Once More on Hypatia's Death

Summary

While the legend of Hypatia of Alexandria is doing very well and keeps flourishing, scholarly inquiry into historical Hypatia seems by now fulfilled and complete. This is because our sources on Hypatia are so laconic, perfunctory, and vague that they can offer no ground for further study. Regarding the legend, suffice it to mention the movie Agora by Alejandro Amenabar, which uses a huge stage production shown against a beautiful backdrop of Alexandria to tell, predictably, a story of brutal struggles by intolerant, perfidious, power-hungry Christians with the civilized, refined, virtue-blessed world of the learned Hellenes as personified by Hypatia and her father Theon, who disappeared forever with her death. Even though Alejandro Amenabar conceded in an interview that he much liked my book, he adopted little of its chief findings for use in his film.

Hypatia's fate continues to inspire novelists, playwrights, and poets. A look on-line at Amazon Books or at links related to “Hypatia of Alexandria” reveals that comprehensive, sizeable works of literary fiction and popular books on her appear almost every year. Since I sometimes receive complimentary copies of such works from their authors, or I am otherwise advised about their message, I know of their more or less tendentious content. I have recently been informed by the French writer Olivier Gaudefroy that he published a voluminous police trilogy with Hypatia as a heroine and that he intends to produce the first French-language biography of Hypatia (?).