1 Edward Watts, Hypatia: Te Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 37 – 50. 2 On her social role see Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and So- cial Confict, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 313 – 17; Watts, Hypatia, 79 – 92. 3 Tese men were the Constantinopolitan professors Ammonius and Helladius. For discus- sion of their interaction with Socrates see Hist. eccl. 5.16. 4 For additional discussion of Hypatia’s murder within the larger context of Socrates’ Ecclesi- astical History see Walter F. Beers’ paper in this volume. Hypatia and her Eighteenth-Century Reception Edward Watts Introduction As many of the papers in this volume show, one of the greatest challenges schol- ars face when considering the life and career of Hypatia is recovering her suc- cesses and achievements when her tragic death has overshadowed them in late antique sources. Indeed, it is remarkable how quickly Hypatia the person was overwhelmed in the historical imagination by Hypatia the martyr and liter- ary character. Hypatia the person was an amazing woman. Trained as a math- ematician in the great Alexandrian tradition of Pappus and Ptolemy, Hypatia pushed beyond both the limits of her curriculum and the example of her father to become one of the most important philosophers of the later fourth century. 1 She mentored Synesius, one of late antiquity’s most famous Christian intellectu- als, and stood near the center of civic and intellectual life in the Mediterranean’s second largest city for a generation. 2 And yet what Hypatia accomplished in her life has come to be dwarfed by the way in which she died. Tis happened almost immediately. Te earliest surviving source to speak about Hypatia’s death was Socrates Scholasticus, her younger contemporary and a student of men who taught in Alexandria at the same time that Hypatia did. 3 When Socrates wrote about Hypatia two decades afer her death, however, he transformed the powerful and accomplished woman that she was into a hollow literary character who inhabited the world of his Ecclesiastical History simply because her death refected poorly on Cyril of Alexandria, a fgure who Socrates disliked intensely. Socrates’ portrait of Hypatia is striking for the utterly precise way in which he balanced details about Hypatia with indictments of Cyril and the Alexandrian political climate he created. 4 Hypatia appears in the fnal book of the Ecclesiasti- For author’s use only