Hypatia

Socrates Scholasticus, writing in Constantinople a generation later, says she surpassed the philosophers of her day, succeeded to the Platonic school that came down from Plotinus and expounded all philosophy to any who wished to hear, and met the magistrates with an ease that came from her learning (7.15). Synesius wrote to her as mother, sister, teacher and benefactor, and asked her to have a hydroscope made for him (Letters 15, 16). Damascius, a pagan writing a century on, has her expound Plato or Aristotle in public to any who would listen, and lays the murder at Cyril's door; Socrates says that it brought no small reproach on Cyril and the church of Alexandria.

The picture of her as the Library's last scholar, dying with it, is modern. John Toland's Hypatia (1720) made her a learned martyr torn to pieces by the clergy, but says nothing of a library; Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980) made her the last scientist to work in the Library and joined her death to its end; later tellers made her its last librarian, and the film Agora (2009) put her at the sack of the Serapeum and its library. No ancient source connects her with any library. Legend: told story