Hypatia of Alexandria: mathematician, martyr and feminist icon

7:00Greg Jenner:We've got the biography by Socrates, the scholar. There's another guy called Damascus who wrote A Life of Another Neoplatanist in which she has some interesting stuff, really more about the culture of Alexandria, where she grew up. And we've got the amazingly horrible John of Nikiou, who is a 7th century Coptic bishop. Coptic is the language of the more, shall we say, primitive, I think it's actually a technical term, primitive Christianity in Egypt. And he wrote a world history, like you do, mansplaining history for everybody. And his paragraph on Hypatia, is very important because it reflects what people like him thought of her.

7:43Greg Jenner:And that is that she is a seductress, a high class sex worker who beguiles people with witchcraft. So we get, we've got a text that reflects what people were shouting in the street.

7:55Professor Edith Hall:I solve one quadratic equation and all of a sudden I'm a witch. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

8:00Greg Jenner:So it's, but it's really important because it shows that that particular animus against her had been quite articulately expressed in terms of sexual begarment and magic tricks. And that is presumably why she, oh no, cannot do spoilers. Yeah, don't do spoilers yet because Olga doesn't know. I don't know anything. Yeah, we'll come to the spoilers later. Anyway, John of NICU is the kind of religious person that I have avoided all my life being a vicar's daughter.

8:29Olga Koch:So Olga, we haven't got tons on the life of Hypatia. How would you feel if your future biography was compiled from DMs that you'd sent or people had sent to you and some random guy in Turkey?

8:40Professor Edith Hall:That's exactly how I'd want to go. Yeah, just leave a fantasy.

8:46Olga Koch:Yes.

8:47Professor Edith Hall:She was so good at math, it made people hard.

8:54Professor Edith Hall:That's the byline of the book, yeah.

8:58Greg Jenner:Before we get to high patience. Is that an astrolabe in your pocket?

9:06Olga Koch:Marvellous. Right, before we get to Hypatia herself, let's talk about the world she was born into. We've previously done an episode in the previous series about the city of Alexandria in Egypt. For Olga's benefit, Edith, can you give us a quick rundown of life in late 4th century Alexandria, this amazing city of learning?

9:22Greg Jenner:It is a city which has had the very famous library and several other libraries and museums attached to it. It's a university city. It's still the greatest university in the whole of the Greco-Roman world. But it's multi-ethnic to an extraordinary degree and has had a history of huge liberalism about that. So you've got a massive Jewish population who have very well treated for the most part. I mean, of course, lots of times when they weren't, but, you know, they live there. They have had their works translated into Greek from Hebrew. But you've also, because of the particular point in history, in the 490s, the first really harsh edicts from the new Christian emperors were coming out.

10:09Greg Jenner:So 391 is the edict of Theodosius that all pagan temples have to be shut down. So she comes into the world. She's born between 350 and 370 AD, CE. the exact point as she's reaching adulthood, where being an old pagan philosopher is beginning to become a very dangerous thing to be.

10:34Olga Koch:So we have the rise of Christianity. We've got obviously a large Jewish sort of traditional sort of community there. But she's a pagan, which means she worships multiple gods.

10:43Greg Jenner:Yes, I don't think she did worship multiple gods because she's actually a Neoplatonist pagan. So what happened to... Come on, obviously.

10:51Olga Koch:It's very important. You're embarrassing us. I know.

10:54Greg Jenner:So while there's a sort of notional acceptance of the pagan pantheon, I don't think she had any kind of real kind of faith or prayer life to gods because she believes in this Neoplatonist model of the universe, which is that all of the physical world that we can see around us, everything, our bodies, the environment, nature, anything made out of matter is a second rate copy of the eternal oneness of the world of ideas.

11:23Professor Edith Hall:Oh, my yoga teacher thinks the same. Right.

11:25Greg Jenner:A lot of people do. This was basically Plato's model. It's tweaked. There is a God, but the God is oneness, right? This sublime world of ideas in our heads. So I don't think she will have absolutely done some public rituals. She'll have appeared at respectable events just as people go to church, even if they don't believe in religion or they go to the synagogue without actually having a prayer life, as it were. but she's deeply spiritual in terms of feeling in touch with this divine other world of ideas and that actually fits with doing mathematics because math is about these abstract laws that always hold.

12:04Professor Edith Hall:Yeah, that's a question I would have. It's like if a person in Alexandria at the time wanted to study math, how sort of religiously informed would it be or would they just be completely discrete and separate?

12:15Greg Jenner:It would really be very separate by this time. made huge advances in all kinds of areas, not just arithmetic, but in geometry and all kinds of other branches of it. And that was very tied in with her other great interest, which is astronomy. Yeah, we'll get to that.

12:33Olga Koch:So let's talk about her childhood very briefly. You said she's born somewhere in the 350s, 370s. I mean, when we talk about this is like late antiquity, this is the ancient world, but she's like nearly 800 years after Plato. Yeah, well, yeah. It's ancient history to her.

12:47Greg Jenner:OK, thank you. One of my hobby horses about people's misunderstandings of the classical world, so-called, in broad senses, is that it lasted for a millennium. So you've got Homer, his poems are 800 BC. In fact, the heroes he's talking about were 1300 BC. late Bronze Age he's 8th century to 7th century BCE and I personally when asked when do I put an end to the classical world precisely say 391 it's that edict of Theodosius where things tipped from being public pagan worship still being okay to know the Christian sort of closure but other scholars will put it much later they'll say well actually all this sort of philosophy was going on for another 200 years 300 years till the Arab conquest.

13:36Greg Jenner:She's actually just on the tail end as it's all going and crumbling. Poor woman. But people were still Neoplatonists practising so for another two centuries afterwards.

13:48Olga Koch:Olga, how do you think a young woman like Hypatia got into maths in the ancient world?

13:52Professor Edith Hall:Well, she was a pagan. So I guess she started out by counting the gods.

13:56Olga Koch:One to 12. What's your inkling? How do you think a young woman gets into math at that point in history?

14:02Professor Edith Hall:Oh, my God. She lets a man explain it to her. Was it part of like a curriculum in school?

14:09Greg Jenner:What she taught actually was part of her university curriculum. Now, she's a Nipo baby. Of course.

14:16Professor Edith Hall:I mean, I wasn't going to say her dad, but we were all thinking it.

14:18Greg Jenner:And her dad is called Theon, which just means godly. And he is kind of head of the maths department at the library and museum. He is the professor of maths in Alexandria. No son is mentioned. We know nothing about any other member of the family. No mother is mentioned. No sister is mentioned. It's highly likely if he only had one kid and it was a girl. There are several instances of this in antiquity where men sort of politely forgot that there was no Y chromosome and actually trained up the daughter as an apprentice. I mean, that's gone on throughout history. we actually know of four other women who were around in the 4th century.

14:59Greg Jenner:One actually in Alexandria.

15:01Professor Edith Hall:Four whole women. Four whole women. Count them. That's a lot. We have confirmation of four women.

15:06Greg Jenner:There was a mathematician, a good one, called Pandrosyon, which is a beautiful name. It actually means all moist like the morning dew. Then we've got one over at Pergamon, which is the second biggest library, which is on the west coast of Turkey. we've got somebody else in Athens who's another Neoplatonist so she isn't alone

15:32Olga Koch:but Hypatia is effectively treated as a son almost by her dad

15:36Greg Jenner:I believe so

15:37Olga Koch:and he's called Theon what does Hypatia mean? you've given us his name

15:41Greg Jenner:Hypatia is such a weird that's a sort of Victorian pronunciation Hopatia it means the very highest up the summit, the pinnacle of excellence just the very top most no pressure the top most, it's just from the Greek word which means elevation that's amazing what does Olga mean? I don't want to talk about it

16:06Professor Edith Hall:it's actually short for oligarch

16:11Professor Edith Hall:to be clear that's a joke

16:15Olga Koch:she's named the highest summit dad expects big things of her right Absolutely.

16:19Greg Jenner:But it's also, you know, in terms of being into astronomy, it's kind of, you know, it's an appropriate name. It's like looking upwards.

16:27Olga Koch:Nominative discernment is my name. So we have Patia sort of taking on her dad's school job. He's the teacher, he's the math professor at the library of Alexandria. She takes the role on, you know, what is on the syllabus? What would be on the course that she's teaching?

16:40Greg Jenner:There would be Neoplatonist philosophy. Sure. So how do we think about the material world? How do we think about the one, the unity that will have been introduced actually by a version of Aristotle's logic? So it's not, you know, it's kind of a synthesis, a bit of stoicism in there, because the way to achieve union with the one intellectually and psychologically is actually by a mild form of asceticism. You know, you've got to live quite a disciplined life physically. You cannot do self-indulgence. No luxuries. Yes. So it's got a monastic kind of hint, but it's not actually in any way religious.

17:19Greg Jenner:It's all about the self and self-discipline. Then there will have been maths, there'll have been Euclidean maths, there'll have been optics and there'll have been astronomy. So basically all the fields in which you can apply maths.

17:32Olga Koch:Yes. Optics would be light, right? How light moves and bounces off things and so on.

17:36Greg Jenner:Well, and vision.

17:37Olga Koch:And vision, of course, yeah. And Euclidean, I mean, Euclidean is the great mathematician. and he's like the guy.

17:42Greg Jenner:Yes, and trigonometry, geometry. I mean, all these are Greek words because they were being practiced in antiquity.

17:51Professor Edith Hall:I mean, she sounds busy. She didn't have time to respond to fan mail.

17:53Greg Jenner:They didn't do statistics because that's a Latin word.

17:57Olga Koch:Oh, well, that's Romans for you, isn't it? The Romans, they love data.

18:00Professor Edith Hall:Yeah, exactly. No spreadsheets in Alexandria. Confirmed.

18:06Olga Koch:Okay, so Hypatia or how did you pronounce it? Hypatia. Hypatia. That sounds slightly like you're sort of, I don't know, it feels slightly like you're tripping over. It's almost like you're sort of falling down the staircase.

18:17Greg Jenner:It's very pretty and green.

18:18Olga Koch:It's beautiful. Okay, so she's a Neoplatonist. So we've got the three levels of reality, the soul intelligence and the divine one that might not be that divine. Actual reality isn't real.

18:28Greg Jenner:What? Yeah, so material reality is not real. Okay. The three levels of soul intelligence and the one.

18:35Professor Edith Hall:Yeah, it's a poor facsimile of the one. Right. Come on.

18:38Olga Koch:It's a photocopy of reality. Okay, fine. Are we living in the Matrix? is that what you're saying? Am I Neo? Are you Neo? Who's Neo here? All right. So Hypatia is mostly teaching men?

18:49Greg Jenner:Yes. Are there any women in her class? I very much doubt it. I cannot tell you that for a fact but usually there are sources saying that the museum, which is the big library where the teaching goes on, did not admit women. So she seems to be quite exceptional and I'm sure that if she'd actually got married she wouldn't have been allowed in. You know, I think it's this sort of, she's sort of a virgin who doesn't have anything to do with sex. So she's like a pagan high priestess.

19:18Professor Edith Hall:Oh, and she stays that way throughout her entire life.

19:20Greg Jenner:As far as we know, yeah. Oh, my God.

19:22Olga Koch:Wow. So she's a virgin and a mathlete. Cliché confirmed. Harsh. Sorry. Sorry, mathletes. Olga, how do you imagine the student-teacher relationship going if she's got a class of men who are expecting to learn from men and here's this woman teaching them?

19:38Professor Edith Hall:Honestly, guys, I don't know. I feel like, first of all, it would stink, okay? Let's just throw that there. A bunch of young boys in one room, unventilated, that place stunk, I can tell you this much, all right? Also, deodorant has been invented, from what I can gather. Yes, links North Africa, yeah. Yeah, so I think it would be a lot of disciplining. And I bet they would all keep falling for her. She would be the only woman in the university, so they'd be like, I guess you're the one. There's no other chicks, you know what I mean?

20:07Greg Jenner:I think Is this true? Well there is a story which I'm absolutely sure is apocryphal but that one student who was so love-lorn that he kept harassing her to try to get her to go out with him and it's said that she threw a soaking sanitary pad at him

20:24Professor Edith Hall:Queen!

20:25Greg Jenner:And said that's what you're in love with like my physical body Oh my god

20:28Professor Edith Hall:I love that

20:29Greg Jenner:What you should be after is the true love of the one ideal form of beauty not this material copy.

20:38Professor Edith Hall:She probably would have proved her point better if he didn't absolutely love getting a pad thrown at him. I can guarantee you that. Okay, this reminds me. My fiancé was so in love with this history teacher in middle school that when she got married and changed her name, he insisted on still using her maiden name in front of the entire class. Wow. Teenage boys are crazy.

20:59Olga Koch:Hot for teacher. It's a powerful pheromone combination, isn't it? Absolutely.

21:03Greg Jenner:This is incredible behaviour. It is incredible behaviour.

21:06Olga Koch:So she's got a student who's in love with her. She chucks a sanitary towel at his head. HR surely had words there because you can't do that. But that's an interesting sort of comeback.

21:14Professor Edith Hall:I bet all the other boys were like, can I have one? I'm telling you.

21:18Olga Koch:She's got her fans and her students sort of seem to really admire her. They do. We haven't got her getting married. So she commits herself to her work. That's her life's work. Yes. Which is interesting. So we now are kind of moving through to her mathematics career. What does she contribute to mathematics? You know, her father had been the great teacher at the school. Does she add new knowledge? Is she as great a mathematician as perhaps Hollywood would like her to be?

21:42Greg Jenner:Probably not that original. She was an expert expounder of complicated mathematical ideas. She wrote big commentary books. This was the great age of commentaries on Euclid's elements, on a guy called Diophantus who wrote the treatise on arithmetic that everybody did, probably on Ptolemy's Almagest, almost certainly on Archimedes, who was one of the greatest, you know, mechanical engineers.

22:12Professor Edith Hall:Okay, sounds like she was a reply girl. Yeah.

22:15Greg Jenner:But her own contribution seems to have been of development, again, of somebody else. A guy called Apollonius had written a book on conic sections. Oh, my favourite. She does seem to have advanced how you measure cones or how cones exist. It's something to do with cutting through the curving surface that goes around to measure it by doing some sort of intersection. It's not completely clear. I have tried this with an ice cream cone myself.

22:46Professor Edith Hall:Well, sometimes it's important that it's the developments in these commentaries actually make the original work more relevant. Like nobody really cared who Shakespeare was. And then 10 Things I Hate About You came out. And then people sort of started getting it. So I don't think we should underestimate her contribution.

23:01Greg Jenner:No, she was genuinely held to have said something completely original about cones. And she was also set to just be a really charismatic, brilliant communicator of this.

23:12Olga Koch:Yeah, so she's an amazing teacher. Yes. Right. You know, her students love her.

23:15Greg Jenner:And that is an enormous gift to be able to express very complicated ideas in very simple ways.

23:21Olga Koch:We need to talk about her astrology career. Sorry, astronomy career. She's not on TikTok. She's not a kind of astrology girlie. She's an astronomy girlie. She's all about the stars and planets and how to measure the heavens. What do we know of this work? Very little. Great. I'm sorry.

23:37Greg Jenner:I mean, the fact that she comments on Ptolemy is the most important evidence. I mean, you cannot read Ptolemy's Almagest without knowing an awful lot of stuff. There's also some people have said she invented the astrolabe. Now, we know that's not true, but she could have somehow refined it. The what, sorry? The astrolabe. It's the model of...

23:58Professor Edith Hall:The astrolabe.

23:59Olga Koch:Yeah, not astrolabia, if that's what you're thinking.

24:01Greg Jenner:I wasn't thinking about it, but I know what you were thinking about. It's a spherical teaching aid to help you understand how the constellations move around the planet. All right, cool. It's very, very advanced. The ancient Greeks were, given that some people still think the Earth is flat, it's really quite remarkable that they figured out no.

24:20Professor Edith Hall:Okay, but they had an upright... Sorry, what am I thinking of? Oh, my God. I'm doing a joke but I forgot three words that I need to do this joke oh yeah there wasn't a light pollution so they could actually see the stars in the city so it's not really fair it's not really fair we can't do that that's true we don't see the stars if we could see the stars we would also be very smart

24:41Greg Jenner:yes well she almost certainly used one for teaching yeah she may well have refined it yeah even though we do now know that it's not true that she actually invented it but it's just a very beautiful image of this girl boss as you put it teaching with her astrolabe.

24:57Olga Koch:And her fanboy, Sarnisius, he sent her a letter at the end of his life saying, could you help me with an astrolabe? I'd like an astrolabe. Yes, please could you source me one, darling? Yeah. She's doing commentaries on other earlier writers. Maybe some original research, maybe refining instruments like an astrolabe. She may have written philosophy, but none of it survives?

25:17Greg Jenner:Yes. Some scholars say that we've got about 5 % of all of basically what was written in classical antiquity. I suspect it's less than that. I think it's probably nearer 1 % or 2 % because the process of copying out papyrus and then vellum and manuscripts and all the rest of it had to be copied out and copied out every century in these monasteries of Byzantium or it wouldn't have survived through to the 15th century to get into print.

25:45Professor Edith Hall:Well, you'd hope that it was the best 5%, right? Because now I'm thinking about what if the 5 % that survives me is like all the text messages I've ever sent and they have to extrapolate my stand-up genius from the sort of BRB text messages.

25:58Greg Jenner:It is a really interesting question. If only 5 % of your sort of life's work could be saved.

26:04Professor Edith Hall:Just emails. Can you imagine? Please, not just the emails.

26:07Olga Koch:When I quit Twitter, I downloaded my Twitter archive because I was slightly obsessed with like, this is important. This is my life's work. I'd sent 400 ,000 tweets. I'd looked at it. It's about 20 % number about Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. unbelievably boring man I am I'm so dull

26:23Professor Edith Hall:and imagine if of that 20 % only the 5 % is everything that remains of you

26:28Olga Koch:I will be renowned through history as a guy who hated Spurs

26:31Greg Jenner:I think 2000 years time which is what we're talking you know it's 1700 years time the gap between us and Hypatia there could be an alien who was absolutely obsessed with the phenomenon of 21st century soccer and they would be very pleased about that and they'd be like

26:47Professor Edith Hall:there was this soccer scholar you're the Sainese See a society. At last.

26:52Olga Koch:The credibility I've craved for so long.

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28:26Olga Koch:preferred in the modern world hypatia is quite well renowned so much so that several things have been named after her so a mini quiz for you olga which of these things is not named in honor of Hypatia of Alexandria. So we have a crater on the moon, an order of monks, a genus of butterfly, so a type of butterfly species, a font or an asteroid belt. Which of those five is not named after Hypatia?

28:56Professor Edith Hall:Font or what's the last thing?

28:58Olga Koch:Asteroid belt.

29:02Olga Koch:I'm going to throw font in. No, I almost wrote the script in Hypatia font because I was so... It's a joke no one would understand. That makes so much sense. No, there is a Hypatia font. There's a Hypatia asteroid belt. There's a Hypatia butterfly. There's a Hypatia crater on the moon. So there's no monks named after her. But there is a novel about her, about a monk visiting her, I think, in the 19th century. Yes, that's the Charles Kingsley one. Oh, it's the one you mentioned. Yeah, OK. So she's getting her retrospective acclaim now. Oh, yes. You know, we are now happy to acknowledge Hypatia as one of sort of the big brains of the ancient world.

29:33Greg Jenner:Well, she's the first woman in STEM. Well, there you go.

29:37Olga Koch:And across Alexandria, was her big brain recognised at the time? I think we've got the sense that she obviously had an important job. Was she the go-to maths person?

29:46Greg Jenner:She certainly was the person you would go to with any kind of mathematical or astronomical query. We'd really know that, though, from the amount of antipathy she generated, strangely. I mean, she was so hated by the Christians.

30:03Professor Edith Hall:Haters are my motivators.

30:06Greg Jenner:She was so hated by the Christians that that implies that they felt she had very considerable authority and influence over a large portion of the population.

30:15Olga Koch:So we can measure her influence by the sort of scale. The antipathy. Right, that's interesting. It's quite a good metric for influence, isn't it? To see how much you hate it. I think so. To realise how much you're contributing.

30:26Professor Edith Hall:I think Taylor Swift built a whole career around it. So, yeah, it makes sense to me.

30:30Olga Koch:That's fascinating, isn't it? OK, so her reputation clearly, you know, she's revered and respected in certain communities and perhaps starting to acquire her haters in others. Was Hypatia a rare exception in Alexandria in terms of the lives of women? So I know obviously she's rare in terms of women in science at this point. But did women have more rights in Alexandria? Did they have more freedom?

30:50Greg Jenner:They did have some rights. And I think she would have been able to inherit property and keep it as her own, for example, if she didn't marry. That sort of economic independence is absolutely crucial, obviously, to being able to operate as you want. And women could divorce as well, couldn't they? Yes, they could get divorced.

31:07Olga Koch:Because ancient Athens, women had almost no rights at all.

31:10Greg Jenner:The position of women in general in ancient Greece, the oppression has been exaggerated. In that a classical Athens was not typical at all. Women were far more oppressed there than they were in almost all other city states. The second is that if you only assess a civilisation by the legal, economic and suffrage rights, then you get no idea about everyday lives. Women had such a fantastic time in ancient religion. They had all these goddesses. They were the high priestesses everywhere. We've only just appointed our first ever archbishop, woman archbishop of Canterbury. Compared with the monotheistic religions, you had all these different goddesses to go to.

31:55Greg Jenner:incredibly homosocial society. That is, you hung out with other women of all ages at riotous women-only festivals.

32:02Professor Edith Hall:Oh, yeah. I mean, have you ever visited a convent? That stuff is lit.

32:06Greg Jenner:You have Aphrodite. You go to Aphrodite's temple if you want to get to be sexually attractive. You go to Hera if you're looking after your social status. You go to the temple of Artemis for your biology. You go to Athena if you're a craftswoman or you're involved in any kind of weaving or anything like that. You've got all your own, Demeter and Persephone is crucial to agriculture. It was wonderful having been brought up in a strict Anglican household of the deepest sexism and being told that girls couldn't sing in choirs because their voices were impure. I would absolutely swap a few things like suffrage, rights to vote, for that religious experience and time with other women.

32:49Greg Jenner:One day I will write that book. Oh, amazing.

32:52Professor Edith Hall:100%. You go queen out with the girlinas while the boys die at war. Can I ask a question about what you said about the antipathy?

33:01Greg Jenner:Yeah.

33:01Professor Edith Hall:What was the criticism? Like, what is it that they hated about her writing or her conduct?

33:07Greg Jenner:The Roman Empire is trying to go Christian. And people who taught pagan philosophy, so things like Neoplatonism, which told you to question everything. and do scientific explanations for things. So you were going to explain comets as something to do with something that's going on mechanically in the universe, not as a sign from God. This represents an incredible obstacle to converting the population to proper Christianity. So she became a figurehead for the resistance to the newly converted emperors. Oh, my God.

33:52Professor Edith Hall:So in a way, her neo-pagan views were more progressive than the Christian ones. Fastly.

33:57Greg Jenner:That's what I'm talking about. And that's why her reception, as I put it, since the early 18th century, it starts with a free thinker called John Toland, who is an extraordinary man, who's a total feminist, wants women to get educated. He supports the Jews in London. He's an Irishman, but he comes over an incredible intellectual free thinker, didn't believe really, hated horrible dogmatic religion. So he saw in Hypatia a combination of religious tolerance, free thought, and he believed that women should be educated just as much as men. And it starts off with a treatise he wrote called Hypatia in 1720.

34:38Greg Jenner:Oh, wow. Yeah. And after that, she has been used over and over again as a symbol of free thought, scientific investigation and religious tolerance. And women in STEM, of course. And women, totally women in STEM. So there are two, two philosophy journals called Hypatia. Dora Russell, Bertrand Russell's wife wrote books about her. She is very, very important to women in science.

35:07Professor Edith Hall:Her, Elizabeth Holmes. What a fantastic list of women in STEM.

35:12Greg Jenner:I know several women in STEM who call their pets Hypatia. Oh, that's so sweet. That is a good name for a cat. It's a big cat and dog name. There's also been some very famous racehorses called Hypatia. I don't know when all this happened. Why animals? Because she wasn't a zoologist. I was going to say, is she renowned that she loved the tractor?

35:31Olga Koch:You know, she's just always betting on the Grand National?

35:33Greg Jenner:No, if you go on what shall I call my cat sites, it's always in the top 100. Wow.

35:37Olga Koch:Wow. What a legacy. I like that a lot. Yeah. Okay, let's get back to the ancient world or the late antiquity world, wherever we're going to place it. So Hypatia is obviously around in the kind of mid to late 300s and Christianity had been arriving in the Roman Empire earlier than that and it had taken sort of 60, 70, 80 years to sort of become the official religion and a bit of a pushback and then, you know. But here we are in Alexandria in Egypt and we've got damage to pagan temples. We've got kind of real physical changes. we've got tensions and we get the arrival of a new person called Cyril but before Cyril there's someone else important we should mention.

36:12Greg Jenner:Yes so between 391 when the Serapian was destroyed and the Nicene Creed was officially set up as what you have to believe in if you're a Christian one of the reasons I think that Hypatia was able to survive and carry on teaching for at least another 20 years was that the patriarch, that means the bishop, Christian bishop of Alexandria, was a guy who was quite sympathetic to her and open-minded called Theophilus. So for 20 years, she was under the protection of that bishop and he wasn't going to let all the fanatics close down. So he's a Christian, but he's quite open-minded and he's tolerant of her science.

36:52Greg Jenner:And there were plenty of those. There were plenty. The kind of things that were starting up were incredible schisms, arguments, the patristic arguments of the early church fathers that get so laughed at about how many angels can dance on a pin. Is there a trinity? Is there a triune? Is God a monad? You know, they're all right in there. And Theophilus apparently wasn't really interested in that sort of doctrinal thing. He was a perfectly good pastoral bishop and he wanted harmony in his city between the Jews, the pagans and the Christians. what happened in 412 is that a very different character got to be the bishop after Theophilus died and he is called Cyril he only gets into that position by beating up another guy called Timotheus there's a huge amount of rioting

37:45Professor Edith Hall:as is the Christian way

37:47Greg Jenner:but Alexandria had actually for several hundred years been known as the riot city they do like rioting in Alexandria. So it was almost any excuse for a riot. So there were lots of fights and riots and bloodshed before Cyril even got in. So I think he's already slightly paranoid before he even gets in. He wants to secure his power base. Things then heat up even further because a new governor appointed by the Roman Empire, who's a secular governor, comes in, who's actually a Greek. All these people are Greek, even though they're in the Roman Empire, but called Orestes, as in the Greek mythical figure.

38:26Greg Jenner:He just happens to be called Orestes. And that is, it's the face-off between Cyril and Orestes that poor Hypatia is caught.

38:36Professor Edith Hall:So which one of them is Millwall? That's a question on everybody's minds right now. Yeah.

38:44Greg Jenner:Now, both of these guys were ruthless.

38:48Professor Edith Hall:And is Orestes tolerant of Hypatia or no? Absolutely. Okay, so he's on her side.

38:52Greg Jenner:He's pretending to be a Christian because he's got to, but he's actually deeply interested in all the Neoplatonism. And there were Christian Neoplatonists.

39:00Olga Koch:So he's a political appointee. He's governor of Egypt on behalf of the Roman Empire. He's a Greek. So it's all these sort of different identities. And they're talking Greek.

39:08Greg Jenner:All of their intellectual life will have been conducted in Greek. And the intellectual Jews all knew Greek. That's the language of the intellectual life. Very, very few people are speaking Latin.

39:20Professor Edith Hall:Much like today. Yeah. Same.

39:23Greg Jenner:So she gets caught in the crossfire.

39:25Olga Koch:And we start to get violence in the city and we get Cyril and Orestes, you know, they're starting to be on opposite sides of mob violence. Right. And some of this mob violence targets Jews. Some of it targets Christians. Some of it target pagan. You know, everyone's getting hurt.

39:38Professor Edith Hall:So we're thinking, is it modern terms? It's like if the mayor of Rome and the pope had mobs? Yeah.

39:44Olga Koch:It's almost, yeah, it's I guess governor of Egypt is a sort of bigger job, I suppose. it's kind of he's ruling a big old chunk of land but yeah but the bishop of yeah it's

39:52Greg Jenner:and the Christians were very very very anxious to sorry mayor of

39:56Professor Edith Hall:Los Angeles and Tom Cruise a much

40:00Olga Koch:better analogy

40:02Greg Jenner:yes both the resties and Cyril wanted to be the top guy in Alexandria and Cyril basically won but it started off with quarrels about the Jews neither of these guys is a Jew How do we treat the Jews? Orestes is a secular guy who is interested in harmony in his multi-ethnic city. Cyril is persecuting the Jews. Orestes decides to hold a meeting with the Jews where he suggests that they actually quieten down a bit, not be so provocative. Victim-blaming. Well, a bit. So they used to have these really wild dances on the Sabbath. Orestes suggested at this meeting they slightly calm them down. Unfortunately, Cyril has spent a spy in who is a Christian called Herax, who then foments the resentment of the Jews against Erestes.

40:57Greg Jenner:It's that complicated. Oh, wow. Okay. Agent provocateur. Yeah. He went in as an agent provocateur. He's undercover. To tell the Jews, who he actually hates, Ian, Herax and Cyril, he provokes them into violence. There's a huge riot. Some people die. Arresteus then has Hiraqs arrested and tortured in public just to up the ante a little bit, in the theatre, no less. Which was a pretty stupid thing to do because that is, as I say, it's escalating, escalating the conflict. And there are reprisals and a lot more persecution of Jews. Cyril starts bringing in various different groups of thugs, really.

41:43Greg Jenner:one is his Neitran monks now the Neitran monks are the most ascetic of all they're way out in the desert and they live in the desert on practically nothing except bugs and caterpillars and what drops of water they can squeeze out of palm trees and they're incredibly religious and ascetic so they're really, because they're so deprived they come in, they're very violent, they come in and join his private army then he gets the Parak Bolani the people who risked their lives they're really weird because we start off as a group of Christian paramedics. Right. They are paramedics who are supposed to do things like take old people into old people's homes and take people back from hospitals and protect.

42:24Greg Jenner:But they also serve, sort of under Cyril, but they also serve as his private bodyguard, his bouncers, his kind of mafioso thugs. Those two jobs do not normally go together. It's weird.

42:38Professor Edith Hall:Well, people don't know, but the entirety of the KGB is trained in first aid.

42:43Greg Jenner:and how not to give it. It's really like that. They're kind of all-purpose private army.

42:51Professor Edith Hall:Everything you're describing to me, it's like it is true. Women are too emotional. Men lack that emotion that is needed to lead because all of that has no emotion in it whatsoever. Yes.

43:00Greg Jenner:Extraordinary. The exact process we don't understand by which the enmity against Arrestes got transferred to Hypatia. Ooh. Yes.

43:10Professor Edith Hall:Where does she even come into this?

43:11Olga Koch:For five minutes you've been talking, we haven't mentioned her once. Yeah, I'm sorry. But no, it's a good point. Like, where is she in all this?

43:18Professor Edith Hall:Wait, does the Parabalani have something to do with this?

43:20Greg Jenner:Orestes really likes her. He likes Neoplatonic philosophy. The kind of Alexandrian, his vision is precisely the one where she is going to be this dominant intellectual force and help keep everything open and progressive. And the old Alexandria of intellectual culture is not replaced by a fanatical primitive Christian theocracy. I mean, that is what we're talking. Huge issue. But the hate, people said she had, this is where my Coptic bishop from later on comes in useful. They said she had beguiled him sexually and enchanted the governor of the empire with her witchcraft.

43:58Professor Edith Hall:Which is literally her doing two plus two, which costs four and he's going,

44:04Greg Jenner:and the hatred for her was so much that it did lead to her being assaulted by the Parabolani.

44:11Olga Koch:Oh, man.

44:12Greg Jenner:So the paramedics turn into paramilitary. Yeah. Blimey. Different explanations have been offered, as I said, for exactly how the government got so... The secular government, the administration under Orestes, got so associated with her.

44:29Olga Koch:But it was. And there's a monk called Ammonius who tries to kill Orestes. Yes. And he hurts Orestes but doesn't kill him. He's one of the Neutrons. Right. And he's then captured, tortured, executed. He's another, yeah. Who are Neutrons?

44:42Professor Edith Hall:Did we discuss that? I don't think we did.

44:44Olga Koch:The monks from the desert. Yeah, the desert monks.

44:46Professor Edith Hall:Damn, okay, yes, yes, yes.

44:47Olga Koch:The caterpillar munchers. Yeah, exactly.

44:50Greg Jenner:The desert in Egypt was absolutely full at this time. People were coming from all over the world to become extremely fanatical Christians in the desert. Yeah. It was a thing.

44:59Professor Edith Hall:Burning Man, totally. Again, I'm putting into terms people understand.

45:03Greg Jenner:Exactly. It's a thing. So another guy, Orestes, is very heavy handed. If he had behaved more like Theophilus, who knows how much longer that rather tense detente couldn't have lasted. Right. But it did for 20 more years under Theophilus when he was bishop. When Orestes comes in at the same time as Cyril, chalk and cheese. Yeah.

45:26Olga Koch:So they're executing and punishing and torturing their enemies. Yes, both sides. Both of them. Yeah. Okay. And so.

45:32Professor Edith Hall:So did the Parabolani kill? Hypatia? Yes.

45:36Olga Koch:I was going to say, word of warning to you, Olga, and also to the listener. We have to change gear into pretty horrible territory here. The comedy maybe stops for a bit because this is awful. The film does it, the Rachel Weisz movie, does it pretty brutally.

45:49Greg Jenner:The film does do it brutally, but also what I really liked was it managed not to be at all voyeuristic. There's a whole genre of 19th century paintings of Hypatia being stripped naked and beaten up. Really revolting. Victorian sort of sadomasochistic pornography objectifying her. And she's always ridiculously Caucasian looking in these paintings and this beautiful white body being savaged by rather dark looking sort of Coptic Christians. You know, it's sort of racist. It's everything. No, they either arrested her while she was actually teaching or pulled her out of her chariot, her vehicle, as she was driving to or from her teaching post and took her into a church which had been a temple, I think of Zeus.

46:40Greg Jenner:It had been a temple and had been converted into the cathedral and killed her in a way that seems to have involved either stoning or taking down a certain kind of tile, which they called shells. They were like big seashells. And somehow, you know, people even say that they skinned her. but she did die she had no one to protect her Arrestees just wasn't good enough you know you can blame the guy I think if you want to

47:11Olga Koch:So she's caught up in this violence it's in no way her fault, she's not incited it she hasn't joined a side, she's just been teaching in her

47:17Greg Jenner:We have no evidence for that whatsoever that she had any political interest, she obviously wanted the multi-ethnic and open society but it was the ire, the rage that Orestes seems to have managed to get aroused in Cyril and the Christians. Orestes then disappears off the... Yeah, I was going to say, what happens in the end? Well, there is no more word of him. He stops being governor. Somebody else comes in as governor. Maybe people said that he had screwed up. Maybe he was actually genuinely upset and thought this is no way to... We don't know very much about him, Guy. The one we know most about is Cyril, who went on to be one of the most successful bishops and early Christians of all time, was involved in all the most famous theological disputes and was even made a saint.

48:11Greg Jenner:Yes.

48:11Professor Edith Hall:Oh, come on. Wait, so this was the beginning of the end, right? So like from this moment on, it became more and more conservatively Christian, right? Yeah. Oh, boy.

48:20Olga Koch:Was there a sort of sense of shock that Hypatia, this great intellectual, had been killed in such a disgustingly horrific way? Do we get a sense of the empire at large going, hang on, what?

48:29Greg Jenner:Two or three sources lament it sorely. Yes, and these tend to be, again, the sort of Greek intellectuals, even those who convert to Christianity, very many of them still think the philosophy is wonderful and the science is wonderful. Some people have said that laws about violence and stuff were tightened up in Alexandria, but I can't really see any substantial data to support that.

48:53Olga Koch:So Cyril becomes a saint. Ammonious became a martyr saint. So Ammonious was the nitrogen monk who tried to kill Orestes. He became a saint. And then you said that Hypatia becomes a sort of martyr to philosophy later.

49:04Greg Jenner:I think she's a secular saint. Yeah. She becomes a very important representative for both women in science and free thinking. Yeah. Both of those were in the John Toland. So that's the 18th century. That's 1720. Yeah. Amazing.

49:17Professor Edith Hall:And don't forget virgins.

49:19Olga Koch:Patron saint of virgins.

49:20Professor Edith Hall:Here we go.

49:21Olga Koch:That's amazing. What a life. I mean, Olga, do you think Hypatia deserves her role as, you know, the first woman in STEM? Are you happy with that title?

49:29Professor Edith Hall:Yes, absolutely. Good. That was just so, so deeply, deeply sad. I don't have anything. No, I know.

49:36Olga Koch:It's an extraordinary life because it's an intellectual life, but it sort of crashes into all these other sort of huge moments in history.

49:43Professor Edith Hall:It's a lesson in when in doubt, just throw a used pad at them.

49:47Greg Jenner:She ought to have been in Alexandria teaching philosophy and maths.

49:51Olga Koch:Yeah. always but it was the wrong time yeah yeah yeah but we do know her better so we do get to celebrate her and that's you know it's worth discussing her and and thank you for that and yeah it's a very

50:01Professor Edith Hall:sad end but extraordinary life i think yeah and maybe you listener consider renaming your cat yes the nuance window

50:14Olga Koch:time now for the nuance window this is where olga and i sit silently doing our geometry homework while Professor Edith stands at the front of the class and lectures us with her astrolabe. Tell us something we need to know about Hypatia. So my stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes.

50:28Greg Jenner:Take it away, Professor Edith. There's something else other than craters on the moon that have been named after Hypatia. And this is the Hypatia stone. The Hypatia stone was discovered in 1996 by an Egyptian geologist. He discovered it in what are called the Libyan glass parts of the Sahara. Now, Libyan glass is some sort of strange meteorite type sort of mineral that looks like glass. He was researching that and he came across a small, very, very rough, craggy looking stone, only about 1.3 inches in diameter, tiny little sparkly diamonds in it. And it has been tested now. It's been sent by people in Los Angeles, universities and in South Africa, Johannesburg.

51:18Greg Jenner:This stone's mineral makeup is so extraordinary that it means it's almost certainly made, formed before our solar system. It is quite extraordinary. Now, he wanted it, the geologist who found it wanted it called after Hypatia, which is very sweet because as an Egyptian scientist, he saw himself as a descendant. He didn't name it an Arabic name. He named it the tradition of the Library of Alexandria. but just imagine this tiny stone and I've seen lots of different pictures of it. Unfortunately, the scientists have cut it into bits so it's even smaller to examine it. This means that it's more than 4.6 billion years old.

52:01Greg Jenner:It was formed at minus 198 degrees centigrade or colder in a supernova. That's amazing.

52:10Professor Edith Hall:Beautiful. She's timeless. I feel that.

52:14Olga Koch:high pace of the eternal idea, the eternal continent in the solar system. I mean, pretty good to be 4.2 billion? 4.6 billion.

52:21Professor Edith Hall:I think she'd like it too, because she liked stars and stuff. If I have one takeaway, she likes all that

52:28Greg Jenner:stuff. But it's kind of union with the one. Yeah. It came from outer space. It became before our galaxy.

52:35Olga Koch:So what do you know now?

52:41Olga Koch:It's time now for this, so what do you know now? This is our quickfire quiz for Olga to see how much she has learned. Olga, you are... What's this expression? Gently, I'm going to call it flustered. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

52:54Professor Edith Hall:I've been taking notes, but they make very little sense.

52:56Olga Koch:I'm sure they're excellent. They look very comprehensive. And neat.

53:00Professor Edith Hall:We'll see. We've got good handwriting. And neat.

53:02Olga Koch:We've got ten questions. We've talked about all these things. Let's see if you can remember some stuff here. Okay. Question one. In which Egyptian city did Hypatia live and work?

53:11Professor Edith Hall:Alexandria. There we go.

53:13Olga Koch:We're up and running. OK, this is a slightly harder one. Question two. What was the name of Hypatia's mathematician father? Theon. Oh, very good. Yeah, very good. Which means godly. Question three. Name one thing that is now named after Hypatia.

53:26Professor Edith Hall:A moon crater.

53:27Olga Koch:Yeah, absolutely. Or an incredible diamond in the desert. Or butterfly genus, a font, asteroid belt. Hypatia font is very nice, by the way, if you want to use it. Question four. What did Hypatia inherit from her father? What role?

53:40Professor Edith Hall:Oh, the professor of math at the university? Yeah, absolutely.

53:43Olga Koch:What did you think I meant by inherited? Nose. She's got his eyes. Question five. What astronomical instrument did Hypatia possibly produce a design for?

53:55Professor Edith Hall:Astrolabe.

53:56Olga Koch:Yeah, astrolabe. Labe. Sorry, not lobe. Yeah, that's just your handwriting. That's fine. Question six. Can you name one area of astronomy or mathematics that Hypatia wrote commentaries on?

54:06Professor Edith Hall:Arithmetic.

54:07Olga Koch:It was. And also conic sections is possibly her. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the big one. The cones, the traffic cones and the ice cream cones. Question seven. What did Hypatia allegedly do when a student claimed that he loved her?

54:18Professor Edith Hall:She threw a sanitary napkin at him.

54:21Olga Koch:She did. Question eight. Slay. Question eight. What was the name of the philosophical school of thought that Hypatia followed?

54:28Professor Edith Hall:I have it written here. No, no, no, no, no. Don't you, don't you even, don't you even think. Wait. Okay. It was pagan, but it was, oh my God, I literally wrote it down because you kept saying it.

54:41Olga Koch:Neoplatonist? Yeah, very good. Amazing. Well done. Question nine. Hypatia likely practised which type of religion but maybe didn't actually worship?

54:50Professor Edith Hall:Pagan?

54:50Olga Koch:Yeah, absolutely. And this for a perfect 10. How, sadly, did Hypatia die?

54:55Professor Edith Hall:She was attacked ruthlessly by the Parabolani in a converted Zeus temple that was turned into a not Catholic Christian cathedral.

55:07Olga Koch:I'm going to give you 11 out of 10 because you remember Parabalani.

55:10Professor Edith Hall:All right.

55:11Olga Koch:Incredible technical recovery in the last one there.

55:13Greg Jenner:You really, really paid attention.

55:15Professor Edith Hall:I was listening to you. Yeah, I mean, it's very, very interesting. I mean, you're a PhD student.

55:18Olga Koch:Of course you're paying attention. You're a big brain. I'm surrounded by very clever people here. But that's amazing. 11 out of 10, Olga. Well done.

55:25Professor Edith Hall:Thank you very much. I had a fantastic teacher.

55:28Olga Koch:Yeah, absolutely. As Hypotia was too. Well, thank you so much, Olga. But you're a fantastic student. No. I'm a really good host. Yeah, really good host? No? You're a great host. Make it all happen. No, it's fine. Thank you, Olga. Thank you so much, Edith. Listener, if you're in the mood for more ancient philosophers with Edith, check out our episodes on Aristotle and Pythagoras. He's more than just a triangle guy. It's quite the life. And to hear more from Olga, of course, you can listen to our episodes on Ivan the Terrible. He was terrible, by the way. He really was. That's confirmed.

55:55Professor Edith Hall:Terrible confirmed.

55:56Olga Koch:Or the episode on vital electricity, which is an absolute hoot. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, You can listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the excellent Professor Edith Hall from University of Durham. Thank you, Edith. Thank you. I had a riot. Very fitting. And in Comedy Corner, we had the outstanding Olga Koch.

56:25Olga Koch:Thank you, Olga. Thank you very, very, very much. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we solve another forgotten historical equation. But for now, I'm off to go and beg Rachel Weisz to play me in a movie.

56:34Greg Jenner:Bye! That would be good.

56:40Olga Koch:Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4. This episode was researched by Adam Simcox. It was written by Dr. Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr. Emma Naguse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Jill Huggett. It was produced by Dr. Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, me and senior producer Dr. Emma Naguse. And our executive editor was Philip Sellers.

57:04Olga Koch:Greg will be bringing a live version of the Your Dead To Me podcast to theatres around the UK this spring. You can join him in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester and for more information and ticket details go to yourdeadtomelive.com Attention animal lovers, haters and undecideds. A little birdie, a tit, told me that you're looking for a podcast just like Evil Genius, but without all those stupid humans. I'm Russell Kane, waddling onto your feed and squawking about my show, Evil Animals. Every episode, I'm joined by two human guests, or as I like to call them, ex-monkeys, passing judgment on all the creepiest crawlies and the biggest elephants in the room.

57:43Olga Koch:Our vampire bats, terrifying giant mosquitoes. Our bottlenose dolphins, sex-obsessed savages. And we're going there. Domestic cats, evil or genius? Pig out on evil animals in the Evil Genius podcast feed, first on BBC Sounds.

58:23Olga Koch:your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.