Was classical Alexandria really this brutal and class-segregated?
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At that time yes. The Roman Empire was weak and receding and the vacuum that created fueled a struggle between groups looking to fill it. Hypatia wasn't just killed by accident being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was targeted and assasinated by Christians involved in a violent three way struggle for control of the city of Alexandria with Jews and Rome.
Hypatia's admirers included Alexandria’s governor, Orestes. Her association with him would eventually lead to her death.
Hypatia's crime was she was smart, and an advisor to the Roman governor of Alexandria Orestes. Orestes was a Christian but he governed independently from the Church's bishop Cyril. When a disagreement arose between the two Cyril tried to assassinate the Roman Governor Orestes but failed. Next the Christians took aim at one of his primary advisor in their struggle, the Philosopher Hypatia. She was met on the streets by christians who dragged her out of her carriage and brutally murdered her within a nearby church.
With Cyril the head of the main religious body of the city and Orestes in charge of the civil government, a fight began over who controlled Alexandria. Orestes was a Christian, but he did not want to cede power to the church. The struggle for power reached its peak following a massacre of Christians by Jewish extremists, when Cyril led a crowd that expelled all Jews from the city and looted their homes and temples. Orestes protested to the Roman government in Constantinople. When Orestes refused Cyril’s attempts at reconciliation, Cyril’s monks tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him.
Hypatia, however, was an easier target. She was a pagan who publicly spoke about a non-Christian philosophy, Neoplatonism, and she was less likely to be protected by guards than the now-prepared Orestes.
In the year 415 or 416, the mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy.
Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar
An avowed paganist in a time of religious strife, Hypatia was also one of the first women to study math, astronomy and philosophy
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