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The year of her birth is unknown. The Polish historian Maria Dzielska,
arguing that the career path of a 4th century academic might parallel
a modern one, suggests that Hypatia was born around 355, which
would have made her 60 when she died. This chronology allows her to
be significantly older than her more notable students, conforming to
modern convention. One should bear in mind, though, that a Roman girl
was a legal adult at the age of 12, and in an age when life was nasty,
brutish and short, people did not have the luxury of prolonging
childhood, adolescence and graduate school into their thirties.
In the novel Alexandria I assume along with most historians that Hypatia
was born between 370-380. I’ve also assumed she was as brilliant as her
attainments suggest and she was likely a child prodigy along the lines of
Mozart and Gauss. Historical accounts note her beauty and chastity,
suggesting she was fairly young when she died.
At some point she made too many enemies, and they managed to get
the mob riled up against her. The result was her murder, the most
famous example of pagan martyrdom in the ancient world. Apparently
the Church has been complaining about the movie because it
portrays Christians as a bloodthirsty mob of intolerant fanatics. Such
a sweeping generalization would not be fair, but the facts are the
Death of Hypatia, 1930s
William Mortensen(1897–1965)
† History does not record the year of Hypatia’s birth, and all estimates are nothing more than
guesses — guesses which invariably reflect the bias of the person making the guess. Most
estimates — with the notable exception of Maria Dzielska’s — have placed the year of Hypatia’s
birth in the range from A.D. 370 to 380. That is to say, most historians before Ms. Dzielska have
regarded this to be a plausible range of years for Hypatia’s birth to have fallen in.
In fact, Charles Singer, in his book, A History of Scientific Ideas, specifies with a greater implied
precision than any other, the year of Hypatia’s birth. He gives the year of her birth as A.D. 379 — a
figure which was adopted for Khan Amore’s Hypatia, for it best suited the needs of his fiction.