Alejandro Amenábar’s film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz as the celebrated pagan mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria, has occasioned a number of online reality checks regarding the tensions and outright contradictions between the Enlightenment myth of Hypatia’s story and what is historically known. Many of these are from Christian writers, but the most complete and helpful online treatment I’ve found so far belongs to a self-styled “Irish-Australian atheist b-st-rd” with an academic background in medieval literature and ancient and medieval history, blogger Tim O’Neill of Armarium Magnum (hat tip).
O’Neill’s year-old post “Agora” and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again takes the film’s 2009 press release as the occasion for a blistering critique of what O’Neill calls “pseudo historical myths about the history of science,” “hoary Enlightenment myths” that turn Hypatia’s story “into a morality tale about science vs fundamentalism.” (O’Neill is also the creator of an in-depth website called History Versus the Da Vinci Code.) O’Neill writes:
As an atheist, I’m clearly no fan of fundamentalism—even the 1500 year old variety (though modern manifestations tend to be the ones to watch out for). And as an amateur historian of science I’m more than happy with the idea of a film that gets across the idea that, yes, there was a tradition of scientific thinking before Newton and Galileo. But Amenábar has taken the (actually, fascinating) story of what was going on in Alexandria in Hypatia’s time and turned it into a cartoon, distorting history in the process.
Specifically, O’Neill cites a rendition of events traced to the anti-Catholic 18th-century writer Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and popularized by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. According to this picture, mobs of violent Christians, guided by the patriarch Theophilus, torched the great library of Alexandria, while Hypatia, despised by Theophilus’s successor Cyril for her “learning and science,” was murdered by fanatical mobs moved by Cyril’s rabble-rousing.
From the film’s press release, O’Neill gathers that the filmmakers are at least clear, as Sagan was not, that the great library at Alexandria was apparently long gone by Hypatia’s day. Was it burned by Caesar’s forces? There’s some evidence in that direction, but the record is unclear. It seems likely that the great library succumbed to a series of debilitations: successive fires, plundering, decay and neglect. A decent overview of the historical issues is available at the Straight Dope website (maintained by Cecil Adams, also an atheist, I think).
Does Agora present the Christian mob as the destroyers, not of the great library, but of a “second library,” as the press release indicates? Barely. If you are very alert, you may catch a snatch of unclear, partly offscreen dialogue mentioning the “fire that destroyed the mother library,” and identifying the present library as a surviving “daughter library.”
The opening titles, though, simply speak of “the greatest library in the world” (no mention more than one). Apart from one or two oblique references, Agora does nothing to dispel the identification of this one great library as the one we see destroyed by Christians in the film. Essentially, the film celebrates the popular myth with only the barest of sops to historical plausibility.
The historical basis for the myth is that circa 391 a mob of Christians destroyed the Serapeum of Alexandria, the pagan temple of Serapis. Such violence, as Agora dramatizes, was tragically not uncommon in Alexandria, and Christians, pagans and Jews were all guilty of it, though even Agora acknowledges that the persecution of the Christians by pagan Rome preceded any Christian violence. (To that extent, Agora‘s version of events is at least better than the Da Vinci Code movie, which first floats the outrageous claim that the Christians started the violence before agnostically concluding, “We can’t be sure who began the atrocities.”)
There is evidence that the Serapeum once housed a “daughter library”—but also evidence that by 391 that library was no longer extant. In actual accounts, pagan as well as Christian, of the destruction of the Serapeum, there is no indication of a library or of scrolls. Agora, by contrast, speaks constantly of “the library,” and dramatically displays the gleeful plundering of an immense collection of thousands of scrolls (as well as Hypatia’s frantic efforts to save as many as possible).
Regarding Agora‘s portrait of Hypatia herself, O’Neill aptly notes:
There is some suggestion that Amenábar’s film depicts her as an atheist, or at least as wholly irreligious, which is highly unlikely. Neo-Platonism embraced the idea of a perfect, ultimate source called “the One” or “the Good”, which was, by Hypatia’s time, fully identified with a monotheistic God in most respects.
This is indeed what the film does. Charged with believing “in nothing,” Hypatia improbably responds, “I believe in philosophy”—a response that elicits sneers from the Christian authorities. (“Philosophy—just what is needed at this time.”)
In reality, far from being despised for her “learning and science,” evidence indicates that Hypatia was widely admired by learned Christians. Cyril, a ruthless and brutal tactician but also well-educated and able scholar, regarded Hypatia as a political enemy: Cyril’s efforts to expand ecclesiastical power were actively opposed by Orestes, the Christian Roman prefect and a friend and student of Hypatia. Cyril’s attempts to make peace were rebuffed by Orestes, and Hypatia publicly backed the prefect—support the patriarch obviously resented. Cyril believed that, without Hypatia’s support, Orestes would not continue to oppose him—correctly, as it turned out, since after Hypatia’s murder Orestes resigned and left Alexandria.
Obviously, Hypatia’s pagan status wouldn’t have endeared her to Cyril or his followers, but given Cyril’s ruthlessness toward fellow Christians he considered enemies (Novatians, Nestorians), there seems to be no reason to think that he would have been any less displeased with Hypatia’s support of Orestes had she been baptized. If Cyril’s followers dared to throw stones at Orestes and his entourage, they could just as easily have murdered Hypatia had she been a Christian.
While Hypatia’s “learning and science” was the basis for her fame and influence, there seems to be no reason to assert that Cyril or his followers hated her specifically because of her learning, as opposed to the way she used her influence. Cyril would hardly have scorned her support had she offered it to him instead of to Orestes.
Ultimately, the consuming message of Agora is: Reason unites us, faith divides us, and never the twain shall meet. It’s not without nuance in other respects, but on this point Agora is as diagrammatic and predetermined as one of Hypatia’s astrolabes.
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I have not seen the film, but the trailers (there are more than one). Besides Alejandro Amenábar’s obvious anti Catholicism, as far as I know there were no books, but scrolls at that time. In one scene the book (Bible? Missal?) was shown.
Both Theophilus and Cyril are shown with a codex (bound book) of the gospels. Codices did exist at this point in history, in fact they existed as early as the 1st century AD, and according to Wikipedia by AD 300 they had achieved numerical parity with scrolls. The film is set from AD 391-415.
Steven your comments are supported by the book Hypatia of Alexandria, Maria Dzielska translated by F. Lyra, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mass., London, Eng.
Thanks, Daniel, I’m looking forward to Dzielska’s book, currently its way via interlibrary loan. In the meantime I’m working from a number of sources, some of which are in turn indebted to Dzielska.
Once again, historical truth is twisted to fit the current secular humanist philosophy that pervades the culture. Another piece of Hollywood drivel.
I don’t know if I would call it “drivel.” In some respects at least the movie is thoughtful and interesting. We aren’t talking about “Da Vinci Code” or “Robin Hood” here, or even “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.” Closer to “Kingdom of Heaven,” maybe. A movie that ultimately deserves to be rejected, but thoughtfully rejected. (There’s no need to get particularly thoughtful over “Da Vinci Code” or “Elizabeth Redux.”)
Good old revisionist history. Where would our enlightened progressives be without it? Well, they’d be stuck with the truth, and that’s no way to advance an agenda designed to extinguish their biggest foe (and ultimately the only entity that stands in their way), the Catholic Church.
David Bentley Hart does a good job of clearing up some historical myths (without sugar-coating the culpability of the Church) in his book, Atheist Delusions. About Hypatia (chapter 4), he says, “Hypatia, the female pagan lecturer in mathematics and philosophy, was savagely assassinated and dismembered by the parabalani of Alexandria (originally a Christian ‘charitable’ fraternity devoted to the impoverished ill) because she was suspected of having prevented a rapprochement between the patriarch Cyril and the Christian imperial prefect Orestes. ...It is an almost infallible rule that, whenever any popular history relates the story of Hypatia, it repeats the fashionable myth that she was murdered by Christian zealots on account of her paganism and of her sex (which, supposedly, Christians would have thought disqualified her for a public career). Admittedly, more twaddle tends to be written about Hypatia than about any other figure from early or late antiquity, and this particular image of her—the martyr to misogyny and religious intolerance—is merely the most current of the many silly romances that have sprung up around her over the years. ... Hypatia died, as far as we can tell, because she became inadvertently involved in one of the conflicts that were constantly erupting at the demotic level of Alexandrian society between those warring tribes that mad life in the city so constant an adventure. ...”
Sounds like the perfect storyline for an unbiased and agenda-free Hollywood history lesson.
For what it’s worth, Agora isn’t a Hollywood film at all. It’s a Spanish/Portuguese co-production of several film companies. The director is Chilean, and none of the major characters are played by Americans. Several are Brits, and there are also South Americans, Middle Easterners and others.
It is in English, and occasionally this produces cognitive disconnects. When the slave Davus gives his name to one of the parabalani, the parabalano jokes, “Davus the slavus.” In Greek, I suppose that would be something like “Davus ho doulos,” or perhaps, to keep the mispronunciation, “Davus ho doulus,” but still without the “v” and so without a comparable rhyme.
Oh, you guys are all a bunch of Agora-phobes. :-P
In all seriousness, the picture sounds awful. But fine, whatever. Just so long as there’s not a “Based on true events!” title at the beginning of the film or anything.
On the bright side, the opening weekend box office was a miniscule $33,000. Looks like it’s bombing big time. I wonder what the budget was?
Backs up Medved’s claim that it’s not *all* about the money in the film industry. Some pictures are agenda driven and get made even though they are a huge net loss.
Yeah, only $33k, but it’s only showing on 2 screens. So that’s $16.5k a screen, which is more than “Shrek”. Not that it’ll still do that kind of business when it sees a wider release. Assuming it sees a wider release, I’d still expect it to do worse than the new “Robin Hood,” though. I would predict a domestic gross of around $40-50M. It’s already seen $33M world-wide which means that it should at least break even on its $70M budget.
“Backs up Medved’s claim that it’s not *all* about the money in the film industry. Some pictures are agenda driven and get made even though they are a huge net loss.”
Sure, although FWIW Medved was writing about Hollywood and America (Hollywood Versus America), and Agora is a European film with an international, largely non-American cast, and I don’t know that anyone has ever claimed that foreign film is all about the money.
In principle, the idea that money is not the bottom line and that filmmakers, especially foreign filmmakers, do make movies they believe in whether they make money or not strikes me as a more hopeful thing than not. It results in movies like Agora but also like, say, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Whereas if everything is driven by money, you get movies lining up to be the next Avatar. Not that I didn’t enjoy Avatar, but I don’t want to live in a world in which all movies want to be it.
It’s also worth noting that Agora didn’t have a North American distributor until *after* it had become a box-office smash in its native Spain, where it reportedly grossed over $30 million. (And the distributor that picked it up in the United States is Newmarket, the same outfit that distributed Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.)
Good point, Peter. It’s interesting that Newmarket, which as you note distributed The Passion of the Christ for Mel Gibson, is responsible this year for two anti-religious biopics dramatizing the Enlightenment narrative of faith against reason: In addition to Agora, Newmarket also distributed the Charles Darwin biopic Creation.
I felt the movie was an indictment of all fanaticism, not just this age; but Amenabar does distort a lot of history in service to his art. I was going to recommend that anyone who wants to know more about Hypatia should pick up “Hypatia of Alexandria” a very readable biography by Maria Dzielska (Harvard University Press, 1995) but someone beat me to it. I’ve also posted a series of essays on the “reel” vs. “real” historical events and characters depicted in the film at my blog (http://faithljustice.wordpress.com/)
Just watched the movie its sad that some beleieve this is actually true.
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