Hypatia by Edward J. Watts

Author:Edward J. Watts [Watts, Edward J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Memory of Hypatia

The discordance between the type of person that Hypatia was and the brutal way in which she died explains the initial shock that many people felt at her murder. People across the empire came to see her death as a new and frightening break from the social conventions that had ensured the functioning of the empire for centuries. Hypatia had never been a public official, nor had she been an officeholder. She was a philosopher who engaged in public life in order to make her city and her fellow citizens better. Historically, such figures had been exempt from the sorts of displays of intimidation and violence that sometimes accompanied political gridlock in Roman cities. The metastasis of violence her death represented would have seemed as profoundly dangerous and destabilizing to people in Alexandria and Constantinople as the urban riots in the spring and summer of 1968 seemed to people in the United States. The horror of Hypatia’s murder blended with the fear of what might come next to make people profoundly anxious.

As time passed, Alexandria quieted. Instead of heralding the explosion of even greater anarchy, Hypatia’s death finally resolved the conflict between Orestes, Cyril, and the Alexandrian elites. All parties feared further escalation and appear to have stood down. Orestes seems to have finished his term in office and left Egypt; we hear nothing more about him. Cyril, for his part, would remain Alexandria’s bishop until 444, during which time the city would remain free from major riots. This period of calm did not, however, make people forget Hypatia’s death. Outside of Alexandria, the murder of a female philosopher and the role that Cyril had played in creating the climate that led to it fit too neatly into a larger narrative about the Alexandrian bishop to be forgotten. This was particularly true because the peace that Cyril had brought to Alexandria did not extend to the wider empire. Cyril’s rivalry with bishop Nestorius of Constantinople, the empire-wide Christological division that this ultimately provoked, and Cyril’s use of force and intimidation to emerge victorious ensured that the memory of Hypatia’s murder stayed alive.

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