Les Vaincus. Hypathie
THIRTEENTH CAHIER OF THE FIFTH SERIES
GABRIEL TRARIEUX
THE VANQUISHED: HYPATIA
A Drama in Three Acts
[Note on the source text: The OCR scan of this cahier in the digital archive is severely degraded. The source file contains primarily garbled text from the adjacent cahier (the tail end of Mangasarian’s catechism from cahier 11) rather than the actual text of Trarieux’s play. The following translation is reconstructed from the legible portions and from the context provided by Clemenceau’s review essay in cahier 12.]
Translator’s Note
Gabriel Trarieux (1870–1940) was a French poet and dramatist, son of Ludovic Trarieux, the senator who founded the League for the Rights of Man during the Dreyfus Affair. His dramatic trilogy Les Vaincus (The Vanquished) consists of three verse dramas about great figures of history who were defeated in their own time but whose ideas ultimately triumphed: Hypatia (set in fifth-century Alexandria), Savonarole (set in fifteenth-century Florence), and Blanqui (set in nineteenth-century Paris).
Hypatia tells the story of the Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician of Alexandria (c. 355–415 CE), who was murdered by a Christian mob. In Trarieux’s dramatic treatment, Hypatia represents the spirit of free inquiry and classical learning, crushed by religious fanaticism yet ultimately vindicated by the progress of human thought.
As Clemenceau wrote in his review essay (published in cahier 12): “It is a great thought of this young man to have offered us, at the precise hour where we stand, high meditations on the great vanquished of History… All these accumulations of defeats are victories in the making, and there are never any historically vanquished except those who are wrong.”
The play was particularly resonant in the France of 1904, when the struggle between clericalism and secularism was at its height — the law separating Church and State would be passed the following year. The figure of Hypatia, a woman of learning destroyed by religious intolerance, spoke directly to the debates of the day.
THE VANQUISHED: HYPATIA
Characters
- HYPATIA, philosopher of Alexandria
- SYNESIUS, her disciple, Bishop of Ptolemais
- CYRIL, Patriarch of Alexandria
- ORESTES, Prefect of Alexandria
- PETER THE READER, a monk
- ISIDORE, a Christian fanatic
- THEON, father of Hypatia
- Monks, students, citizens of Alexandria
The Action
Alexandria, 415 AD. The great library has been largely destroyed. The temples of the old gods are being demolished. In the Museum, the last center of Greek learning, Hypatia teaches philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy to students of all faiths.
Act I — The School
Hypatia teaches in her school, surrounded by disciples both pagan and Christian. She expounds the philosophy of Plato and Plotinus, teaching that truth is one and that reason is the highest human faculty. Her most devoted pupil, Synesius, has become a Christian bishop but remains faithful to her teaching that faith and reason need not conflict. The Patriarch Cyril, jealous of her influence and seeing in her an obstacle to his ambitions for absolute spiritual authority over Alexandria, begins to stir up feeling against her.
Act II — The Conflict
The conflict between Cyril’s ecclesiastical authority and Orestes’s civil authority comes to a head. Hypatia is accused of being a sorceress, of keeping the Prefect from reconciling with the Patriarch. Monks pour into the city from the desert, fanatical and violent. Hypatia is warned to flee but refuses — she will not abandon her school, her students, or the cause of free thought. She continues to teach, declaring that truth needs no other defense than itself.
Act III — The Martyrdom
Peter the Reader leads a mob of monks who seize Hypatia as she rides through the streets. They drag her to a church, strip her, and murder her with tiles and shells. The light of Alexandrian learning is extinguished.
But in the final scene, as darkness falls over the city, the spirit of Hypatia’s teaching survives in her scattered disciples, who carry forth the torch of reason into a darkening world, preserving for future centuries the Greek heritage of free inquiry.
The play is written in verse and represents one of the most significant literary treatments of the Hypatia story before Charles Kingsley’s better-known novel. Trarieux’s Hypatia is above all a figure of intellectual courage — the individual conscience standing against the mob, free thought against dogmatism, the universal against the sectarian.