8. Robert Fraser (Senior Research Fellow, Literature Department, Open University, UK)
Of Sirens, Science and Oyster-Shells: Hypatia the philosopher from Gibbon to Black Athena

Since her assassination by a Christian mob in March 415 CE, the Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher Hypatia has obsessed the imagination of Europe. Memorably portrayed by Edward Gibbon in his unflattering account of the Egyptian church in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she has ever since been used by anti-clerical writers to demonstrate the perversity of the clergy, by Christians to illustrate the follies of paganism or else of fanaticism in their own ranks; she has become a nationalist, feminist and, most recently, an anti-colonial icon. Fictional, and would-be historical, accounts of her life and death have appeared in many languages, notable in French, Italian, English and, most recently, in German. At one point too, her legend became intertwined with that of St Catherine of Alexandria, a confusion that has caused her to act as a thorn in the flesh on many sides. This paper starts by looking at original sources of the story, and at the history insofar as we can reconstruct it. It then moves on to uncover successive layers of myth that have been ladled onto this Hellenistic intellectual from the Enlightenment to the present day. Hypatia has an odd habit of getting under the skin of her observers, wherever they may be found. Her story can be used as a case study by several different ideological lobbies; but because she does not quite fit any of the proposed paradigms, she has a tendency to expose the fault-lines in all of them. Unsurprisingly she has an especially interesting relationship with Catholic and post-Catholic societies, for which reason she has proved of enduring interest to authors over several centuries in Italy, and in recent years in Quebec. Her availability as a political symbol has recommended her to nationalists since the Risorgimento. Her ethnic ambiguity – was she Greek; Berber; African? – has also given her a worried fascination for postcolonial and Afro-centric critics, notably for Martin Bernal, who in his famous (or notorious?) book Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1990) adopts Hypatia as a representative of a last ditch stand by an authentic African intellectuality in the face of a crushing Hellenistic hegemony. Hypatia deserves to be better known in postcolonial circles. She is one of history’s magnificent martyrs – but for what cause?

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