Synesius

Synesius of Cyrene was the philosopher-bishop (c. 370–413) who studied at Alexandria under Hypatia, to whom his warm and admiring letters survive — among the most personal records we possess of that famous teacher.

A landowner, orator, and reluctant statesman, he composed hymns of a markedly Neoplatonic cast, addressing the divine in language drawn from Plotinus and the Chaldaean theology. Even after accepting a bishopric he remained a Platonist at heart, his Christianity and his philosophy held in a characteristic late-antique union.

Born at Cyrene in Libya to a wealthy family that traced its descent to the Spartan Heraclids, Synesius studied mathematics, astronomy and philosophy at Alexandria. He visited Athens and found it a disappointment — famous now, he wrote, for its honey rather than its philosophers. Around the year 400 he spent several years in Constantinople on an embassy seeking tax relief for his province, and delivered before the emperor Arcadius the speech On Kingship, which urges a philosophical ideal of rule and warns against relying on Gothic troops. His Egyptian Tale, or On Providence, allegorises the court politics of those years through the story of the brothers Osiris and Typhos.

Other works include the Dion, a defence of the literary and philosophical life, the playful Praise of Baldness, and On Dreams, which explains divination by dreams through the imaginative spirit, the soul's vehicle that serves as a mirror for images from above; Ficino translated it into Latin. Some nine hymns, mostly in Doric lyric metres, survive.

Around 410 he was chosen bishop of Ptolemais. In a famous letter he set out his conditions: he would not give up his wife, and he could not abandon certain philosophical convictions, including the pre-existence of the soul and the eternity of the world, or accept the popular understanding of the resurrection. He was consecrated nonetheless, and spent his episcopate defending the province against nomad raids. Grief at the death of his three sons darkens his last letters; he seems to have died about 413.