Hypatia's death had nothing to do with the Library of Alexandria
Modern retellings often link Hypatia's killing to the burning of the great Library. But the library was already gone during her lifetime. The real Hypatia was a celebrated Alexandrian philosopher and mathematician, respected by pagans and Christians alike, who was caught in a political feud between the city's prefect and its bishop.
Hypatia was born sometime between 350 and 370 AD, with many scholars favouring about 370, the daughter of the mathematician Theon, who ran an exclusive, conservative school in Alexandria. Nothing is known of her mother. Like her father, she taught the original Neoplatonism of Plotinus rather than the more religious version taught at the Serapeum. The contemporary historian Philostorgius said she surpassed her father in mathematics, and she was not the city's first female mathematician, since Pandrosion came before her, but she is the first whose life is reasonably well documented.
Her scholarship survives only in traces. Her notes on the Arithmetica, Diophantus's work in thirteen books, may be partly woven into its surviving text, and another on Apollonius's conic sections that is lost. Many scholars think she edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest. She built astrolabes and hydrometers but did not invent them. According to Damascius, she lectured on Plato and Aristotle and walked the city in a philosopher's cloak, giving impromptu public talks.
Every student of hers whose name we know was Christian, including Synesius of Cyrene, later bishop of Ptolemais. Bishop Theophilus, who demolished the Serapeum in 391, tolerated her school and let her cultivate Roman officials, and she became hugely influential. After he died in 412, his nephew Cyril seized the bishopric in a violent struggle. When Hypatia advised the prefect Orestes during his feud with Cyril, rumours spread that she was blocking their reconciliation, and in March 415 a Christian mob led by a lector named Peter murdered her.
Her killing shocked the empire and turned her into a martyr for philosophy, hardening later Neoplatonists such as Damascius against Christianity. Medieval Christians absorbed her into the legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Enlightenment writers made her a symbol against Catholicism, Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel romanticised her, and the twentieth century embraced her as a feminist icon.
Source: Hypatia
