 Dr. Watts. Thank you once again for joining me. How are you? Thank you? Very good. Awesome. So last time in our dialogues we discussed two topics that are actually going to converge in this one individual. We discussed what quote-unquote we would call the pagan generation, the final pagan generation and the concepts of Paideia which was a social bond, a social glue that helped these things together and what was expected of somebody. So the figure that we're talking about today, Hypatia, she comes a little bit after this period of time but she really inherits and lives and passes in the world left by the final pagan generation. So before we get into the person herself, in our discussion of Paideia we focused a lot on Athens but can we focus on Alexandria? Because I know you touched on both of them but we only had time to discuss one. So what is the world of Alexandria at this time that Hypatia is born into? Yeah so in a way if we were to think about the educational world of the Mediterranean you could maybe call Athens Oxford and you could call Alexandria Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the newcomer in a way. It was a city of course founded by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC but the educational culture and the intellectual culture there was something that was kind of astroturfed by the first king of Egypt after the breakup of Alexander's empire. He put a bunch of money into building the greatest library in the Mediterranean and a bunch of money into building research institutions that attracted the best scholars across the Mediterranean. And so the Alexandrian educational environment was something that was really designed from the top down to appeal to the cultural needs of a very large city. And so Athens was by late antiquity a small city maybe 15-20,000 people in it. Alexandria was the second biggest city in the Mediterranean. It was 500,000 people perhaps and it had been a large city for a very long time. So by the time Hypatia was born around 355 the city of Alexandria was the second largest city in the Roman Empire for you know almost 400 years. It had an infrastructure that was an intellectual infrastructure first built by the Ptolemaic kings but also later superintendent by Roman emperors and it was a big city and a dynamic and vibrant city. So it was a city that was the only port in the entire Mediterranean that was on one side on the south side of freshwater port that connected to the Nile and on the north side a Mediterranean port. And so there was a saying that Alexandria was the only place in the Mediterranean where you could buy both freshwater and saltwater fish because you know you just have to walk seven miles across this sort of sandstone ithsness to go between the two of them or limestone ithsness to go between the freshwater and saltwater. But because of this all of the the produce of Egypt would go be offloaded on the south side of Alexandria trucked across the city and sent on across the Mediterranean the same was true of trade coming from the Indian Ocean it really was a world-class metropolitan area. And so when Hypatia was born this was a city that had probably the biggest in terms of numbers and maybe even in terms of percentage Christian population among the major cities in the Mediterranean. It was still early in her childhood imagined to be a pagan majority city but it probably wasn't and it became clear in 360 around 360 that actually the Christians were at least as numerous as the pagans and they also could win in a fight. And so it was the first city that reaches this tipping point where pagans realize we're a minority now. You know this city is not our city it belongs to these other people who have very different ideas about how religious practice works and we need to figure out how to make that something that we can tolerate. And so Alexandria is perhaps a generation ahead of the rest of the Roman world in coming to terms with the fact that this is going to become a Christian world. And for Alexandrians like Hypatia this is their life you know they need to figure this out and they need to do it in a way that causes as little disruption as possible. And Hypatia was very committed to this idea of living in a city that is changing dramatically. It's a dynamic city it's a young city because a lot of the people coming into Alexandria they tend to be young people coming into work and so demographically it is a city that is very very dynamic in the fourth century. And Hypatia is among a group of people that are very interested in being sure that the structures that make the city work can be adaptable enough that this dynamism doesn't really throw the place into chaos. Fascinating thank you for that answer. Yeah and Alexandria like most cosmopolitan places the experience of one person versus another can drastically differ depending on social social and economic class you know whether you're a Jewish Roman, a pagan Greek speaking elite versus a Demotic Indigenous person right so she's born into this kind of inequality for lack of a better term that you know you see happens in any major city like I live in a where you live you can go from from the barrio to you know the million dollar homes on the hill or whatever so same thing for Hypatia there too so she's inheriting a very dynamic world as bustling with culture but also with perhaps not always the best kind of situation for everybody involved. So Hypatia becomes kind of a symbol after her passing we'll talk about the symbol later but like you emphasized in your biography of her Hypatia is a person first so who is that person who is Hypatia what was her educational background like I want to get to know the person before we touch on what she came to represent for vastly different types of people. Yeah this is why Hypatia I think is so fascinating because the person has been lost historically people don't want to talk about the person unless you're talking about the symbol but the person is fascinating so she was the daughter of the most prominent scholar of mathematician scholar and mathematician in Alexandria at that time and the daughter of an intellectual in the fourth century generally was educated at a pretty high level so they needed to know how to write obviously they needed to know literary references and the sorts of things that equipped you to participate in a world of Hypatia and they needed to also have enough background in composition and rhetorical performance that they could take on an advocacy role if they needed to and we know of a lot of women in the fourth and fifth centuries who are capable of doing this and actually do perform this kind of public advocacy role but it's usually an advocacy role that they perform on behalf of their families so they will go and make appeals for their children to be treated well they will go and make appeals for you know for other members of their family or their community to be treated well but they tend not to have a public role what is different about Hypatia is she gets this training and it becomes really really clear that she's you know better than her father far better than her father Alexandria in that particular moment had embraced a brand of philosophical teaching that privileged mathematics over philosophy this seems all very weird to us but to an ancient audience philosophy represented the pinnacle of all knowledge and so you would learn things so that you could progress to that pinnacle and the question was what is the highest point in that knowledge what is the highest point of you know a human's ability to understand the dynamics of of his or her world and for Alexandria in the fourth century they said that the the highest point you can reach is a understanding of pure numbers and so when we think of things like the concept of justice we tend to use things like the idea of the Plato develops of the forms a kind of absolute understanding of like what justice is for an Alexandrian mathematician in the fourth century an Alexandrian philosopher in the fourth century they would equate that actually with a number you know they would say that you know you can see in this particular number the purest manifestation of this idea and so the forms are imperfect because they're vague they're abstract like what is a form the number five you can understand the number five right it's tangible and so therefore there's a perfection in that tangibility what Hypatia was able to do was overturn like a century of Alexandrian consensus that you put numbers above concepts you equate numbers with concepts but the concepts can best be understood through numbers Hypatia said that's not right actually mathematics is very important but it's secondary to the Platonic idea of the forms there is a higher level knowledge that comes through an understanding of the forms and my father and his teachers and you know the past few generations of Alexandrians have done it wrong the thing that's so remarkable about this is Hypatia makes this argument while her father is still alive you know she is trained in his school she does the equivalent of a dissertation on a mathematical topic and he then steps aside and gives her control of the school and she redirects Alexandrian philosophical training so that it's now about platonic ideas and not about numbers and she has she succeeds in doing this by the time she's in her 30s and so we have to understand this is a figure who is brilliant incredibly talented and incredibly capable of explaining her insights and making cases that overturn literally a century of kind of received wisdom of how one understands intellectual culture in one of the two most important centers of intellectual culture in the Mediterranean world and she does it while she's young and so we have to see in her a really really incredibly powerful intellect and a really really incredibly powerful personality and you know and we haven't even mentioned the fact that she does all of this despite the fact that as a woman she's not supposed to run her own school absolutely she's a she's a we as when she becomes a symbol of something more we kind of lose sight of the fact that just taking Hypatia on her own terms as a person is just extraordinary this is a person who as a woman in antiquity in the eastern part of the empire is overcoming obstacles in a male dominated situation for centuries for millennia right she is she's writing I mean this isn't like I mean nothing against cornutus I love my cornutus but you know cornutus is making little commentaries on Aristotle and things but Hypatia is writing commentaries on complex mathematical texts that are just completely you know out of probably out of most people's pay range at that time so it's out of my range yeah I mean it's all great it's all great to me but you know like and her dad is using her texts in his own writing it's just amazing just what she accomplished and you're saying all this before she was even turning 30 and as a woman you know it's just it's really really amazing when you take this person on her own terms just doesn't have a person I think the gender aspect of what Hypatia accomplishes is is so important because we do have other women who are teachers but they're but they don't quite achieve what Hypatia does so there is a woman named Androsion who is an Alexandrian mathematician who is teaching you know generation actually two generations before Hypatia and she does have students but the male establishment in Alexandria attacks her so viciously I mean we actually know about her because there is a text written by somebody else that attacks her method of solving mathematical problems it turns out her method is better than his method it's actually wildly better but the attack is so significant because she is an outsider and she cannot be anything but an outsider it doesn't matter how good her work is as a woman who's a mathematician in Alexandria she's not going to be accepted by the establishment and so seeing the case of Androsion and seeing what Hypatia is able to do where she not only is accepted by the establishment but she revolutionizes the establishment she gets them to completely change what they understand to be the appropriate way to do philosophy and mathematics that's breathtaking you know there it's not just that she was teaching it's not just that she was running her own school it's that she was running her own school and was so impactful that she changed the entire direction of you know Harvard of antiquity it's remarkable and you know and the the sorts of obstacles that were stacked up to prevent her from doing that that she overcame I think are really formidable I mean there's nobody like her in antiquity well said well said um so you write in your biography of Hypatia that a late antique philosopher was not primarily measured by her command of the details contained within the canonical texts people instead evaluated the degree to which her life in conduct embodied the philosophical principles those texts taught this is something that I remember from further kind of adjacent but Garth Fowden's text about the pagan holy man in antiquity which is basically just the teacher you know he was saying the same thing whether it be Yemlichus or the later figures you know they're the they're almost being created as neoplatonic saints so where does Hypatia fit into that um just in terms of herself um you know we uh we see it in the lives of Edwards right a neoplatonic saints porphyry proclas and you know it's all over eunepius right so where does Hypatia fit into this so I think you know this is um in a way Pierre had those idea that the philosophical life is a practical life um you know you can read these things you can understand these things but that doesn't make you a philosopher the philosopher somebody who lives these things um there's a great passage in eunepius or in um Damascus's life of Isidor where he he says that um a philosopher named Amonius was the greatest commentator who ever lived but he also makes it completely clear that he doesn't live it you know he doesn't live philosophy he understands it he writes it his insights into the text are unparalleled but he doesn't live like a philosopher and therefore he's not a philosopher and so the purpose of a philosopher was both to understand the texts and understand the systems that allow you to get at the deeper knowledge of the texts but then to apply them you know and apply them in a way where you lived your daily life in a way that embodied those true philosophical principles because in the end philosophy was not just about getting knowledge it was about gaining um access to something that was more real uh and more holy and more divine um and what what the philosophical life was supposed to lead to was a higher level of a higher level of existing um in this world but also a higher level of existing beyond the sort of physical and bodily plane and so what hypatia was doing um was first of all realizing even though she was trained in this way by Theon that didn't emphasize philosophy in the same fashion she realized that philosophy did have this potential to lead to a higher level existence in this world and also lead to a connection with the divine and her teaching was about training students so they too could live this particular type of lifestyle and she personally believed that philosophy meant practicing I mean literally practicing what you're preaching right you if you're going to teach these things you need to live these things but it isn't just about not being a hypocrite it's about truly getting the the absolute benefits from um living a way that is true and honest and and is consistent with what the gods wish of you and so this is what hypatia is is doing you know she is embodying in her conduct the ideas that she presents in her classrooms um and her students absolutely understand that's what she's doing absolutely respect it and they really try to emulate her because they see in this a path to a higher level existence and it's an open path and it's a path that involves contemplation and it involves understanding and it involves knowledge and this makes it very very appealing to people in Alexandria who particularly want to follow that kind of a contemplative path towards enlightenment absolutely um thank you for that answer uh it kind of um i'm not really sure as is neo it's the the kind of uh yamblican neoplatonism still in vogue at this time is this so that this uh the story of the yamblican neoplatonism after julian is a little bit um it kind of nearly dies uh you know it is something that um the people the main practitioners of it in the 350s and 360s sort of fade away uh and it's sort of fading out and it gets um revivified in Athens because a person connected with the amicus who's named the amicus but is you know only connected with the amicus comes to Athens and introduces a couple of Athenians to this this style of teaching and it takes root in Athens and then there's an yamblican neoplatonic revival that is sort of catalyzed by this colonization in Athens in the 390s. Hypatia is a different tradition so there are yamblican neoplatonists in Alexandria um we first see them around the 390s um and they have a very very different approach to what philosophy is and what kind of public role philosopher should play than hypatia has. So hypatia actually is a a devotee of the tradition that is much more associated with porphyry and platinus um a contemplative rather than a ritual influenced or ritual inflected tradition and so for hypatia and her disciples a sense to communion with the divine comes through contemplation and it comes through thought and it comes through a kind of meditation about higher principles whereas for yamblicans there's a ritual aspect to it um right that if you're right and if you are a Christian the ritual aspect is a problem because it's sacrifice um if you are a Christian the contemplative approach doesn't need to be a problem right because what you're doing is you're ascending to a supreme deity and so what hypatious tradition is able to do is appeal equally to Christians and non-Christians um you can be completely consistent with what porphyry is saying and with the practices that um platinian and porphyrian Platonism are encouraging it and be a pagan and you can also be completely consistent with it and be a Christian um and there's even origin for example who does that right so yeah yeah I mean and so origin for example is probably I mean I think um some people disagree with me but I think origin was a student of the same teacher as platinus you know I think they were in the same they were both studying an harmonious sacrosse oh so you fall into that camp where they're both studying out under Ammonis yeah okay yeah that's interesting because I know some people are like well maybe it was a different origin I think there's two origins yeah there are two that are that are associated there um and I think that what you know that teaching is something that can work with Christianity and so when you read the hymns of synesias um who is hypatia's most famous student some of those hymns you know could have been written by porphyry some of those hymns absolutely could not have been written by porphyry they are very clearly Christian but philosophically they don't contradict each other right I mean the principles the philosophical principles in there don't need to draw a line between the hymns that are explicitly Christian and the hymns that are not and so for years people read it as well synesias converts to Christianity in the middle I don't think so you know the system works hypatia system works for both sets of hymns and so I think that what hypatia realizes is she is in a way a convert to this way of approaching philosophy she realizes that there is a tremendous appeal to this way of approaching philosophy in a city that religiously is going through tremendous turmoil because this is a way to embody the promise of paideia to bring together everybody who is educated Christian pagan doesn't matter but to do it not just about rhetoric and you know performance of traditional traditional Greek public speaking but to do it through philosophy and there is a way for philosophy too to continue to serve as this high level sort of capstone of knowledge and education um and not make it fall victim to the confessional politics and the division that the conversion of the empire to Christianity is creating and so what hypatia has is a vision for philosophy as something that is 100 true to her convictions of what platonic interpretation leads to and also completely accessible regardless of the religious tradition that you belong to and this is what she's teaching she's teaching Christians she's teaching pagans she's teaching them in the same sort of contemplative influence system the only thing she's not doing is saying what that supreme god is and as long as you don't say what that supreme god is it can be Christian it can be the platonic it can be the platinian one it can be whatever you see it as but there's a supreme god at the center of this system and hypatia's philosophy is something that allows you to understand that god's knowledge that has been conveyed to humans and helps you sort of commune with a higher level reality that is closer to that god and if that's a Christian god good for you and if it's not a Christian god good for you the tradition works and you can be part of this family and this tradition without asking or answering that one question and as long as you don't answer that question or ask that question this is a training that works for Christians and pagans theos hipsistos right like well what kind of god is it oh it's just pious god you know you don't know but um but yeah she really was a really trailblazing ecumenical figure especially at this time of flux in the world um you know thank you for that clarification also on her uh the you know the difference between the yambokin and the the platinian concept of the contemplation versus the theological ritual i always found that fascinating because it was also a point of you know just some little side observations before i get to the next question just i always found that fascinating because uh you know even even in within neoplatonism or quote-unquote neoplatonism itself you could tell there was a huge um tension there between you know yambokis is on the mysteries is all about you know how uh perhaps blotinus doesn't have it all right and uh i always found the porphyrian contemplative part interesting as well because you you don't need to theorize about it in terms of like oh this could you know just as well be this as as that you see it in nakamadi like porphyry or later porphyry is using the same kind of florilegium uh that became the sentences of sextus and nakamadi you know they're both drawn from the same traditions and they're both just kind of uh feeding off of each other and they get they're equally working as well so um perhaps another another time on that though but uh uh yeah so spoiler alert for our audience a patient does pass in the senseless senseless act of mob violence in march 415 um so dr watz what were some of the factors that brought this all to ahead especially if you could touch upon the tensions between arrestees and syril yeah so the the problem that we have in um alexandra as you get into the 410s is there had been an eruption of violence between the yambokin neoplatonists and christian authorities in the in the early like in 392 um where neoplatonists were uh in a sense they were provoked by actions of the bishop there was a riot and they seized and fortified the sarapan temple which was on a the highest point in alexandria and very very difficult to access and so there was a standoff um that was resolved by the students of this yambokin neoplatonic group agreeing to leave the sarapan they were they were given amnesty for the violence they committed they killed people i mean they killed a significant number of people um they were given amnesty the teachers fled alexandria and then christian stormed the sarapan and tore the temple down and hypatia was instrumental in bringing the city back i mean there was a a working relationship that was developed between hypatia and the bishop in alexandria hypatia of course was not any amnesty there's no indication that her students were involved in this she certainly was not involved in this kind of thing um and so she represented a a establishment that was looking to build back some kind of consensus about how alexandria should work and what sorts of people should be running the city and theophilus who was the bishop who had in a way proved his point also was looking for some sort of way to to calm the city down and make it governable and so this prevailed for about 20 years until theophilus's death but when theophilus died he had been preparing things so that his nephew zero could take over for him but the illness that theophilus had it seems like he probably had a stroke and so he was incapacitated but he didn't die so syril couldn't make any moves to officially take over control of the alexandrian church because the office was still alive but it gave rivals enough time to build a power base to try to challenge syril and when theophilus finally finally died there was a pretty intense though short-lived outburst of street fighting in the city that lasted long enough for certain communities to line up either for or against syril and once that ended and syril became bishop of alexandria he began settling scores and this led to a conflict with the the governor in charge of alexandria it was a man named arrestees arrestees tried to sideline syril by working with the city council and in particular working with hypatia and the bet that arrestees was making was that hypatia is a philosopher hypatia is a woman hypatia has no there's no way hypatia can hold office in the city although she does work with the city council and she serves as a emissary and expresses concerns on behalf of the city she's never going to hold office in the city she's never going to hold office in the empire instead she is seen as an honest broker who behaves publicly in a way that's totally consistent with her philosophical principles and so there's a certain power there that that comes with this status as a philosophically influenced on the philosophically informed speaker of principle and so when arrestees is trying to negotiate some kind of a solution to the problem that syril is posing with this problem of disruption and and regular violence in the city he starts working with hypatia to build a coalition of people who are anti-syril and hypatia serves as a liaison linking the city council to arrestees and she becomes seen by supporters of syril as the locus of resistance to syril and so supporters of syril attack her when she's out in public and hypatia had a tendency to travel in public and go in public without a lot of attendance most people in in roman city if you are wealthy and well off i think we can imagine kind of like how cersei lannister travels in king's landing and game of thrones you know you don't want to actually set foot on the ground you don't want to be kind of like out there exposed you want to be carried or protected and have lots of attendants around you hypatia wasn't like that hypatia just traveled in the city even though she was elite even though she was important even though she was prominent and well known she just traveled in the city by herself and she was set upon by a mob as she was walking home and they tore her apart i mean literally tore her apart we're told that they used roof tiles to cut her body to pieces and then they burned her body alongside the seashore at the site near to the cathedral of alexandria and this horrified people it horrified everybody in alexandria because hypatia represented the kind of embodiment of honesty and principle in public life she didn't do these things because she wanted to gain anything from doing them she did these things because her practice as a philosopher obligated her to be publicly involved it was the obligation of every philosopher who took the position seriously to do what they could to make the society around them more philosophical and that meant they had to play a public role and some of that was teaching but some of that was also standing up before their fellow citizens and saying you know what you're doing is it's inconsistent with a higher level principle or what you're doing is unjust or what you're doing is unfair and what you're doing is unwise and they are supposed to speak from their sense of how the larger principles of the world fit together and give you a sense of how the smaller things that you are focused on fit into a bigger picture that's influenced by by the divine and influenced by knowledge and influenced by the kind of higher principles that only a philosopher can really understand that's what hypatia was doing and so what philosophers were supposed to do and she was killed for it and not only was she doing that but unlike some other philosophers like Themistias and some other contemporary philosophers in the fourth and early fifth century she wasn't pretending to be a philosopher for her own gain she wasn't getting rich from this she wasn't becoming important from this she didn't intend to get any like government offices she couldn't she couldn't get any of those things she was doing this because it was her job it was her obligation it was her passion it was her way of life and they killed her for it and so this becomes symbolic of a general social breakdown where nobody was sure what rules are now governing things and so it's a tremendously disruptive thing for people in Alexandria to see that somebody like hypatia could be killed you know they understood partisans in a religious conflict they understood that maybe you know monks or people who work for the bishop might fight other monks or people who work for the bishop they might fight militant pagans but they didn't fight people who were non-combatants and so when hypatia was killed it really emphasized to people that something was dramatically out of line and probably the thing that emphasizes that best is there's a historian named Socrates who writes a church history and the principle that's guiding his church history is the idea that whatever when the church is healthy the empire and the world is healthy and when the church is too concerned with material gain or political power then the roman world gets kind of thrown off its axis and there are all these problems and the evidence that he uses to show that the roman world was falling off its axis in the four tens is a set of events one of which is the sack of Rome by a lyric something that everybody who does roman history knows about that's less important in Socrates mind than the murder of hypatia the murder of hypatia is better evidence that the world is messed up than the fact that Rome was sacked for the first time in 800 years and so that shows how shocking it was that she was killed in this particular way right this is probably the point like like you mentioned in your book very quickly hypatia becomes a symbol and we're going to get into the symbol right now that you write a quote hypatia's death was so shocking so frightening that she quickly became a symbol of an older more functional time that seemed to be slipping away in the early fifth century and you mentioned the sack of Rome the general instability of the empire for more on that go to dr wasa's channel it's amazing but more on that at the end so yeah we'll get into the symbolism right now hypatia seems to after she becomes a cipher for vastly different people this kind of tends to lead to her being a very misunderstood figure in general she's incredibly important but people tend to just imprint their own ideas and identity onto her most for the most part and this is something you really focus on in the last couple of chapters of your book so going from scholasticus to today with hypatia as a feminist symbol or as a any of the other kind of symbols people want to appropriate her for you know pagan identity anything like that can you elaborate on you know just hypatia as a symbol and are people necessarily getting her right uh yeah i think that the thing that we get is this one image of hypatia this philosophical woman being torn to pieces and then that over time can mean anything that people want it to mean so hypatia becomes a symbol of in the fifth century to many people hypatia becomes a symbol of a society that doesn't value rules anymore it doesn't value the things that govern behavior it doesn't value the protections that people could expect to have and so in fifth century authors are talking about hypatia they just say enough about her to set up that she belongs to a kind of society that valued rules and certain behaviors and that society was torn apart when she was killed by the time you get into the sixth century she becomes much more something that pagans want to talk about so pagans talk about hypatia's murder in the early sixth century in the context of justinian's actions against paganism and then she becomes this a sort of symbol of christian intolerance more broadly not like socrates is a christian socrates believes that the empire should be christian he just believes that it shouldn't be christian in the way that it happened in alexandria where you're murdering people who are basically innocent non-combatants just doing their job in the sixth century pagans say that this is a symbol of you know christianity's natural violence and the way that it overturned social norms by the seventh century you see this as a way of emphasizing the distinctiveness of a certain brand of christianity in egypt and hypatia becomes the villain in the story as it's told in the seventh century um where ciril is a hero and he's working with governor or he's working um to try to make the church viable and governors work with the evil magician hypatia to prevent ciril from doing what he needs to do um that's a seventh century perspective that in some ways is shaped by you know the fact that the author has lived through persecution of the egyptian church um and is also actually writing under um the first sort of beginnings of um antichristian activity by muslim rulers in egypt so you have a perspective there that again is a perspective that influence that that filters a seventh century reality into the story of hypatia as you move through time you see like a 17th century reality filtered through hypatia you see in france in the early 18th century you see a biography of hypatia that's written at the behest of a woman who wants people to take seriously the idea of women as scholars um what's interesting about that text is the person who writes it does not give this this woman the text that she wants and so it's published in this literary journal um in the 1710s and the next issue has a letter from the woman that is a kind of um passive aggressive shade throwing on the person who wrote the article the biography saying well actually that isn't what i wanted him to write and really what we should see in hypatia is a legendary woman who stands for what women can accomplish and instead he wrote something that was like a christian polemic um by the time you get into the 19th century some of the stories about hypatia that are told are colonialist stories about um greek sort of european uh culture in an environment that is orientalized and violent and so you have the reflection of colonialism in the way that hypatia is presented a totally ahistorical understanding of what hypatia was but charles kingsley was not interested in history he was interested in a particularly racist and noxious victorian way of seeing the other um and he uses the story to tell that uh in the 20th century you you get hypatia as a symbol of feminism um and in some ways the some of the portraits of hypatia as a feminist icon are things that hypatia herself would have been appalled by um there's one that talks about her as a sexually liberated um woman who you know who chose her own sexual destiny and uh hypatia was a virgin very proudly so um yeah so for a senior right like that was a very big thing among those philosophers back then yeah there's actually a story that i think originates from hypatia herself that says that there was a student who um fell in love with her and she tries to convince him that this is just a bodily thing she tries to actually use it said she's she uses a therapy that Pythagoras develops that uses music to calm the passions of somebody and she tries it and the student is too far gone for this to work and so she takes a menstrual pad and shows it to him and says this is what you're in love with to emphasize to him that his his attraction to her is bodily and the emotional attraction that a philosopher has exists on the level of the soul has nothing to do with the body and he needs to snap back into that because that kind of love is something that her circle embodies physical love is not something that has any part in it so seeing hypatia as an embodiment of sexual liberation that's not who hypatia was but it's a way of understanding hypatia that reflects a particular 20th century set of concerns and so what we see with hypatia and even now i think the example probably people are most familiar with is the movie agorah where you have hypatia presented as like this person who discovers what is it like a Copernican universe and then is attacked by a group of people who look a group of christian monks who look a lot like the taliban and so you have a 21st century view of hypatia as you know like a stem person when you know actually she does the opposite and moves you away from stem to higher level principles of philosophy attacked by you know movement that is very very clearly dressed up in noticeably 21st century garb so you see in each moment just the simple fact that you have with hypatia a person who died and had this status as a philosopher you see her reinterpreted based on the ideals conditions and tensions of whatever moment she needs to be reinterpreted whatever moment whatever conflict she's being introduced into but when that happens you lose the person and when you focus on her death you lose the life and you lose the agency and you lose the the power and achievement and bravery of this this woman and i think that what i was hoping to do in the book is to show that when we tell these stories we're keeping the name of hypatia alive but we're not keeping the legacy of hypatia alive you know the the legacy of something that should belong to her it shouldn't belong to the people who killed her and so the story of hypatia has to really focus on what she had control over and the fact that for like 60 years she had control of her quite a bit and she achieved quite a bit that was completely consistent with what her objectives were we should not focus on the last minutes of her life when she didn't have control over what was going on and to do anything but that is to not do justice to this person who's a remarkable person who very much deserves our attention and our respect absolutely well said and just the side observation before we go here yeah and essentially reminds me of another alexander here to figure phylo people really take phylo and they lose sight of the person and they use him for a vast multitude of things they don't really take phylo on his own terms uh i think david runia and uh i've read a biography of phylo phylo an intellectual thinker and the jewish diaspora by haras ladel but she they both mentioned you know just phylo be phylo let's in the same here let let hypatia be hypatia they're both far more fascinating than any other imprints we kind of cast shadows we cast on them um but dr watz this has uh been incredible thank you for uh giving us this uh portrait of this remarkable human being um i would love to do this again sometime so sure perhaps i'll have you back shortly um in the meantime though um i know you have an awesome youtube channel which i watch quite a bit uh where people find that where can people find your book on hypatia uh so the hypatia book comes from oxford university press you can get it from oxford university press it's also on amazon and barns of noble and probably wherever you look for books uh and then the youtube channel is the eternal decline uh rom and that has a whole bunch of things about roman history and people and events associated with roman history um and i think we're we're starting up something on roman sites and and probably roman coins so those should be appearing hopefully in the near future so check out check that out for sure i think you released one of them already haven't you um yeah yeah we're trying to do um a discussion of roman sites that people might not know about but are really fascinating to look at and then we're going to do some shorts on roman coins which is a passion of mine so awesome awesome and in the meantime dr watz this has been absolutely a pleasure thank you so much for being generous with your time and your knowledge thank you so much