Greek Women

by Mitchell Carroll

As she attained to womanhood, Hypatia united with the charm of extraordinary beauty all the rarest traits of spirit and character. She became the object of flattering regard on the part of the cultured; the common people reverenced her as a superior being, and even the Christians respected her learning and her demeanor. Hypatia was worthy of all the admiration that she excited. Amid the widespread corruption of the age, she lived as spotless as a vestal. The philosophy she professed preserved her from pollution and inspired her with the love of beauty, truth, and goodness.

With her intense devotion to the gods of her fathers, with her extraordinary endowments and wide learning, with her preëminent virtues and the charm of her whole personality, this celebrated maiden appeared to the pagan world as a higher being sent by the gods to defend the ancient faith against the subverting teachings of the Christians,--a herald, who with the weapons of exalted wisdom and moral sublimity should win the victory and restore the worship of the gods to its former splendor. This was also the ambition of the virgin philosopher.

Hypatia's early womanhood was passed in the period when hostility to paganism reached its height. She was barely twenty-one when Theodosius I. issued an edict commanding the destruction of heathen temples and images at Alexandria, and from this time the patriarchs of the city endeavored to exercise both spiritual and temporal authority and to root out every vestige of paganism.

Against such an opposition Hypatia sought to contend. Her weapons were not carnal, but intellectual. By a spread of the knowledge of Greek philosophy and literature, she sought to quicken the sensibilities of the people and to reawaken a reverence for the Greek gods. It seemed at first as if her efforts would be crowned with success. Her lecture hall was crowded with the clever and intellectual men of the day, and many came from distant parts, attracted by the reputation of her beauty and learning. Hypatia soon surpassed all her contemporaries in wisdom and influence, and rapidly became the soul of the rather numerous pagan community at Alexandria. This remarkable maiden was honored with a devotion which almost bordered on idolatry. Orestes, the prefect of the city, though professedly a Christian, often came to her for counsel. The learned and eloquent Synesius of Cyrene, afterward a Church Father, was one of her devoted followers, and even after his conversion to Christianity maintained a correspondence with her and showed in manifold ways his regard for his former teacher. Numerous panegyrics and epigrams were composed, lauding her in most exalted terms.

Thus Hypatia, by moral suasion and by avoiding all open opposition, sought to wean the people from Christianity and to revive their faith in the ancient gods. Her success in attracting to paganism both the cultured and the plain people naturally caused her to be an object of hatred and jealousy to those who strove to promote Christianity by violence and force.

The name of Cyril, among the Church Fathers, is the synonym for fanaticism and bigotry. Elevated to the archi-episcopal chair of Alexandria to succeed his uncle, Theophilus, he sought to attain supreme power in the city and to make the power of the Church dominant in temporal affairs. He succeeded in expelling the Jews, and then turned his attention to the extermination of paganism. As Hypatia was the chief exponent of the old gods, and as her influence extended even to the palace of the prefect, Cyril hated her with all the zeal of bigotry and was eager for her downfall. Irreproachable in conduct, beloved of all, influential with the civil power, she was not subject to attack in any open manner, and Cyril finally countenanced an inhuman and disgusting plot of assassination devised by the most violent of his followers--the deacon Peter.

One day in March of the year 415, Peter secretly gathered in an alley not far from the lecture hall of Hypatia a band of savage monks from the Nitrian desert. When the customary lecture hour approached, Hypatia, unconscious of danger, left her house and entered her chariot to drive to the lecture hall. Soon the mob of zealots, headed by Peter, rush out from the alley, seize the horses, tear the helpless woman from her seat, and drag her into a neighboring church. Here, more like savage beasts than men, Peter's frenzied followers remove from her every shred of clothing, and at the foot of the bleeding image of the Saviour of mankind do to death the virgin martyr in the most horrible manner with fragments of tiles and mussel shells. The limbs are torn from the still quivering body, and, when life is extinct, the howling mob gather up and burn the fragments of the mutilated corpse.

It was a horrible deed. The life of a beautiful and talented maiden was sacrificed for the cause which she professed, and, like many a Christian maiden, she attained by her death the sanctity of martyrdom. The purity and nobility of her character invested her with an enduring fame, and, though her end marks the doom of the old gods, Hypatia herself will never be forgotten. Judged by the abiding results of her activity, Hypatia was, like Shelley, "a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void her luminous wings in vain," but as the embodiment of the highest and best elements of Greek culture she deserves to rank as one of the most typical of Greek women.

A peculiar and deep-rooted trait in woman's nature is tender compassion and sympathetic devotion to suffering humanity. Hence from heroic times onward through the various epochs of Greek history we find women at the bedside of the sick and the wounded, acting as attendant, nurse, or physician. Thus it is not surprising that we should find Greek women preeminent in the art of medicine.

In the Heroic Age, Homeric heroines were gifted with a knowledge of plants and their virtues. Hecate, wife of King Æetes of Colchis, her daughter Medea, and Circe were so celebrated in this respect that they passed for enchantresses. One has but to recall the transformation of Odysseus's companions into swine as an evidence of Circe's peculiar power. All the daughters of Asclepius the physician--Hygiea, Panacea, Iaso, and Ægle--were specialists in medicine. Helen of Troy knew how to compound her celebrated potion, Nepenthe, which made men forget all care and enjoy sound slumbers; and OEnone, the forsaken wife of Paris, and Agamede, daughter of a king of Elis, were skilled in the use of simples.