Hypatia of Alexandria · Mathematics
The honest history of 415 CE - the power struggle between the prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril, the Lenten mob, the killing recorded by Socrates Scholasticus - and then the fifteen centuries in which Hypatia became a symbol: of reason against fanaticism, of women in science, of the end of antiquity. What the sober evidence supports, and what it does not.
You learned that Hypatia was killed in 415 during the Orestes-Cyril conflict by a mob led by a reader named Peter, that our earliest and most reliable account is Socrates Scholasticus (who condemned it), and that over 1,500 years she became a contested symbol. Explain the sober history and how the myth departs from it.
Leads to Socrates Scholasticus.
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