Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher by Edward J. Watts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
170 PHOENIX Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher. By Edward J. Watts. New York: Oxford University Press (Women in Antiquity). 2017. Pp. xii, 205. Edward Watts's monograph on the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia, one of antiquity ’s most fascinating but most elusive figures, is a timely addition to OUP’s “Women in Antiquity” series. The first biography of Hypatia available in English in over two decades,1 it appears not long after the sixteenth centenary of Hypatia’s death (415 c.e.), which has sparked interest well beyond specialist circles. The aim of the series is to provide “compact and accessible introductions to the life and historical times of women from the ancient world” (unpag. [II]) and Watts fulfills this admirably by painting a vivid picture of Hypatia and late antique Alexandria without glossing over the precarious nature of the evidence on which he draws. The ancient texts that bear witness to Hypatia’s life are few, many of them fragmentary and doubtful and most of them highly biased, while her own work is almost entirely lost. The biographer, then, not only needs to have an exceptional grasp of the nature and agenda of the sources but also an impeccable sense for context and conjecture. Watts, who has published widely on the social history of late antiquity, has both. The seventh chapter is a case in point: it offers a concise account of what we know of four other female intellectuals of the time—Pandrosion, Sosipatra, Asclepigenia and the anonymous wife of Maximus of Ephesus—to stake out the gender dynamics and expectations in the intellectual life of late antiquity. Despite the somewhat fanciful chapter title (“Hypatia’s Sisters”), Watts is not interested in crude analogies but engages in nuanced comparison to tease out what is unique in depictions of Hypatia. More than any other study to date, Watts’s book aims to place Hypatia in the social, economic, and cultural milieu of Alexandria at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries. His Hypatia is an outstanding woman, a towering intellectual and a well-connected public figure, but her life is firmly rooted in, and conditioned by, the circumstances in which it was lived. There is a certain revisionist impetus behind Watts’s historicising account. First, he takes issue with the tradition indulging in the retelling of Hypatia’s gruesome murder and refuses to let her death define the record of her life. His Hypatia did not become a martyr on one fateful day, but lived her life heroically (5). Secondly, he revisits the entrenched view that Hypatia was caught up in, and eventually fell victim to, religious factionalism and strife. While Watts does not downplay the importance of the religious and ecclesiastical dynamics shaping Hypatia’s Alexandria, he vehemently insists on reading them against its socio-economic divisions. Here, Watts tells an important story about extremism. When he touches on Hypatia’s murder (Chapter Eight), he plausibly suggests that she did not perish in an act of pre-meditated murder but in an eruption of mob violence—killed not by religious fanatics but by the disenfranchised and poor of the port city, who suffered disproportionately from the slowing of the economy outside the Mediterranean sailing season (114–117). For Watts, Hypatia’s murder is a symptom of long-standing dislocations in the power structures and social fabric of her city. In consequence, this is where Watts starts his 1 M. Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (tr. F. Lyra; Cambridge MA and London 1995)—originally published in Polish as M.D., Hypatia z Aleksandrii (Krakow 1993). M. B. Deakin (Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr [Amherst, NY 2007]) offers an accessible introduction to Hypatia’s mathematics and science. Among non-English publications, S. Ronchey, Ipazia: la vera storia (Milan 2010) and H. Harich-Schwarzbauer, Hypatia. Die spätantiken Quellen. Eingeleitet, kommentiert und interpretiert (Bern 2011) stand out. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 171 account. The first chapter (“Alexandria”) sets the scene with an admirably dense and informative portrayal of late antique Alexandria. Programmatically, it juxtaposes a standard account of the city’s foundation, history, and institutions with a vivid sketch of the often dire living and working conditions...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".