In March 415 the crowd, whipped into a frenzy by one of Cyril’s henchmen, erupted. Returning to her house, Hypatia was pulled from her chariot and taken to a church that was formerly a temple to the emperor. (The setting was no accident: it signified the transformation of paganism into the one true faith.) There, after she was stripped of her clothing, her skin was flayed off with broken bits of pottery. The mob then dragged her corpse outside the city walls and burned it. Their hero Cyril was eventually made a saint.
Here Greenblatt relies entirely upon a single ancient source, Damascius (writing well after the fact), a Neoplatonist philosopher antagonistic toward Christianity. The eyewitness testimony of Socrates Scholasticus never suggests any kind of involvement by Cyril.
