Ronchey, S. “Perchè Cirillo assassinò Ipazia?” Tolleranza religiosa in età tardoantica: IV-V secolo. Atti della Giornate di studio sull’età tardoantica, Rome, 26-27 May 2013. Eds. A. Marcone, U. Roberto, and I. Tantillo. Cassino: Edizioni Università di Cassino. 135-77.

In this essay, the author attempts to reconstruct the concatenation of facts concerning Hypatia’s assassination by drawing exclusively on ancient sources, evaluating them succinctly against the backdrop of the various environments in which they developed, contextualising them clearly within their historical and social realities, and here and there stripping away the ideological accretions that fifteen centuries of historiography have grafted onto the event.  She thereby avoids the usual inevitable dialectical schemas – pagan-Christian opposition and contradictions between tolerance and intolerance – and highlights the transversal nature of the different sources, or groups, of categories such as moderation and fundamentalism, rationality and irrationality, or rationalism and irrationalism. 

Hypatia was not, as the stereotype would have her, a champion of philosophical reason in contrast to Christian unconditional belief, but the philosophy she practiced had sacred, esoteric and ritual (or magical, according to the accusation of John of Nikiou) implications. The environment of her students and followers became a tight network of discreet affiliations and clienteles, and, as Synesius testifies, it is through these that Hypatia’s “power” (δυναστεία) was carried out. It is the vast, underground ‘masonic’ alliance she headed, and which was evidently influential in the political choices of the élite and the very same administrative higher-ups of Alexandra, that suddenly presented itself to Cyril and provoked in him the sudden attack of envy (φθόνος) on which the contemporary Christian (Socrates Scholasticus) and pagan (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, handed down through Souidas) sources insist and which are all in agreement in holding him responsible for not only radicalising the conflict, but also the assassination itself. For his part, Cyril was not simply a sectarian “zealot” (ἔνθερμον); he nurtured a rational political strategy sui generis that he had inherited from his predecessor and uncle Theophilus and plotted to pursue by any violent and ruthless means, in line and executed with a precise end, as Socrates Scholasticus accused him of: “to erode the power of those who exercise it in the name of the emperor” and “to condition the power of the state beyond the limits permitted to the priestly sphere”. From this perspective, what would the sacrifice of a public personality like Hypatia - who was not a direct political adversary and did not belong to any of the categories of religious competitors of his armed proselytism - serve?

Persevering in the search for a concrete motive for the assassination, we can try an experiment: leave off the word φθόνος, “envy”, used in the sources, and better translate it as “competition”. If Cyril’s pogrom against the Alexandrian Jews leads to an escalation of violence, religion is not the only competitor that pits Cyril against the Jewish community and its Greek protectors gathered around the ‘proto-masonic’ circle of which Hypatia was grandmaster. The Jewish citizens were competitors of the Christian community in both religious and business matters: in particular, in the contract for sea transport of grain from Alexandria to Constantinople, as stated in the Codex Theodosianus in a decree of 390. Cyril’s anti-Jewish politics and, specifically, the pogrom of 414 can be placed in relation to the extension of the monopoly on sea transport of grain from Egypt to Constantinople to the Christian church. In particular, in a papyrus fragment (the P. Ross. Georg. III. 6, recently cited by Sarolta Takács, now reunited with the fragment P. Hamb. IV 267) mention is made of a certain Hierax and his son Theon ναυτῶν ἐκκλησίας. The value of this documentary evidence, its interpretation, and dating need to be understood more fully. In all probability, the similarity in the name of the Hierax mentioned in the fragment and that of the philo-Cyril agitator at the city assembly meetings in the theatre - as well as grammar master whom John of Nikiou describes so admiringly – whose murder by the Jews is at the origins of the escalation that leads to Hypatia’s assassination can be regarded as fortuitous. However, in the absence of more circumstantial proposographical documentation, the emergence of his name from the ancient fibres of P. Ross. Georg. III. 6 is at the very least evocative, and provides, if not yet a possibility of identification, the lure of the power of suggestion.   In this essay, the author attempts to reconstruct the concatenation of facts concerning Hypatia’s assassination by drawing exclusively on ancient sources, evaluating them succinctly against the backdrop of the various environments in which they developed, contextualising them clearly within their historical and social realities, and here and there stripping away the ideological accretions that fifteen centuries of historiography have grafted onto the event.  She thereby avoids the usual inevitable dialectical schemas – pagan-Christian opposition and contradictions between tolerance and intolerance – and highlights the transversal nature of the different sources, or groups, of categories such as moderation and fundamentalism, rationality and irrationality, or rationalism and irrationalism. 

Hypatia was not, as the stereotype would have her, a champion of philosophical reason in contrast to Christian unconditional belief, but the philosophy she practiced had sacred, esoteric and ritual (or magical, according to the accusation of John of Nikiou) implications. The environment of her students and followers became a tight network of discreet affiliations and clienteles, and, as Synesius testifies, it is through these that Hypatia’s “power” (δυναστεία) was carried out. It is the vast, underground ‘masonic’ alliance she headed, and which was evidently influential in the political choices of the élite and the very same administrative higher-ups of Alexandra, that suddenly presented itself to Cyril and provoked in him the sudden attack of envy (φθόνος) on which the contemporary Christian (Socrates Scholasticus) and pagan (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, handed down through Souidas) sources insist and which are all in agreement in holding him responsible for not only radicalising the conflict, but also the assassination itself. For his part, Cyril was not simply a sectarian “zealot” (ἔνθερμον); he nurtured a rational political strategy sui generis that he had inherited from his predecessor and uncle Theophilus and plotted to pursue by any violent and ruthless means, in line and executed with a precise end, as Socrates Scholasticus accused him of: “to erode the power of those who exercise it in the name of the emperor” and “to condition the power of the state beyond the limits permitted to the priestly sphere”. From this perspective, what would the sacrifice of a public personality like Hypatia - who was not a direct political adversary and did not belong to any of the categories of religious competitors of his armed proselytism - serve?

Persevering in the search for a concrete motive for the assassination, we can try an experiment: leave off the word φθόνος, “envy”, used in the sources, and better translate it as “competition”. If Cyril’s pogrom against the Alexandrian Jews leads to an escalation of violence, religion is not the only competitor that pits Cyril against the Jewish community and its Greek protectors gathered around the ‘proto-masonic’ circle of which Hypatia was grandmaster. The Jewish citizens were competitors of the Christian community in both religious and business matters: in particular, in the contract for sea transport of grain from Alexandria to Constantinople, as stated in the Codex Theodosianus in a decree of 390. Cyril’s anti-Jewish politics and, specifically, the pogrom of 414 can be placed in relation to the extension of the monopoly on sea transport of grain from Egypt to Constantinople to the Christian church. In particular, in a papyrus fragment (the P. Ross. Georg. III. 6, recently cited by Sarolta Takács, now reunited with the fragment P. Hamb. IV 267) mention is made of a certain Hierax and his son Theon ναυτῶν ἐκκλησίας. The value of this documentary evidence, its interpretation, and dating need to be understood more fully. In all probability, the similarity in the name of the Hierax mentioned in the fragment and that of the philo-Cyril agitator at the city assembly meetings in the theatre - as well as grammar master whom John of Nikiou describes so admiringly – whose murder by the Jews is at the origins of the escalation that leads to Hypatia’s assassination can be regarded as fortuitous. However, in the absence of more circumstantial proposographical documentation, the emergence of his name from the ancient fibres of P. Ross. Georg. III. 6 is at the very least evocative, and provides, if not yet a possibility of identification, the lure of the power of suggestion.