Hypatia

I was born at Alexandria, daughter of Theon, and raised among numbers, spheres, and the discipline of Plato. In our city’s schools the scholar’s chief tool was commentary: to make difficult books intelligible and orderly for living minds. I taught from Diophantus’ Arithmetica and Apollonius’ Conics, and I labored over astronomical writings associated with Ptolemy, so that students might see the steps of an argument as plainly as stones in a pavement.

My pupils gathered from temples and churches alike. Synesius of Cyrene, who later wore a bishop’s omophorion, wrote to me of instruments: the astrolabe’s circles, the hydroscope’s column of water. Such devices were not toys but lessons in measure and cause. I asked my students to prove, not to declaim; to fit their thoughts to demonstration, as a craftsman fits brass to a ring.

Alexandria was a city of collisions—councils, congregations, guilds, and imperial edicts crossing one another like tides. I spoke openly in civic matters when asked, and counted the prefect Orestes a friend. To teach is also to advise: to steady minds when the streets grow loud.

In the month of March, in the consulship of Honorius for the twelfth time (415), I was seized in the Caesareum by a Christian crowd under the lector Peter. They tore my body with potsherds and burned the remains. Others later made of this what suited their age. I held to the same task throughout: the patient clarification of difficult things.