human education. But one or two really pathetic passages in them show that Hypatia was one to whom (if merely in virtue of her woman's heart) Synesius could pour out his most real and human sorrows, sure of sympathy, if not of comfort. These letters, indeed, with the tone of chivalrous admiration which they breathe, are among the most interesting documents of the age; and indicate, with the *Ethiopics* of Heliodorus, and even the *Pastorals* of Longus, that there were men here and there, among the ancient and dying races of the South, who were approaching, for good and evil, the medieval form of thought as to the relation of the sexes. Hypatia herself, however (if we are to credit Suidas), carried to an extreme the Manichaean disgust of sex common to Neo-Platonists and monks. Her method of ridding herself of a certain unfortunate lover is probable enough, but too gross to quote. Those who may read it in the original will do well to remark (unless the histories of Popish saints have already taught them) how near the limits of sentimental prudery are to those of shameless cynicism. The story of Hypatia's having been married to Isidorus seems an utter mistake of Suidas. He cannot mean Isidorus of Gaza; the man who became head of the Athenian school after Proclus and Marinus must have been born after Hypatia's death; for she died A.D. 413 or 415, according to Socrates; and Proclus (if Marinus, his pupil, may be trusted) was born A.D. 412. Photius merely says that Isidore surpassed Hypatia, "as a man a woman." The assertion that he was her husband is a mere note of the edition of 1620-30. But the chief argument against her marriage is to be found in Synesius' letters, in which he repeatedly begs to be remembered lovingly to his father Theoctecmus (not Theon, as he is usually called), to her brother Athanasius, and to other friends; but makes no mention either of a husband, or of any Isidorus. And the known tendencies of the school make it most improbable that such a woman should have degraded herself in her own eyes so far as to become a wife.

Her tragedy is well known by the account of Gibbon, drawn from *Socrates*, bk. vii., § 15; and from Theodoret, who asserts Cyril's complicity. Theodoret knew Cyril well enough to suspect him of anything; at least, to say of him, after his death, that "the only fear was that hell would find him too unpleasing a guest, and send him back to earth." And certainly all we know of him justifies the sneer; at least, it seems certain that Cyril protected her murderers.

Hypatia's death seems to have happened thus:—The minds of the Nitrian monks, and of the Alexandrian populace, had been inflamed by her intimacy with Orestes, the prefect, who was at open war with Cyril. Hating her both as what she was, the championess of an eclectic Polytheism; and as what she was not, a profligate woman, they laid wait for her at the door of that lecture-room in the Mouseion, where (to the envy of Cyril) her admirers' chariots and slaves were wont to wait. She was seized, stript naked, dragged into the Kaisareion (then a Christian church), and torn piecemeal, with fragments of shells and pottery. The flesh was scraped from the bones, and what remained burned in the Kimaron.

Thus ended, or seems to have ended, the last noble woman whom Greek paganism produced. Her letter to Cyril, regretting Nestorius' banishment, must be considered as a forgery; for Nestorius was not banished till A.D. 436, and Socrates gives too detailed and honest an account of her death to be far wrong. But, indeed, Hypatia is at best but a myth and a shade; and two centuries more saw her transfigured into the famous Saint Catharine of Alexandria; the Christians whom she opposed into pagan philosophers confuted; Cyril into Maxentius the persecutor; the potsherd of the Kimaron into the toothed wheels miraculously broken by lightning from heaven; and Hypatia installed for a thousand years to come as one of the four virgin saints of Christendom. So does the whirligig of Time bring round its revenges; and every noble soul, even under a feigned name and circumstance, has its nobleness acknowledged, and does—not the work which it intended, but the work of which it was really capable.