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A Stage Play in Three Acts
Historical Notes
This play is my speculation about what might have happened
in fifth century Egypt. Key events depicted in the play are based on historical accounts,
including the gory details of Hypatia's demise, although the sources are sketchy,
conflicting, and highly biased.
If you want to compare fictionalized versions, read the novel Hypatia by Charles
Kingsley, which was published in England in 1853 and tells a very different story.
Kingsley was an Anglican rector who wanted his story to be a romanticized Bible lesson for
Victorian ladies.
In my version of the events, some facts have been adapted to the dramatic purposes. The
main (royal) library of ancient Alexandria was probably destroyed by the Imperial Roman
army several centuries earlier when they set fire to the city as a cover for Julius Caesar
to escape a local revolt. From that time on, the remaining scrolls were housed in the
Temple of Sarapis, which is the library where Hypatia studied and taught. The destruction
of the temple by Nitrian monks probably occurred several years earlier than the time of
the play and under a different archbishop.
Also by 415, Hypatia's father Theon was probably already dead. The Roman empire had two
emperors at that time, one in Milan and one in Constantinople, but it is probable that
both Orestes and Cyril took their orders from Theodosius, the Christian emperor of the
East. It was just too tempting for the sake of the conflict of the play to have Orestes
instead represent the old order, ruled nominally by Flavius Honorius in the West.
Of all the characters, only Titus and Lydia are entirely fictional. Naomi is patterned
after a mysterious alchemist, Maria the Jewess, who lived in Alexandria much earlier, but
who, if she had been alive in 415, undoubtedly would have been a friend to Hypatia.
The real Cyril hated Jews with a vengeance, and his writings about them are even more
malicious than any of his speeches in the play. He wrote other theological tracts on the
divine natures of Jesus and Mary, and mainly for this work and despite his blatant racism,
he was sainted and is today considered one of the fathers of the Roman Catholic Church.
Surrounding the legend of Hypatia is the suspicion that she was a lesbian, although there
is no direct evidence for this. It is anybody's guess whether the historical person was
the repressed sensualist of this play. Orestes did try to get Hypatia to marry him, but
the history books emphasize his political motives, not his lust, for which presumably a
Prefect of Egypt had plenty of other outlets.
"The book" cherished by Naomi and Hypatia is today called the Corpus Hermeticum,
a collection of Greco-Egyptian religious texts, which has been a controversial document
throughout Western history. Some scholars hold that its rediscovery by Cosimo de Medici
around 1440 (almost exactly a thousand years after Hypatia) marked the beginning of the
Renaissance in Europe.
In a dramatic sense, however, "the book" Hypatia dies to protect is any book,
all books.
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Gerald Everett Jones
Writer-Producer 
