Philosopher

This entry collects letters that Synesius of Cyrene (c. 370-c. 413 AD) addressed simply "to the Philosopher" (Greek: te philosopho), without a proper name. Scholars have long and almost universally identified this addressee with Hypatia of Alexandria, the renowned Neoplatonist mathematician and philosopher who taught Synesius and to whom he wrote with deep reverence as his master and spiritual guide. If the identification holds, the recipient is Hypatia (c. 355-415 AD), head of the Alexandrian Neoplatonic school, famed for her teaching of mathematics and astronomy and notoriously murdered by a Christian mob in Alexandria in 415. Because the database preserves only the generic salutation rather than a name, the attribution to Hypatia, though standard in the scholarship, rests on inference from Synesius's tone and from the wider context of his correspondence rather than on an explicit naming in these particular records.