The Tragic End and Legacy

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. I don't know about your house, but at my house, everybody's online. streaming, shopping, Zoom calls, you name it. That's why having fast, reliable internet that can keep up really matters and why you need Optimum's famously fast fiber Innet. It blows flaky five G home internet out of the water. It has the fastest and most reliable internet speeds And doesn't slow down when everybody's online, which let's be honest, is all the time. Right now, they have a deal that's tough to beat, just twenty five dollars a month for five years. So don't wait, callall eight eight eight for optimum. Visit optimum dot com or stop by your local optimum store today. famously Fast Fiber for twenty five dollars a month for five years, That's a no brainer Terms supply see optimum d. com for details Big transfer news today. Wh's moment? M. Welome to the couch, with Domino's best deal ever since they just added stuffed crrust. Any pizza, any toppings now with stuffed crrust for ninellars ninety nine cents. It's a long term contract, with no release clause. Only nine dollars ninety nine c That sounds like the move. I'm heading straight to Dom Pr price is higher for some locations, excludes excell specialty pizza select this offer from six hundred fifteenenth seven, twenty six, onnline own. Size availability varies byst he tyight, max seven topping six for and in New York style crest., minimum purchase required for delivery, prices, participation, delivery area and charges may vary Hello and welcome to Your Dead To Me, the Radio four comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name iss Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian author and broadcaster, and today we are grabbing our maths textbooks and frolicking back to the fourth century to Egypt to learn all about mathematician and philosopher, Hypatia of Alexandria. And to help us we have one terrific teacher and one sublime student History Corner She's professor of Classics at Durham University. You might have heard her on Natalie Hayes Stand Up for the Classics or Great Lives on BBC Radio four. Maybe you've read one of her many books, including Aristotle's Way, How Ancient Wisdom C can Change Your Life and Facing downown the Furies. And you'll know her from our episodes on Pythagoras, the Triangle Guy, and Aristotle. It's Professor Edith Hall. Wlcome back Edith Hello, I'm thrilled to be here delight to have you back and in Comedy Corner. She's comedian, writer and actor. You'll have seen her on Mock the The Week,QI, Frankie Boyle's New World Order, Late Night Mash. Or you've heard her co hosting the BBC's funny technology podcast Human Eerror. Maybe you've seen her award nominated stand upp show Olgcacock Comes from Money. And you'll definitely remember her from our episodes on Ivan the Terrible and Vital Electricity It's Olgar Coch. welcome, Olgar. Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to have you here. Ulgar, previously on the show, you said that your history knowledge is basically all the American presidents And that's it. Yeah. I mean and the thing is even that was lying, I think maybe half of them have been. Okay I was going to ask you, who's the twelfth American president? Oh fourth twelfth Oh God. Never mind. John Adams is somewhere in there. He's quite early. Let's be honest. Is he earlier than fourth? Yeah. Is she second? Yeah. Oh boy. This is bad, this is bad. Shut it down. Okay, you are doing a PhD right now. Yes. Crucially not in history. I would like your listeners to know. But you're a woman in STEM, right? Yes. So Proudably so. Good. So have you heard of Hypatia of Alexandria? If I'm being completely honest, I only found out that she was a mathematician But I want to say thirty seconds ag This is gonna be a very, very fun episode, if anything, just for me. So, what do you know Well that brings us to the first segment of the podcast, which is so what do you know, This is where I have a go at guessing what our lovely listener might know about today's subjects. You might know from the introduction, like Ulga has just discovered that Hypatia was a philosopher and mathematician. She's a bigger name in recent years thanks to the two thousand nine film Agara starring Rachel Weiss, but you may also know Hypatia from a nineteen eighty seven episode of Doctor Who where she's one of several geniuses kidnapped to build a super brain I did not see the episode. I've seen any episodes of doctor Who. But What was the truth? Re really not on brand for you at all? I know I give off real Doctor Who energy, but I've never seen it. But what wass the truth behind the dramatic Hollywood Hyp Asa? How much of a genius was she really? And what on earth is a Cic section? Let's find out. Right, Professor Edith. When we did our Pythagoras episode, it turned out we couldn't trust anything written about him by anyone. A lot of fun, but not hugely helpful. Are we on firmer historical ground with Hypatia of Alexandria? We are We are on slightly firmer h. You immediately caveated it. Slightly firmer historical ground because we've got two sources that are approximately contemporary with her as well as one or two that are quite a lot later. So we've actually got some letters by a guy called Synesius Cyrenene, who was some kind of student or acccolyte of her Cyrenees in Libya So this is we're talking about the North African Greek intellectual diaspora. He seems to have absolutely adored her, wanted to send her his work and his ideas. She doesn't seem to have answered very much. like already. At some point stopped contacting him, but the respect he holds her in is very indicative. Okay, so Cynesius of Cynee, what a name He's a bit of a fanboy. Olga, you are an expert in reply guys. Wow, what a swerve. I like that. Are you on fromir historical territory here? This is the psychology of people who write back? I guess so. It's very interesting. So basically my masters was about reply guys, which are. A catch all slang term for men who, I guess incessantly respond to women who don't act like they exist on the internet in a sort of very casual and very, I guess like buddy buddy fashion that's overly familiar. This guy kind of recontextualizes it. It's not modern phenomenon. It's been around. What other sources do we have for Hypatient? We have the letters of her fanboy Anesus And we have biography by Socrates scholar, another guy called Damascus, who wrote a life of another neooplatonist in which she has some interesting stuff really more about the culture of Alexandria and where she grew up. And we've got the amazingly horrible John of Niciu, who's a seventh century tick. Bishop and he wrote a world history, man explaining history for everybody and his paragraph on H patia is very important because it reflects what people like him thought of her. And that is that she is a seductorous, a high class sex worker who begalals people with witchcraft 'ot a text that reflects what people would shouting say that way. I solve one quadratic equation and all of a suden I'm a witch. Yeahes. Right. beforefore 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 give us a quick rundown of life In late fourth century, Alexandria, this amazing city of learning 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 multiethnic to an extraordinary degree and has had a history of huge liberalism about that But you've also, because of the particular point in history, in the four hundred nineties, the first really harsh edicts from the new Christian emperors were coming out three hundred nine one is the edict of Theodosius that all pagan temples. have to be shut down R So she comes into the world. She's born between three hundred and fifty and three hundred seventy, AD, C E the exact point as she's reaching adulthood, where being an old pagan philosopher is beginning to become a very dangerous thing to be. But she's a pagan, which means she worships multiple gods Yes, I don't think she did worship multiple gods because she's actually a neolatonist pagan So what happened to her C on That's very important.rass I know sorry. So while there's a sort of notional acceptance of the pagan pantheon, I don't think she had any kind of real 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 anythingthing made out of matter is a second rate copy of the eternal oneness of the world of ideas. Yeah. my yoga teacher thinks the same Right. A lot of people do. So let's talk about her childhood very briefly. You said she's born somewhere in the three fifies three seventies. Olga, how do you think a young woman like Hypatia got into maths in the ancient world Well, she was a pagan, so I guess she started out by counting the gods. onene to twelve What's your inkling? How do you think a young woman gets into math at that point in history? Oh my gosh, she lets a man explain it to her. Was it part of like a curriculum in school. What she taught actually was part of her university curriculum. No she's a Nepo baby. Of course. I mean, I wasn't gonna to say her dad, but we were all thinking. herer dad is called Theton, Theon, which just means godly And he is kind of head of the math 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 you only had one kid and it was a girl. There are several instances of this in antiquity where men couple sort of politely forgot that there was no Y chromosome and actually trained up daughter is an apprentice. I mean that's g on throughout history. We actually know of four other women who were around in the fourth century. One actually in other. fourour whole women. Yeah whole women. That's a lot. We have confirmation of four women. There was a mathematician a good one called Pandroson which is a beautiful name. It actually means All moist like the morning dew then we've got one over at Pergaman, which is the other the second biggest library, which is on the west coast for Turkey. somebody else in Athens who's another neoplatonist So she isn't alone. But hypatia is effectively treated as a son almost by her dad. I believe so. And he's called Theon. What does hypatia mean?, hypatia is such a weird, that's a sort of Victorian pronunciation. I was going to say Patia. Oh , it means the very highest up the summit Pinnacle of excellence. Wow. Just the very topost. No pressure. The topmost, it's just from the Greek word hooksos, which means elevation That's amazing. I like that a lot. What does Uga mean? I don't wantan to talk about it. So now it's actually short for oligarchs. . Let should be clear that's a joke. Okay So we have Payt sort of taking on her dad's school job. know he's the teach, she's the math profess of the library of Alexandria. She takes the role on. What would be on the course that she's teaching? 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 intduced actually by a version of Aristotle's logic. It's kind of a synthesis there a bit of stoicism in there becausecause the way to achieve union with the one intellectually and psychologically is actually by a mild form of asceticism. you've got to live quite a disciplined life physically. you cannot do self indulgence. It's got a monastic hint, but it's not actually in any way religious all about the self and self discipline. thenen there would have been maths, there have been Euclidean maths, therell have been optics and there have been astronomy. So basically all the fields in which you can apply N Yeah. I mean she sounds busy. She didn't have time to respond to fan mail. They They didn't do stat statistics because that's a Latin word. Oh. Well, that's Romans for you isn't it? The Romans they love data. Exactly. No spreadsheets in Alexandria. Confirmed Okay, so Hypatia or how do you pronounce it? H Hupia Hupatia That sounds slightly like your're sort of, I don't know, it feels slightly like you're tripping over. Itsmost like you're falling down a staircase. But it's very pretty andreen. It's beautiful. So Hypatia is mostly teaching Men Are there any women in her class? I very much doubt it. I cannot tell you that fact, but usually there are sources saying that the Mouson, the museum, which is the big library where the teaching goes on did not admit women R 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 she's sort of a virgin who doesn't have anything to do with sex. so she's like a pagan high priestess. And she stays that way throughout her entire life. As far as we know, ye. Oh my Godd. Wow. So she's a virgin and a mthlete Please she confirm. Harsh, sorry. sorry, athlettees. 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' this woman teaching them. 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, deodant hadn' been invented. from what I can be. 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. St? I think I think's true. Well, there is a story which I'm absolutely sure is apocryphal, but that one student who was so loveeln that he kept harassing her to try to get her to go out with him. and it's said that she threw a soaking sanmitary pad at hand. We and said that's what you're in love with. like my physical body. Oh my god, I love that. What you should be after is the true love of the one ideal form of beauty, not this material copy. 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. 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 com. I bet all the other boys were like, can I have one? The ultimate cookout starts with the ultimate ingredients. At Whole Foods markarket, no antibiotics ever burgers and kebabs are prepped and ready to throw on the grill. Fire up a juicy ribbeye. 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Get advice from a specially trained registered nurse about issues affecting your family's health and wellbeing. New Jersey families with a newborn can sign up for a free home visit. Visit familyamilyConnectsnj. org comm to schedule your nurse visit today She's got her fans and her students sort of seem to really admire her. do. 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 not that original She was an expert expounder of icated mathematical ideas, she wrote big commentary books. This was the G Age of commentaries on Eucklid elements on a guy called Diaphantas who wrote the treated on arithmetic that everybody did probably on Ptolemy's Almeest almost certainly on Archimedes, who was one of the greatest you know mechanical engineers. Okay sounds like she was a repied girl. Yeah. But her own contribution seems to have been of development, again if somebody else, a guy called Apollonius had written a book on Cic sections. Oh. My favorite. She does seem to have advanced how you measure cones or how cones exist something to do with cutting through the curving surface that goes round to measure it by doing some sort of intersection It's not completely clear I have tried this with an ice cream cone myself.. Well, sometimes it's important that these developments in these commentaries actually make the original work more relevant. L noody really cared who Shakespeare was and then ten 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. No She was genuinely held to have said something completely original about cones. She was also to be really charismatic brilliant communicator of this. So she's an amazing teacher. Yeah. You know H students love her. And that is an enormous gift to be able to express very complicated ideas in very simple ways. Hypatia is quite well renowned so much so that several things have been named after her. There's a Hypaca asteroid belt, there's aypaca butterfly, there's a Hypaca crater on the moon. So she's getting her retrospective acclaim now. Oh yes. you know, we are now happy to acknowledge Hypeatia is one of sort of the big brains of the ancient world. Well she's the first woman in STEM. Well there you go. What was the criticism? What is it that they hated about her writing or her conduct The Roman Empire is trying to go Christian and peopleople who taught pagan philosophy So things like neoplatonism told you to question everything and do scientific explanations for things. so you We're 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 Wow. Christianity So she became a figurehead for like the resistance to the newly converted emperors. God. So in a way, her neop pagan views were more progressive than the Christians Falsely So Hypacia is obviously around in the kind of mid to late three hundreds and Christianity had been arriving in the Roman Empire earlier than that and it had taken sixty, seventy eight years to sort of become the official religion and a bit of a pushback. And then you know But in here we are in Alexandria in Egypt and we've got damage to pagan temples, we've got real physical changes, we've got tensions, and we get the arrival a new person called Cyril, but before Cyril, there's someone else important, we should mention. Yes. So between three hundred and ninety one when the Serapan was destroyed and the Nice Ced was officially set up as what you have to believe in if you were a Christian One of the reasons I think that Hypatia was able to survive and carry on teaching for at least another twenty 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. Yeah. So for twenty years she was under the protection of that bishop and he wasn't going to let all the fanatics So closed down. So he's a Christian, but he's quite open minded and he'solly tolerant of for science. And there were plenty of those. Yeah. in four twelve 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 Timothheus, you know' huge amount R the Christian way. Yeah. But Alexandre had actually for several hundred years been known as the riot city. I mean they do like rioting in Alexandria. so Almost any excuse for it 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 Okay before he even gets in. he wants to secure his power base. Things then heat up even further because a kn 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 but called Orestes as in the Greek mythical figure. He just happens to be called Arestes And that it's the face off between Cyril and Arestes that poor Hypatia is caught Both of these guys were were ruthless. She gets caught in the crossfire And we start to get violence in the city and we get Cyril and arrestees 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 pague. know, E everyone's getting hurt. So we're thinking is it modern terms? It's like of the mayor of Rome and the pope Yes hadad Mbs? Y Yeah. It's almost yeah, I guess Governor of Egypt is a sort of biggerob I suppose. It's kind of he's ruling a big old chunk of land, but yeah, but the bishop of yeah,' And the Christians were very, very, very anxious too.orry, mayayor of Los Angeles and Tom Cruise. A much better analogy,. Yes. both Arestes and Cyril wanted to be the top guy, rightight? Okay in Alexandria. And Cyril basically won Cyril starts bringing in various different groups of thugs really. One is these Natron monks. Then he gets the parrot Bolani, the people who risk their lives. are they're really weird because we start off as a group of Christian paramedics incredible. They are paramedics who were supposed to do things like take old people into old people's ownes, take people back from hospitals and protect, but they also serve that' sort of under Cyril But they also serve as his private bodyguard, his bouncer, Wow, his kind of Mafioso thugs jobs do not normally. Well, people don't know but the entirety of the KGB is trained in first aid. And how not to give. The exact process we don't understand by which the ennmity against Arestes got transferred to Hypatia Wh Yes. whereere does she li?'s say the five minutes you've been talking We ha't mentioned her wife. She's sorry. No no, but no it's a good point. like whereere is she in all this? Be the parable lining have something to do with this? Threstes really likes it. He likes neeoplatonic philosophy. The kind of Alexandra in 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. Yeah. I mean, that is what we're talking. huge issue the hate People said she had this is what work 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 Which is literally her doing two plus two she was for. And it's going? The hatred for her was so much that it did lead to her being assaulted by the Parabllani. So kind of the paramedics turn into paramilitary. Limy ifferent explanations have been offered for exactly how the government got so the secular government under arrestes got so associated with her that it was So they' they're executing and punishing and torturing their enemies. Yeah both sidesesome. Yeah. o. And so so Parabalani kill Hypusha either arrested her while she was actually teaching or pulled her out of her chariot or a vehicle as she was driving to or from her teaching post and took her to into a church had been a temple. I think of Zeus and had been converted into the cathedral and killed her. She's caught up in this violence' in no way her fault. She's not incited it. She hasn't joined aside. She's just been teaching in her. We have no evidence for that whatsoever that she was had any political interest. She obviously wanted the multi ethnic and open society it was the Ia the rage Arestes seems to have managed to get aroused in Cyril and the Christians. Orestes then disappears off the Yeah I was going to say mean, what happened to the end? Well, there is no more word of him. He stops being governor. Somebody else comes in as governor and maybe people that he had screwed up Maybe he was actually genuinely upset and tght this is noh to you know we don't know very much about him guy 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. Yes. Oh, come on., 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 So Cyril becomes a saint And then you said that her patry becomes a sort of martyr to philosophy later. I think she's a secular saint. Yeah. She becomes a very important representative for both women in science and free thinking. That's amazing. What a life? I mean Olga Do you think Hypeatia deserves her role as you know the first woman in STEM? Are you happy with that title? Yes, absolutely Good. That was just so deeply, deeply sad. I don't have anything No. But we do know her about her, so we do get to celebrate her and that' you know it's worth discussing her. and thank you for that. And yeah, it's a very sad end, but extraordinary life, I think The who one's window Time now for the nuance window. This is where Olgar and I sit silently doing our geometry homework while Professor Edith stands at the front of the class. and tells us something we need to know about Hypatia. so my stopwatch is ready To minutes, take it away Pfessor Edith There's something else other than craters on the Mon that have been named after Hypaca And this is the hypacious stone, the hypacious stone was discovered in nineteen ninety six 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 one point three inches in diameter, tiny little sparkly diamonds in it and It has been It tested now, it's been sent by people in Los Angeles universities and in South Africa, Johannesburg