aelia Pulcheria)  4, 68. See also Socrates Scholasticus Pylaemenes  223 Pyrrhus (king of Epirus)  276n102 Pythagoras  140 Raïos, Dimitris K.  43n66, 44n70 Ras el‑Soda, temple of  126n28 Rasooli, Mehdi “Amo”  88 Rathbone, Dominic  268, 271 Read, Sara  173n7 Rebillard, Éric  272n84 reception of Hypatia, ancient and modern  4 – 5, 61 – 64, 209 – 215, 234 – 235 reception studies, as discipline  211 – 212, 234 Regression (film)  234 religion. See also Christianity; Jews; ­sacrifice – violence and religious festivals  282 – 284 religious life of intellectual Hellenes in late antiquity  4, 119 – 132. See also specific deities – anti-pagan riots  67, 78 – 79, 83 – 84, 130 – 131, 217n33, 218, 220 – Bes-oracle cult, purge of  121 – 122 – Chaldean Oracles and  141 – 142 – ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan,’ nonexclusivity of  130, 142 – 143 – crypto-devotion  121, 130 – 132 – foundation deposits  129 – 130 – Gesios of Atripe, temple images ­rescued by  122 – 124, 127, 131

340

Index of Subjects

– in House of Proclus, Athens  121, 127 – 130, 131 – images, power of  125 – 127 – lararia  128, 131 – martyr, view of Hypatia as  269 – 271 – mystery expressions, Synesius’s use of  30 – 32 – ‘pagan,’ as term, versus ‘Hellene’  119n2 – sacrifices, purpose of  129 – sorcery attributed to Hypatia and  28, 120, 142, 151, 156, 162, 185, 195, 219, 251, 280 – theurgy  120, 138 – 139, 141 – 142 – traditional Egyptian religion, relationship to  119 – 121 Renne, E. P.  173n9 Richlin, Amy  173 Rist, John  140 – 141 Ronchey, Silvia  269, 271 Roques, Denis  30, 42n61 Rufinus of Aquileia (Rufinus of Concordia), Historia ecclesiastica – dating of  88 – 89 – on dismemberment  111 – 113 – euhemeristic theories, corpse veneration accusations, and descriptions of cult sites as tombs  106 – 110, 114 – fire, destruction by / denial of burial  113 – 114 – Frigidus episode  99 – headless torso and death of traditional religion in  103 – 104 – iconography of Serapis, re-reading of  104 – 106 – image destruction, death of Hypatia as  88 – 89, 90, 97 – 110 – Origenist controversy and  21, 22, 23 – public event, destruction / death as  110 – 111 – remedium or spiritual cure, history conceived as  98 – 99 – Serapis, on destruction of cult statue of  89 – 90, 97 – 110 – Socrates Scholasticus, intertextuality with  88 – 89 – sources for  89, 97n37, 109 Ruggini, Lellia Cracco  171 Rusticula (Novatian bishop of Rome)  72

Sacheverell, Henry  198, 200 – 202 sacrifice – death of Hypatia, sacrificial aspects of  269 – 271 – purposes of  129 – Synesius using language of  260n69 Sagan, Carl  231 – 233 Salzman, Michele  115 – 116 Sartre, Maurice  190n80 Scheidegger Laemmle, Cédric  5, 209, 324 Schmid, D. J. A.  196n13 Schmitt, Tassilo  22n60, 39n45 scholasticus / Dometianus, letters of Synesius to  59 – 61 Scott, Ridley  216 Scott, Robert  272 Seeck, Otto  29, 42n61, 80n54 Seng, Helmut  3, 29, 324 Serapeum, Alexandria, destruction of – Agora (film) and  217 – 218, 219, 220, 227, 228 – in Mauthner’s Hypatia (1892)  62 – Rufinus on  89, 97 – 98 – Synesius’s Dio and  20, 27 – Theophilus and  97 Serapis (deity) – Apis, as ossified form of  107, 112 – destruction of cult statue of  89 – 90, 97 – 110, 115, 227, 228, 279 – 280 – Osiris myth and  112 – Theadelphia / Fayum wooden Serapis  103n64 seventeenth century, emergence of Hypatia as Enlightenment symbol in  210 sex / sexuality. See also gender – Agora (film), erotics of  235 – 237 – masculine desire, Hypatia / intellectual women as objects of  61 – 65, 161, 173 – 176, 178 – 179, 181, 190, 192, 200, 235 – 237 – Origen / Origenists accused of denying goodness of sexuality and procreation  22 – stripping of Hypatia  267 – 269, 282 – virginity / sexual abstinence, Hypatia’s choice of  63, 160 – 161, 175, 178 – 179, 184, 190

Index of Subjects

Shanzer, Danuta  178 Shenoute of Atripe  122 – 124, 127, 131 Shiell, William D.  256n6 Shorrock, Robert  152n6, 154 Simplicius Philosophicus, in Aristotelis Categorias commentarius  143, 144n47 Socrates, Athenian Philosopher  12n21, 14, 16n36 Socrates Scholasticus (Socrates of Constantinople) See also textual commentary on Socrates Scholasticus’ account of Hypatia’s death – Ammonius (monk), tortured to death for assaulting Orestes  77, 79, 86, 91 – 93 – civil strife in spring of  415, and death of Hypatia  67, 68, 74 – 79, 83 – 84 – Constantinople and Alexandria, rivalry between  68 – 71 – critique of Cyril by  115 – 116 – dating of  88 – 89, 153 – on dismemberment  111 – 113 – ‘disorder’ theory of history in  73 – on early career of Cyril  68, 71 – 79, 84 – 85, 117, 193 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  196, 199, 203 – euhemeristic theories, corpse veneration accusations, and descriptions of cult sites as tombs  106 – 110, 114 – female characters besides Hypatia in  183 – 184 – fire, destruction by / denial of burial by  113 – 114 – gender and status dominating account of  182 – 185 – Hierax, Orestes’ arrest and torture of  75 – 77, 86 – image destruction, death of Hypatia as  88 – 94, 115 – 117 – John of Nikiu and  78, 94 – 96 – Latin translation of (Cassiodorus / Epiphanius, Historia ecclesiastica tripartita)  91n18, 93, 94, 111, 248 – 249, 250, 255 – 256, 259n16, 260, 262, 278 – 279 – on Novatians  69, 71 – 73, 74, 86, 194 – on Origenist controversy  20, 23

341

– parabalani and  79 – 81, 86, 196, 258 – partnership of Pulcheria and Cyril  68 – 71, 84 – 85, 86 – Platonist, identification of Hypatia as  137 – political contest between Orestes and Cyril  67, 76 – 79, 84 – 85, 86, 93, 249 – 250 – on public aspects of Hypatia’s career  8n6 – public event, destruction / death as  110 – 111 – relationship of Hypatia and Orestes in  78, 92, 182 – rise of Pulcheria to power and  81 – 85, 86 – Rufinus, intertextuality with  89 – significance of Hypatia’s death for  67 – 68, 85 – 86, 193 – 195 – as source of information about Hypatia  67 – 68 – sources for  89 – stoning, death of Hypatia by  93, 114 – 115, 275 – 280 – sympathetic account of Hypatia  151, 152, 156, 157, 160, 162, 165, 168, 174 – 175, 181, 259 – text of account of Hypatia  248 – 250 Sophronius  89, 98, 109 sorcery attributed to Hypatia  28, 120, 142, 151, 156, 162, 185, 195, 219, 251, 280 Sorlin, Pierre  224n55 Sosipatra  181n45 Speusippus  14 Stahl, Roger  229 – 230n73 Stefaniw, Blossom  27n78 Stenschke, Christoph  280 Stewart, Peter  102n60, 125 Stilicho, execution of  54n18 Stoics and Stoicisim  23, 105 stoning – death of Hypatia by  93, 114 – 115, 275 – 280 – in Greek myth  279 – 280 – in Old and New Testaments  280 Strabo  265 stripping of Hypatia  267 – 269, 282

342

Index of Subjects

substitutive image act, literary construction of Hypatia’s death as  115 – 117. See also image destruction, death of Hypatia as Suda  3, 17n40 – Damascius’ Philosophical History and  175 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  196, 203 – sympathetic representation of Hypatia in  133n2, 151 – 152, 156, 160 – 162, 165, 168 – text sourced from  246 – 248 – Toland, as source for  199 Synesius of Cyrene  3 – 4. See also Dio (Synesius) and late antique defense of classicism; letters of Synesius – in Agora (film)  221 – 223, 224n53, 234 – astrolabes and  138, 164 – on Athens  36, 56, 135 – 136n7 – Catastases  55 – as Christian  13 – Constantinople, embassy to  35 – 38, 39n45, 49 – death of  53, 54 – death of sons of  4, 44 – 49 – eighteenth-century reception of Hypatia and  196 – historical evidence of  52 – Hypatia in works of, besides the letters  55 – 56 – marriage of  21 – 22 – as metropolitan of Ptolemais  19, 44, 62 – planisphaerium designed by, ekphrasis on  36 – 37 – Platonism of Hypatia and  137 – 141 – representation of Hypatia by  172n4 – as student of Hypatia  2, 3, 193 – Theophilus and  22, 28 Syrianus  143 Tall Brothers  20 – 21, 23, 74 Tanaseanu-Döbler, Ilinca  59n33 tax system in late antique empire  14 – 15 Taylor, Liz  216 “Teaching as Hypatia” project, 213, 213 – 214 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord  186 – 187

Terrasson, John  206 – 207 textual commentary on Socrates Scholasticus’ account of Hypatia’s death  255 – 284 – Caesareum as locus of Hypatia’s death  261 – 266 – δίφρος as lecturer’s chair or litter, interpretation of  92 – 93, 255 – 284 – Lent, occurrence of Hypatia’s death during  281 – 284 – maltreatment of Hypatia’s body  266 – 267 – martyr, view of Hypatia as  269 – 271, 282 – ‘mob’ attack, lack of evidence for  258 – ὄστρακα used to kill Hypatia, means of death by  270, 271 – 280 – Peter the lector / Peter the magistrate (murderer of Hypatia)  256 – 258 – planned rather than spontaneous lynching of Hypatia  255 – 256 – punishment of assassins  284 – as ritualistic execution of outcast or criminal  265, 266 – 267 – sacrificial aspects of  269 – 271 – stripping of Hypatia  267 – 269, 282 – sympathetic account of Hypatia’s treatment  259 Theadelphia / Fayum wooden Serapis  103n64 Themistius, Orationes  17n39, 31n14 Theodora (dedicatee of Damascius’ Philosophical History)  179n36 Theodoret of Cyrrhus – as lector  258n9 Theodosian Code  15n31, 80, 83n74, 129, 139n26, 141n37 Theodosius (consul)  73, 92, 250, 279 Theodosius I (emperor)  97 Theodosius II (emperor)  68, 70, 81 – 82, 83n68, 84, 99, 117, 204, 248 Theon (father of Hypatia) – in Agora (film)  216n29, 218 – commentary of Book III of Ptolemy’s Almagest  3, 37n39 – Damascius on  175 – Mouseion, Alexandria, membership in  17

Index of Subjects

– Philostorgius on  248 – as teacher of Neoplatonic tradition to Hypatia  136 Theophanes  82 – 83n68, 82n60, 196 Theophilus (bishop of Alexandria) – in Agora (film)  218 – Cyril (nephew) compared to  86, 97, 185, 253 – Cyril (nephew) succeeding  69, 73 – 74, 218, 252 – Eunapius of Sardis on  279 – 280 – John Chrysostom and  21, 69, 73 – as lector  257 – Origenist controversy and  19 – 23, 25n73, 27, 74 – paschal letters of  21 – 22 – Serapis, role in destruction of cult image of  105, 109 – 110 – Synesius and  22, 28 Theopompus (Novatian bishop of Alexandria)  72, 74 theoria  25 – 26 Theotecnus (in letter from Synesius to Hypatia)  47n82 Theotokos controversy  73n27 Thesmophorion, Alexandria  268 Thessalonica, massacre at (390)  77 – 78 theurgical animation practices  100 – 101, 119, 127 theurgy  120, 138 – 139, 141 – 142, 166n62 Thompson, Dorothy  268, 271 Thucydides  10, 184n59 Tillemont, M. Lenain de, Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire Ecclesiastique des six Prémiers Siecles (1709)  196 Timothy (archdeacon in Alexandria)  73 – 74 Tinnefeld, F.  49n89 Toland, John  2, 197 – 205 – Christianity not Mysterious (1696)  197 – 198 – Tetradymus (1720)  198 – 202 Treitschke, Heinrich von  62n43 Treu, Kurt  15n33 Trigilio, J.  190n79

343

Trinitarian controversies  73 Troy (film)  216 Trump, Donald  191 – 192n83 Ulpia Marciana  82 Uniting with the Solar Disk (ẖnm ỉtn; Egyptian ritual)  101 Urbano, Arthur  174n14 Valens (emperor)  15n30 Valentinian (emperor)  15n30 Valois, Henri de  274 Van de Walle, E.  173n9 Van Uytfanghe, Marc  99 variatio  53 – 54 Varner, Eric  102 Verius Sedatus  131 virginity / sexual abstinence, Hypatia’s choice of  63, 160 – 161, 175, 178 – 179, 184, 190 Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique  206 – 207 Wallraff, Martin  260n21 Watts, Edward  2, 5, 90n16, 94, 97, 115, 151, 176 – 177n24, 179, 180, 183, 193, 272n83, 282, 324 Weisz, Rachel  189, 215, 216 Wessel, Susan  74 Whiston, William  196 – 198, 201 Wildberg, Christian  128 – 129 Wipszycka, Ewa  257 wisdom, as female quality  182n49 world-soul  111n102 Xenocrates  14 Xenophanes of Colophon  108 Yazdgerd I of Persia  82n60 Yuḥannā al‑Mudabbir. See John of Nikiu Zeus (deity)  103, 147, 148, 155n11, 160 Zintzen, Clemens, Damascii vitae isidori reliquiae  246 Zoroaster  27