The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

by Justin Pollard

Revered Hypatia, ornament of learning, stainless star of wise teaching, when I see thee and thy discourse I worship thee, looking on the starry house of Virgo; for thy business is in heaven.

  Palladas, Greek Anthology, 11

  The highly charged religious atmosphere in Alexandria was making it a dangerous place to have an opinion—any opinion—and rough seas now buffeted what had once been the intellectual safe haven of the museum. Indeed, Theon is the last name we can definitely associate with the institution that has been at the center of our story since the earliest days of the city. He is its last known member, the last in that roll call of the most brilliant names in antiquity. But it is his daughter who will always be associated with its fall.

  In the early years of the fifth century Theon’s daughter seemed to have emerged from the religious crisis of her father’s era unscathed. From early childhood she had been her father’s greatest collaborator, and we find her name first in his introduction to his commentary on the Almagest: “Commentary by Theon of Alexandria on Book III of Ptolemy’s Almagest, edition revised by my daughter Hypatia the Philosopher” (Theon, recorded in A. Rome, Commentaires de Pappus et de Théon, volume 3, p. 807).

  Hypatia was the inheritor of her father’s mantle; indeed, many sources claim she was much more than that, and according to the philosopher Damascius “she was by nature more refined and talented than her father” (Damascius, Life of Isidore, excerpted in The Suda).

  She was a mathematician of noted brilliance, writing commentaries on the works of Apollonius of Perge and the notoriously complicated Arithmetica of the third-century inventor of algebra, Diophantus. Indeed, it has been doubted whether, without her clear, patient explanations of the works of this famously opaque mathematician, his work, crucial in the development of modern mathematics, would even have survived. The bitter irony is that today none of Hypatia’s original works survive, and therein lies the key to one of Alexandria’s most tragic episodes, the beginnings of its disappearance back into the Egyptian sands.

  Hypatia was born around 355 into the academic elite of Alexandria. At her father’s side she learned astronomy and mathematics as well as the practical skills first mastered by such luminaries of the museum as Eratosthenes and Archimedes, including the building of planispheres and astrolabes. But her interests went far beyond the stars into the realms of philosophy, a philosophy far removed from her father’s mystical occultism.

  There is no evidence that Hypatia was ever herself a member of the museum, let alone the “last librarian,” as some have claimed. Indeed, after the death of her father we have no evidence for the museum or library, in the sense that Archimedes or Euclid might have understood them, existing at all. According to the church father Epiphanius of Salamis, whose life roughly coincided with Hypatia’s (he died in 403), the Brucheum quarter of the city where this institution had once stood among gardens, royal palaces, and summerhouses now made for a rather startling sight. In describing the founding of the library he makes the casual aside that it was “in the [part] called the Brucheum; this is a quarter of the city today lying waste” (Epiphanius of Salamis, Weights and Measures, chapter 9).

  We do not know which of the various Roman emperors left the most beautiful quarter of this city in ruins. It may be that this iconic part of the city had never recovered from the fury of Caracalla. But as Alexandria stands on a geological fault line that produced a major earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 365, we can’t even be sure that it wasn’t simply nature that tore down the marble halls.

  If the buildings of the old museum were gone, however, the idea of it was not dead, and the philosophy schools, now perhaps housed in the homes of the teachers, survived. From the late 380s Hypatia had formed her own such school in the city, attracting the sons of some of the most influential and wealthy men in the empire. Among them she lectured in the subjects her father had taught her—ethics, ontology, astronomy, and mathematics—but to a smaller and more select group she also taught philosophy, including the ancient pagan ideas of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle as well as the Neoplatonism of Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus.

  This group of initiates became an intensely loyal family around Hypatia; they called each other “brother,” maintained their contacts over a lifetime, and would only hint to the outside world at what secrets they had heard in Hypatia’s house. But this was not a crypto-pagan cult, not simply another band of disinherited priests reminiscing over the old days like the embittered Palladas. Nor were they the augurs and fortune-tellers that Theon counted among his friends. They instead represented both the old and the new in the empire and the city—and as such represented perhaps a chance for Alexandria to reinvent itself, and so save itself, one last time.

  The guarded nature of Hypatia’s pupils and her own fate make it hard to unlock the secrets of her school, but thanks to the surviving letters of one of her closest followers we can reconstruct something of her life and times and gain a window into a very unexpected world.

  Synesius of Cyrene was a young and wealthy landowner from Alexandria’s sister city who came to Egypt’s capital in the 390s to gain what even then must have been considered a classical education. In his 156 surviving letters we gain tantalizing glimpses of the life of a fourth-century aristocrat in the city and at home. In a letter to his best friend, Herculian, later prefect of Constantinople, he remembers their arrival in Alexandria and their time with Hypatia, the “lady who . . . presides over the mysteries of philosophy”:

  If Homer had told us that it was an advantage to Odysseus in his wanderings that he saw the towns and became acquainted with the mind of many nations, and although the people whom he visited were not cultured, but merely Laestrygonians and Cyclopses, how wondrously then would poetry have sung of our voyage, a voyage in which it was granted to you and me to experience marvelous things, the bare recital of which had seemed to us incredible! We have seen with our eyes, we have heard with our ears the lady who legitimately presides over the mysteries of philosophy.

  Synesius, Letter 137 (to Herculian)

  From his letters we also learn something of the other “disciples” in Hypatia’s house, including Olympius, a hugely wealthy Syrian landowner with whom Synesius talked of hunting and horses; his little brother Euoptius; Ision, who told stories like no other; Syrus, “our friend”; his uncle Alexander; “father” Theotecnus, “the worthy and holy”; Theodosius, “a grammarian of the first order”; Auxentius, his childhood play-mate; and Gaius, “the most sympathetic.”

  At one level these seem exactly what might be expected from an old aristocracy—young men looking to a heroic and already ancient past. Synesius talks about happy days on his estate outside Cyrene that reminded him of the “golden age,” and in Alexandria, gazing across the heptastadion to the Pharos and walking down the marble colonnades of the Street of the Soma, he must have imagined he walked with the ghosts of Alexander, Callimachus, and Archimedes. But Hypatia’s “family” were not all they appeared. These were not, as they have so often been characterized by later writers, the last of the old guard. She was a pagan—true—or at least she was a Neoplatonist, but astonishingly, perhaps half of her students were Christians.

  Synesius himself married a Christian and went on to become bishop of Ptolemais in Cyrenaica, where he was succeeded in that position by his little brother, the fervent Euoptius. The mysterious “Petrus” mentioned in one letter has a name which suggests his Christian pedigree as well, while Synesius’s friend Herculian became bishop of Cotyaeum in western Turkey. This perhaps explains how, when others were barricading themselves in the Serapeum or fleeing abroad, Hypatia continued teaching unhindered.

  So just what was Hypatia teaching this eclectic inner circle who gathered at her house in the city in the last years of the fourth century and the first decade of the fifth? From Synesius we can discover that it must have been a form of Neoplatonic philosophy far removed from the radicalism of the defenders of the Serapeum—a gentler and older Hellenism that had bound all those wh
o had worked in the library and museum regardless of politics or creed. In a letter to Herculian Synesius exhorts him to “go on digging up the eye that is buried within us” (Synesius, Letter 137 [to Herculian] ).

  And in that phrase we probably hear an echo of Hypatia’s own words, as she taught her charges to release the “luminous child of reason” (Synesius, Letter 139 [to Herculian]). It seems that what Hypatia wanted most from her students was that they love and seek wisdom, but not simply knowledge divorced from the real world around them. The course that she advocated required physical purity and mental wisdom. Learning was not of itself enough, nor was “right living,” as Synesius tells Herculian:

  The masses think that uprightness of life does not exist for the end of wisdom, but stands by itself, and is itself the perfection of man, and that the way is not a way merely, but the goal itself at which we must aim. In this view they are mistaken. An unreasoning self-control and an abstinence from eating of meat, have been given to many unreasoning creatures by nature. We do not commend a raven or any other creature that has discovered a natural virtue, because they are devoid of reasoning power. To live according to reason is the end of man.

  Synesius, Letter 137 (to Herculian)

  Hypatia, at least in the minds of her followers, perfectly combined the two. She was a teacher who remained a virgin all her life, who always wore the simple white tribon robe of a philosopher, and who practiced moderation in everything. Those lucky enough to spend time with her referred to themselves as the “fortunate chorus that delights in her divinely sweet voice” and called her “divine spirit” and “blessed lady.” Even in her ordinary lectures her disciples seem to have found divine truths, learning that mathematics is a stepping-stone to understanding and, as Synesius puts it, that “astronomy is itself a divine form of knowledge.”

  Her influence in Alexandria reached far beyond her private teaching circle. The chronicler Socrates Scholasticus tells us that she also gave public lectures where city officials and ordinary citizens might hear her, and says that she achieved such “heights of erudition” that she surpassed all the other philosophers of her day. He also claims that she “succeeded to” the Platonic school derived from Plotinus (although it is unclear if this means she was the official head of the Neoplatonic school) and “delivered all the philosophical lectures to those who wished to listen” (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 15).

  This public speaking spread her fame throughout the higher echelons of the government, and she seems to have been consulted at least informally by senior officials, including councillors, military commanders, and even the prefect. Socrates Scholasticus tells us, “On account of the majestic outspokenness at her command as the result of her education, she maintained a dignified intercourse with the chief people of her city, for all esteemed her highly and admired her” (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 15).

  Yet her teachings do not seem to have brought her into conflict with either the Christians among her group or the church authorities in the form of Alexandria’s patriarch Theophilus. Indeed, Synesius writes to both Theophilus and the philosopher Hypatia asking for similar favors as though the two were on a comparable level. That she avoided such trouble during Theophilus’s antipagan campaigns tells us that her Hellenism was cultural rather than religious, centered on the raison d’être of the museum, the pursuit of knowledge, and the self-knowledge that leads to understanding. The schools of Alexandria didn’t yet separate pupils on religious grounds, so all religions could seek wisdom with Hypatia—a wisdom born not from dogma, magic, augury, or sacrifices, but from thought alone.

  But this understanding was not for everyone. Her group considered themselves an elite (as indeed they were, both in education and fortune), and the squabbles of “believers”—those who considered belief enough in itself—were, in their eyes, beneath them. Synesius himself rails against both the “white mantles”—the street philosophers peddling quick-fix paganism to the masses—and the “black mantles”—zealous monks preaching Christian salvation. For him, and his teacher, divine knowledge was not for the masses but reserved for the favored few who could survive the arduous mental journey to enlightenment. For them the path to “truth,” be it Neoplatonist truth or Christian truth, was an intellectual obstacle course whose end could be reached only by great mental effort, physical moderation, and ethical purity. Belief of itself would never be enough—the road still had to be traveled—and that journey was the subject of Hypatia’s private classes and the reason for the great secrecy that surrounded the discussions of their inner circle. Pogroms, fighting, and desecrations were for believers who took on an idea without thinking, but had nothing to do with them. It was an extraordinary concept, and one which could hold both pagans and Christians together; but just as it formed, so its hour was already passing.

  The patriarch Theophilus died on Tuesday, October 15, 412. He had spent his years in office antagonizing both pagans and Christian heretical sects but had never touched Hypatia’s circle. He had been known to the people of Alexandria as the “church pharaoh,” yet he had been careful not to overextend his power into the secular administration of the city—the preserve of the prefect and dux—nor had he sought to interfere in the philosophical education of men such as Synesius, who he knew would one day take high office in his church. It had been a delicate balancing act, and Theophilus’s death left a dangerous power vacuum. And into that vacuum exploded his nephew Cyril.

  Two candidates were nominated to succeed Theophilus, and the nature of the subsequent election campaign would give an unpleasant foretaste of what was to come. The stronger candidate was said to be Timothy, Theophilus’s archdeacon, who had a lot of backing within the church hierarchy as well as the support of one of the military commanders in the city. The other was Cyril, Theophilus’s nephew, an impetuous, self-promoting radical who believed in backing up the power of the Word with the power of the mob. This was not to be an election decided by debate or even a vote. Three days of street fighting ensued, after which, on October 17, a triumphant Cyril was installed as patriarch. This brutal election had been a testing ground for Cyril’s influence, involving as it did secular imperial figures as well as church fathers, and from his victory Cyril drew some new and deadly lessons. Just as the state had become involved in an ecclesiastical struggle (although bearing in mind the violence of the struggle, it had actually had little choice), so now, as patriarch, Cyril believed he had a right to a say in the secular administration of the city. This belief in a new, wider mandate would have terrible consequences, as Socrates Scholasticus says:

  Cyril came into possession of the episcopate, with greater power than Theophilus had ever exercised. For from that time the bishopric of Alexandria went beyond the limits of its sacerdotal functions, and assumed the administration of secular matters.

  Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 7

  Cyril wasted no time in suppressing any groups in the city that either disagreed with him or did not accept his absolute power over them. The first to suffer in his “purification” of the church was the entirely harmless Christian Novatian sect. The Novatians followed the teachings of the Roman priest Novatian, who had split from the official Catholic Church because he considered it too lax in readmitting former Christians who had, in the face of persecution, renounced their religion. His followers called themselves “the Pure” and required considerably greater self-discipline among themselves than Cyril’s followers did. Indeed, perhaps that is why he set upon them. Socrates Scholasticus certainly had some sympathy for Novatians, and notes: “Cyril immediately therefore shut up the churches of the Novatians at Alexandria, and took possession of all their consecrated vessels and ornaments; and then stripped their bishop Theopemptus of all that he had” (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 7, chapter 7).

  It seems that in Alexandria, at least, Cyril would have no bishop but himself.

  N
ext he turned from those he considered “too religious” to those he considered not religious enough—the Jewish community. It had come to his notice that some Jews in the city did not celebrate the Sabbath in a particularly “religious way,” preferring instead to visit the theaters rather than staying at home in prayer. For Cyril this presented an opportunity not just to confront the Jews but to draw the state authorities into his arguments and make them decide whose side they were on as well.

  Since his election campaign, Cyril had skillfully used the Christian mob in the city and groups of radical Nitrian monks from the desert to stir up trouble. He now stationed his people in the theaters to goad the Jewish population into taking violent action. On one of these occasions the prefect of Egypt, Orestes, happened to be in the theater giving a speech, when a brawl broke out. Some of the Jews in the audience shouted out to Orestes that Hierax, an agent of Cyril, was fomenting trouble and begged for his arrest. Orestes, already wary of Cyril’s attempts to extend his influence into the government of the city, was only too happy to oblige, and Hierax was arrested and tortured.

  But if he hoped to put Cyril in his place and remind him of the terrible powers of the prefect, he was very much mistaken. Cyril immediately summoned the Jewish leaders of the city as though he were governor himself and warned them in the most patronizing terms to behave and leave his agents alone. It was the last straw of antagonism for some Jews in the audience, first goaded and threatened by Cyril’s thugs, then sternly told off like children by their leader when they tried to fight back. At that moment some decided to take physical action and in doing so played straight into Cyril’s hands.

  The event that gave Cyril the opportunity he had been looking for occurred late one night. Having set an ambush around the church of Saint Alexander, a group of radicalized Jews ran through the streets shouting that the church was on fire. Local Christians jumped from their beds and ran to the building to help, only to find they had run into a trap. A bloody fight ensued in which many of them were killed.