Agora (2009)

Hypatia and her father Theon leaving the Serapeum followed by their slaves

 

Oscar Isaac and Rachel Weisz as Orestes and Hypatia

 While researching St. Catherine of Alexandria for an ongoing project, I keep coming upon the story of the Neo-Platonist mathematician Hypatia and the claim that the third century martyr and the fourth century philosopher are one and the same person. It is a question which I am still studying and will write more about at a later date. In the meantime, I decided to watch the 2009 film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz and Oscar Isaac, because of the authentic recreation of the ancient city of Alexandria. Much about the film is historically accurate and Rachel Weisz gives a magnificent performance. Oscar Isaac is well-cast as Hypatia's would-be lover whose political entanglements lead to doom. However, there are some glaring manipulations of the known facts. According to The National Catholic Register:

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....

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 of 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.”) (Read more.)

The great library of Alexandria was destroyed two hundred years before Hypatia was born, during the reign of Cleopatra VII, when the Romans under Julius Caesar were fighting with pirates and lost control of the fire from the burning ships in the harbor. That left the smaller library called the Serapeum, which is the library destroyed during the civil unrest in 391 AD. Even then, there were enough books left in Alexandria for the Arabs, who conquered the city in the seventh century and, according to popular lore, used those books they did not approve of to heat their baths. For more on the details on the various upheavals of Alexandria I cannot recommend highly enough The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard. Both Christians and Jews of Alexandria suffered from the fierce pagan persecution. With the legalization of Christianity came a shifting of the power structure in a city which, because of its great diversity, had always been prone to riots and mob violence.

 As for Hypatia, she was a neo-Platonist philosopher and mathematician who taught the sons of the elite of Alexandria, both Christian and pagan alike. In those days mathematics was pretty much entwined with what we now call numerology. And the study of mathematics usually included astronomy, which in ancient times and into the Renaissance was synonymous with astrology. The fact that devout Christian families entrusted her with their children's education meant that they held her in high regard. She was known for her wisdom and virtue, and many of her students turned to her for advice later in life which, since her students became bishops and government officials, caused her to become caught in the midst of tense political struggles. From Armarium Magnus:

Unfortunately for those who cling to the discredited "conflict thesis" of science and religion perpetually at odds, the history of science actually has very few genuine martyrs at the hands of religious bigots. The fact that a mystic and kook like Giordano Bruno gets dressed up as a free-thinking scientist shows how thin on the ground such martyrs are, though usually those who like to invoke these martyrs can fall back on citing "scientists burned by the Medieval Inquistion", despite the fact this never actually happened. Most people know nothing about the Middle Ages, so this kind of vague hand-waving is usually pretty safe. 

Unlike Giordano Bruno, Hypatia was a genuine scientist and, as a woman, was certainly remarkable for her time (though the fact that another female and pagan scientist, Aedisia, practised science in Alexandria unmolested and with high renown a generation later shows she was far from unique). But Hypatia was no martyr for science and science had absolutely zero to do with her murder. (Read more.)

The parabalani, who were said to be responsible for burning the Serapeum and murdering Hypatia, have been described as monks but they were not under vows or holy orders. They were a gang of laymen who began as bodyguards for Christian prelates during the days of persecution but as Christianity became legal and a political force, the parabalani went more and more on the offensive.  By Hypatia's time they appear to have been no better than a bunch of Klan-like thugs. In the film Agora they look like members of ISIS or the Taliban, while the Patriarch St. Cyril of Alexandria resembles a terrorist chieftain. I thought that the portrayal of St. Cyril, who was a great intellect in his own right, would have been more realistic and interesting if it had been more nuanced.

The political struggle between the Roman prefect Orestes, Hypatia's former pupil, and the Patriarch St. Cyril, led to the horrific murder of Hypatia, not because of her love of science and philosophy but because of her perceived political influence. It also must be remarked that the filmmakers did not show anything close to the real horror of Hypatia's death, in which the parabalani reportedly flayed her alive. In the film, Hypatia's former slave mercifully suffocates her to death before his comrades stone her, so that her suffering is minimized. That is an aspect of the movie which I wish had been true. As Hypatia dies, the camera shows her eyes fixed upon the oculus of the dome, which she sees at an angle so that the shape is not round but oval, solving for her the puzzle of the universe, that the earth circles the sun in an elliptic orbit.

A really excellent review, HERE. Share