How long should it take for a murder case to be closed? Ten years? Twenty? More than one thousand five hundred years after Hypatia’s death, the case is still hot. In 2010, scientific historian and mathematician Ari Belenkiy presented a new perspective that shook up the modern assumptions about what happened. By looking back on Hypatia’s life and death, we find compelling parallels to modern conflicts of politics and science.
Hypatia was a renowned philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer in late fourth and early fifth-century Alexandria, arguably among the first women in documented history to achieve these titles. Her death was described by two near-contemporaneous historians, Socrates and Philostorgius. The full extent of her work is still debated today, but she is believed to have edited Ptolemy’s Almagest—a major astronomical textbook studied for fourteen centuries until Copernicus—and to have constructed astrolabes and other astronomical instruments. She was also a famous teacher who drew in students from around the Mediterranean.
However, her intellectual prominence placed her at the center of a political conflict. She was violently murdered by a group of Christians, allegedly for her association with the pagan Prefect Orestes, a political rival of Cyril of Alexandria. Early historians agree on the fact of her brutal death but disagree on its timing and causes. The event has captured the imaginations of many artists and philosophers over the years, symbolizing the clash between faith and reason.
Belenkiy noticed a gap in the modern understandings of Hypatia’s murder. Historians typically brushed it off as a political or sectarian killing, but none had examined its astronomical context. Belenkiy’s previous work on the history of calendars informed his studies of Hypatia in the 2010s, which proposed that Hypatia had been conducting observations connected to calculating the date of Easter. Easter, the date signifying Jesus’s resurrection, is designated as the first Sunday after the full moon on or after the vernal equinox. Before the development of modern scientific instruments, the astronomical calculations required for this task were difficult to use and imprecise. It is not unthinkable that Hypatia and the Church of Alexandria could have come to different conclusions about the correct date of Easter.
“Even among different Orthodox churches, there was common disagreement about the placement of Easter, which fueled lots of confusion,” Belenkiy explained in an interview. In his 2010 paper, Belenkiy argues that the problem came to a head in 417 CE as the Roman and Alexandrian churches disagreed over Easter’s correct date. The Roman church chose to celebrate the holiday in March, while Alexandria celebrated in April. Belenkiy suggests that Hypatia may have realized that the equinox was assigned differently by Alexandria and Rome. If Hypatia’s astronomical work had aligned with the Roman calculation, conflicting with Alexandria’s proposed date of Easter, her findings would have threatened the authority of the Alexandrian church. The Alexandrian church might have lost support from the imperial court in Constantinople, resulting in a political backlash that could have contributed to her death.
This scenario focuses on the disagreement between the Roman and Alexandrian churches, but in a later 2016 article, Belenkiy turned his attention to how Hypatia’s observations may have intersected with the fraught relations between Alexandria’s Christian communities. He revised his timeline and scenario, suggesting that the relevant clash occurred in 414 CE, when Passover and Easter fell on March 22nd. Instead of framing this as a conflict solely between the Christians and Jews, Belenkiy emphasized the pressure this overlap could have placed on Cyril, the powerful Alexandrian Bishop. Cyril faced competition from the Novation sectarians, who aligned their Easter with the Jewish calendar. Because the group that celebrated Easter first could claim legitimacy in the region, Hypatia’s calculations could have heightened sectarian tensions, feeding into Cyril’s violent campaign against the Novatians and the Jews. Belenkiy also speculated that Hypatia might have received a gratifying offer of a privileged baptism if she altered her findings but refused in order to preserve scientific integrity.
Belenkiy sees Hypatia as the first true scientific martyr, someone who deserves much more recognition in the current historical landscape. Her rejection of intellectual compromise on scientific grounds, even amid political pressure and violence, stands as an example of strength and fortitude to all who do research today. To commemorate her life and contributions, he created a petition which is still active to commemorate her name: Hypatia Day, a day to recognize courageous women in science and to remember Hypatia’s contributions.